NLA Innovative Ideas talk 02 Dc 2013
Ed Summers @edsu
This talk was held at the National Library of Australia. I went out of curiousity expecting a demo of cool things from the Library of Congress. Well there were certainly some cool things but given my current interest in the quantification of impact I came away with something else - a set of arguments and positions about access and impact and what exactly that means.
This post is basically my edited and cleaned up notes - any opinions or asides are my own and this is my interpretation of Ed’s talk. Comments and asides are marked up like this.
Bio
- Ed Summers has worked on digitisation at Library of Congress
- Linkypedia developer among other tools
- Now a softwre dev at library of Congress
Introduction
Library of Congress is de facto US National Library
- includes repository devlopment centre - essentially a digital preservation group
- but no final view on what is preservation or repository
- could make the argument that a digital repository is just all the infrastructure for storage and access facilitation
use as justification to focus on doing useful things
could make similar argument for eresearch - rather than focus on grand initiatives focus on being useful
Doing useful things
role of access especially web based access and what access means in the context of digital preservation
digital preservation is access in the future
preservation means access as a way of enabling preservation
- access really is the same as web based access - no brainer
if people engage with your content it will be ustained
balanced value impact model - Simon Tanner
- think about how preservation has impact
what is the benefit? eg cultural preservation and return of digital patrimony to the originating communities, such as Aboriginal groups - may not show formal cost/benefit result
idea of web as customer service medium - the great success of the web has around involvement and engagement on a mass scale eg social media
example nla newspaper ocr correction by crowd sourcing
success of wikipedia by author engagement
GLAM galleries archives libraries and museums
- wikipedia glam effort to engage with GLAM community
- use of GLAM content in wikipedia
demos
- American memory - 1990 effort to digitise Library of Congress data and distribute on laser disc to universities to provide access
- innovative move to web 1993
- very hierarchical content model oriented round collections - very taxonomic view
- lots of clicks to get to an item
- wondered on content use -moved to Flickr to make more searchable photo stream - no massive click frenzy to get to an item
- simplify access -get 200% increase in access
- flickr allowed people to tag and reuse content ie engage with content
click counting does not measure impact
linkypedia - shows how web content used on wikipedia - find how many articles on wikipedia use a a particular resource for citation
- gives counts give number of secondary links - indicator of degree of value and reuse
- usage can be monitord by rss
see reuse of data in sites such as pinterest
wikistream - harvest content from wikipedia via irc to harvest updates
- wikipedia content very dynamic - lots of changes
easy to build an application by gluing tools- unix style building
wikipulse -shows edit activity as a spdometaphor
wikipedia community is active and engaged
Chroma - tool running on amazon to give impression of Wikipedia activity and site usage - question is what use people made of a resource
visual representations gives richer more impressistic use of sites
Others
use of twitterbot to provide auto feed 100 yeasrs ago today to build engagement
mechanical curator - bl tumblr feed of image detail
Conclusion
It’s all about usefulness - if it is useful people will engage with content, cite it and make use of it, and much of the repository space should be around providing access to content - if it’s useful people will engage
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