Being a Good Data Provider, by Alastair Dunning

Being a Good Data Provider

Alastair DunningJISC Programme Manager - Digitisationa.dunning AT jisc.ac.uk, 0203 006 6065November 2011, Oxford

This presentation is intended to give some brief advice for those publishingdigital content (digital images, cultural heritage, scholarly information etc.)on the Internet

Outline

Being a Good Data Provider: A simple thing gets complex

Cool URIs

Being Friends with Google, Is Google Enough?

International Portals

Geographies

Re-Use and APIs

Licensing

Cool URIs

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/web-focus/

URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) refers to the "generic set of all names/addresses that are short strings that refer to resources" whereas URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is "an informal term (no longer used in technical specifications) associated with popular URI schemes: http, ftp, mailto, etc.“

Keep them stable, memorable and consistent – develop a short URI policy

Cool URIs Where do URIs get quoted? – Often taken out of their environment

– Publicity material – expensive to reprint

– Academic Citations – damages scholarly trust (plus citation guidelines?)

– Bookmarks within browser or on social bookmarking sites

– Emails (therefore less than 76 characters, avoid underscores)

– Blogs and other URIs

– By search engines – loss will inhibit resource discovery

– Guesswork – users make guesses at URIs – use redirects and good 404 pages – often true when people are running queries against a database

Good Example – BBC website

Bad Example …

Item level not collection level

Users may have no interest in the general resource but plenty of interest in a particular item

Designing Shakespeare – Shakespeare performed in London & Stratford, 1960 – 2000, 1000s of plays

Researchers & teachers interested in general resource

Actors interested in specific performances. Needed stable URIs for cast lists and photos

Being friends with Google

No need to explain the importance in exposing content to metadata – many users have Google as their principal springboard for digital information

Even if using authentication, expose metadata

Make sure your database is easily queried by robots like Google

Optimisation is complex and depends on good communications process

– Use established URIs – Ensure your website is trusted

– Get incoming links from other trusted sources – this drives up traffic via Google and via the original sites themselves

Strategic Content Alliance / Netskills training and documentation

Being friends with Google

Give distinctive <title> to each page – helps with clarity on Google

Use Google Sitemaps to upload details of your pages

Google Analytics can help with measuring web usage

Google Maps, Google Scholar?

http://www.google.com/publicsector

Is Google everything?

Recommendation by peers and other respected persons gets resources used

Marketing a resource is an integrated strategy to marketing which involves technical and ‘academic’ integration

Workshop will be held in this area for all JISC projects in this programme Source – Lesly Huxley et al (2007): Gathering

evidence: Current ICT use and future needs for arts and humanities researchers

Is Google everything?

How is your collection integrated into library catalogue?

How does your resource fit in with other resources?

Source – Mark Greengrass et al (2007): RePAH: A User Requirements Analysis for Portals in the

Arts and Humanities

“Resource discovery and use would be increased by separate collections being aggregated logically based on their content”Recommendation 3 – Daisy Abbott (2008): Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory

Working with Aggregators

CultureGrid - http://www.culturegrid.org.uk/

– UK aggregator cultural heritage material Large-scale harvest of digital resources

– Works well for images and multimedia

– Culture grid then exposes metadata to Europeana WorldCat - http://www.worldcat.org/librarians/default.jsp

– Bibliographic data - both digital and not digital

– Metadata exposed via Registry of Digital Masters

– Requires membership – so best done via institution

Aggregators

Other options

– Archives Hub, http://archiveshub.ac.uk/

– Connected Histories, British History 1500 – 1900

– JISC Historic Books, JISC MediaHub

Other options exist and will emerge, particularly within specific subject fields and areas of interest.

Key is to have easily exposable or transferable metadata

Geographies

“80% of data has a geographical component” … possibly

Lists, text, word can be confusing to navigate

Maps have a simplicity which many, but not all, find engaging

Examples - BL Sound Archive, Population Reports online, Flickr

It’s about visualising your data in different ways … time is also a powerful metaphor

Geographies

Application Programming Interfaces (API)

“The best use of your data will be thought of by someone else”

Separating data from its interface

Publishing each strand of metadata as a separate URI

Allows others to build interfaces over your data (and edit / annotate your data, if you want)

Requires certain amount of technical knowledge in setting up and institutional belief

Good example – http://www.vam.ac.uk/api

Licensing

A different challenge for re-use – making sure people know what they can do with your content

Licensing in – clearing third party rights

Licensing out – what can your users do– Possibilities – re-use in educational context, remashing (including editing,

cropping, rearranging), commercial use, anything, attribution

– Various existing licence s– worth exploring Creative Commons

– Other options may be required for third-party material

Clarity over this is essential to avoid user confusion and legal ramifications

But all JISC projects must indicate what can be done to their content

Discovery Principles

Since writing this presentation, many of its points are embedded in the Technical Principles for the Discovery Ecosystem

Sounds nerdy.

Isn’t.

Okay maybe it is.

But vital for projects with data to expose to users

In Summary

Irrespective of the type of content ...

Cool URIs

Being Friends with Google, Is Google Enough?

International Portals

Geographies

Re-Use and APIs

Licensing