Impact, Aggregation, Partnership

Impact, Aggregation, Partnership

Alastair DunningJISC Digitisation Programme Manager@alastairdunning

18th March 2011 - New Strategies for Digital Content

which are the really successful digitised resources?

in higher education: eebo, tlg, old bailey online, complete works of charles darwin (and more)

source: my personal opinionheadnote: there’s a whole messy argument about impact and value i’m skipping overalso worthy of mention: visual arts data service, british history online, archaeology data service, british cartoon archive, and many more ...

which are the really successful digital resources?

in education: PubMed central, Research Papers in Economics, arXiV

see: http://repositories.webometrics.info/toprep.asp

but also in education: wikipedia, flickr, google, google books

what do these resources have in common?

aggregationcritical massmultiple sources

thinking of the educational resources, how do we know they are successful? and more over why are they successful?

the complete works of charles darwin onlinethesaurus linguae graecaeeeboold bailey online

the complete works of charles darwin onlinethesaurus linguae graecaeeeboold bailey online

the complete works of charles darwin onlinethesaurus linguae graecaeeeboold bailey online

the complete works of charles darwin onlinethesaurus linguae graecaeeeboold bailey online

so this should give us some clear indications of how we want to build digitised resources in the future

drawing on multiple sources is necessary to offer a resource with a wide impact

now, turn to university digital / digitisation strategies

they are full of well considered points about

• seeking multiple funding sources• strategic engagement within the institution

• meeting user needs• preservation, sustainability

• and all the other things we go on about

but, how many of them have given thought to creating resources with others?

maybe a few. but it does not fit well with institutional strategies.

and if you want senior support and buy in for your digital strategy, it needs to fit in with your university’s focus

users (that, um, use the resources)

vs

universities (that provide the digitised resources)

a tension:

How should universities proceed?

commercial publishersE.g. ProQuest, Gale, Adam Matthews

non for profit platformsE.g. JSTOR, JISC Collections

a tension ... that partnerships will help deal with

but also other universities, collections holders and researchers

a tension ... that partnerships will help deal with

universities and other collections holders will have related content that

will make your content stronger

a tension ... that partnerships will help deal with

but why should university senior management want to host others’

collections?

a tension ... that partnerships will help deal with

because your university researchers can provide the expertise in curating

and editing the website

a tension ... that partnerships will help deal with

but more importantly, your university staff can use the resource to advance their teaching and research and raise

the university’s profile

the results: • new forms of ebook publishing

• undergraduates undertaking research• altered study of 18th century london – “history

from below”• widely used by general public• wiki for debate and discussion

• kudos for universities for hertfordshire and sheffield, and the researchers involved

c.200,000 criminal trials from Old Bailey, 1674 – 1913240,000 manuscripts from eight London archives and 15 datasets

but if my university’s content is constantly aggregated, will it not get lost?

well, maybe. but there’s nothing to stop you publishing your content by itself as well

indeed, publishing in multiple places and formats will increasing usage and impact. (just make sure your logo is visible)

ensure that your content is discoverable and aggregatable (sp!)

not only by portals and gateways, but by new media companies wishing to create interfaces

exposing metadata, developing application programming interfaces

non desktop access, esp. mobiles

again, partnerships with others will help with this

In Summary:

Medium Impact – Work well, but by yourself

High Impact – Identify others who can enrich your content for users, and work with them