Understanding large digital collections and learning new tools: The Texas Digital Newspaper Program...

Understanding large digital collections and learning new tools: The Texas Digital Newspaper Program Visualizations.

Mark Phillips & Will Hicks

As digital libraries continue to grow, they:

• Challenge existing infrastructure for searching and browsing

• Make it hard to communicate the size and scope of resources

• Have the opportunity to supply resources for those interested in the “long tail” of topics

Understanding and communicating the scope and scale of digital collections is important because:

• Allows for engagement with user communities• Introduces new opportunities for interaction• Helps promote underlying resources

The UNT Libraries Digital Collections currently has 429,591 items in 500+ collections/groupings.

These are published to the world as:

The Portal to Texas History

The UNT Digital Library

The Gateway to Oklahoma History

The Texas Digital Newspaper Program

• Promotes standards based newspaper digitization, presentation and access

• Empowers interested partners of all sizes to provide greater access to their local newspaper content.

• Newspapers are published on The Portal to Texas History and preserved in the UNT Libraries Digital Archive.

TDNP Statistics:• Over 1 million pages• 132,000+ issues• 3.6 million item uses• 1829 – 2013 date range• 596 titles• 102 counties• 131 communities

In February 2013 The Portal to Texas History celebrated its 1 millionth page of Texas Newspapers

We creating several visualizations to help communicate this collection to users

We printed out two of them because they were rather huge

Printed 4 ft. x 8 ft.

Hung on the wall (by the cake)

People interacted with the poster in interesting ways.

Another was over 25 ft. long

Visualized every day since 1829

Issues, Pages, Uses

D3.js

JavaScript Library

Plays with others

Well Documented(d3js.org/)

ark created title printed county city pages uses

ark:/67531/metapth100000 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1923-11-27 Brown County Brownwood 4 24

ark:/67531/metapth100001 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1923-12-11 Brown County Brownwood 4 68

ark:/67531/metapth100002 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-01-21 Brown County Brownwood 4 24

ark:/67531/metapth100003 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-02-11 Brown County Brownwood 4 51

ark:/67531/metapth100004 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-02-20 Brown County Brownwood 8 42

ark:/67531/metapth100005 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-03-13 Brown County Brownwood 4 35

ark:/67531/metapth100006 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-03-31 Brown County Brownwood 4 45

ark:/67531/metapth100007 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-04-17 Brown County Brownwood 4 30

ark:/67531/metapth100008 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-05-06 Brown County Brownwood 4 28

ark created title printed county city pages uses

ark:/67531/metapth100000 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1923-11-27 Brown County Brownwood 4 24

ark:/67531/metapth100001 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1923-12-11 Brown County Brownwood 4 68

ark:/67531/metapth100002 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-01-21 Brown County Brownwood4 24

ark:/67531/metapth100003 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-02-11 Brown County Brownwood 4 51

ark:/67531/metapth100004 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-02-20 Brown County Brownwood8 42

ark:/67531/metapth100005 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-03-13 Brown County Brownwood 4 35

ark:/67531/metapth100006 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-03-31 Brown County Brownwood4 45

ark:/67531/metapth100007 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-04-17 Brown County Brownwood4 30

ark:/67531/metapth100008 2010-06-28 The Collegian 1924-05-06 Brown County Brownwood4 28

40

Data! Wee!

Data Explorer | Backup

CC0 Licensed Dataset:

Phillips, Mark Edward and Hicks, William. Texas Digital Newspaper Program Million Page Dataset. UNT Digital Library. http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc158400/

Mark Phillips – mark.phillips@unt.edu

Will Hicks – william.hicks@unt.edu

http://texashistory.unt.edu