2018 Virtual Symposium on Information & Technology in the Arts and Humanities

“Users of Arts & Humanities Digital Collections”

Conference Program

April 10, 2018

12:00pm-5:00pm EST

#VISitAH | @asist_ah

2018 Virtual Symposium on Information & Technology in the Arts and

Humanities

“Users of Arts & Humanities Digital Collections”

April 10, 2018

12:00pm-5:00pm EST

Schedule at a Glance [Eastern Standard Time]:

12:00-12:10 Christian James, Introduction 12:15-12:55 Mark Williams and John Bell, “The Media Ecology Lab: Archival Access

Online, Born-Networked Scholarship” 1:00-1:40 Elena Villaespesa, “A User-Centered Approach for Museum Online

Collections” 1:45-2:25 Ricardo Punzalan, “Beyond Clicks, Likes, and Downloads: Identifying

Meaningful Impacts for Digitized Ethnographic Archives” 2:45-3:30 Santi Thompson & Michele Reilly, “Reverse Image Lookup: Assessing Digital Library Users and Reuses” 3:35-4:15 Elizabeth Joan Kelly, “How Do Wikipedians Use Digital Cultural Heritage?

A Case Study from Louisiana”

2018 Virtual Symposium on Information & Technology in the Arts and

Humanities

“Users of Arts & Humanities Digital Collections”

Introduction Christian James Christian James is SIG AH Chair and Web Application Librarian at Catholic University of America University Libraries, where he maintains Libraries websites and digital collections. Christian has a MLS from the University of Maryland, College Park and a MA in History from George Mason University.

The Media Ecology Project: Archival Access Online, Born-Networked Scholarship Mark J. Williams & John P. Bell The Media Ecology Project seeks to create a dynamic environment where researchers digitally access archival moving image collections and contribute back to the archival and research communities through the fluid contribution of metadata and other knowledge. Our moving image heritage is at enormous risk. Moving image archivists and digital repository advocates are developing solutions to these problems. But we cannot sustain interest in "preservation" without a better sense of the historical value of these materials. "Access" is not enough; new knowledge production is required in order to connect archival materials with audiences and prompt preservation and access efforts. MEP is working to produce cooperation and efficiency in relation to motivated engagement with academic communities. We will introduce 1) the goals, premises, and basic architecture of tools and platforms for The Media Ecology Project; 2) a brief survey of our pilot projects with major moving image archives in the U.S.; 3) The Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT), a new NEH-funded tool that is a drop-in module to facilitate the creation and sharing of time-based media annotations on the Web; and 4) new research pursued for a Knight News Challenge Prototype Grant to make film and video housed in libraries more searchable and discoverable.

Mark Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College and director of The Media Ecology Project. He is the founding editor of an e-journal, The Journal of e-Media Studies. With Adrian Randolph, he co-edits the book series Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture for the University Press of New England. With Michael Casey (Dartmouth Music and Computer Science) he received an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to create the ACTION toolset for cinematic analysis. He has received with John Bell an NEH grant to build a Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT). With Lorenzo Torresani (Dartmouth Computer Science) he has received a Knight Foundation grant to develop computer vision and machine learning capacities for moving images.

John P. Bell is a software developer and artist at Dartmouth College, where he is the Associate Director of the Media Ecology Project and Lead Application Developer in ITS with a focus on digital arts and humanities projects. His research focuses on collaborative creativity and has produced everything from utilitarian semantic web publishing platforms to aggressively useless installation art. With nine others, he was the co-author an 85,000-word long book about a 38-character long computer program. He is also an Assistant Professor of Digital Curation at the University of Maine and Senior Researcher at the Still Water Lab.

A User-Centered Approach for Museum Online Collections Elena Villaespesa As museums embrace the usage of agile digital production methodologies with a user-centered design,

understanding user experiences with their Online Collections becomes critical. This presentation will

focus on the different types of users that visit The Met’s Online Collection and the importance of

providing specific experiences in each case as expectations, knowledge and art expertise, context and

motivation, imply a diversity in needs when coming to navigate and explore art.

Elena Villaespesa holds a M.A. in Arts Management and a Ph.D. in Digital Heritage at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. Her dissertation defines a performance measurement framework that may serve as a tool for museums to evaluate the success of their activities on social media. As part of her PhD research she worked in the action research project led by Culture 24 Let's get real. Tate is the main case study for this research and as part of this collaboration she became a Tate Honorary Research Fellow 2015-17. Her professional career encompasses an international experience in some of the most prestigious museums in the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate in the United Kingdom and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Spain, where she has served in leading digital producer and data analyst roles.

Beyond Clicks, Likes, and Downloads: Identifying Meaningful Impacts for Digitized Ethnographic Archives Ricardo L. Punzalan Ethnographic archives hold records that document the resources, history, and culture of Indigenous communities. Often generated in the context of anthropological fieldwork, these materials come in diverse formats (e.g., manuscripts, sound recordings, moving images, and photographs). In recent years, libraries, archives, and museums have made great strides digitizing and providing online access to this genre of cultural heritage materials. While these efforts have enabled new possibilities for collections management, content delivery, and user interaction, access to digitized ethnographic archives presents unique ethical concerns because of the sensitive nature of their content and contexts of creation. Ethnographic archives often retain links to Indigenous source communities, yet archivists lack specialized impact and assessment measures that account for the complex political and cultural issues that access to such items entails. Extant models for impact assessment inadequately track the value of access to digitized ethnographic holdings. As users increasingly access digitized ethnographic materials, more systematic methods to assess the outcomes and impacts of digital access of these types of cultural heritage collections need to be in place. This presentation discusses six areas of meaningful impacts--Knowledge, Professional Discourse, Attitudes, Institutional Capacity, Policy, and Relationship--that can be used to examine the outcomes of access to and use of digitized ethnographic archives. The presentation will: provide an overview of ethnographic archives, their users and uses; evaluate relevant frameworks, methods, and published studies on impact assessment; and, finally, discuss these six areas of impact in assessing access to digitized ethnographic archives. Ricardo L. Punzalan is assistant professor of archives and digital curation at the College of Information Studies, affiliate assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, and co-director of Museum Scholarship and Material Culture program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also the current chair of the Native American Archives Section of the Society of American Archivists. In 2016, he received an early-career grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to study and develop strategies to assess the impact of access to digitized ethnographic archives for academic and Indigenous community users. His other research examines ‘virtual reunification’ as a strategy to provide integrated access to dispersed ethnographic archival photographs online. He also leads a team of postdoctoral scholars and masters’ fellows to enhance agricultural data curation efforts at the U.S. National Agricultural Library. Punzalan holds a Ph.D. in Information as well as graduate certificates in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and Museum Studies from the University of Michigan. He previously taught on the faculty of the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies. His articles have been published in leading library and information science and archives journals, including the Library Quarterly, Library Tends, Archives and Manuscripts, American Archivist, Archivaria, and Archival Science. In 2012, he received the Hugh A. Taylor Prize from the Association of Canadian Archivists for his co-authored article in Archivaria on users and uses of digitized photographic archives.

How do Wikipedians Use Digital Cultural Heritage? A Case Study from Louisiana Elizabeth Joan Kelly Links to cultural heritage institutions' (CHI) digital assets can be found in various places in Wikipedia articles. What can librarians working with digital CHI collections learn from analyzing these citations on Wikipedia? This presentation details a case study analysis of Wikipedia links to online resources from Louisiana CHI in order to determine what types of resources users are citing on Wikipedia, what is the content of the Wikipedia articles with CHI citations, and how this can influence the work of CHI.

Elizabeth Joan Kelly is the Digital Programs Coordinator at the Monroe Library at Loyola University. She has been employed at the library since 2010 and manages the library's digital programs including digital collections and preservation, digital scholarship, scholarly communications, and library web services. Her research interests include digital library and archives assessment, particularly the reuse of digital library objects, as well as library pedagogy. Recent publications on these subjects include articles in the The Journal of Web Librarianship, The Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, College & Undergraduate Libraries, Codex, and Archival Practice, among others. Elizabeth has also presented widely on these topics at conferences and annual meetings.

Reverse Image Lookup: Assessing Digital Library Users and Reuses Michele Reilly and Santi Thompson This presentation introduces and builds upon the application of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) and reverse image lookup (RIL), a graduated form of CBIR, as a potential assessment tool for cultural heritage repository managers. The presenters will focus their conversation around five topics: (1) CBIR and RIL definitions and history; (2) RIL case studies; (3) methods and results of presenters’ RIL study; (4) RIL benefits and limitations; and (5) implications of RIL on digital repository assessment. The presentation concludes by proposing that RIL offers benefits for cultural heritage repository managers in the assessment of users and the reuses of their collections. Audience members will gain insight into how the software can be used as another viable option in their assessment toolkit.

Michele Reilly. Associate Dean of Libraries (Director for Resource Management Services). Professor. University of Arkansas Libraries. Michele Reilly earned her MLS degree from Indiana University in Bloomington (2005) with a concentration in collection development and library management. In her current position as Associate Dean of Libraries for the University of Arkansas Libraries, some of the duties she provides are; materials budget management, collection development strategies, oversight of the technical services, integrated library system, and resource accessibility. Her research has concentrated on the access, discoverability, preservation of digital cultural heritage materials, the future of digital technologies that brings these unique resources to a wider audience, and how users are affected and interact with online cultural heritage assets.

Santi Thompson is the Head of Digital Research Services at the University of Houston (UH) Libraries. In this role, he develops policies and workflows for the digital components of scholarly communications, including digital research support and digital repositories. Santi publishes on the assessment of digital repository metadata, software, and content reuse. He also currently serves as the principal investigator for the IMLS-funded “Developing a Framework for Measuring Reuse of Digital Objects” grant project and the co-principal investigator for the IMLS-funded “Bridge2Hyku Toolkit: Developing Migration Strategies for Hyku.”