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Are we serving the right stakeholders?
OCLC, Yale, June 2013 Dave Thompson
Digital Curator, Wellcome Library
you
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
The Wellcome Library
• Part of Wellcome Collection, astonishing public venue in London developed by the Wellcome Trust. Where people can learn more about medicine through the ages & across cultures.
• More than 100,000 readers visit us each year, including historians, academics, students, health professionals & consumers, journalists, artists & members of the general public.
Big digital ambitions
• Ambitious digitisation plans. Digitise the library.
• Library transformation strategy, physical to digital.
• Increasing amounts of material available on line.
• Lessons to date provide interesting insights.
We know why digital is important, eh?
• Wide access to otherwise rare & fragile materials available as malleable data.
• Bon digital archives provide unique insight, to reveal a human side.
• Democratisation of access to data without visiting the archive. 24x7x365.
• Isn’t offering digital access to material a good thing?
Who is the boss of you?
• We know our stakeholders so well, project boards, governors, funding committees, competing user groups, managers, etc.
• Daily we face budgets, deadlines, objectives, reviews, competition for resources.
• Easy to see working with digital as a technical & organisational task. Hit the mark & move on.
• But are these the only stakeholders?
The material
• Quantity Vs quality. 10 illuminated manuscripts or 1000 students texts?
• Does metadata support granular discovery of rich digital material in ways that maximise its use/re-use?
• Format, how can material (data) be applied to research. Do users really want page turners?
• Ways in which the material will/can be used. Not only format of the data but rights too.
http://colophon.com/gallery/minsky/illum.htm
MOH tables as data sets
• MOH reports contain average 47 tables of data each. Tables have clear rows/columns & caption or description of contents & numeric content. That’s >250,000 tables.
• Tables extracted from OCR’d text, formatted according to the physical layout & manually checked/corrected for accuracy.
• Tables delivered from supplier as CSV & XML files. The XML contains HTML formatting indicating layout.
• Exploring creating a database to allow users to discover & download tables individually, or in aggregate.
The future
• We don’t know how material will be used in the future or what will be important.
• Researchers increasingly competent in working with data, e.g. data as XML, or encoded as ALTO files.
• Ideally rights in material will be open & permit diverse re-use.
• Moving data into the future is an exercise in faith, vision & imagination.
The user
• We consult with users in usability testing. What are their data needs?
• ‘Sufficient’ metadata (DMD & AMD) is essential to the re-use of data.
• What will user do with material? Flexibility of format, structure, etc.
• Need to create users who are self directed, use material without support.
What's the point?
• The point of digitisation & preservation is re-use.
• But not re-use by archivists, the point of digitisation & preservation is not endless life cycle management.
• Re-use is the application of material to the creation of new knowledge.
• Creation of new social relationships in the creation & management of data.
What happens on my watch…?
• We are custodians. We are not owners.
• Actions we take, decisions we make – or don’t take/make – affect the future use/re-use of the material.
• Much effort/resource focussed on acquisition or creation of digital material. Too much?
• Can only work with what was created/acquired at the time. Re-purposing material later expensive & time consuming.
Digital is for life not just for Christmas
• Need to work with digital now, but need to imagine a future in which data will be used.
• Need to work end to end. Imagine the entire process from whoa to go, digitisation to discovery to use.
• Costs of/for digital must include costs of conservation, metadata creation & data formatting. It’s a whole package.
• Balance between mass availability & less, but done better.
• Need new ways of engaging with creators & users.
• Need to imagine data into the future, be re-usable.
• Need to do more to negotiate rights for permitted reuse with creators.
• Working with digital is a social, not technical activity, built on relationships.
Lessons learned
• Archivists role is mediator between the material, the user and the future.
• We can’t do digital simply because doing digital is a ‘good thing’. Challenge is bigger than this.
• Need to identify & match best suited data to users & support their data needs by providing rich metadata that enhances digital material.
• Not a technical exercise. Social activity, building relationships & projecting relationships into the future.
Thank you
Questions now, questions later…?
Dave Thompson, Digital CuratorWellcome Library
[email protected] / http://wellcomelibrary.org
@d_n_t