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Showing posts from August, 2015

Navigating the "if you build it, they will come" mentality in digital libraries

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how users come to find our digital content, and how we can improve the ways users find, navigate and interact with our content. We are in the midst of a re-design of Digital Collections for Special Collections and Archives at Kent, moving to an open source Omeka option. I'm most excited about the enhanced search and browse features, and also in using OAI-PMH to further open our collections online. I will be tracking use over the next year and looking to see how users find our collections (open Google search? From our homepage?), and then what they do once they have found what they are looking for. But this all assumes that people have found a way to search the digital collections- how can we highlight certain features that are currently hidden and buried away? Our staff and faculty have used some social media tools in the past, but are these a lasting mechanism? Omeka has a digital exhibit function, which I hope will be quite useful as