Skip to main content

Russian doll effect in digital libraries


I've heard a few presentations from Jim Bradley (Head of Metadata and Digital Initiatives at Ball State) over the years on the idea of the Russian Doll effect in digital libraries. This has been an intriguing premise to me- How can we effectively assess and track how our digital collections are living beyond the scope of the repository, and further, how can we track this type of scholarship? Surely this process would display the value and importance of open digital collections, and also indicate how scholarship is influenced and created through these collections.

The elusiveness of digital media can be a curious one to try to ponder and capture effectively, but I think what is interesting to me, is how users can repurpose, repackage and bundle information into new contexts. Bradley has spoken about a project where students used drawings from the Pierre and Wright Architectural Records and created new designs and 3D objects from the original drawings. The digital library then sought to collect these new creations in their own new (but related) collections.

In a similar vein here at Kent, I was thrilled to see our student newspaper (who we've recently been meeting with) start to highlight content from our digital archive. Example here, telling us that in 1942 Kent State freshman were made to wear dinks, give up their seat to upperclassmen at any given time and know the alma mater by heart.

Coeds Receiving Dinks, Kent State, 1940s
Image from: Kent State University Libraries. Special Collections and Archives.

My hope (and goal) looking to other collections is to find these threads of use and find a way to effectively put in a metrics frame to capture this kind of information. This kind of information may help guide future project decisions and also gauge interest in what users are looking for.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sanborn fire maps

It has been a long time since I have written here, and my only excuses are the general life feeling that there are not enough hours in the day/week/month.... One excuse is that I did finish writing a short book last year that is now out! Framing Privacy in Digital Collections with Ethical Decision Making published by the lovely, lovely folks at Morgan & Claypool. I'm also working on a somewhat related writing project now on privacy and archivists that I hope to have finished up by late spring with colleague and friend Dr Jodi Kearns from the University of Akron. But recently, my colleague Michael Hawkins and I applied for a grant from the Ohio Local History Alliance, and were successful! We're in the early stages now of packing up the collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps and getting it prepared for digitization. Kent State is the holding institution for Ohio, and more general info on the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps can be found here . We're opting to outsou...

New image viewer in place for Omeka content

In anticipation for the addition of a large number of textual documents to be added to our online digital archive in the next year, we've added a new image viewer that allows for much more interaction with the digital items. Now a user can zoom in and navigate through an image or document. Here is an example: http://omeka.library.kent.edu/special-collections/items/show/1458 One feature that we are excited to have in place with this new viewer is to provide a slideshow/scroll view of items with multiple pages or images. Thanks to Project Mirador ! Check back for more additions in the coming months.

Daily Kent Stater and new May 4 content up!

Over the winter break, we were busy getting another decade of the student newspaper online, as well as some truly unique audio material from the May 4 Collection. Visit  http://dks.library.kent.edu/  to browse the new decade (1990s). As well, we also have added many unique reel-to-reel  audio  recordings from the May 4 collection to our May 4 Digital Archive. These are quite fascinating- with many live radio broadcasts from the hours, days and weeks after the shootings as well as many public hearings, and I can truly say that it is very easy to get lost in these recordings.  Some of the recently digitized items include previously inaccessible audio recordings of radio call-in forums, a speech by University President Robert I. White the day after the shootings, a press conference with six students who met with President Richard M. Nixon just days after the shootings, the Scranton Commission hearings , and a speech made by Dick Greg...