Create champions for your digital collections

Creating collection champions can contribute to institutional strategies to:

Enrich teaching and learning

Universities are universally focused on opportunities to enhance student experience and success though enriching learning and teaching provision. Providers at all levels are looking for digital technologies to increase flexibility of mode, to enable personalisation and collaboration and to transform access to and contextualisation of resources.

Digitised content can make a strong contribution to these objectives by

• Enriching course materials and open education resources
• Providing a window on the world of advanced study and the mechanics of scholarship
• Offering teachers new opportunities to animate their subject areas

Enable research

Research is measured through a broad suite of impact factors that are underpinned by the strengths of people and resources. In many disciplines, those assets are increasingly distributed and virtualised, with research groups operating across faculty, institutional and geographic boundaries. The availability of content in a digital environment supports the distributed academy, providing a platform for the individual and the community.

Digitised content can make a strong contribution to these objectives by

• Offering flexibility of access in terms of location and time
• Linking scanned images with reusable text, lexical tools, metadata and commentary
• Applying advancing IT techniques to analysis and comparison of texts and data
• Providing a platform for interaction amongst scholars, linking commentary and debate directly to sources

Enhance reputation

Reputation for research, learning, teaching and more broadly as an institution is developed on a number of fronts ranging from impact measures to astute marketing and publicity. Most would agree that high profile collections can play a part in that mix, demonstrating scholarly tradition, worthy investment and learning opportunity, especially in the humanities.

Digitised content can make a strong contribution to these objectives by

• Making the institution collections richly visible to the widest audience online
• Providing a vehicle for widely resonant press releases and associated social media
• Generating exposure through use in A-level teaching

Creating collection champions will help those who:

Find content on recommendation from teachers

Students at all levels look for recommendations from teachers to guide them towards resources. These can be either through course reading lists or in the form of recommendations made in class or in a one-to-one discussion. When searching for resources to recommend, teachers tend to rely on their own specialist knowledge of the field, but may use library catalogues or online databases to check they have not missed anything relevant.

Find content by following experts online

Students and researchers who are becoming familiar with their field of interest recognise the value of identifying and following experts. Establishing who are experts and finding their publications is seen as a good way to enter into a new topic of research. An overview article or chapter written by a subject expert is seen as an excellent starting point for further exploration. When preparing to teach courses staff are also likely to look for relevant courses taught by other experts for examples and to compare approaches.

Use online social tools to find content

Students and researchers use online social tools to form peer communities in which information on resources will be exchanged. Most used are e-mail lists, writing personal and shared blogs, and tracking relevant blogs, often through RSS feeds. A few report use of Twitter for this purpose, but Facebook is not mentioned. Students are more likely to use social media such as Twitter and Facebook as a way of sharing resources where this forms part of the way they keep in touch with peers and classmates.

Find content by following citation chains

Researchers, both graduate students and faculty, place high value on following bibliographic references from books and articles they are reading, as a way of expanding their reference lists. This applies both to when they are researching new topics and as a way of expanding their knowledge of a research field in which they are already active.

In 2018 Jisc commissioned Sero HE to interview academics who were actively engaging with digital archival collection in learning, teaching and research.

From embedding digital archival collections into the curriculum, to creating open educational resources to support students and researchers, to using digital tools to help students develop better skills of reflection analysis and evaluation, these case studies demonstrate the variety and depth of interaction with digital media in both undergraduate and postgraduate studies in the United Kingdom.

See the list of case studies.

Since the launch of this guide in 2014, Jisc has worked with UK higher education academics and librarians to highlight resource discovery and the use of digital collections.

The audio and written case studies created between 2014 and 2017 provide valuable insights into the methods used by academics and librarians to showcase digital collections.

See the list of case studies.

• University College London runs Transcribe Bentham, a crowdsourced project aimed at transcribing the unpublished works of Jeremy Bentham. The project will result in new materials for a publication and a fully-searchable text
• The Imperial War Museum has published images from its collection on HistoryPin, and have asked users to locate the places in images on a map of the world
• The British Library has launched 'In the Spotlight', a crowdsourcing platform focused on their collection of playbills

Skills and knowledge required

• Experience of community management

Cost

• £££££ - continuous investment required

Resources

• Liber guide to crowdsourcing

Skills and knowledge required

• Experience of management and planning

Cost

• £££££ - ongoing investment required

Resources

• NISO's 'A framework of guidance for building good digital collections' continues to provide advice on the core elements of project management

• The 'Workers Underground’ video and written case study shares the personal stories of those who contributed to the digital collection, and the 2016 impact report on the  'Europeana 1914-1918' project
• The Rijksmuseum offers the Rijks Studio tool that allows users to create their own collections, order reproductions and post new artworks based on the museum’s collection
• The National Archives and the Imperial War Museum collaborated with Zooniverse to crowdsource the transcription of data from digitised First World War documents
• University College London runs Transcribe Bentham, a crowdsourced project aimed at transcribing the unpublished works of Jeremy Bentham

Measures for this activity should be designed based on the type of engagement desired or the user activity being encouraged.

Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources: the Balanced Value Impact Model from King's Digital Labs may assist in planning and measuring engagement with users of your collection.

Skills and knowledge required

• Expertise in the subject matter or curation experience
• Experience in marketing

Cost

• £££££ - continuous investment required

• The National Archives and the Imperial War Museum are collaborated with Zooniverse to crowdsource the transcription of data from digitised First World War documents

Measures should be designed in conjunction with your collaborators, and will depend on the objectives of the collaboration. A useful resource might be Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources: the Balanced Value Impact Model from King's Digital Labs.

Skills and knowledge required

• Expertise in the subject matter or curation experience
• Experience in marketing

Cost

• £££££ - continuous investment required