Improve the user experience of your digital collection

Enhancing the user experience of your collection can contribute to institutional strategies to:

Enrich learning and teaching

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

Improve efficiency and effectiveness

The strategic outcomes of digitisation can alternatively be described in terms of economy, efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery. This is particularly evident in the cases of learning and teaching and of research, where digitisation brings opportunities for greater effectiveness (personalisation, collaboration, etc) as well as saving time and money.

The cases for efficiency and effectiveness can be assessed by comparing current practice (for example in curation, learning and research). However, it is important to beware of overstating economic benefits as the costs of digitisation are highly variable and may be set against zero cost (though less effective) alternatives.

Assist widening participation

Universities are strategically committed to widening participation across social and economic groupings in higher education for all levels (undergraduate degrees, postgraduate studies, continuing and professional education) and regardless of mode (ranging from full time to distance education and MOOCs).

Digitised content can make a strong contribution to these objectives by

• Showcasing attractive and original learning and research content to prospective students
• Enabling re-use, thus adding value to educational resources, not only for university use but also for schools and colleges
• Social media amplification that brings original digitised content to the attention of key interest groups, such as A level teachers or local interest groups

Build a scholarly record

Alongside a range of institutions and authorities, Universities play a critical role in building the scholarly record, not only by undertaking research and cultivating dialogue but also in capturing, validating and preserving scholarly assets. These assets include underlying data, publications and artefacts. 

Digitised content can make a strong contribution to these objectives by

• Making unique assets more accessible for citation, social recommendation and re-use as a result of representing them in the digital world
• Providing a digital backstop in the preservation chain
• Reducing wear and tear on original artefacts

Offer economy of access

Alongside memory institutions, universities recognise the importance of providing access to unique texts and other assets of scholarly significance held in their special collections. However, supporting physical access is costly and inefficient for all parties. Whilst principally of interest to researchers in the institution, in the wider HE community and beyond, the potential for these assets to enrich the learning and teaching experience is increasingly recognised, especially if they can be readily accessed in digital form.

Digitised content can make a strong contribution to these objectives by

• Alleviating pressures on curators to accommodate visiting scholars
• Saving visiting costs to the researcher or student, with resulting environmental benefits
• Opening up resources to students who would be unlikely to access the originals
   

The global pandemic of 2020-2021 showed how digital access to collections can suddenly and unexpectedly become essential when onsite access for users is not possible for some reason.

Enhancing the user experience of your collection will help those who:

Use a general search engine to find content

Students at all levels, teachers and researchers report making use of general search engines to locate resources. Google is most often cited but others are used. Many students at undergraduate level report that they go no further than the first page of search engine results, and often no further than any Wikipedia entry highlighted. More advanced students and researchers will often use the search engine as the first stage of a more extensive discovery process.

Use a general web service to find content

Research shows that most undergraduate students make use of well-known web-based services as a key part of their discovery behaviour. The most-used service is Wikipedia, although others such as YouTube and Flickr are mentioned for appropriate disciplines. Many students will go no further, though some will go on to cite, and some of those to visit, any references the service lists. Literature reports that teachers may also use Wikipedia, primarily to see what their students are finding. Graduate students and researchers may sometimes use Wikipedia for a quick introduction to a new topic.

Use Google services (Scholar, Books etc) to find content

Faculty researchers not only use a general search engine to find papers and books, but will often use specialist services such as Google Scholar and Google Books as the starting point for keyword searches or for citation analyses. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students are also reported as using these services as one method of discovery. Some students report that book previews in Google Books can be sufficient for them to feel no need to seek out the full volume.

Use online research resources or databases to find content

Researchers, both graduate students and faculty, bookmark and then directly access online resources, including collections and databases, that they find valuable and to which they want to make return visits. Old Bailey Online and the Astrophysics Data System are two examples studied in the literature, but there are many more.

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.

The most basic measure you can carry out is to ensure you carry out user testing regularly, and act on the findings.

There are a number of tools that will allow you to effectively use web analytics to understand changes in how users navigate your site as a result of amends following user testing. You want to pay particular attention to the average page views per visit, bounce rate, quantity of returning visitors and visit duration figures.

• Get started with Google Analytics Academy Courses
• Introduction to Google Analytics Segments

Skills and knowledge required

• Knowledge of usability or experience testing

Cost

• £££££ - continuous investment required

Resources

• 5 crucial principles of websites usability and design
• Quicksprout's website useability guide

It is very difficult to measure the use of appropriate language, although a number of readability measures exist. 

There are a number of tools that will allow you to effectively use web analytics to understand changes in traffic to your site as a result of using appropriate language:

• Get started with Google Analytics Academy Courses
• Introduction to Google Analytics Segments

Skills and knowledge needed

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) skills
• Knowledge of marketing or writing for the web

Cost

• £££££ - continuous investment required

Resources

• Writing in Plain English and creating accessible documents
• Google Search Central
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) starter guide by Google
• Bing’s webmaster how-to centre

Skills and knowledge required

• Knowledge of marketing and audience segmentation
• Expertise in subject matter or curation experience

Cost

• £££££ - occasional investment required

Resources

• How the British Library is using SEO to become a digital media publisher

Skills and knowledge required

• Expertise in usability and user experience
• Experience of web development

Cost

• £££££ - continuous investment required

Resources

• This list of web analytics software will give you information on using log analysis to identify changes in the way search engines crawl your site following publication of a sitemap