Make your collection available for learning and teaching

Making your digital collection available for learning and teaching 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

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.

Contribute to widening participation activities

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

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.

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.

• Digital archives built by students: inherited learning at University of Hertfordshire (pdf)
• Digital diseases: creating 3D models of human bones at the University of Bradford (pdf)
• Turning students into scholars: embedding digital collections in the history collection at Cardiff University (pdf)
• Wikimedia in the curriculum: addressing the challenges of digital and information literacy, digital scholarship and open knowledge at the University of Edinburgh (pdf)
• Teaching with digital archives to improve pedagogy: teaching digital history techniques to undergraduates at Loughborough University (pdf)
• Observing the 80s: creating and curating a digital archive collection at University of Sussex (pdf)
• Panopticon and the people: digital approaches to the history of crime and punishment at University of Liverpool (pdf)
   

Read more about these case studies in the opening chapter.

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 University of Leicester makes the metadata for its digital collections available under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence, while digital items are available under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) licence
• The Rijksmuseum makes a subset of its digital collection of high resolution images available under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence
• The Smithsonian has released over 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from its collections under a CC0 licence as part of the Smithsonian Open Access Initiative

The most basic measure you can carry out is to check that both your resources and the associated descriptive data is clearly licensed.

The purpose of licensing is to encourage the appropriate re-use of resources, and tracking this is not straightforward. Some platforms offer usage statistics. Other useful measures include:

• Gathering a list of places in which re-use is occurring
• Tracking and logging the types of re-use that are occurring
• Statistics from web search engines targeting re-use - Google’s Image Search and TinEye both allow you to identify copies of an image uploaded to the internet

Another tool that might help you assess the re-use of your resources is Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources: the Balanced Value Impact Model from King's Digital Labs.

Skills and knowledge required

• Knowledge of licensing

Cost

• £££££ - occasional investment required

Resources

• Creative Commons update on Open Glam, highligthing collections that have released digital objects onto the web using CC0 licenses
• Open data guides from the Open Data Institute
• A consortia of international organisations has created RightsStatements.org to encourage standardisation of copyright information for digitised collections

• The University of Leicester has created short videos that use digitised images from its Manufacturing Pasts collection, narrated by one of its professors
• The Royal Maritime Museum has a series of learning resources that draw from their collections, including videos, lesson plans and classroom activities
• BFI Education at home offers a variety of resources from primary through to secondary level pupils
• The People’s Collection Wales offers learning resources from Key Stage 2 to Post 16

The most basic measure is to evidence the use by educators of the resource packs you create.

Wikimedia Commons provides a range of tools that will help you track the use of your items:

• On any resource page on Wikimedia Commons you can see a list titled ‘File usage on other wikis’ when you open 'More details'. You may also check usage worldwide using the Global Usage function'
• Gain daily statistics for every page on Wikipedia
• The BaGLAMa tool counts monthly hits on images from different source organisations

Skills and knowledge required

• Expertise in the subject matter or curation experience
• Experience of pedagogy and curriculum planning

Cost

• £££££ - occasional investment required

Resources

• The OER Impact Study

• The University of Leicester library makes metadata for their digital collections available under a Creative Commons Zero licence, while making their digital items available under Creative Commons Attribution, non-commercial licence
• The Tate has published data about items in their collection under a Creative Commons Zero licence. Images, such as 'Photograph of a bicycle' may be used non-commercially under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (unported) licence

The most basic measure is whether both your resources and associated descriptive data is clearly licensed. However, the purpose of licensing is to promote appropriate re-use of resources. Tracking re-use is challenging, as you may not be aware of all the places where reuse is occurring. Where specific known services are being used to promote re-use (e.g. Wikimedia, Flickr) they often provide usage statistics. Other useful re-use measures:

• List of places where re-use is occurring, and the type of re-use
• Case studies of specific re-use and the outcomes

Other tools that might help you assess the re-use of your resources are 'Measuring the impact of digital resources: the balanced value impact model' from King’s Digital Lab and an introduction to Google Analytics Segments. 

Skills and knowledge required

• Licensing

Cost

• £££££ - occasional investment required

Resources

• Video guide to open metadata licensing
• Open data guides from the Open Data Institute