Ensuring your digital collections reach academic researchers

Making your digital collection available for learning and teaching can contribute to institutional strategies to:

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.

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

Making your digital collection available for learning and teaching will help those who:

Use a 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 an online research resource or a database 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 by following experts

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.

• British History Online provides BHO, Chicago and MLA 'cite' options on each text page. Additionally they offer a comprehensive citation guide covering use of extracts such as maps and paragraphs
• The Old Bailey Online provides a citation guide for items in its collection. Research by the team showed that most researchers used the citation guide provided, demonstrating it is possible to influence behaviour
• Trove digitised newspapers provides extensive details on citing types of materials in the collection. This includes a ‘cite’ function for newspaper articles within the 'i' details tab that displays the citation information in common formats, offering export options to make it easy for researchers to include correct information in several popular reference management packages

The most basic measure is to determine whether there is a citation guide for items in your digital collection.

Many libraries offer advice on bibliometrics including UCL and the University of York. 

Skills and knowledge required

• Knowledge of citation and referencing styles and practice

Cost

• £££££ - occasional investment required

Resources

UCL provide a References, Citations and Avoiding Plagiarism guide

How to Cite Archival Sources from Tufts University, with a supplementary Major Citation Styles guide

• The Science Museum has opened up its collection via a public API and encourages creative use of its data
• Rijksmuseum offers a number of APIs to retrieve object metadata and bibliographic data

You can generally track use of your API through software logs and web analytics, although this might not reflect the true value of use. Other measures might include:

• A list of the projects that have used your API
• Case studies of specific use of your API and the outcomes

The Museums and the machine-processable web wiki provides a useful list of projects using data from cultural heritage APIs.

You might also find Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources: the Balanced Value Impact Model from King's Digital Labs useful.

Skills and knowledge required

• Expertise in the subject matter or curation experience
• A knowledge of rights and licensing
• Experience in computer programming
• Experience of working with APIs
• Experience in marketing

Cost

• £££££ - continuous investment required

Resources

• The Museums and the machine-processable web wiki provides a place to enter information about your collection's API as well as browse other collections offering API access to their data.

• 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. The project will result in new materials for a publication and a fully-searchable text.

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

• Trove digitised newspapers provides extensive details on citing types of materials in the collection. This includes a ‘cite’ function for newspaper articles within the 'i' details tab that displays the citation information in common formats, offering export options to make it easy for researchers to include correct information in several popular reference management packages

• The most basic measure you can carry out is to determine that reference management software is supported by your mechanisms
• Many libraries offer advice on bibliometrics including UCL and the University of York

Skills and knowledge required

• Knowledge of web development

Cost

• £££££ - occasional investment required

Resources

• How to Cite Archival Sources from Tufts University, with a supplementary Major Citation Styles guide
• What is reference management from the ‘ReMIT: Reference Management Integration Toolkit