A co-design project, also known as spotlight on the digital, in partnership with RLUK and SCONUL. It puts into practice the recommendations of our phase one investigation into the challenges of discovery of online digital collections.
Background
The need for this project emerged out of the concern that digitised collections are not as 'discoverable' as they could be through the channels and devices most commonly accessed by users.
It seeks to investigate and identify practical solutions that will support higher education institutions enhance the discoverability of their digitised collections for the benefit of their key audiences, in particular researchers, teachers and students.
What we're doing
We are in the process of implementing key recommendations from the phase one report to provide training, tools and horizon scanning in the area of online resource discovery, and to optimise Jisc discovery services to increase visibility of digital collections in Archives Hub and Copac. This 'action' phase of the project commenced in September 2014 and will conclude in July 2016.
Phase two has been prioritised into four key action areas:
National training package to support increased use and discovery of online digital resources to support research, teaching and learning
The pilot is being prototyped and tested with the input of several HEI’s who applied for resource discovery scholarships. Read more about the resource discovery scholarships on the project blog post
Research and develop tools to facilitate discoverability of online digital collections
The project is assessing the tool specification outcomes from phase one as well as researching developments in communities such as Europeana and DPLA to identify which tools discoverability avenue to pursue and prototype
Optimise Jisc resource discovery services to increase visibility of digital collections
Archives Hub are in the process of adding records of themed digitised collections to their collection level descriptions including those produced from Jisc digitisation programmes listed on Jisc Content
The project is collaborating with Jisc Historical Texts to prototype and link records of digitised monographs from the Jisc-Wellcome UK Medical Heritage Library (UKMHL) digitisation project to Copac. Read more about the UKMHL on the blog
Provide horizon scanning on rapidly changing technology and workflows in resource discovery
The project has convened an expert group who will meet several times across phase two to discuss trends in resource discovery and deliver up to three briefing papers on the subject
Phase one of the project has so far delivered the following outputs:
Making your digital collections easier to discover is a guide which will support creators/managers of digitised resources in identifying the most appropriate discovery tactics to adopt according to the particular context of their collection/s, level of cost, effort and expected impact
Discoverability technical tools consists of specifications for several technical tools that could be developed in the future to support discovery solutions both at national and/or institutional level
Discoverability diagnosis is a web-based assessment, both human and machine-based, of the discoverability of a sample of between 150-200 collections that were digitised in the last 10-15 years. The aim of this output is to 'take the pulse' of the current level of discoverability of digitised collections and identify broad patterns, barriers and key 'pain points' for discoverability, which will then feed into the identification of appropriate solutions
The technical tool specifications and web assessment outcomes can both be found among the project final outputs blog.
Within many further and higher education institutions and their allied organisations there exists a wide-ranging, diverse group of libraries, archives and collections.
