Based on the book Exploring Digital Libraries, this ALA Techsource webinar examines cultural heritage collections in the context of the social web and online communities. Calhoun and Brenner explore the possibilities and provide examples of digital libraries' shift toward social platforms, along the way discussing how to increase discoverability and community engagement, for instance through crowdsourcing.

1. Supporting Digital Scholarship:
Engaging Your Community Through
Cultural Heritage Digital Libraries
ALA TechSource Workshop
Karen Calhoun
Aaron Brenner
October 8, 2014 1

2. Calhoun, Karen. Exploring Digital
Libraries: Foundations, Practice,
Prospects. Chicago: ALA Neal-
Schuman, 2014.
Chapter 7 “Digital libraries and their
communities”
Chapter 10 “Digital libraries and the
social web: collections and
platforms”
2

3. Learning objectives
• Consider the context in which digital libraries are discovered
locally, regionally and globally
• Be acquainted with some ideas for examining your assumptions
about your audiences and their needs
• Evaluate some ways to increase the “social life” of your cultural
heritage digital collections
• Become familiar with some examples of crowdsourcing in cultural
heritage digital libraries
3

4. Poll:
Are you responsible for managing, or helping to manage a
digital library?
Yes – cultural heritage digital library
Yes - subject-based or institutional repository
Yes – other
Yes – several of the above
 No
4

5. Two Main Issues
Visibility and reach (discoverability)
• “Unlearn” some core
assumptions (DLs as
destination sites)
• Understand the context in
which digital libraries are
discovered locally,
regionally and globally
“Social life” of digital libraries
• The web as a platform for
participation
• Changing community
expectations
• From collections to
platforms
5

6. Getting Attention on the Web
6
“You Are What You Link”
Source: Adamic and Adar 2001

7. Discoverability: Integrated and
Decentralized
 Integrated discoverability
• “The Libraries will need a [pre-indexed] system or service
layer that integrates metadata from internal, external,
owned, licensed, and freely-available data sources
selected by library staff” (Hanson et al. 2011)
 Decentralized discoverability
“The Libraries should generate … metadata for local collections and data sources that
can be exported, harvested, or made available for crawling by external systems.”
(Hanson et al. 2011)
7

8. An Example of Best Practice (you
are what you link)!
8

9. 9

10. Integrated
Discovery
10
Content
from
Creators
and Their
Agents
Local Catalog
Local Digital
Libraries
Locally
managed
resources
Feeds from
other sources
(fee or free)
Local
discovery
layer
Decentralized Discoverability
Uploaded/harvested/crawled
/indexed metadata & links
Library
cooperative
commons
services and
registries
ArchiveGrid
Search engines
(Google, Google
Scholar)
National,
National,
international, and
domain-specific
collections and
international, and
domain-specific
collections and
National,
international,
and domain-specific
services
services
collections and
services
Europeana
DPLA
Digital Lib.
of Georgia

11. Pause for questions,
comments
11

12. Online Community Life Cycle
Life cycle model of success factors for
digital libraries in social environments
Based on Iriberri and Leroy (2009)
Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. p. 161.
12

13. If a network-based service’s
intended communities do
not actively engage and
participate, the service will
(eventually) die.
13

14. Social digital libraries?
14
• Most continue to operate from a traditional,
collections-centered service mode
• The social nature and roles of a library are typically lost
– DLs and repos are mostly read-only (“web 1.0”)
• A digital library that incorporates social web
approaches continues to be the exception rather than
the rule.

15. Changing Community Expectations
15
When individuals who use social
sites and tools approach digital
libraries (and repositories), they
bring their social web expectations
with them.
The digital libraries that continue to
operate from a traditional,
collections-centered service model
(that is, nearly all of them) are now
faced with finding their place in the
fast-moving, chaotic information
space of the social web.

16. The web as a platform for participation
16

17. What is the social web?
17
• The term “social web” refers collectively to the web sites, tools and services that
facilitate interactions, collaboration, content creation and sharing, contribution
and participation on the web
• The distinguishing characteristics are human and machine-to-machine
interactions
• The social web supports many types of online communities, and not just those
who participate in social networks
• In addition to the many web services and APIs that support the social web, the
large-scale take-up of mobile smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices has
created a huge scope of opportunity for social web growth

18. Digital libraries and the social web
18
• The advent of the social web provides an opportunity to
shift the focus and core assumptions of digital libraries …
– Away from:
– Their collections and information processes (selecting,
organizing, providing access, etc.)
– In favor of:
– New, community-centered ways of thinking about services,
expectations and potential social roles.

19. From static repositories to social
platforms?
19
Dan Cohen
History scholar
Exec. Director, DPLA
(Formerly of Center for
History and New Media)
“Social platforms” are active, open, modular,
gregarious and “chatty” with other software,
servers, people and organizations

20. What would change?
20
Transitions associated with the shift to social digital libraries
and repositories (figure 9.1, p. 214, Exploring Digital Libraries

21. What to do?
Inventory columns/questions
Name
Size
Target Audiences/communities
Usage (stats, webanalytics)
Rankings
Similar/related/competitor sites
Last needs assessment?
Benefits to target audiences
Communications/outreach activities
Potential for web services/social features?
What else?
21
Inventory of your digital collections repositories?

22. Some Possibilities to Consider
• Needs assessment of your
intended audiences
• Environmental scan: look at
examples in other
organizations
• Examine your digital library
using the online communities
life cycle model (slide 12)
• Inventory your digital
collections to identify
opportunities to make them
more social and aligned with
community needs/practices
• Don’t do anything within your
organizational “silo” – reach
out, look for willing partners
and pilot/demo projects
22
What else?

23. Questions:
• In what ways have you reached out to give a
user focus to your digital library work?
• What are challenges – social, technical,
resources, expertise – you face in doing so?
23

24. Platforms: more than open access,
opening knowledge creation
24
Europeana Business Plan 2014
http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/f19cc4ff-56a3-422c-83d9-f156ecc9b4ca

25. Characterizing crowdsourcing for
cultural heritage
“[A]sking the public to
undertake meaningful
tasks … in an environment
where the activities and/or
goals provide inherent
rewards for participation”
- Mia Ridge
25
less: more:

26. Enriching content:
Transcription, tagging, identification
26

27. Participatory Collection-Building
27
http://www.nowseethis.org/peopleshistory

28. Immediate History / Memorials
28
http://marathon.neu.edu/
http://911digitalarchive.org/

29. Connecting in person:
Roadshows & Collecting Days
29

30. Engagement-First Projects: NYPL Labs
What it means
fundamentally,” Vershbow
continues, “is re-imagining the
very roles of librarians and
curators, positioning them not
only as custodians of physical
collections, but as leaders of
online communities.”
http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/09/15/all-hands-deck-
nypl-turns-crowd-develop-digital-collections
30
Labs doodle by Michael Lascarides
http://www.nypl.org/collections/labs

31. Beyond transcription:
31

32. Ultimately, crowdsourcing is
about far more than collecting
data
32
Trevor Owens:
http://www.trevorowens.org/2012/03/crowdsourcing-cultural-heritage-the-objectives-are-upside-down/

33. Getting collections on the
network
Cooper Hewitt Collections developer Sebastian Chan:
The site “puts the museum properly ‘on the Network’...
...asserts the value of even incomplete object records in the face of falling public funding for
digitization and culture in general
...communicates to the public that the museum is human and fallible, just like them
...is aimed at both scholars and casual visitors, and increasingly machines and robots that
inhabit the web” 33

34. Wikipedia: for mutual benefit
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org
http://vimeo.com/78005986 34

35. Microdata: richer representation
on the Web
35

36. Leveraging Linked Data to support communities:
multi-lingual support
36

37. Linked data for mapping
communities
37
http://linkedjazz.org/public_demo_mapping/

38. Other strategies for engaging &
socializing digital libraries:
38

39. Chatty and unpredictable:
Serendipity, bots, and applications
39

40. Localizing views & contributions
40
http://inkdroid.org/ici/ https://www.historypin.org/map/

41. Visualizing the data inside collections
http://web.stanford.edu/group/ruralwest/cgi-bin/drupal/visualizations/us_newspapers

42. ...and uses we cannot anticipate:
“...[R]esearchers may want to interact with a
collection of artifacts, or they may want to work with a
data corpus. Some may want to search for stories in
historic newspapers. Some may want to mine
newspaper OCR for trends across time periods and
geographic areas. Some may want to see what a
specific user tweeted. Some may want to look at the
spread of an event hashtag across the world in a day.”
Leslie Johnston, “Data is the New Black,” The Signal: Digital Preservation, October
14, 2011, http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2011/10/data-is-the-new-black/.

43. Happening now: 680 other ideas
https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/libraries 43

44. Thank You!
No man is an Island,
entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the Continent,
a part of the main.
Meditation XVII, John Donne
karencal129@gmail.com
abrenner@pitt.edu
44

45. Over to you!
45

46. References (1/3)
• Adamic, Lada A., and Eytan Adar. 2001. “You Are What You Link.” In 10th Annual
International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong.
http://www10.org/program/society/yawyl/YouAreWhatYouLink.htm.
• Calhoun, Karen (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman
• Chan, Sebastian. “Cooper-Hewitt Online Collection | MW2013: Museums and the Web 2013.”
Accessed September 25, 2014. http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/bow/cooper-hewitt-
online-collection/.
• Charles, Valentine, and Cécile Devarenne. “Europeana Enriches Its Data with the Art and
Architecture Thesaurus.” Europeana Professional.
http://www.pro.europeana.eu/c/portal/layout?p_l_id=1278264.
• Cohen, Dan. “The Social Life of Digital Libraries,” April 2010.
http://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/226651.
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47. References (2/3)
• De Jager, Wiebe. “Helping Cultural Heritage Institutions Get Their Content on Wikipedia |
Europeana,” August 6, 2014. http://blog.europeana.eu/2014/08/helping-cultural-heritage-institutons-
get-their-content-on-wikipedia/.
• Europeana Business Plan 2014. Accessed March 31, 2014.
http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/f19cc4ff-56a3-422c-83d9-f156ecc9b4ca.
• Gan, Vicky. “All Hands on Deck: NYPL Turns to the Crowd to Develop Digital Collections.”
Accessed September 25, 2014. http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/09/15/all-hands-deck-nypl-turns-
crowd-develop-digital-collections.
• Hanson, Cody, and Heather Hessel. University of Minnesota Libraries - Discoverability Phase 2
Report, February 4, 2011. http://purl.umn.edu/99734
• “LD4L Use Cases - Linked Data for Libraries - DuraSpace Wiki.”
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/ld4l/LD4L+Use+Cases.
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48. References (3/3)
• Owens, Trevor (2012) “Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: The Objectives are Upside Down”.
http://www.trevorowens.org/2012/03/crowdsourcing-cultural-heritage-the-objectives-are-upside-down/
• Pattuelli, M. Cristina, Matt Miller, Leanora Lange, Sean Fitzell, and Carolyn Li-Madeo. “Crafting
Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage: Mapping and Curation Tools for the Linked Jazz Project.”
The Code4Lib Journal, no. 21 (July 15, 2013). http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8670.
• Proffitt, Merrilee, and Sara Snyder. “CNI: Wikipedia and Libraries: What’s the Connection?”
presented at the Coalition for Networked Information Fall 2012 Membership Meeting, December
10, 2012. http://vimeo.com/61522767.
• Ridge, Mia. “Open Objects: Sharing Is Caring Keynote ‘Enriching Cultural Heritage Collections
through a Participatory Commons.’” Accessed March 31, 2014.
http://openobjects.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/sharing-is-caring-keynote-enriching.html.
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