Day 3: Strand Symposium

Phew, if I thought I had a lot of notes from the British Library, it’s nothing compared to the stacks of notes I took today. Over the course of the day, we heard 9 different speakers covering topics in digital scholarship. Carol Tenopir of UTK described how academics determine what online sources are trustworthy and how they use those resources. The kinds of criteria academics use–who the author institution is, impact factor, citations/references, etc.–are somewhat particular to academic resources but could also be applied to other types of users and online resources. One aspect I found particular interesting was the idea of interconnectivity as an important factor for trust: the more a source is referenced or referred to by other users online (whether a citation in an online journal or a retweet or a link in a blog), the more likely a user is to trust that information. As more and more information is shared and created online, it seems clear that this interconnectivity is going to be a vital part of establishing trustworthy information.

Our Dean, Tula Giannini discussed Project CHART and the Brooklyn Visual Heritage Project, which the Pratt students were very familiar with. David Nicholas presented a really fascinating talk on Europeana and his research into how users engaged with the collection. Using deep log analysis (Google Analytics and Clickstream logs), he looked into usage behavior and how that could be used to guide the design of the site. Many people engage with Europeana with mobile devices, which present an entire different set of usage challenges and requirements than someone connecting at a desktop. There are fundamental differences between mobile user behavior versus stationary user behavior, and it is important for information professionals to consider these differences when designing content delivery systems. I hadn’t looked into any sort of this research before, and it was a real eye-opener for me.

Stuart Dunn gave another interesting talk on formal/informal publishing of archaeological datasets, and Susan Whitfield discussed the background International Dunhuang Project (see yesterday’s post on the British Library). Richard Gartner discussed metadata standards and how there are so many of them! Seriously, what can you do (answer: metadata wrappers). Matt Kibble discussed digital publishing, product management and market research, which was interesting to hear about since you generally don’t hear about the commercial perspective in school. Chris Cotton ended the symposium by talking about private-public partnerships for digitization projects and outlined some of the amazing things ProQuest has done with public UK institutions.

Paola Macchionni presented on a really important topic: sustainability of digital projects. Since taking the Projects in Digital Archives course earlier this summer, web preservation has been on my mind a lot. When the funding for a digitization project is over, what happens to the website? Digital assets are not like analog items – they need constant maintenance in order to be preserved and continued to be accessed. The earlier digitization grant projects did not seem to take these considerations into account, and some projects have been totally lost after the initial funding ends. Now, digital preservation and contingency plans seem to on everyone’s mind, so plans for on-going maintenance are now included in project proposals.

I don’t have photos of the symposium, but afterwards a bunch of us went to the National Portrait Gallery (open late on Thursdays). That was fantastic: around every corner was a painting I recognized from a book cover, textbook illustration, and documentary, and to see them in on a monumental scale was so amazing.