by Sara Ring
Quick Summary
If you have a digital collection at your organization and are thinking about any type of assessment, I encourage you to look at the good work of the Digital Library Federation’s Digital Assessment Interest Group. Formed in 2014, this interest group is looking at how to measure impact of digital collections, develop areas of commonality, and discuss how to best collect, analyze, and share information.
If you have a digital collection at your organization and are thinking about any type of assessment, I encourage you to look at the good work of the Digital Library Federation’s Digital Assessment Interest Group. If you’re looking for an opportunity to connect with other colleagues on this topic, many of the subgroups are also open for participation.
Formed in 2014, this interest group is looking at how to measure impact of digital collections, develop areas of commonality, and discuss how to best collect, analyze, and share information. More information is available on their wiki page. At the November DLF Forum, I attended a session that outlined the work of the Digital Assessment Interest Group and all the various subgroups.
Cost Assessment Working Group
At the DLF Forum, this group demonstrated the digitization cost calculator they have been working on. One can enter in the estimated number of scans for a project, provide a staffing estimate for the project, and select all the processes that are expected to be performed. The list has over 20 common tasks associated with digitization projects, but there is also an “other” option if you need to define a task that is not in the list. After you enter in this information, the tool produces a cost estimate report for you. You can also view data from similar institutions to compare to your own institution.
User Studies Working Group
This working group is actively creating guidelines for usability of digital collections. The Content Reuse subgroup is developing a toolkit for libraries, and recently submitted an IMLS grant application.
The Analytics Working Group
This group has published a white paper on the use of Google Analytics in digital libraries. They are currently working on a complement to that paper on the use of various analytic tools.
Metadata Working Group
The Metadata Working Group aims to build guidelines, best practices, tools and workflows around the evaluation and assessment of metadata used by and for digital libraries and repositories. So far, they have completed an environmental scan. They have begun building a preliminary assessment framework.
Cultural Assessment Working Group
The Cultural Assessment working group formed in February 2016 to discuss ways to assess digital collections and their cultural impact. They are exploring whether and how cultural biases/assumptions are embedded in special collections and archives, in selections of what to digitize, in requests communities of libraries and archives make for content, in choices about levels of digitization and preservation, in metadata creation, and in decisions about access. The work of the group was broken down into several subgroups: Selection & Digitization, Metadata, Digitization & Preservation, Publicizing and Discoverability, and the Annotated Bibliography Group. Coincidentally, the Chair of the group recently spoke at the December 7 NISO virtual conference “Making Certain Digital Content is Preserved: Archiving Digital Resources.” If you are a Minitex participating library staffperson reading this article, you can access the recording through the Minitex MyLibrary portal.
