Applying Web Analytics to Online Finding Aids: Page Views, Pathways, and Learning about Users

Many of those now accessing archives through online finding aids are encountering primary materials (albeit virtually) for the first time. These users are often unfamiliar with finding aid structure, terminology, and principles. This article reports on a qualitative, exploratory study of a subset of these novice users. The study concentrated on four key components of online finding aids: terminology, navigation, display, and structure. The goal was to discover by what route users accomplished a given task, to determine what elements on the site helped or hindered them in completing the task, and to gain insight into their overall experience with a range of styles of online finding aids. Findings suggest that site structure often presupposed users' knowledge of archival principles. Therefore, what may seem to archivists and their web designers to be elegant solutions to resolute issues in online finding aids, in fact, confused or eluded novice users. However, findings suggest, as well, that participants went through a rapid self-education process while completing the study, leading them to more efficient searching and to a higher level of ease and confidence as they explored a variety of online finding aids.

The internationalization brought about by online finding aids and the United States’ expanding diverse population necessitates a renewed focus on representation and accessibility in archival research. The accessibility of archival resources depends on the language in which the content is offered to the public. Throughout the United States, the Spanish-speaking population continues to grow. Employees in the University of North Texas Special Collections department obtained grant funding to translate finding aids and digital exhibits into Spanish, with an emphasis on finding a translation solution that offered a balance between cost and quality (i.e., readability and accuracy). This article discusses possible options for translation, including translation vendors, Office 365, and DeepL; findings of the project, with specifics about the cost-effectiveness and quality of each option; and general advice to other institutions interested in undertaking translation projects, regardless of available resources.

This case study examines how the Florida State University Libraries' Claude Pepper Library planned the first phase of the Pepper OnLine Archival Retrieval and Information System (POLARIS) Project—the development of an on-line finding aid and search engine—to provide electronic access to its unique resources. It also demonstrates how the project staff studied the research usability of the Pepper Collection finding aid in the on-line environment. The identification of potential users, creation of a focus group based on a sampling of these users, and the compilation and analysis of focus group responses were important factors in planning the first phase, evaluating usability of the finding aid, and influencing the changes that the POLARIS Project team made.

Although it is tempting for a repository to begin its work with EAD by marking up its existing finding aids as they are, more satisfying results will ensue if the repository invests some time up front in assessing, and perhaps revising, its finding aid model. The Minnesota Historical Society recently completed such a project to evaluate the effectiveness of its finding aids and to reengineer their look, feel, and structure in order to make them more effective tools for delivering information about archival materials to distance users via the World Wide Web, as well as to in-house users. The author describes the process and the results of that intensive project.

Introduction: This paper explores the potential of Linked Data to enhance library catalog records, using the internationally recognized song "The Girl from Ipanema". Method: The famous song was used as a case study to illustrate the possibilities of the usage of a knowledge graph and metadata (authority and bibliographic data) enrichment. Results: By applying Linked Data principles, the study demonstrates how metadata enrichment can improve access and discoverability in library systems. This is achieved by including International Resource Identifiers (IRIs), the utilization of external sources such as the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), and the Last.fm application programming interface (API). In addition, a knowledge graph was introduced as a tool for providing structured relationships with bibliographic entities within a catalog. Conclusions: The Last.fm open API is used to enrich metadata, offer track listings, and add album art to search results, thus enhancing user experience and information retrieval. The case study includes a knowledge graph in the online library catalog.

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From 700 to 1Using Limitations to Create New Knowledge Philip Hallman (bio) and Matthew Solomon (bio) At first glance, who would imagine a connection between the quixotic Danish film director Lars von Trier’s 2003 documentary The Five Obstructions, the Food Network TV series Chopped, and production papers from the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Who would further envision these apparently unrelated productions as inspiration for teaching undergraduate students to use primary source materials and conduct original archival research? While seemingly disparate, the unifying connection between all three is the notion that specified limitations are useful. In a consumer society, the seemingly counterintuitive notion that limitations can be more beneficial than boundless choices is a powerful idea. In what follows, we discuss how our approach to teaching archival research in Authorship and the Archive: Exploring the Film, Theater, and TV Collections of the U of M Special Collections Research Center, a 400-level course in the University of Michigan Department of Screen Arts and Cultures, evolved and improved as we fully embraced the pedagogical possibilities of well-chosen limitations. In 2013, enrolled students in this class had their pick of more than seven hundred boxes, but when we taught the course in 2018 and 2020, we began with just one. As teachers, limits may seem like a potentially shortsighted pedagogical strategy. We are taught to give more to our students, to provide them with anything and everything that we think might inspire them to learn and create. The reputations of institutions like ours are based partly on an ability to attract top faculty and students by offering them extraordinary resources. Our experience at the University of Michigan shows that particular limits, however, can help students acquire entirely new competencies while fostering collaborative public-facing course outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, undergraduate students experience the unexpected joys of archival research while realizing that the ability to “create new knowledge” is very much within their grasp and can even be accomplished within a single semester. Indeed, the possibility of creating new knowledge arrives on the first day of class, when we plop an archival box in front of the students and ask them to open it and look inside. Students are surprised to come into contact with unexpected materials (this past semester, they commented as much on the onionskin paper on which some correspondence was typed as on the content of the letters). Their task is to find something new, work to explain its significance, and thereby show us something we don’t already know. Rather than being asked to formulate and answer research questions (a “top-down” approach that corresponds with the way most use online search engines), students in Authorship and the Archive are tasked with generating new knowledge from the contents of a carefully circumscribed archival collection in “bottom-up” fashion.1 This disrupts their notion of how learning in a humanities course might occur and inspires them to dig in and try to make sense of what they find—or else to drop the course immediately, as several have done. Like the cooking contestants on Chopped who are forced to figure out how to make an appetizer in twenty minutes using watermelon, canned sardines, pepper jack cheese, and zucchini (the actual ingredient list in one episode), we use limitations to try to create something that is novel and satisfying. The goal is to jostle the mind and stimulate creativity rather than encouraging students— either explicitly or implicitly— to reproduce received knowledge. Perhaps, like director von Trier has suggested, obstructions is a better term than limitations. At a time when research has become synonymous with entering a few key terms in a search engine, we are teaching our students archival research skills in an active learning environment. Instead of being asked to analyze films, master course content, write term papers, or take examinations, our students are learning “information literacy for primary sources”— a fundamentally different skill set than other forms of information literacy.2 Archival research is largely immune to the word searches on which online research tends to [End Page 109] rely. Indeed, finding aids can be frustratingly imprecise, and hypothesis-driven research rarely fares...

Many archives, including the National Archives of Korea, use online finding aids. However, in many aspects, they need improvement. In this study, with focus on the National Archives of Korea, the online finding aids of the National Archives of Australia (NAA), The National Archives (TNA) of United Kingdom, and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) of the United States were analyzed. Focus group interview was administered to users of the archives, identifying the pros and cons of online finding aids of NAA, TNA, and NARA. Based on the results, various improvement and development directions are suggested, including aspects on overall functions and hierarchical search, search options and subject search, representing search results, and archival contents services.

Introducción: Desde su fundación, la Facultad de Ciencias Médicas (FCM, UNC, Argentina) y sus miembros participaron en el diseño y la aplicación de políticas públicas eugénicas destinadas a evitar la despoblación y disminuir la mortalidad infantil. El presente trabajo describe dichas políticas desde la fundación de dicha institución hasta el inicio del proceso de Reforma Universitaria. Materiales y Métodos: Se realizó un análisis bibliográfico de bases de datos online y catálogos de bibliotecas para identificar textos referidos a políticas de puericultura y salud pública promovidas por la FCM en el período 1877 - 1918. Resultados: Se obtuvieron un total de 11 referencias bibliográficas: tres libros, dos artículos publicados en revistas científicas y seis Tesis para optar al título de Doctor en Medicina y Cirugía de la FCM. Discusión: Se evidencia en los textos analizados un gran interés en la caracterización de la mortalidad infantil en Córdoba y la promoción de la lactancia materna exclusiva. A ello se asocia la creación y administración de instituciones de salud de puericultura entre los que se destaca el Consultorio Protector de la Infancia. Conclusiones: La FCM, ligada a grupos políticos cordobeses, participó activamente en la difusión de los conceptos de puericultura (cuyas destinatarias eran principalmente las mujeres-madres de estratos socioeconómicos carenciados) y en la implementación de acciones tendientes al crecimiento poblacional y la inculcación de valores morales aceptados por sus académicos.

Until March 1998 the most “high‐tech” access to a significant Public Record Office (PRO) finding aid was via irregularly produced microfiches. By January 2001 the full catalogue of the PRO’s holdings (conservatively estimated at 7 million records) will be available via the World Wide Web. This article describes the steps taken to achieve this transformation. Use made of various standards such as the International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)), Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and the Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) is described.

Tools, techniques and protocols necessary for building up digital libraries have now fully evolved with computing power that allows parallel processing, multitasking, parallel consultation and parallel knowledge navigation and sohare tools that facilitate artificial intelligence and interadivity. Coincided with availability of sofhvare, hardware and networking technology, the advent of world wide web 0its, ever incr easing usage and highly evolved browsers have paved the way for creation of digital libraries. With rapid developments in technologies necessary for developing digital libraries, the world of digital information resources has expanded rapidly and exponentially. Increasing number of publishers are using the internet as a global way to offer their publications to the international community of scientists and technologists. With the technology available at an effordable cost, the libraries are initiating small digitisation projects as an individual library or as a group of libraries. Building-up digital collection and the infrastructure required to access them is a challenge that every library has to deal with. The article delves into technological evolution, cultural revolution and contents enrichment that led to revolution in growth and development of digital libraries. The artide has two distinct parts, while the first part deals with various aspects of building, accessing and organising digital resources and collection, the second part elaborates on the process, technology, formats, compression techniques and tools used in digital imaging. The article describes optical character recognition (OCR) and advocates for hybrid solution for preservation of digital information. http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dbit.21.6.3547

The Electronic Records Management System (ERMS) is Los Alamos National Laboratory’s method for consolidating, tracking, and preserving valuable records according to National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requirements. Like an online library catalog, the ERMS stores unclassified electronic records that are retrievable from a remote computer system, and the ERMS contains a list of unclassified physical record holdings (paper documents, audiovisual materials, photographs, etc.) that are stored in the LANL Records Center and may be checked out. This guide covers new processes that affect both physical and electronic records. Each process begins when an employee (referred to as the requester) submits a request through the AskIT ticketing system (askit.lanl.gov). A request may include submitting a record, retrieving a record, or destroying a record.

Popular commercial on-line services such as Google, e-Bay, Amazon, and Netflix have evolved quickly over the last decade to help people find what they want, developing information retrieval strategies such as usefully ranked results, spelling correction, and recommender systems. Online library catalogs (OPACs), in contrast, have changed little and are notoriously difficult for patrons to use (University of California Libraries, 2005). Over the past year (June 2005 to the present), the Melvyl Recommender Project (California Digital Library, 2005) has been exploring methods and feasibility of closing the gap between features that library patrons want and have come to expect from information retrieval systems and what libraries are currently equipped to deliver. The project team conducted exploratory work in five topic areas: relevance ranking, auto-correction, use of a text-based discovery system, user interface strategies, and recommending. This article focuses specifically on the recommending portion of the project and potential extensions to that work.

ABSTRACTIn this article, research carried out in Iran illustrating new developments in knowledge organization is reviewed. For this purpose, all relevant studies were identified and classified into three categories: (1) studies focusing on conceptual models; (2) studies focusing on the RDA standard; and (3) studies focusing on online library catalogs (OPACs), metadata, and labeling formats related to RDA and FRBR. LIS dissertations and theses were reviewed and categorized into these three groups. The results of each research were categorized. At the end, the research methods applied in these researches were analyzed and some suggestions for further studies are proposed.

Many small businesses search government and commercial online databases for information about areas such as law, grants, and research in their field. The key to searching online databases efficiently is to become familiar with the search techniques that you can apply to almost any database, including article databases and online library catalogs. Understanding such techniques is important, because searching online databases is a bit different from using web search engines.