Measuring the Impact of Digital Collections

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present conceptual definitions for digital object use and reuse. Typically, assessment of digital repository content struggles to go beyond traditional usage metrics such as clicks, views or downloads. This is problematic for galleries, libraries, archives, museums and repositories (GLAMR) practitioners because use assessment does not tell a nuanced story of how users engage with digital content and objects.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reviews prior research and literature aimed at defining use and reuse of digital content in GLAMR contexts and builds off of this group’s previous research to devise a new model for defining use and reuse called the use-reuse matrix.FindingsThis paper presents the use-reuse matrix, which visually represents eight categories and numerous examples of use and reuse. Additionally, the paper explores the concept of “permeability” and its bearing on the matrix. It concludes with the next steps for future research and application in the development of the Digital Content Reuse Assessment Framework Toolkit (D-CRAFT).Practical implicationsThe authors developed this model and definitions to inform D-CRAFT, an Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant project. This toolkit is being developed to help practitioners assess reuse at their own institutions.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first to propose distinct definitions that describe and differentiate between digital object use and reuse in the context of assessing digital collections and data.

Digital libraries are distributed software infrastructures that aim at collecting, managing, preserving, and using digital objects (or resources) for the long term, and providing specialized services on such resources to its users. Service provision should be of measurable quality and performed according to codified policies. Currently, modern digital libraries include a wide range of conventional digital objects: text document, image, audio, video, software, etc. In the emerging domain of the Internet of Things (IoT), cyberphysical smart objects (or simply smart objects) will play a central role in providing new (smart) services to both humans and machines. It is therefore challenging to include smart objects, the newest type of digital objects, into digital libraries as novel first-class objects to be collected, managed, and preserved. However, their inclusion poses critical issues to address and many research challenges to deal with. This paper aims at paving the way towards such a novel inclusion that will enable effective discovery, management and querying of smart objects, so establishing cyberphysical digital libraries. In particular, our approach is based on a metadata model purposely defined to describe all the cyberphysical characteristics (geophysical, functional, and non-functional) of smart objects. The metadata model is then used for a seamless integration of smart objects into digital libraries compliant with the digital library reference model proposed by the DL.org community. The proposed approach is also exemplified through a simple yet effective case study.

Digital access and preservation questions for cultural heritage institutions have focused primarily on primary repositories — that is, around collections of discrete digital objects and associated metadata. Much of the promise of the information age, however, lies in the ability to reuse, repurpose, combine and build complex digital objects[1-3]. Repositories need both to preserve and make accessible primary digital objects, and facilitate their use in a myriad of ways. Following the lead of other annotation projects, we argue for the development of secondary repositories where users can compose structured collections of complex digital objects. These complex digital objects point back to the primary digital objects from which they are produced (usually with URIs) and augment these pointers with user-generated annotations and metadata. This paper examines how this layered approach to user generated metadata can enable research communities to move forward into more complex questions surrounding digital archiving and preservation, addressing not only the fundamental challenges of preserving individual digital objects long term, but also the access and usability challenges faced by key stakeholders in primary digital repository collections—scholars, educators, and students. Specifically, this project will examine the role that secondary repositories can play in the preservation and access of digital historical and cultural heritage materials with particular emphasis on streaming media.

A case study on migrating large digital collections into a consolidated repository

Digital libraries maintain information lifecycles for the digital objects contained therein. Typically these information lifecycles stipulate that a digital object is deleted at the end of its lifecycle. We propose a transient framework for digital libraries in which suitable objects are transformed through a state transition lifecycle thereby reducing the need to ever delete the digital object from the digital library, Transience works for certain media types and we describe and positively evaluate a prototype deployment in the domain of security video.

Developing preservation processes for a trusted digital repository will require the integration of new methods, policies, standards and technologies. Digital repositories should be able to preserve electronic materials for periods at least comparable to existing preservation methods. Modern computing technology in general is barely fifty years old and few of us have seen or used digital objects that are more than ten years old. While traditional preservation practices are comparatively well-developed, lack of experience and lack of consensus raise some questions about how we should proceed with digital-based preservation processes. Can we preserve a digital object for at least one-hundred years? Can we answer questions such as Is this object the digital original? or How old is this digital object? What does it mean to be a trusted repository of digital materials? A basic premise of this article is that there are many technologies available today that will help us build trust in a digital preservation process and that these technologies can be readily integrated into an operational digital preservation framework.

In this chapter, I present the post-authentic framework, a theoretical framework for knowledge creation in the digital, and I introduce two concepts central to the framework, symbiosis and mutualism. In light of the considerations reasoned in Chap. 1, I discuss and question the relevance of notions of authenticity and completeness in relation to digital objects. I take the example of a digital cultural heritage object to highlight how ideas of authenticity and completeness have consequences not only for the production of digital heritage and with respect to heritage values and practices but, more widely, for our understanding of digital objects and knowledge production in a digital society. Finally, I rework such notions using the formation of the digital heritage collection ChroniclItaly 3.0 as an example of how the post-authentic framework can guide the fluid interactions between human and technological processes that are required in the contemporary context of digital knowledge creation.

Our notion of IT infrastructure is changing dramatically. We used to be happy with just a power plug for our desktops - today, many of us can hardly imagine a day without Internet access. Data centres provide storage and other dedicated services to large organizations - today, anybody can access such services in the cloud. Grid technologies offer a complex environment for compute-intense applications . . . however, we still lack a simple, yet trustworthy environment for curating, semantically modelling, and sharing file-based information. This thesis develops the foundational concepts for such an environment, and it builds on a class of systems stemming from scholarly communications called "digital repositories". Rather than building a new system, we analyse the interoperability channels between existing repositories, added-value services, and other agents. The Open Repository Environments emerging from these gateways are evolutionary in that repository components can change over time; anarchic to the point where they invite decentralised agents to participate; and a bridge between existing infrastructures. The infrastructures that were of particular influence to this thesis are e-Infrastructure for virtualising heterogeneous resources, as well as repository technologies for managing reference networks of file-based information, namely "digital objects". Like any software architecture, the design of Open Repository Environments is a creative process that may be inspired by existing models and experiences, and this thesis creates a framework for such models. Its repository reference architecture derives the minimum consensus on what repositories constitute from an extensive analysis of existing experiences, and specifies two interfaces through which interoperability channels can be established: the Open Storage Interface and the Federation Interface. Subsequently, we present results from a detailed analysis of the functionalities and design criteria for an Open Storage Interface. On the other hand, Federation is a continuum of attributes and techniques rather than a single interface. In our analysis of Federation, we describe this continuum, identify existing federation patterns, and develop a novel Notification-based federation mechanism - probably the first such attempt since the creation of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting in 2001. This thesis builds on a number of linked activities that were mostly conducted between 2001 and 2009, and in participation of six national and international research projects in the field. These activities combine analysis and discussion, notably in a series of workshops we organised in Europe and the US to bridge the e-Infrastructure, preservation and repository communities, as well as the architectural design and prototyping of the e-Infrastructure initiatives TextGrid and Dariah based on the findings presented in this thesis.

The growing and ubiquitous presence of digital objects raises issues of interest from the points of view of both Aesthetics and interaction design. In fact, such issues concern the perceptual dimension that defines our relationship with digital objects, the reconfiguration of the sensitive experience that their development implies, their hybrid ontological status, and their possible role in developing innovative forms of aesthetic education combined with design thinking.In the contemporary debate, digital objects are intended – on the one hand – as designed objects that incorporate and employ digital technologies [1–3].On the other hand, they are interpreted as virtual bodies, interactive digital images that become a phenomenon of the binary representation of an algorithm which interacts with a user [4]. Within the former perspectives, digital objects display a quality that broadly belongs to technical devices, meaning their openness to forms of interactivity, and their sensitivity to contingency. In the latter, the features of intermediacy and virtuality are considered the defining characteristics of digital objects. The growing complexity of digital objects is, in fact, re-defining the relationship between materiality and distance, provenance and pertinence, suggesting an interactive conception of agency that allows forms of aesthetic experience in which imagination, sensibility and intuitions can be displayed within relational structures. By showing the results of a research project focused on digital materials and their transformation, which involved children aged 8 to 11 years old, this contribution aims to discuss the possible role that such objects can play in developing new forms of aesthetic education.

“What is a good digital library?” – A quality model for digital libraries

The aim of this paper is to identify the reasons for the contradictory conclusions of the fictionalist and the realist theoretical positions on the ontological status of digital game objects. First, the applicability of the Waltonian notion of fiction regarding digital game objects and events is challenged. The paper clarifies that the debate contains a categorical misunderstanding, and that it is not really about the discursive quality of fictionality (or factuality), but about an ontological opposition between represented and real objects. It is then demonstrated that digital game objects belong to a special category of non-physical informational entities that realists rightly consider real because they exhibit systemic behaviour, but fictionalists are also correct regarding their function as signifiers of non-real, represented objects. Following Aarseth, a distinction is made between represented, simulated and real objects. It is argued that simulated digital game objects are real objects, but not necessarily the same kind of objects as those they represent: a virtual library is a library, but a virtual kitten is not a kitten. Finally, it is suggested that the main reason for the confusion about the existential status of game elements is an issue of descriptive language: a confusion between signifier and signified and the uniform designation of heterogeneous phenomena.

Connecting Repositories to one Integrated Domain

Emerging materiality through dynamic digital conservation

Large amounts of cultural heritage content have now been digitized and are available in digital libraries. However, these are often unstructured and difficult to navigate. Automatic techniques for identifying similar items in these collections could be used to improve navigation since it would allow items that are implicitly connected to be linked together and allow sets of similar items to be clustered. Europeana is a large digital library containing more than 20 million digital objects from a set of cultural heritage providers throughout Europe. The diverse nature of this collection means that the items do not have standard metadata to assist navigation. A range of methods for computing the similarity between pairs of texts are applied to metadata records in Europeana in order to estimate the similarity between items. Various methods for computing similarity have been proposed and can be classified into two main approaches: (1) knowledge-based, which make use of external knowledge sources and (2) corpus-based approaches, which rely on analyzing the frequency distributions of words in documents. Both techniques are evaluated against manual judgements obtained for this study and a multiple-choice test created from manually generated categories in cultural heritage collections. We find that a combination of corpus and knowledge-based approaches provide the best results in both experiments.

The mass digitization efforts associated with the e-COL+ project, focusing on French natural history collections, provide an invaluable opportunity to reassess the need to build a comprehensive 3D digital collection to complement existing 2D digital repositories. This article explores the importance of incorporating 3D data into digital collections, highlighting its significant impact on scientific research, conservation efforts, and public outreach campaigns. Although the e-COL+ project faces practical obstacles related to digitization, it also raises important theoretical questions about the complex interplay between physical and digital objects. Here, we challenge the concepts of digital clone and digital twin that are commonly used in the construction of digital collections. The digital twin concept more accurately captures the intricate and adaptive connection between physical and digital entities that results from the precise digitization techniques used and the evolving characteristics of the specimens found in natural history collections.