Supporting Digital Scholarship: From Collections to Online Communities

ALA TechSource Workshop

Karen Calhoun

Aaron Brenner

June 19, 2014 1

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Exploring Digital Libraries: Foundations, Practice, Prospects

Karen CalhounALA Neal-Schuman, 2014

Chapter 7 “Digital libraries

and their communities”

Chapter 8 “The prospects of

open access repositories”

Chapter 9 “Digital libraries

and the social web:

scholarship”

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Key Challenge for Digital Libraries: Community

EngagementFor the viability of

their agendas, and

for their

sustainability:

Economically

Socially

EthicallySource: Rebecca Siegel, CC BY 2.0https://www.flickr.com/photos/grongar/4966015822

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Prospects of Repositories

In general, subject-based repositories have been more

successful at attracting submissions and use

World ranking of 1,746 web repositories, January 2014

Source:repositories.webometrics.info

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Successful Subject Repositories:

Are woven into the way their disciplines communicate:

Readers/researchers: where they look for information, see what’s

been or will be published, look for collaborators

Writers/contributors: where they “register” their work (and establish

claims to discoveries), where they first share their work with

colleagues for comment/review

See also Erway (2012) Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary

Repositories

Had a strong community orientation at inception and have

a high degree of trust and participation at maturity

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Institutional Repositories

By contrast, institutional repositories have faced

and continue to face serious challenges

A lack of clarity around purpose and focus

Weak understandings of community needs,

attitudes, work practices/motivators

Scholars’ lack of awareness of the repository or its

benefits

Recruiting content

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A repository should not be a solution looking

for a problem to solve

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Poll:

Are you responsible for managing, or helping to

manage a repository?

Yes – subject-based

Yes – institutional

Yes – other

Yes – several of the above

No

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Online Community Life Cycle

Life cycle model of success factors for digital libraries in social environmentsBased on Iriberri and Leroy (2009)Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. p. 161. Used with permission.

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

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A critical measure of engagement and participation

Ratio of

amount of content in the repository

content that could reasonably be expected to be there

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How big are they vs. how big should they be?

“If all of the tenured academic research

active staff at a UK university deposited

all of their annual output (papers,

presentations, learning materials, etc.) in

the institutional repository, deposits

would be in the range of 10,000 items per

year” (Carr and Brody 2007)

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Pause for questions, comments

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Lessons from researching the book

• Why have some repositories had a

distinctive impact on the

communities they were built to

serve, while others are more or less

ignored?

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What to do?Inventory repositories Understand target

audiencesName

Size

Usage (stats, web analytics)

Rankings

Similar/related/competitor sites

Last needs assessment?

Benefits to target audiences

Communications/outreach activities

Potential for web services/social features?

What else?

Audience segmentation

Size

Needs assessments (personas?)

Work practice studies

Discipline-specific norms

Funders, funding policies

Value propositions (by audience segment)

What else?

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Improving value propositions to stakeholders and target audiences

Hosting Library • Fostering open access to scholarship• Raising profile of library’s curatorial

role in scholarly communication

Parent Institution • Showcasing institution’s intellectual output/prestige

• Source of institution-level metrics

Institution’s End-Users • Discovering research conducted locally

• Networking, finding collaborators

Institution’s Faculty & Researchers

• Increasing exposure to work• Solving visibility, management, or

access problems

Government Agencies • Supporting knowledge transfer and economic growth

Adapted from: Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. Table 8.1, p. 183Used with permission

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Question:

In what ways have you reached

out to give a user focus to your

repository work?

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Repositories: What’s Next?1. In what ways will repositories support the

emergent 21st century scholarly research

infrastructure?

2. To what extent are repositories likely to

evolve into a sustainable, global ecosystem

for capturing, making accessible, and

preserving the scholarly record?

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Will a network-based ecosystem of loosely-coupled, communicating services

emerge?

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Digital libraries and the social web

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.

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What is the social web? 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

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Social digital libraries and repositories?

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.

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Changing Community Expectations

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.

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lukew/10453074195/ CC BY 2.0

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What would change?

Transitions associated with the shift to social digital libraries and repositoriesCalhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. Figure 9.1 p. 214. Used with permission

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The evolution of digital libraries toward new roles on the social webCalhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. Figure 9.2 p. 215. Used with permission.

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Social web impacts on researchers and scholarshipCalhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. Figure 9.3 p. 217. Used with permission.

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Over to you!

• In what ways is your library moving beyond its

established portfolio of services in support of

digital scholarship?

• What do you make of the emergent (and

presently chaotic) information space defined by

e-research initiatives, scholarly social networks,

altmetrics, researcher profiling systems…?

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References (1/2)

• Calhoun, Karen (2014). Exploring Digital

Libraries. Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman

• Carr, Leslie, and Tim Brody (2007) Size Isn’t

Everything. D-Lib Magazine 13 (7/8)

• Cybermetrics Lab, CSIC (2014). The Ranking

Web of World repositories. Retrieved June,

2014 from http://repositories.webometrics.info

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References (2/2)

• Erway, Ricky (2012) Lasting Impact:

Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories.

Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research.

• Iriberri, Alicia, and Gondy Leroy (2009) A

Life-Cycle Perspective on Online

Community Success. ACM Computing

Surveys 41(2):11