Calhoun and Brenner Workshop: Supporting Digital Scholarship

Supporting Digital Scholarship: From Collections to Online Communities

ALA TechSource Workshop

Karen CalhounAaron BrennerJune 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 Ethically

Source: 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 2014Source: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

audiencesNameSizeUsage (stats, web analytics)RankingsSimilar/related/competitor sitesLast needs assessment?Benefits to target audiencesCommunications/outreach activitiesPotential for web services/social features?What else?

Audience segmentationSizeNeeds assessments (personas?)Work practice studies Discipline-specific normsFunders, 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 communicationParent Institution • Showcasing institution’s intellectual

output/prestige• Source of institution-level metrics

Institution’s End-Users • Discovering research conducted locally

• Networking, finding collaboratorsInstitution’s Faculty & Researchers

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

access problemsGovernment Agencies • Supporting knowledge transfer and

economic growthAdapted 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.

26Social web impacts on researchers and scholarship

Calhoun, 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