The Power and the Pitfalls of Cultural Heritage Portals
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The benefits of Cultural Heritage aggregators are widely known, but there are pitfalls. This presentation looks at how we measure value, how we think about being comprehensive, and asks whether we need to focus more on connections and enabling storytelling.
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The Power and the Pitfalls of Cultural Heritage Portals
- 1. 02/12/2014 Discovering Cultural Heritage: the power and pitfalls of aggregating content
- 2. 2 + 2 =
- 3. 17 x 23 =
- 4. “Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.” Is Steve (a) a farmer (b) a librarian?
- 5. WYSIATI
- 7. What we know…. “Online finding aids clearly offer scholars enormous benefits. As mentioned, the use of finding aids before visiting an archive can help a scholar prepare more thoroughly for the visit, and use his/her time most effectively while there, especially given limited travel time.” ITHAKA, 2012
- 8. Archives Hub: Value • The ability to search across archives held in different locations, without knowing where they are held • The ease of use of the interface • The breadth of coverage • Online access to collections that would not otherwise be available online • Frequent new additions • Access to the institution’s own descriptions (admin) Annual online survey, 2012, 2013
- 9. Stuff Repository Website Online
- 11. Aggregator
- 16. Saves time Recommend to others
- 17. 4 1 2 3
- 18. Do ‘hits’ or ‘page views’ translate into value? 17/04/14 – 17/07/14 (3 months) Archives Hub sessions: 83,787 APE sessions 86,800
- 20. “The average website bounce rate is 40% (source: Google).” “After being an analyst for many years, I can tell you that I misinterpreted bounce in my early days and I run across many people who don’t spend enough time in analytics tools to know how to accurately interpret this metric. The primary reason is context.” http://www.marketingtechnologyinsights.com/2014/03/ignore-bounce- rate.html http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2012/02/what-is-bounce-rate http://www.marketingtechnologyinsights.com/2014/03/ignore-bounce-rate. html
- 21. Can we trust statistics? • Archives Hub July 2014 – Google Analytics: 72,434 – Logs: 901,976 • Robots? • 404s and 500s? • Error? • Hacking?
- 22. Happy user Happy user you know about Value
- 25. Innovation ? Use
- 26. Recommendations “For archives, we recommend ongoing improvements to access through improved finding aids, digitization, and discovery tool integration, as well as expanded opportunities for archivists to help historians interpret collections, to build connections among users, and to instruct PhD students in the use of archives.” ITHAKA report, 2012
- 27. Exploring British Design http://archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/topics/exploring-british-design/
- 52. ‘gold mining’ 33 hits on APE 146 hits on the Archives Hub
- 53. Search: smith, williams, jones, boland, rousseau, gruber…before success with arnold Shakespeare – one entry for the personal name
- 56. 2 + 2 = 4 ……..Thinking Fast 17 x 23 = 391 …..Thinking Slow
- 57. “Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.” Is Steve (a) a farmer? (b) a librarian?
- 59. WYSIATI WYSIATI
- 61. Should aggregators build basic bridges that help others build their own landscapes, rather than trying to build big impressive bridges?
Editor's Notes
- Have a think about this…
- …and this….
- Take a look at this description of Steve. What sort of profession do you think he has? We’ll come back to that too.
- This is an acronym for something crucial to the way we think….we’ll come back to that too
- Generally accepted view of benefits of online finding aids.
- How is an aggregator different from a repository website? Expectations. This is key. You know what the website represents. There is less need to think about the user experience, comprehensiveness, trust, because the researcher knows they are interested in those collections.
- If a researcher knows ‘The Tate Gallery has the archives I’m interested in’ or ‘my subject is children’s literature and this is the archive for children’s literature’ then they are much more likely to persist.
- To distill what is required down to the most basic components. Someone else could come up with a different model, but this covers what seems to me to be most important….or thought to be most important.
- Comprehensive is often cited as the most important priority for an aggregator.
- For the Hub comprehensive comes top, over digital archives.
- What does comprehensive really mean? It is not that easy to quantify. We will never be truly comprehensive.
- user friendly in broadest sense – engaging, people stay on the site, it works for them.
- We use these two metrics as the best representation of user friendliness. But there are major challenges with MEASURING value.
- Value of an aggregator is a complex thing – what is the benchmark?
- Does traffic from Google translate into Value? The Hub traffic largely comes via search engines, striaght into our /data/ description pages.
- For the Hub blog for example, a high bounce rate is probably a good thing. Bounce Rate generally is misunderstood.
- Statistics are a complicated business!
- Just one visit to an aggregator for archives can result in a whole new field of research opening up. Several visits to an aggregator may not yield any useful results to inform research. Citation is a challenge even for repositories, let alone for aggregators
- Maybe what people end up using, or what is popular, is not the best option (by the most objective assessment we can make) Maybe people like the familiar. Maybe something new and unfamiliar is a hard sell, even if it makes sense. You may like tacos, but are you prepared to try tacos with locusts – delicious and nutritious!
- How can we show the connection between innovation and use? It can be hard to prove. Maybe it is not very immediate. Maybe innovation does not work! Maybe it is not readily connected to use.
- We need projects that question our assumptions about researchers. Exploring British Design is looking to find new routes into content and at the same time trying to understand more about researchers’ behaviour.
- Search for: missionaries. What is the story? What are the connections? A closer reading shows that I’ve got only records with images.
- If I click on any one thing I go off to start a new story…but I am presented with more individual items.
- Unexpected behaviour: link from specific thing often goes to the homepage of the institution, e.g. from ‘Gazetteer of Mines in Chile’ to a page about collections online – problem of granularity The story is broken….
- Unexpected behaviour. The story is broken….
- Here’s where the story ends…
- Context: No context or connections
- A pitfall of aggregators – its hard to remain sustainable in the long term.
- Europeana: search for missionaries. Not very engaging, although in principle bringing together a diverse set of resources.
- Europeana: search for missionaries and africa
- A visual warning about digital data….most stuff is not digitised! We should not sell access to cultural heritage on the basis of access to digital cultural heritage!
- Attractive site, well laid-out DPLA as a platform is to the fore Innovative ideas about search/explore
- Unexpected behaviour
- Unexpected…but not unwelcome behaviour….an attempt to try different routes into content.
- A timeline works well as a new way to think about resources.
- Promise of connected content….
- Where are the relationships? There is a link to a provide the archival context only. connections are in the traditional mode.
- Features are a way to tell stories, but curated by the service, not enabling users to create their own stories.
- Images are hidden within descripitons rather than to the fore. Maybe more honset, but not ideal.
- Attempt to implement a more on the fly solution, enabling more freedom of movement. Slow response Problems with relevance ranking Problems with faceted search APIs difficult to work with – many non-standard Many services still don’t have an API
- What does the number of hits signify? With archives it may not tell the whole story.
- A name search is a good thing, but is adding the search before having much data putting the cart before the horse?
- Serendipity – BL mechanical curator is explicitly random.
- Maybe we should think more about behavioral psychology – we could learn a good deal.
- Thinking fast; thinking slow.
- The brain creates stereotypes. It leaps to conclusions. It likes cognitive ease – what makes immediate sense.
- So what of comprehensiveness? Is the story really the thing?
- What you see is all there is. This is a truism for most people in most situations.
- Cultural heritage is about stories Aggregators find it hard to enable story telling They are wedded to collection or item descriptions They often preference images They have a challenge with sustainability