Beyond size and search: Building contextual mass in digital aggregations for scholarly use

Abstract

At present there are no established collection development methods for building large-scale digital aggregations. However, to realize the potential of the collective base of digital content and advance scholarship, aggregations must do more than provide search of sizable bodies of content. Informed by empirical understanding of scholarly information practices, the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project developed an aggregation strategy for building Opening History, one of the largest digital cultural heritage aggregations in the country. The strategy applied policy-driven collecting, based on the principle of contextual mass, and conspectus-style evaluation of collection-level metadata to identify strong subject areas within the aggregation. Analysis of density, interconnectedness, diversity, and small/large collection complementarity determined subject concentrations and thematic strengths to be prioritized for future collection development and used as organizational structures for browsing and visualization. The approach models how scholars build their own personal research collections, as they follow leads from collection to collection across institutions near and far, and adds value that cannot be achieved through conventional retrieval and browsing at the item-level.

Supporting the long‐term curation and migration of natural history museum collections databases

“…First, the management of aggregates, groupings, sets, and collections of digital objects requires understanding the relationship between collection-and item-level representations and metadata (Wickett, in press;Wickett, Renear, & Urban, 2010;Zavalina, Palmer, Jackson, & Han, 2009). Further, management of the infrastructure used to store collections dataoften, relational databasesrequires an understanding of the complex interplay between numerous entities and representation layers: the individual records in the collection; the data schemas that pull them together; the physical hard drives they are stored on; the physical objects they represent; and the uses and users of the collection; and the ways in which digital aggregates change and grow over time (Buneman, Chapman, & Cheney, 2006;Buneman, Cheney, Tan, & Vansummeren, 2008;Codd, 1970;Palmer, Zavalina, & Fenlon, 2010;Thibodeau, 2002). Finally, best practices in data collections curation must account for the fundamental need to migrate them over time.…”

Enhancing cultural heritage collections by supporting and analyzing participation in Flickr

“…Participation, especially with the niche, long‐tail groups, has been instrumental in defining valuable sub‐groups of photographs in existing collections, such as sets of clowns, shipwrecks, and antique vehicles. As emergent specialized strengths are identified in their collections, data providers can take advantage of the unforeseen opportunities for both collection development and collaboration for building new cross‐institutional special collections (Palmer, Zavalina, & Fenlon, 2010).…”

Tooling the aggregator's workbench: Metadata visualization through statistical text analysis

“…Since 2002, the DCC has gradually refined a mixed manual/automatic workflow for aggregation development, illustrated in Figure 1 and detailed in Palmer et al (2010).…”