- Digital Impacts: How to Measure and Understand the Usage and Impact of Digital Content, Oxford Internet Institute/JISC, Oxford, 20th May 2011 (#oiiimpacts)
- Beyond Collections: Crowdsourcing for public engagement, RunCoCo Conference, Oxford, 26th May 2011 (#beyond2011)
- Professor Sherry Turkle, Alone Together RSA Lecture, RSA, London, 1st June 2011 (#rsaonline)
I’m getting a bit behind with blog postings (again), so here, in the interests of ticking another thing off my to-do list, are a few highlights from various events I’ve attended recently…
It was good to see a couple of fellow archivists at the showcase conference for JISC’s Impact and Embedding of Digitised Resources programme. As searchroom visitor figures continue to fall, it is more important than ever that archivists understand how to measure and demonstrate the usage and impact of their online resources. The number of unique visitor’s to the archive service’s website (currently the only metric available in the CIPFA questionnaire for Archive Services, for instance) is no longer (if it ever was) adequate as a measure of online usage. As Dr Eric Meyer pointed out in his introduction, one of the central lessons arising from the development of the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources has been that no single metric will ever tell the whole story – a range of qualitative and quantitative methods are necessary to provide a full picture. The word ‘scholarly’ in the toolkit’s name may be rather off-putting to some archivists working in local government repositories. That would be a shame, because this free online resource is full of very practical and useful advice and guidance. Like the historians caracatured by Sharon Howard of the Old Bailey Online project, archivists are not good at “studying people who can answer back” – the professional archival literature is full of laments about how poor we are at user studies. The synthesis report from the Impact programme, Splashes and Ripples: Synthesizing the Evidence on the Impacts of Digital Resources, is recommended reading; detailed evaluation reports from each of the projects which took part in the programme are also available (at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/impactembedding.aspx). Many of the recommendations made by the report would be relatively straightforward to implement, yet could potentially transform archive services’ online presence – and the TIDSR toolkit contains the resources to help evaluate the change. Simple suggestions like picking non-word acronymns to improve project visibility online (like TIDSR – at last I have understood the Internet’s curious aversion to vowels, flickr, lanyrd, tumblr and so on!) and providing simple, automatic citations that are easy to copy or download (although I rather fear that archives are missing the boat on this one). Jane Winters was also excellent on the subject of sustaining digital impact, an important subject for archives whose online resources are perhaps more likely than most to have a long shelf-life. Twitter coverage of the event is available on Summarizr (another one!).
One gap in the existing digital measurement landscape which occurred to me during the Impacts event was the need for metrics which take account, not just of the passive audience of digital resources, but of those who contribute to them and participate in a more active way. The problem is easily illustrated by the difficulties encountered when using standard quantitative measurement tools with Web2.0 type sites. Attempting to collate statistics on sites such as Your Archives or Transcribe Bentham through the likes of Google Scholar or Yahoo’s Site Explorer is handicapped by the very flexibility of a wiki site structure, compounded again, I suspect, by the want of a uniquely traceable identity. Google Scholar, in particular, seems averse to searches on URLs (although curiously, I discovered that although a search for yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk produces 0 hits, yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.* comes back with 26), whilst sites which invite user contributions are perhaps particularly susceptible to false-positive site inlink hits where they are highlighted as a general resource in blogrolls and the like.
This need to be clearer about what we mean by user engagement and how to measure when we’ve successfully achieved it was also my main take-away from the following week’s RunCoCo Conference – Beyond Collections: Crowdsourcing for Public Engagement. Like Arfon Smith of the Zooniverse team, I am not very comfortable with the term ‘crowdsourcing’, and indeed many of the projects showcased at the Beyond conference seemed to me to be more technologically-enhanced outreach events or volunteer projects than true attempts to engage the ‘crowd’ (not that there is anything wrong with traditional approaches, but I just don’t think they’re crowdsourcing). Even where large numbers of people are involved, are they truly ‘engaged’ by receiving a rubber stamp (in the case of the Erster Weltkrieg in Alltagsdokumenten project) to mark their attendance at an open day type event? Understanding the social dynamics behind even large scale online collaborations is important – the Zooniverse ethical contract bears repeating:
- Contributors are collaborators, not users
- Contributors are motivated and engaged by real research
- Don’t waste people’s time
Podcasts of all the Beyond presentations and a series of short, reflective blog posts on the day’s proceedings are available.
Finally, Professor Sherry Turkle‘s RSA lecture to celebrate the launch of her new book, Alone Together, about the social impact of the Internet, was rather too brief to give more than a glimpse of her current thinking on our technology saturated society, but nevertheless there were some intriguing ideas which have potentially wide-ranging implications for the future of archives. One was the sense that the Internet is not currently serving our human needs. She also spoke about the tensions between being willing to share and privacy. Turkle asked what is democracy and what is intimacy without privacy? In response to questions from the audience, Turkle also claimed that people don’t like to say negative things online because it leaves a trace of things that went wrong. If that is true, it might have important implications for what we can expect people to contribute in archival contexts, and the nature of the debate which might take place in contested spaces of memory. Audio of the event is available from the RSA website.
Around the World in 80 Gigabytes 