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you. Are we serving the right stakeholders? OCLC, Yale, June 2013 Dave Thompson Digital Curator, Wellcome Library. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 /. The Wellcome Library.

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  1. you Are we serving the right stakeholders?OCLC, Yale, June 2013Dave ThompsonDigital Curator, Wellcome Library This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

  2. The Wellcome Library • Part of Wellcome Collection, astonishing public venue in London developed by the Wellcome Trust. Where people can learn more about medicine through the ages & across cultures. • More than 100,000 readers visit us each year, including historians, academics, students, health professionals & consumers, journalists, artists & members of the general public.

  3. Big digital ambitions • Ambitious digitisation plans. Digitise the library. • Library transformation strategy, physical to digital. • Increasing amounts of material available on line. • Lessons to date provide interesting insights.

  4. We know why digital is important, eh? • Wide access to otherwise rare & fragile materials available as malleable data. • Bon digital archives provide unique insight, to reveal a human side. • Democratisation of access to data without visiting the archive. 24x7x365. • Isn’t offering digital access to material a good thing?

  5. Who is the boss of you? • We know our stakeholders so well, project boards, governors, funding committees, competing user groups, managers, etc. • Daily we face budgets, deadlines, objectives, reviews, competition for resources. • Easy to see working with digital as a technical & organisational task. Hit the mark & move on. • But are these the only stakeholders?

  6. Yes, yes, I know who pays my salary.

  7. Other interested stakeholders…. The material. The future The user.

  8. The material • Quantity Vs quality. 10 illuminated manuscripts or 1000 students texts? • Does metadata support granular discovery of rich digital material in ways that maximise its use/re-use? • Format, how can material (data) be applied to research. Do users really want page turners? • Ways in which the material will/can be used. Not only format of the data but rights too. http://colophon.com/gallery/minsky/illum.htm

  9. MOH tables as data sets • MOH reports contain average 47 tables of data each. Tables have clear rows/columns & caption or description of contents & numeric content. That’s >250,000 tables. • Tables extracted from OCR’d text, formatted according to the physical layout & manually checked/corrected for accuracy. • Tables delivered from supplier as CSV & XML files. The XML contains HTML formatting indicating layout. • Exploring creating a database to allow users to discover & download tables individually, or in aggregate.

  10. The future • We don’t know how material will be used in the future or what will be important. • Researchers increasingly competent in working with data, e.g. data as XML, or encoded as ALTO files. • Ideally rights in material will be open & permit diverse re-use. • Moving data into the future is an exercise in faith, vision & imagination.

  11. The user • We consult with users in usability testing. What are their data needs? • ‘Sufficient’ metadata (DMD & AMD) is essential to the re-use of data. • What will user do with material? Flexibility of format, structure, etc. • Need to create users who are self directed, use material without support.

  12. What's the point? • The point of digitisation & preservation is re-use. • But not re-use by archivists, the point of digitisation & preservation is not endless life cycle management. • Re-use is the application of material to the creation of new knowledge. • Creation of new social relationships in the creation & management of data.

  13. What happens on my watch…? • We are custodians. We are not owners. • Actions we take, decisions we make – or don’t take/make – affect the future use/re-use of the material. • Much effort/resource focussed on acquisition or creation of digital material. Too much? • Can only work with what was created/acquired at the time. Re-purposing material later expensive & time consuming.

  14. Digital is for life not just for Christmas • Need to work with digital now, but need to imagine a future in which data will be used. • Need to work end to end. Imagine the entire process from whoa to go, digitisation to discovery to use. • Costs of/for digital must include costs of conservation, metadata creation & data formatting. It’s a whole package. • Balance between mass availability & less, but done better.

  15. Need new ways of engaging with creators & users. • Need to imagine data into the future, be re-usable. • Need to do more to negotiate rights for permitted reuse with creators. • Working with digital is a social, not technical activity, built on relationships.

  16. Lessons learned • Archivists role is mediator between the material, the user and the future. • We can’t do digital simply because doing digital is a ‘good thing’. Challenge is bigger than this. • Need to identify & match best suited data to users & support their data needs by providing rich metadata that enhances digital material. • Not a technical exercise. Social activity, building relationships & projecting relationships into the future.

  17. We can plan all we want. Material has the power to surprise. • Despite our plans…

  18. Serendipity remains alive and well…

  19. Thank youQuestions now, questions later…?Dave Thompson, Digital CuratorWellcome Libraryd.thompson@wellcome.ac.uk / http://wellcomelibrary.org @d_n_t

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