Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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tools that support collaborative work<strong>in</strong>g, onl<strong>in</strong>e archiv<strong>in</strong>g, or electronic publish<strong>in</strong>g, and were unwill<strong>in</strong>g
to support track<strong>in</strong>g systems even if the could support “powerful quality assurance systems.”
The TIDSR Study
As has been illustrated by Brown and Greengrass (2010) and Warwick et al. (2008b), little
comprehensive research has systematically explored the impact and actual usage of digital humanities
resources. Recent work detailed <strong>in</strong> Meyer et al. (2009) reports on a study that exam<strong>in</strong>ed the use of five
digitization projects with<strong>in</strong> the United K<strong>in</strong>gdom us<strong>in</strong>g a variety of measures to obta<strong>in</strong> a more nuanced
picture not just of these projects but of “digitized material <strong>in</strong> general.” This JISC-funded research was
undertaken to promote standards and knowledge shar<strong>in</strong>g among projects <strong>in</strong> terms of how to measure
the usage and impact of their resource. One major outcome of their work was the creation of a “Toolkit
for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources” (TIDSR) 584 While Meyer et al. acknowledged much
was learned from both the LAIRAH and CSHE studies, they suggested that both these studies were
miss<strong>in</strong>g one part of the larger picture:
One major miss<strong>in</strong>g part, however, is any concrete way for collection managers, developers, and
fund<strong>in</strong>g bodies to attempt to understand and collect data for measur<strong>in</strong>g impact from the onset of
a project and throughout the life-cycle of a digitisation effort. The toolkit is an attempt to fill
this gap (Meyer et al. 2009).
For this study they chose five digital projects 585 and used a variety of methods, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g quantitative
measures (webometrics, bibliometrics, log file analysis), and qualitative methods (content analysis,
focus groups, and <strong>in</strong>terviews). 586 Several important themes emerged from the <strong>in</strong>terviews they
conducted with project creators, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the importance of close contact with users when develop<strong>in</strong>g
a project, the fact that many digitized projects had little or almost no contact with the “custodians of
the orig<strong>in</strong>al content” that had been digitized, and, <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>gly, a “discrepancy between <strong>in</strong>tended usage
and perceived success”—i.e., many project creators discovered that the uses to which their collections
had been put were very different from those they had envisaged. Interviews with users were used to
gauge the levels of project impact, and the authors noted several trends, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g that the quality of
some undergraduate dissertation work seemed to improve through contact with primary sources, that
some new types of research were be<strong>in</strong>g presented at conferences (e.g., <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>gly quantitative
research was found <strong>in</strong> many conference papers for the fields served by the relevant digital humanities
resources), and that some new types of research were be<strong>in</strong>g attempted. At the same time quantitative
research projects with digital data had some problems, such as those reported by one researcher who
stated that keyword search<strong>in</strong>g was still very unreliable for digital newspaper data where the text had
been created by OCR. While there were still far too many false negatives and positives, the researchers
concluded that search<strong>in</strong>g the digitized newspapers was far superior to us<strong>in</strong>g microfilm.
In addition to the <strong>in</strong>terviews, Meyer et al. held focus groups with two groups of students. These
revealed that the students were generally enthusiastic about digital resources and that undergraduate
students used digitized collections on a regular basis, both ones recommended by their tutors and ones
that they sought out <strong>in</strong>dependently. Somewhat different results were reported by postgraduate and
584 http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/
585 The five resources were Histpop (http://www.histpop.org), 19 th Century British Newspapers
(http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/f<strong>in</strong>dhelprestype/news/newspdigproj/database/paperdigit.html), Archival Sound Records at the British Library
(http://sounds.bl.uk), BOPCRIS (http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/f<strong>in</strong>dhelprestype/news/newspdigproj/database/paperdigit.html), and Medical Journals Backfiles
(http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/backfiles).
586 The research presented <strong>in</strong> Meyer et al. (2009) focuses on the results of the qualitative measures. The full report can be viewed at
http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/system/files/TIDSR_F<strong>in</strong>alReport_20July2009.pdf