TIDSR-DHOx

Impact as a process: considering the reach of resources from the start
Eric T. Meyer & Kathryn Eccles
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Digital Humanities@Oxford Summer School
29th July 2011
@etmeyer
#tidsr
#oess
#dhox

What is impact and why consider it?
What do we mean by impact?
Reaching intended audience
Reaching new audiences
Attracting users
Attracting new usage
Enabling new research questions
Enabling new approaches to education

Where to begin?
Identify your audience and key stakeholders
Set your goals. What types of impact do you envisage your resource having?
What steps are you taking to ensure these types of impact?
Identify connections
What resources do you see as successful in terms of audience and impact?
Do you see your resource as part of a network of connected resources?

Digitisation and Impact

Measuring usage and impact
What to measure?
Users
Types of use
Awareness
Citation practices
Marketing strategies
Embedding

JISC funded project
July 2008-April 2009
Looked at five specific JISC-funded resources
Designed to test the TIDSR methods and review them for the TIDSR toolkit
TIDSR: The first usage and impact study

Methods
Quantitative methods
• Webometrics
• Web Analytics
• Log file analysis
• Scientometrics / bibliometrics
Content Analysis
Qualitative methods
Interviews
Focus groups
User feedback
Referrer analysis
Content Analysis

Project 1 – Online Historical Population Reports (OHPR/Histpop)

Survey: Low Awareness

Survey: High Importance to Users

Log Files: Non UK Activity

Log File Analysis
Top Search Phrases: Histpop

Histpop: User Communities
Perception: Specific niche community
Well known by target audience
Transforming access and usage patterns
User surveys:
Embedded in educational resources
Enhanced access to primary sources
‘Histpop made it possible to do a completely different project’
Continuing education, online resources, non-traditional learners

Project 2 – British Library 19th Century Newspapers

Citation Habits
Have you ever published a piece based on your work in this collection?
If so, how did you cite the collection?

Webometric results
Highest numbers for original British Library resource (analogue)
19th Century British Library Newspapers registers strong links for a project page
Note: Importance of comparator sites when using webometrics

Blog Evidence

Project 3 – British Library Archival Sound Recordings

Interviews, Group Interviews, Focus Groups
Time intensive, but productive if you are careful about what you ask!
Different stakeholders:
Project team: Positive view of the work only
Broader stakeholders: While the digital project was good, it also introduced tensions in the broader setting of the library
New kinds of serendipity, wide range of users

News
Engagement officer

Project 4 – British Official Publications Collaborative Reader Information Service (BOPCRIS): 18th Century Official Parliamentary Publications Portal 1688-1834

Webometrics
Some resources are available through multiple outlets
Webometrics can capture comparative awareness
These results show how powerful known resources and/or publishers can be

Project 5 – Wellcome Medical Journals: the backfiles project

Webometrics
Wellcome Medical Journals Backfiles project page records strong links, links to Pub Med for WMJB material impossible to trace

Knowing the Users
Historians? (would be looking at older articles)
Not typical PubMed users
Search interface issues / limited search
Clinicians? (would be looking at newer articles)
Not typically reading 100 year old articles
Other users?
Paths of discovery?

New uses?
Majority of downloads targeted more recent material – opening up of new resources to clinicians
More thorough and comprehensive searches
Historians reported more comprehensive search results (quantitative results)
Also reported increased browsing, greater serendipity, due to time saved finding articles

Awareness of Resource by Country

How did you find this resource?

http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/

University of Oxford Podcasts

Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online

British History Online

Siobhan Davies RePlay

http://www.rin.ac.uk/humanities-case-studies
Bulger, M., Meyer, E.T., de la Flor, G., Terras, M., Wyatt, S., Jirotka, M., Eccles, K., Madsen, C.

The Case Studies

Browsing and Searching
Libraries
Journals
Peers

Reconfiguring Resources

“
Old Bailey Online hasn’t replaced anything for me or displaced anything for me, but it is part of this general transformation of how I do what I do.

“
The amount of time I now spend doing the very mechanical, laborious, time-consuming work is much smaller.You can now do things in 5 seconds which it took you 3 months to do a few years ago.

Transformations in Use

“
It’s a huge change. You can do things much more quickly, read much more widely, find connections…it’s very, very important.

“
With something like the Burney Collection, 5 years ago for writing an article I would need to review the newspapers, I would have gone into the British Library and done it on microfilm.
20 years ago, I would have gone into the British Library and done it with the actual paper in front of me.Now I sit at home and I do a keyword search.

“
Asking new questions?

“
I’m not sure all of this raises the quality of anybody’s work.I think it would be quite daft to pretend that all of this makes us better scholars, or makes our books or papers of higher quality. I don’t know if that is true by any means, but it certainly makes it easier and I suppose makes the quantity of stuff that you can produce greater.

“
What might take you several months if not years of research, you could do in hours, days, a week. So I think that means that it makes the nature of your research different because it allows you quantitative information much more quickly, which then allows you to maybe think about how you might use that information differently,because you’ve got so much more time.

Eric T. Meyer
eric.meyer@oii.ox.ac.ukhttp://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=120
Kathryn Eccles
kathryn.eccles@oii.ox.ac.ukhttp://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=138
Oxford e-Social Science Project
Project work funded by:

TIDSR-DHOx

by Eric Meyer

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TIDSR-DHOx

by Eric Meyer

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