Being A Good Data Provider

Being a Good Data Provider Alastair Dunning JISC Programme Manager - Digitisation a.Dunning AT jisc.ac.uk , 0203 006 6065 February 2008, London, UK This presentation is intended to give some brief advice for those publishing digital content (digital images, cultural heritage, scholarly information etc.) on the Internet

Outline

Being a Good Data Provider: A simple thing gets complex

Cool URIs

Being Friends with Google

Is Google Enough?

International Portals

Cool URIs

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/web-focus/

URI ( Uniform Resource Identifier ) refers to the "generic set of all names/addresses that are short strings that refer to resources" whereas URI ( Uniform Resource Locator ) is "an informal term (no longer used in technical specifications) associated with popular URI schemes: http, ftp, mailto, etc.“

Keep them stable , memorable and consistent – develop a short URI policy

Where do URIs get quoted? – Often taken out of their environment

Publicity material – expensive to reprint

Academic Citations – damages scholarly trust

Bookmarks within browser or on social bookmarking sites

Emails (therefore less than 76 characters, avoid underscores)

Blogs and other URIs

By search engines – loss will inhibit resource discovery

Guesswork – users make guesses at URIs – use redirects and good 404 pages

Item level not a collection level

Users may have no interest in the general resource but plenty of interest in a particular item

Designing Shakespeare – Shakespeare performed in London & Stratford, 1960 – 2000, 1000s of plays

Researchers & teachers interested in general resource

Actors interested in specific performances . Needed stable URIs for cast lists and photos

Being friends with Google

No need to explain the importance in exposing content to metadata – academics use this as their principal springboard for digital information

Even if using authentication, expose metadata

Make sure your database is easily queried by robots like Google

Optimisation is complex and depends on good communications process

Use established URIs – Ensure your website is trusted

Get incoming links from other trusted sources – this drives up traffic via Google and via the original sites themselves

Being friends with Google

Give distinctive <title> to each page – helps with clarity on Google

Use Google Sitemaps to upload details of your pages

Google Analytics can help with measuring web usage

Google Maps, Google Scholar?

http://www.google.com/publicsector

Is Google everything?

Recommendation by peers and other respected persons gets resources used

Marketing a resource is an integrated strategy to marketing which involves technical and ‘academic’ integration

Source – Lesly Huxley et al (2007): Gathering evidence: Current ICT use and future needs for arts and humanities researchers

Is Google everything?

How is your collection integrated into library catalogue?

How does your resource fit in with other resources?

Source – Mark Greengrass et al (2007): RePAH: A User Requirements Analysis for Portals in the Arts and Humanities “Resource discovery and use would be increased by separate collections being aggregated logically based on their content” Recommendation 3 – Daisy Abbott (2008): Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory

Bringing content together - International Portals