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Impacts of digital collections: EEBO and House of Commons Parliamentary Papers
Editor's Notes
- This lightning talk is about a recent research project conducted by Oxford Internet Institute on behalf of ProQuest and Jisc to study the impacts of digital collections in the UK. The study focused on two colletcions, Early English Books online and House of Commons Parliamentary papers and these are some of the highlights from this research.
- The Impacts of Digital Collections research was conducted to compare the relative uses of two major digital collections available on national license via Jisc to UK universities Early English Books Online (EEBO) is the definitive online collection of early printed works in English, making digital copies of over 130,000 titles from before 1700 discoverable. To accompany the page images, the Text Creation Partnership created accurate transcriptions of over 25,000 works. These text files are now open access and jointly owned by more than 150 libraries worldwide House of Commons Parliamentary Papers is a comprehensive collection of over 247,000 official original documents from the UK Government from 1715 to today. ProQuest and Jisc also collaborated to integrate the 18th century parliamentary papers from the BOPCRIS project Both these largescale digital collections have been widely available in the UK for over a decade which makes them highly suitable for a study of their impacts on research and teaching practice.
- The research was conducted in partnership with Oxford Internet Institute, using the principles of the TIDSR toolkit they developed with Jisc and studies the quantitative and qualitative impacts of EEBO and Parliamentary Papers on scholarly research and teaching. We looked at usage and citations as well as conducting interviews and a survey with users of the resources from a variety of UK institutions.
- The volume statistics show a steady increase in usage from 2004-2015. The EEBO volume includes data from the Jisc Historical Texts page views, which starts in June 2014. EEBO usage has been increasing steadily at a relatively linear pace. Usage doubled from 50,000 page views per month to 100,000 in about 3 years (2005-2008), then stayed at that level until 2011, when it began to increase again to 200,000 page views per month more recently.
- Parliamentary Papers usage also increases, but in a less marked fashion. Monthly full-text accesses increased rapidly to 50,000 by 2007, and have fluctuated between 50-75,000 full-text accesses per month ever since. From the different patterns of use it seems that Parliamentary Papers found its audience relatively quickly EEBO, on the other hand, appears to still be finding (and being found by) new audiences.
- The usage data was also geo-coded and shows the broad spread of use across the UK. The intensity of use (as shown by the size of the bubbles) for both collections tends to be more heavily concentrated in the South and East of the UK, which isn’t entirely unexpected as many of the UK’s largest higher education institutions are located in these areas. A second thing to note is the relatively broader spread of Parliamentary Papers use in the UK; this is partly due to more use by further education institutions, as compared to EEBO.
- A key finding is that these resources have an impact not only on research at top universities but also in teaching and learning and in non-research intensive institutions. One of the metrics we looked at was REF results and found that institutions that scored in the top third of REF for English and History were also heavy users of EEBO and HCPP. So, if not a causality we can suggest a correlation between use of resources and quality of research outputs. However, we also found that use of resources in the humanities is extremely diverse and there isn’t a well-defined set of journals or resources that all researchers go to, as is the case in some scientific disciplines Instead we found that researchers rely heavily on specific digital collections which might shape their whole research activity.
- We also looked at citations and found that in the last 15 years there is a growing literature that mentions using EEBO or HCPP, so these resources feed into other scholarly outputs such as journals and books. But the figures are very conservative estimates. We know that there is still resistance in citing use of digital resources in favour of their physical equivalent, and that there are long lead times for publications in the humanities to appear, up to 6-8 years We must also be aware of the limitation of citation tracking mechanisms: we checked thoroughly three key sources (Google Scholars, JSTOR and Scopus), and it is interesting to see how little overlap there is of the citations they have returned. So the important message here is to look at patterns of citations, which are increasing, rather than relying excessively on specific figures.
- With regard to teaching and learning, we found clusters of courses on literature and book history at non-research-intensive universities which relied on access to EEBO, and which would simply not have been possible based on those institutions’ limited special collections. Similarly, we found that the Open University has embedded the Parliamentary papers collections in its history course as a way of providing not just access to the information but also for developing students’ digital literacy skills. So, the main value of these resources in teaching and learning is to expose students to primary source materials that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
- So, what next? We are seeing a shift towards data-driven research in the humanities which couldn’t have been possible without the availability of these digital archives. While the majority of users still uses these resources in more traditional ways, and the main gain is in the efficiency and scale of the research carried out, there are increasingly active communities of scholars doing different types of digital scholarship. The digital humanities make use of more sophisticated approaches to interrogate and analyse content through computational approaches such as text mining, and typically operate within cross-disciplinary teams. So thanks to the availability of these collections, large-scale computational analysis of content is set to become a much more important part of the overall humanities scholarship landscape in the future.
- I would like to finish with a quote from the report which recognises that digital collections have become fundamental to modern scholarship. Jisc will continue to work with the community and explore new ways to ensure that these collections are as widely available as possible to researchers, teachers and learners.