Doreva Belfiore, Digital Projects Librarian, invests much of her time improving access to digital collections and making these collections findable on the open web. I talked with her recently about how her work helps to enhance the discoverability of Temple’s digital collections.
NT: So what is the goal of what you are doing?
DB: Ideally, we would like the digital collections to reach the most number of people in the most unhindered way possible. Recognizing how much time and energy goes into the preservation, cataloging and digitization of these collections, it would be a shame to not make them findable as broadly as possible.
NT: Findable to whom and how?
DB: We currently use Google Analytics to gain insight into the traffic on our library web site. Google Analytics is an imperfect tool, but it can tell us how many people access the collections through open searches on the web. It can tell us whether they visited our collections based on open search in a search Engine (Google) or through a direct link from a blog or other site.
We can learn how users found our site (whether a search was used, whether they typed in a web address, or whether another site, like Wikipedia, referred them to us).
We can identify our most popular items, and if there is a specific interest in particular sets of materials. However, we have limited information on how exactly our users navigate through the site, or even who they are, (i.e. age or gender).
Advanced researchers may find our materials when the archival finding aids produced by SCRC are indexed by Google. Theoretically, we could look at these sources as referrers.
So with small, incremental changes we are able to increase discovery and quantify the effect of these changes through Google Analytics. Although, we’re not always sure what is attributable to the changes we have made. Increases in site visits could also be a natural spike due to publicity, the growing of collections, or the inclusion in 3rd party sites and portals such as the Digital Public Library of America.
NT: Other than analytics – are there things we could do to assess discoverability?
DB: Colleagues in public services and special collections report back to us how users find our materials, although this is anecdotal. They report that some students have trouble finding digital materials from within SUMMON. We don’t know if Dublin Core mappings effect SUMMON indexing, but we’re continually looking at how we get our local digital collections shown higher in the search results.
NT: Recognizing that this is an ongoing initiative, what are some next steps?
DB: Well, as I said, this is an iterative process. Another venue for discovery is Wikipedia. So providing opportunities for library staff to learn about editing Wikipedia would be a positive step. We recently participated in a Wikipedia “edit-a-thon” here in Philadelphia and interested librarians were encouraged to participate in that. Here at Temple we’re in the process of getting an interest group off the ground.
NT: Any final words?
DB: Sure. Improving discoverability of our digital collections involves coming at it from many angles where we would expect to see small results growing incrementally, improving:
- cataloging
- workflow
- discoverability
- organization
- communication
The important thing is to get different people together at the table, as discoverability requires skills from all over the library.