Santi Thompson

Measuring Reuse of Digital Objects: Preliminary Findings from the IMLS-funded Project

The first step of the Developing a Framework for Measuring Reuse of Digital Objects project involved a survey identifying how cultural heritage organizations currently assess digital library reuse, barriers to assessing reuse, and community priorities for potential solutions and next steps. This poster offers initial analysis of the survey results.

The “Wicked Problem” of Neutral Description: Toward a Documentation Approach to Metadata Standards

ABSTRACT Increasingly, metadata standards have been recognized as constructed rather than neutral. In this article, we argue for the importance of a documentation approach to metadata standards creation as a codification of this growing recognition. By making design decisions explicit, the documentation approach dispels presumptions of neutrality and, drawing on the “wicked problems” theoretical framework, acknowledges the constructed nature of standards as “clumsy solutions.”

“A picture is worth a thousand words”: Reverse image lookup and digital library assessment

This brief communication builds on the application of content‐based image retrieval (CBIR) and reverse image lookup (RIL), a graduated form of CBIR, as assessment tools for digital library image reuse. It combines literature on the definition, history, usefulness, and limitations of RIL and includes a brief analysis of the 4 published digital library image reuse assessment case studies. In its conclusion, the communication paper proposes that RIL offers benefits for digital library managers in the assessment of their collections.