Simon Tanner

Librarians in the digital age: planning digitisation projects

The digitisation of valued information resources opens up new avenues of access, use, and research and is an important aspect in the development of digital libraries. Increasingly, librarians are having to manage technical projects to achieve their goals of delivering valuable information to their ever‐increasing user base. This is a significant challenge and librarians need the practical skills and the vision to implement such projects in a controlled and manageable fashion. This article describes the key issues in project planning for managing a digitisation project covering the key areas of identifying the vision and the risk management in such technology‐based projects. This article also considers the implementation issues and costs associated with digitisation projects. Finally, there is a consideration of the range of skills needed and how these may be developed for managing and running digitisation projects.

Insight workflow: Systematically combining human and computational methods to explore textual data

Analyzing large quantities of real‐world textual data has the potential to provide new insights for researchers. However, such data present challenges for both human and computational methods, requiring a diverse range of specialist skills, often shared across a number of individuals. In this paper we use the analysis of a real‐world data set as our case study, and use this exploration as a demonstration of our “insight workflow,” which we present for use and adaptation by other researchers. The data we use are impact case study documents collected as part of the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), consisting of 6,679 documents and 6.25 million words; the analysis was commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (published as report HEFCE 2015). In our exploration and analysis we used a variety of techniques, ranging from keyword in context and frequency information to more sophisticated methods (topic modeling), with these automated techniques providing an empirical point of entry for in‐depth and intensive human analysis. We present the 60 topics to demonstrate the output of our methods, and illustrate how the variety of analysis techniques can be combined to provide insights. We note potential limitations and propose future work.

Measuring the impact of digitized resources: The Balanced Value Model

This paper introduces an innovative new model for measuring the impact of digital heritage resources - the Balanced Value Impact Model. The Balanced Value Impact Model (BVI Model) brings together into a holistic framework aspects from disparate Impact Assessment (IA) disciplines into a cohesive and logical process. This model balances vital tangible gains from economic, social and innovation perspectives with harder to measure cultural values. The model has found wide acceptance in the targeted communities, and is being adopted and implemented in a number of organizations, in particular, the Europeana Impact Task Force, which Simon Tanner chairs. Recent research into the value and impact of digitized collections has shown that there are clear benefits and value in the activity, but there is also a lack of measures to back up assertions about Impact with significant evidence beyond the anecdotal. The approach we took was to look outside the heritage community and see how Impact is measured in other sectors, where there are well-understood methods and substantial results. We consulted expert practitioners within and outside the cultural sector, including professionals in the health, environment and transport fields. Our focus was upon unifying knowledge from disparate perspectives. The outcome of this cross-disciplinary approach is a new and targeted model of IA for the cultural and heritage sector. The research that led to the BVI Model was funded by the Arcadia Fund in 2012 and developed by Simon Tanner and Marilyn Deegan at the Department of Digital Humanities, Kings College London.

An analysis of the Arts and Humanities submitted research outputs to the REF2014 with a focus on academic books

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THE HIGHER EDUCATION DIGITISATION SERVICE: MANAGING THE CONVERSION TO ELECTRONIC FORMATS

This article will introduce HEDS and its services, with the focus on its serials related projects and the issues that are raised by digitising serials.

The Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS): Access in the Future, Preserving the Past

The aim of this paper is to discuss the following aspects of digitisation: HEDS and its services, with focus on how HEDS fits into the overall digital libraries initiatives of the UK; digitisation projects and resources in Europe and elsewhere; myths surrounding digitisation; and the future of digitisation in the UK. Many of the themes of this talk begin with ‘it depends’. For example: it depends on what you want from the information content of the originals; it depends on the balance between costs and benefit goals; it depends on the nature of the original material itself.