How We’re Found (or, Referrer Stats for 2008) January 23, 2009
Posted by Sean Aery in : Assessment , 1 comment so far
Now that 2008 is over, we’ll be posting a few charts & graphs that illustrate some interesting trends in how our digital collections (and our shiny new system) have been used in the past year. This post focuses on “referrers,” or, those other sites that people come from that directly lead them to land on our pages.
OK, so what are we counting?
- Any referrals from outside of Duke Libraries websites that resulted in a Page View anywhere in library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/*, including our digital collections homepage, individual collection homepages, contextual info pages, item pages, or search results.
How many?
- 890,000 referrals from 10,000 unique external domains (all Duke library web sites/pages excluded). Only the top 9 individually account for more than 1% of external referrals, so there’s quite a long tail.
Notable External Referrers
Of the 10,000, some stand out in particular…
(more…)
Building collections that work together January 20, 2009
Posted by Rich in : metadata , add a comment
Some of my favorite objects in Duke’s digital collections are images of children. Some of them are touching, some of them are funny, and some of them are just plain cute. But when I see images of children, like this one from the Michael Francis Blake Photographs, I wonder: Who are they? What were their lives like, and what became of them?
There are great images of children in many of our digital collections, including the Michael Francis Blake Photographs, the Sidney D. Gamble Photographs, and Ad*Access. We’ll soon be adding to this list with a new collection, Images of Mainline Protestant Children and Families in the U.S. This collection, coming out of the Duke Divinity School Library, will consist of photos from American magazines of the mid-20th century, depicting what children and families in the U.S. looked like — or, often, idealized versions of what the creators thought they should look like.
As we build our digital collections, we keep in mind how they work as individual collections as well as how they work together. By using consistent metadata across collections and developing ways to display and let users interact with objects from many sources, we try to provide seamless access across collections and create opportunities for interdisciplinary research and interesting discoveries. A search on a term like “children” will bring back images, texts, audio, and video from around the world, various historical periods, and all kinds of social contexts — give it a try and see what you find.
Building the Broadsides collection-Part 1 January 12, 2009
Posted by nh48 in : Announcements, Broadsides, Trident , add a comment
Over the the next few months, we’ll be writing a series of posts that offer a behind-the-scenes look at all of the work and decision-making that goes into building one digital collection, from selection, conservation, and physical processing to scanning, metadata, and publication. We’ve chosen to blog about our work on the Broadsides collection in particular for several reasons:
- It’s a relatively large-scale project that will test our ability to ramp up our digitization efforts (5,500 items from the U.S. and abroad, dated 1790-1940)
- It will serve as a test-case for the development and use of our new metadata tool–codename “Trident.”
- It will be a pilot project to get more library staff involved in generating metadata for digital collections.
So check in periodically to see how the project is moving along!
3D Wall View in Search Results January 9, 2009
Posted by Sean Aery in : Interface Features , 3commentsYesterday, we introduced a new feature in our digital collections interface: the 3D Wall. This is an exciting new interactive view of search results that enables quicker navigation through pages of thumbnails and between items, smooth zooming to high-quality images, and image slideshows.
Here’s a 4-minute demo:
(see larger, high-quality version)
3D Wall uses the program CoolIris. The embedded version requires only that your browser has Flash player; through to use full-screen view, download the CoolIris browser plugin from http://cooliris.com.
Try it out and let us know what you think!
First Wednesday Jan 7 – A Metadata Tool Project January 6, 2009
Posted by wsexton in : Trident , add a commentSlides for my First Wednesday presentation tomorrow on the metadata tool project, including the exciting new project “code name” (which has been determined, pending a better idea) …
