Research and cultural heritage institutions are, as a matter of course, providing online access to converted and born-digital scholarly and cultural content. As the amount of that content continues to grow, there is an increased need to standardize our assessment efforts in a more strategic way. This interest group is working on ways to measure the impact of digital collections; developing areas of commonality and benchmarks in how we measure collections across various platforms; understanding cost and benefit of digital collections; and exploring how can we best collect, analyze, communicate, and share such information effectively across our various stakeholders—from collection managers to scholars.
DLF seeks to facilitate conversations and activities related to digital library assessment. The DLF Assessment Interest Group (DLF AIG) was formed in 2014 as an informal interest group within the larger DLF community. The group meets during the DLF Forum to share problems, ideas, and solutions. The group also has a dedicated Google Group, DLF-supported wiki, and project documentation available in the Open Science Framework.
The group is open to anyone interested in learning about or collaborating on the improvement of digital library assessment. Current working groups are focusing on tools and best-practices documents to:
- support cost assessment
- measure digital library analytics
- standardize digital library content citations
- assess user needs and usability,
- build metadata quality review recommendations and
- explore the cultural assessment of digital libraries.
The Assessment Interest Group is actively engaged in creating products and literature to assist with the assessment of digital libraries. Here are recent drafts and finalized white papers, project documentation, and calls for participation:
The Digitization Cost Calculator project (Contribute data).
“Metadata Assessment Literature Review & Environmental Scan”
“Surveying the Landscape: Use and Usability Assessment of Digital Libraries”
“DLF User Studies in Digital Libraries Bibliography”
“Best Practices for Google Analytics in Digital Libraries”
“Altmetrics and analytics for digital special collections and institutional repositories”
“Guidelines for citing library-hosted, unique digital assets”
“Digitization projects: processes and definitions”
“Annotated Bibliography for Cultural Assessment of Digital Collections”
