Assessment Interest Group

DLF Assessment Interest Group

About

DLF seeks to facilitate conversations and activities related to digital library assessment. To take part, join the Digital Library Assessment Interest Group (DLF AIG), which is open to anyone interested in learning about or collaborating on the improvement of this work!

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.

The Assessment Interest Group is actively engaged in creating products and literature, including white papers, annotated bibliographies, project documentation, and additional resources, to assist with the assessment of digital libraries.

History

The DLF AIG was formed in 2014 as an informal interest group within the larger DLF community.

Read the original announcement on the formation of AIG.

Goals/Objectives

Work on methods to measure the impact of digital collections
Develop areas of commonality and benchmarks in how we measure collections across various platforms
Understand cost and benefit of digital collections
Explore how we can best collect, analyze, communicate, and share such information effectively across our various stakeholders-from collection managers to scholars.

Leadership

Kate Flynn, lead
Santi Thompson, Content Re-use Working Group co-lead
Jackson Huang, Cultural Access Working Group co-lead
Alexandra Provo, Cultural Access Working Group co-lead
Sarah Lynn Fisher, Cultural Access Working Group co-lead
Hannah Tarver, Metadata Working Group co-lead
Jess Spencer Waggoner, User Experience Group lead

Subcommittees

AIG Content Reuse Working Group

The working group researches, develops, and/or deploys recommended practices for digital content reuse in galleries, libraries, archives, museums, repositories, and other cultural heritage organizations. See our wiki.

AIG Cultural Assessment Working Group

This subgroup’s mission is to raise awareness of cultural bias and strive for diversity, equity and inclusivity in digital collection practice to create more inclusive cultures and to mitigate or expose collection bias. Where such practice is lacking, create new frameworks that uphold CAWG values. See our wiki.

AIG Metadata Working Group

This subgroup aims to build guidelines, best practices, tools and workflows around the evaluation and assessment of metadata used by and for digital libraries and repositories. See our wiki.

AIG User Experience (UX) Working Group

This subgroup explores emerging trends in user experience practices that impact digital libraries. We provide a community of practice for UX practitioners to connect and provide peer support. Our recent research topics have included phygital research methods and best practices. See the UX sub-group wiki.

AIG Cost Assessment Working Group

This subgroup’s primary task was to collect, aggregate, and share data on the time (and money) it takes to perform various tasks involved in the digitization process to help with project planning and benchmarking. The group sunset as of 12/31/2024 to create the Digitization Interest Group. You can view the Group’s wiki and OSF pages for information about the work the group accomplished. If anyone is interested in reviving this work, please contact the Assessment Interest Group’s coordinators.

Get Involved

Meetings

Check group communications or the DLF Community Calendar for the most up-to-date schedule

Communications

Initiatives and Resources

Opportunities for Feedback and Contributions

Annotated Bibliography for Cultural Assessment of Digital Collections (2017) — Contribute here

Metadata Assessment Presentations & Publications of Note (2016) — Contribute here

Metadata Application Profile Clearinghouse — Contribute here (requires a GitHub account)

Metadata Assessment Tools — Contribute here