Themes

Part II: Use Studies, Education & Training for Digital Library Collections.
Program chair: Michael Seadle, Institute of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

Digital collections have a user population that is independent of time zone, physical location and language. It no longer suffices to design the interface, the organization, and the content around the expectations of local users. Usage and user studies need to take place in a digital environment and to address cultural and linguistic issues explicitly. Developing and using tools for online user and usage studies is part of a modern evaluation program, and involves new approaches for scholarly research.

Part of the education and training for students and staff should give them new tools for working with modern digital content. Distant reading or text mining is a key element for how future scholars will access content across large ranges of machine-readable text. Machine intelligence and semantic web technologies play a role as digital collections rely increasingly on complex search algorithms rather than simple indexes. Research integrity discovery and evaluation also plays a role in maintaining the quality of scholarly content and needs to be part of contemporary training. Organizations need new approaches to prepare people for content discovery and for reading that were previously not possible.

Contributions (types described below) are invited covering the following topics:

  • Usage studies based on digital sources, including log file analysis, social media, and bibliometric / infometric source analysis
  • Language sensitive and culturally sensitive user studies that include online testing, videoconference-based interviews and/or focus groups
  • Statistical and/or qualitative analyses of digital collections
  • Training and curriculum plans to teach text mining, semantic web, triple store databases, and tools using machine intelligence
  • Research integrity discovery and evaluation tools and training
  • Forms of training and education that help people engage actively with the latest developments in information science
  • Discussion about general issues: How can we better understand users and uses of digital collections? How do we educate and teach for digital collections?