Are we serving the right stakeholders? OCLC, Yale, June 2013 Dave Thompson Digital Curator, Wellcome Library you This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The Wellcome Library Part of Wellcome Collection, astonishing public venue in London developed by the Wellcome Trust. Where people can learn more about medicine through the ages & across cultures. More than 100,000 readers visit us each year, including historians, academics, students, health professionals & consumers, journalists, artists & members of the general public.

Big digital ambitions Ambitious digitisation plans. Digitise the library. Library transformation strategy, physical to digital. Increasing amounts of material available on line. Lessons to date provide interesting insights.

We know why digital is important, eh? Wide access to otherwise rare & fragile materials available as malleable data. Bon digital archives provide unique insight, to reveal a human side. Democratisation of access to data without visiting the archive. 24x7x365. Isn’t offering digital access to material a good thing?

Who is the boss of you? We know our stakeholders so well, project boards, governors, funding committees, competing user groups, managers, etc. Daily we face budgets, deadlines, objectives, reviews, competition for resources. Easy to see working with digital as a technical & organisational task. Hit the mark & move on. But are these the only stakeholders?

Yes, yes, I know who pays my salary.

Other interested stakeholders…. The material.The futureThe user.

The material Quantity Vs quality. 10 illuminated manuscripts or 1000 students texts? Does metadata support granular discovery of rich digital material in ways that maximise its use/re- use? Format, how can material (data) be applied to research. Do users really want page turners? Ways in which the material will/can be used. Not only format of the data but rights too.

MOH tables as data sets MOH reports contain average 47 tables of data each. Tables have clear rows/columns & caption or description of contents & numeric content. That’s >250,000 tables. Tables extracted from OCR’d text, formatted according to the physical layout & manually checked/corrected for accuracy. Tables delivered from supplier as CSV & XML files. The XML contains HTML formatting indicating layout. Exploring creating a database to allow users to discover & download tables individually, or in aggregate.

The future We don’t know how material will be used in the future or what will be important. Researchers increasingly competent in working with data, e.g. data as XML, or encoded as ALTO files. Ideally rights in material will be open & permit diverse re-use. Moving data into the future is an exercise in faith, vision & imagination.

The user We consult with users in usability testing. What are their data needs? ‘Sufficient’ metadata (DMD & AMD) is essential to the re-use of data. What will user do with material? Flexibility of format, structure, etc. Need to create users who are self directed, use material without support.

What's the point? The point of digitisation & preservation is re-use. But not re-use by archivists, the point of digitisation & preservation is not endless life cycle management. Re-use is the application of material to the creation of new knowledge. Creation of new social relationships in the creation & management of data.

What happens on my watch…? We are custodians. We are not owners. Actions we take, decisions we make – or don’t take/make – affect the future use/re-use of the material. Much effort/resource focussed on acquisition or creation of digital material. Too much? Can only work with what was created/acquired at the time. Re-purposing material later expensive & time consuming.

Digital is for life not just for Christmas Need to work with digital now, but need to imagine a future in which data will be used. Need to work end to end. Imagine the entire process from whoa to go, digitisation to discovery to use. Costs of/for digital must include costs of conservation, metadata creation & data formatting. It’s a whole package. Balance between mass availability & less, but done better.

Need new ways of engaging with creators & users. Need to imagine data into the future, be re-usable. Need to do more to negotiate rights for permitted reuse with creators. Working with digital is a social, not technical activity, built on relationships.

Lessons learned Archivists role is mediator between the material, the user and the future. We can’t do digital simply because doing digital is a ‘good thing’. Challenge is bigger than this. Need to identify & match best suited data to users & support their data needs by providing rich metadata that enhances digital material. Not a technical exercise. Social activity, building relationships & projecting relationships into the future.

We can plan all we want. Material has the power to surprise. Despite our plans…

Serendipity remains alive and well…

Thank you Questions now, questions later…? Dave Thompson, Digital Curator Wellcome Library /