How I Spent My Summer – or – Oxford-Illinois Digital Libraries Placement Program Summer 2015 Jennifer Westrick, MSLIS University of Illinois, OIDLPP

The Initial Project Project 3: Migration Workflow for Digital Collections. The Bodleian has been digitizing collections and making them available online for more than twenty years. While the images created can still be useful and viable, the platforms to deliver the images are often difficult to maintain. This project will analyze existing digitization and publication workflows, and propose ways of making legacy content and collections available online through new platforms. Written by Christine Madsen, Head of Digital Programmes, BDLSS (Bodleian Digital Libraries Systems and Services)

Project Changed to Become an Exploration of the Current Situation Before moving ahead on designing workflows, basic information was lacking: - How many are we talking about? - What platforms are they built on? - Does anyone still use them? Digital collections constantly changing; workflow still needed

Deliverables: - Spreadsheet - Detailed walk-through/ workflow of steps taken (what worked and what didn’t)

Retiring a Digital Library: Considerations for Legacy Digital Collections Jennifer Westrick, MSLIS University of Illinois, OIDLPP

digital.bodleian was introduced in July 2015

But what about these?

These legacy collections Are not an issue at smaller and/or less progressive institutions Grew organically; often part of a funded project with specified time frame May be currently used May have important sites that reference/cite the URL Are (?) in digital.bodleian

These legacy collections Are not an issue at smaller and/or less progressive institutions Grew organically; often part of a funded project with specified time frame May be currently used May have important sites that reference/cite the URL Are (?) in digital.bodleian Goal: easy for users, and less work for IT

The Process: Five Steps Define: what is a legacy collection? Identify: The goal is a comprehensive list of possible legacy collections Collect data - Basic information about site - Patron usage (Google Analytics) - Scholarly usage (Google Scholar and Webometrics) - how many outside URLs link to that digital collection - source of that link - Technical Data Assess the collections Next steps for the collections

Step One: Define Goal: what criteria must a collection meet to be considered legacy? A legacy collection: - its content is now part of a newer collection - its technology managed by Bodleian IT staff - some judgement calls, i.e. blogs, exhibits - don’t forget collections within collections

Step Two: Identify Goal: a list of legacy collections Sources: - spreadsheet from Christine Madsen - spreadsheet from Michael Popham - quick Google search - list of sites from IT?

Step Three: Collect Data Goal: Numbers in spreadsheet (color-coded!) Four areas of analysis - Basic information about site - Patron usage (Google Analytics) - Scholarly usage (Google Scholar and Webometrics) - how many outside URLs link to that digital collection - source of that link - Technical Data

Basic information

Patron Usage: Google Analytics - Google Analytics currently tracking usage on 23 of the legacy sites - website statistics include a 30-day summary of - sessions - unique users - pageviews - pages per session - avg session duration - % of users who were new - screenshots saved for future analysis

2,259 sessions 1,776 users 8,601 pageviews 3.81 pages per session 03:06 avg. session duration 72% new sessions Over the past 30 days, ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk had

Google: 1,460 Direct logins: 376 Referral: 171 (harkavagrant.com) Bing: 39 Yahoo: 13 Sources of the 2,259 sessions:

Other means to analyse patron usage? - Software that require purchase - Google keyword search: - hard to do accurately - search results vary widely depending on keyword used - Google assumptions - tailoring results - Alexa or other web-ranking sites: can’t get them to take entire URL “arshama.bodleian.ox.ac.uk” searches on “ox.ac.uk”

URL Analysis: Google Scholar and Webometrics Assumption: Greater number of documents that include a reference, citation or link to our URL = greater significance in the scholarly world (and less inclination to change the URL)

Google Scholar search: Goal: citation information – how many times was the legacy collection’s URL cited? Go into Google Scholar, search on URL - # mentions (supplied by Google Scholar, at the top of the page) - # of items that cite the URL (count each item once) - # of citations (how many total citations from the above items)

3 items have cited this URL 81 total results..for a total of 44 citations ↗ ↗ ↗

Google Scholar can be: - a source of detailed information about each URL that cited the collection (started compiling; too much data) - searched many ways – i.e. root vs entire URL - managed; many academics and institutions monitor their inclusions

URL Analysis with Webometrics Different from Google Scholar because it returns URL usage on websites rather than publications, and no focus on academia. Best thing: List of URLs Mike Thelwall’s Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group Webometrics Analyst 2.0,

Webometrics screen shot Search this list of URLs for wikip,.edu,.ac.uk; record totals

Technical information Goal: collect specifics about each site to assess the difficulty of future actions. Problem: Information is not easily accessible.

Technical information Goal: collect specifics about each site to assess the difficulty of future actions. Problem: Information is not easily accessible. Also collect information on metadata, if it exists

Compilation Approximately 150 rows of potential legacy sites, and 45 columns of criteria

Step Four: Assess Helpful to mark the collection if it is - Active - Dead link - Duplicate or near-duplicate -Not ours: An exhibit A different department or different university entirely Is it in digital.bodleian?

Step Five: Potential Next Steps Goals: Maintain user access and lighten the workload on IT - delete the website - redirect: automatically or with a click - pros: seamless to user - con: site still needs to be maintained - move all legacy collections to a single server - make the pages static and put all on a single server - Archive-It - or other outside web archiving service

Potential Next Steps – big picture - Create guidelines for future digital collections - specify supported platforms - metadata specifics - regularly scheduled maintenance and/or checks - Updated Digital Collections Management Policy - Much depends on staff/time/budget

Retiring a Digital Library: Considerations for Legacy Digital Collections Deliverables: - a detailed walk-through of steps taken (what worked and what didn’t) - a spreadsheet with lots of data (color-coded!) Jennifer Westrick, MSLIS University of Illinois, OIDLPP Summer 2015