1. Harriett Green, Timothy Cole, MJ Han, and Mara Wade
User Engagement with Digital Archives: A Case Study of Emblematica Online
Harriett Green, Timothy Cole, MJ Han, and Mara Wade
Hello, my name is Harriett Green and today I will speak briefly about my work with the digital project Emblematica Online and my investigations into user engagement of this tool.
Library Research Showcase 2014

2. What is an Emblem? @greenharr green19@illinois.edu Motto Pictura
What is an emblem: It’s a genre of early modern printed works emerging primarily from the 16th and 18th centuries: It comes in the form ofa tri-partite document consisting of a “motto”, which fairly self-explanatory; a pictura, or a heavily symbolic image, such as this emblem that depicts a lobster trotting with a globe on its back; and a longer “subscripto,” which is the accompanying text or an extended annotation. This is in Latin and while the subscriptio isn’t translated, the motto is “Sic orbis iter” which approximates to something like, “So the world progresses.”
When you juxtapose that saying with this picture, it’s fairly cryptic and that’s the heart of why these emblem books are studied: Scholars from across disciplines study these emblem books for their rich integration of visual symbols and texts, and what they can reveal about culture, history, and intellectual thought of the period.
These emblem books are contained in special collections around the world, and for a long time, the only way to find about them was this seminal but flawed bibliography by two emblem scholars.
Subscriptio
Peter Isselburg, Emblemata Politica, 1617
@greenharr

3. Emblematica Online
Currently funded by NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources
Provides single point of access to digitized emblem books from libraries in U.S., Germany, Netherlands, UK
Conducting a user study of the Open Emblem Portal
These emblem books are contained in special collections around the world, and for a long time, the only way to find about them was this seminal but flawed bibliography by two emblem scholars.
But now a number of these emblem books have been digitized to varying extents, and Emblematica Online seeks to bring these disparate collection together via a single online portal that we call the Open Emblem Portal.
The project has received two NEH awards, the most recent from the NEH’s Humanities Collections and Reference Resource program.
In this latest stage of Emblematica Online project, we’re working to expand the content from the digital collections of Illinois and Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, our original German partner, to now include digital collections from the University of Glasgow, Duke University, Utrecht, and the Getty Institute. The project also consists of work to enhance the metadata, improve the search interface, and add features such as an Annotation tool.
But another critical part of this is user engagement:
Emblematica Online was built as a collaboration of scholars, technologists, and librarians, and has reached an advanced stage of development and growing scholarly adoption. Yet its functionalities are still experimental, and we still are very much exploring how it provides effective access to the digitized emblems and volumes. Thus in this newest phase of the project, we examine how scholars actually use Emblematica in research and teaching.
Because as we’re finding out more and more, it’s not enough to just create a digital collection or tool and expect users to flock to it. User engagement and assessment is key to making our innovative tools and resources actually be useful to the scholarly communities we’re trying to reach and improve our work in ways that facilitate the integration of these digital resources into scholarly research practices.
@greenharr

4. Goals of study User responses
Understand research practices of scholars who use emblem books
Understand behaviors of researchers working with Emblematica Online and similar digital archives
Gather input on functionalities and services in Emblematica
Searching
Teaching
Research
Improve Functionalities
A preliminary overview of the interviewees’ responses to their work with digital content and emblem books as research resource reveals that Emblematica Online contains rich potential to serve as a conduit for opening up the field of emblem studies to a far broader audience of students and scholars.
The methodology for the first phase of this user study consists of semi-structured interviews with researchers and teaching faculty at institutions around the world—I have and will be interviewing scholars at my home campus in Illinois, at the HAB Wolfenbüttel, and at the Society for Emblem Studies meeting. The eight scholars I’ve interviewed thus far conduct research in early modern studies within the disciplines of literature, book history, music, and art history among others, and their experiences ranged from minimal use of emblem books at all to in-depth research with emblem books in print and digital forms.
The goals of these research interviews are:
Understand the research practices of humanities scholars working in early modern studies across disciplines that draw upon emblem books for research.
Understand behaviors of researchers working with Emblematica Online and similar digital archives.
Gather input from researchers to assess the new functionalities and services added to Emblematica Online, and determine future functionalities that could further enhance the portal. 1)
Expand reach of emblem scholarship

5. Coming Up Next…. http://emblematica.library.illinois.edu
Functionalities
User Study
Improved search interface
Facets by institution
Emblem-level metadata
IconClass cataloging
Annotation Tool
Collection Building tool
Winter 2014: Usability testing Open Emblem portal
ACRL 2015 paper on the full user study
The revamped portal has been released at emblematica.library.illinois.edu There are a few major features that will be forthcoming, including improved interface and search functionalities, more metadata, and tools for annotations and collection building.
I will be conducting usability testing of the Open Emblem portal this winter, and presenting a paper on my results at the ACRL 2015 conference.
@greenharr

6. Thank you!
Harriett Green English and Digital Humanities Librarian University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Thank you and I welcome any questions afterward.

7. Photo Credits
Joseph Mayer, Vortrefflich-Hoch-Adeliches Controfeé,
“Measuring Time,” by aussiegall, on Flickr,
"Untitled” by rachel a. k., on Flickr,