A webinar presented by Aaron Brenner and Karen Calhoun for ALA TechSource based on Calhoun's book Exploring Digital Libraries (ALA Neal-Schuman, 2014).

1. Supporting Digital Scholarship: From
Collections to Online Communities
ALATechSourceWorkshop
Karen Calhoun
Aaron Brenner
June 19, 2014 1

2. Exploring Digital Libraries: Foundations, Practice, Prospects
Karen Calhoun
ALA Neal-Schuman, 2014
Chapter 7 “Digital libraries and their
communities”
Chapter 8 “The prospects of open
access repositories”
Chapter 9 “Digital libraries and the
social web: scholarship”
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3. Key Challenge for Digital Libraries:
Community Engagement
For the viability of their
agendas, and for their
sustainability:
 Economically
 Socially
 Ethically
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Source: Rebecca Siegel, CC BY 2.0
https://www.flickr.com/photos/grongar/4966015822

4. Prospects of Repositories
In general, subject-based repositories have been more successful at
attracting submissions and use
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World ranking of
1,746 web
repositories,
January 2014
Source:
repositories.webometrics.info

5. Successful Subject Repositories:
Are woven into the way their disciplines communicate:
 Readers/researchers: where they look for information, see what’s
been or will be published, look for collaborators
 Writers/contributors: where they “register” their work (and establish
claims to discoveries), where they first share their work with
colleagues for comment/review
 See also Erway (2012) Lasting Impact:Sustainability of Disciplinary
Repositories
Had a strong community orientation at inception and have a high
degree of trust and participation at maturity
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6. Institutional Repositories
By contrast, institutional repositories have faced and
continue to face serious challenges
 A lack of clarity around purpose and focus
 Weak understandings of community needs, attitudes,
work practices/motivators
 Scholars’ lack of awareness of the repository or its
benefits
 Recruiting content
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7. A repository should not be a
solution looking for a problem
to solve
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8. Poll:
Are you responsible for managing, or helping to manage a
repository?
Yes – subject-based
Yes – institutional
Yes – other
Yes – several of the above
 No
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9. Online Community Life Cycle
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Life cycle model of success factors for digital libraries in social environments
Based on Iriberri and Leroy (2009)
Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. p. 161. Used with permission.

10. If a network-based service’s
intended communities do
not actively engage and
participate, the service will
(eventually) die.
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11. A critical measure of
engagement and participation
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Ratio of
amount of content in
the repository
content that could
reasonably be expected
to be there

12. How big are they vs. how big
should they be?
“If all of the tenured academic research active staff
at a UK university deposited all of their annual
output (papers, presentations, learning materials,
etc.) in the institutional repository, deposits would
be in the range of 10,000 items per year” (Carr and
Brody 2007)
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13. Pause for questions,
comments
13

14. Lessons from researching the
book
• Why have some repositories had a distinctive
impact on the communities they were built to
serve, while others are more or less ignored?
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15. What to do?
Inventory repositories Understand target audiences
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Name
Size
Usage (stats, web analytics)
Rankings
Similar/related/competitor sites
Last needs assessment?
Benefits to target audiences
Communications/outreach
activities
Potential for web services/social
features?
What else?
Audience segmentation
Size
Needs assessments (personas?)
Work practice studies
Discipline-specific norms
Funders, funding policies
Value propositions (by audience
segment)
What else?

16. Improving value propositions to stakeholders
and target audiences
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Hosting Library • Fostering open access to scholarship
• Raising profile of library’s curatorial role in
scholarly communication
Parent Institution • Showcasing institution’s intellectual
output/prestige
• Source of institution-level metrics
Institution’s End-Users • Discovering research conducted locally
• Networking, finding collaborators
Institution’s Faculty &
Researchers
• Increasing exposure to work
• Solving visibility, management, or access
problems
Government Agencies • Supporting knowledge transfer and economic
growth
Adapted from: Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries.Table 8.1, p. 183
Used with permission

17. Question:
In what ways have you reached out
to give a user focus to your
repository work?
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18. Repositories:What’s Next?
1. In what ways will repositories support the
emergent 21st century scholarly research
infrastructure?
2. To what extent are repositories likely to evolve
into a sustainable, global ecosystem for
capturing, making accessible, and preserving
the scholarly record?
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19. Will a network-based ecosystem of loosely-
coupled, communicating services emerge?
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20. Digital libraries and the social
web
The advent of the social web provides an opportunity to
shift the focus and core assumptions of digital libraries …
Away from:
Their collections and information processes (selecting,
organizing, providing access, etc.)
In favor of:
New, community-centered ways of thinking about services,
expectations and potential social roles.
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21. What is the social web?
 The term “social web” refers collectively to the web sites, tools and services that
facilitate interactions, collaboration, content creation and sharing, contribution
and participation on the web
 The distinguishing characteristics are human and machine-to-machine
interactions
 The social web supports many types of online communities, and not just those
who participate in social networks
 In addition to the many web services and APIs that support the social web, the
large-scale take-up of mobile smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices has
created a huge scope of opportunity for social web growth
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22. Social digital libraries and
repositories?
 Most continue to operate from a traditional,
collections-centered service mode
 The social nature and roles of a library are typically
lost – DLs and repos are mostly read-only (“web
1.0”)
 A digital library that incorporates social web
approaches continues to be the exception rather
than the rule. 22

23. Changing Community Expectations
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When individuals who use social
sites and tools approach digital
libraries (and repositories), they
bring their social web expectations
with them.
The digital libraries that continue to
operate from a traditional,
collections-centered service model
(that is, nearly all of them) are now
faced with finding their place in the
fast-moving, chaotic information
space of the social web.
Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lukew/10453074195/CC BY 2.0

24. What would change?
24
Transitions associated with the shift to social digital libraries and repositories
Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. Figure 9.1 p. 214. Used with permission

25. 25
The evolution of digital libraries toward new roles on the social web
Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. Figure 9.2 p. 215. Used with
permission.

26. 26
Social web impacts on researchers and scholarship
Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. Figure 9.3 p. 217. Used with permission.

27. Over to you!
• In what ways is your library moving beyond its
established portfolio of services in support of
digital scholarship?
• What do you make of the emergent (and
presently chaotic) information space defined by
e-research initiatives, scholarly social networks,
altmetrics, researcher profiling systems…?
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28. References (1/2)
• Calhoun, Karen (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries.
Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman
• Carr, Leslie, andTim Brody (2007) Size Isn’t
Everything. D-Lib Magazine 13 (7/8)
• Cybermetrics Lab, CSIC (2014). The RankingWeb of
World repositories. Retrieved June, 2014 from
http://repositories.webometrics.info
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29. References (2/2)
• Erway, Ricky (2012) Lasting Impact: Sustainability of
Disciplinary Repositories. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC
Research.
• Iriberri, Alicia, and Gondy Leroy (2009) A Life-Cycle
Perspective on Online Community Success. ACM
Computing Surveys 41(2):11
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