{"id":2810,"date":"2014-04-17T21:11:37","date_gmt":"2014-04-17T21:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitisation.eu\/blog\/?p=1747"},"modified":"2014-04-17T21:11:37","modified_gmt":"2014-04-17T21:11:37","slug":"how-to-maximise-usage-of-digital-collections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitisation.eu\/?p=2810","title":{"rendered":"How to maximise usage of digital collections"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Reblogged from Research in KB<\/span><\/a>\u00a0blog:\u00a0http:\/\/researchkb.wordpress.com\/2014\/04\/13\/how-to-maximise-usage-of-digital-collections\/)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Libraries want to understand the researchers who use their digital collections and researchers want to understand the nature of these collections better. The seminar \u2018Mining digital repositories\u2019 brought them together at the Dutch Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) on 10-11 April, 2014, to discuss both the good and the bad of working with digitised collections \u2013 especially newspapers. And to look ahead at\u00a0what a \u2018digital utopia\u2019 might look like. One easy point to agree on: it would be a world with less restrictive copyright laws. And a world where digital \u2018portals\u2019 are transformed into \u2018platforms\u2019 where researchers can freely \u2018tinker\u2019 with the digital data. \u2013\u00a0Report & photographs by Inge Angevaare, KB.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Mining
Hans-Jorg Lieder of the Berlin State Library (front left) is given an especially warm welcome by conference chair Toine Pieters (Utrecht), \u2018because he was the only guy in Germany who would share his data with us in the Biland project.\u2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Libraries and researchers: a changing relationship<\/h1>\n

\u2018A lot has changed in recent years,\u2019 Arjan van Hessen of the University of Twente and the CLARIN project told me. \u2018Ten years ago someone might have suggested that perhaps we should talk to the KB. Now we are practically in bed together.\u2019<\/p>\n

But each relationship has its difficult moments. Researchers are not happy when they discover gaps in the data on offer, such as missing issues or volumes of newspapers. Or incomprehensible transcriptions of texts because of inadequate OCR (optical character recognition<\/a>). Conference organisers Toine Pieters and Jaap Verheul (University of Utrecht) invited\u00a0Hans-Jorg Lieder<\/strong>\u00a0of the Berlin State Library to explain why he \u2018could not give researchers everything everywhere today\u2019.<\/p>\n

Lieder & Thomas: \u2018Digitising newspapers is difficult\u2019<\/h1>\n

Both\u00a0Deborah Thomas<\/strong>\u00a0of the Library of Congress and\u00a0Hans-Jorg Lieder<\/strong>\u00a0stressed how complicated it is to digitise historical newspapers. \u2018OCR does not recognise the layout in columns, or the \u201ccontinued on page 5\u2033. Plus the originals are often in a bad state \u2013 brittle and sometimes torn paper, or they are bound in such a way that text is lost in the middle. And there are all these different fonts, e.g., Gothic script in German, and the well-known long-s\/f confusion.\u2019\u00a0Lieder provided the ultimate proof of how difficult digitising newspapers is: \u2018Google only digitises books, they don\u2019t touch newspapers.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"Mining
Thomas: \u2018The stuff we are digitising is often damaged\u2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another thing researchers should be aware of:\u00a0\u2018Texts are liquid things. Libraries enrich and annotate texts, versions may differ.\u2019 Libraries do their best to connect and cluster collections of newspapers (e.g., in the\u00a0Europeana Newspapers<\/a>), but \u2018the truth of the matter is that most newspapers collections are still analogue; at this moment we have only bits and pieces in digital form, and there is a lot of bad OCR.\u2019 There is no question that libraries are working on improving the situation, but funding is always a problem.\u00a0And the choices to be made with bad OCR are sometimes difficult: Should we manually correct it all, or maybe retype it, or maybe even wait a couple of years for OCR technology to improve?\u2019<\/p>\n

\"Mining
Librarians and researchers discuss what is possible and what not. From the left, Steven Claeyssens, KB Data Services, Arjan van Hessen, CLARIN, and Tom Kenter, Translantis.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Researchers: how to mine\u00a0for meaning<\/h1>\n

Researchers themselves are debating how they can fit these new digital\u00a0resources into their academic work. Obviously, being able to search millions of newspaper pages from different countries in a matter of days opens up a lot of new research possibilities. Conference organisers\u00a0Toine Pieters\u00a0<\/strong>and\u00a0Jaap Verheul<\/strong>\u00a0(University of Utrecht) are both involved in theHERA<\/a>\u00a0Translantis<\/a>\u00a0project which is taking a break from traditional \u2018national\u2019 historical research by looking at transnational influences of so-called \u2018reference cultures\u2019:<\/p>\n

\"Mining<\/a>
Definition of Reference Cultures in the Translantis project which mines digital newspaper collections<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the 17th century the Dutch Republic was such a reference culture. In the 20th century the United States developed into a reference culture and Translantis digs deep into the digital newspaper archives of the Netherlands, the UK, Belgium and Germany to try and find out how the United States is depicted in public discourse:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Mining<\/a>
Jaap Verheul (Translantis) shows how the US is depicted in Dutch newspapers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Joris van Eijnatten<\/strong>\u00a0introduced another\u00a0transnational HERA project,\u00a0<\/span>ASYMENC<\/a>, which is exploring cultural aspects of European identity with digital humanities methodologies.<\/span><\/p>\n

All of this sounds straightforward enough, but researchers\u00a0themselves have yet to develop a scholarly culture around the new resources:<\/p>\n