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Summary

Research can be a mysterious domain, especially if you are approaching it from a practice perspective. Traditionally, research has been undertaken by academics in higher education, faculty members of the professoriate who often have a 40/40/20 work assignment split between teaching, research and service. However, the perennial gap that exists between research and practice in various disciplines, including library and information science (LIS), has encouraged practitioners to conduct research to help inform their own practices. EBLIP and reflective practice have also provided impetus for librarians to take up the research mantle. Practitioners have questions that need answering, and often the timelines are tight. Research undertaken by LIS scholars (academics working in university library and information science departments) can take a long time to produce published, accessible results. There is also the potential of such research not being relative to practice. Johannes Balslev, the former Director of Ringsted Public Library in Denmark, wrote about this issue within LIS research, stating that ‘[to] a practitioner with very down-to-earth needs, the research being done at the Royal School of Librarianship at that time seemed rather remote’, and went on to say that if he ‘wanted the gaps to be filled’ he would ‘have to start filling them’ himself (Balslev, 1989, 4). As noted in the first part of this book, EBLIP is a way of working that incorporates research evidence with user preference and professional expertise to aid in decision making. Conducting research can be part of that process should the published research evidence in a particular area be lacking: librarians essentially filling the gaps themselves as practitioner-researchers (see Table 4.4).

Crumley and Koufogiannakis’ definition of evidence-based librarianship speaks to the notion of librarians conducting research to enhance the evidence base:

Evidence based librarianship (EBL) is a means to improve the profession of librarianship by asking questions as well as finding, critically appraising and incorporating research evidence from library science (and other disciplines) into daily practice. It also involves encouraging librarians to conduct high quality qualitative and quantitative research. (2002, 62)

Defining EBLIP as a way to improve the profession of librarianship suggests that conducting research extends further than our own libraries. We have an obligation to the profession and to others in situations similar to our own. Who is going to represent what we do if we don't represent what we do?

Summary

The final step in the EBLIP process is to evaluate and determine what impact was made, where gaps remain and where improvement is needed for the next time (Adapt).

This involves both reflection on the implementation of the decision and ongoing assessment or evaluation to determine whether the decision is working in the longer term (Booth 2004a). Within the literature, this step appears to be the one that has received the least attention, yet if you are going to the trouble of working through the other steps of the EBLIP process you should also take the time to examine whether your decision worked or made a difference. Furthermore, if you are adopting a whole evidence-based approach to your practice, this shouldn't be seen as a final step but as an ongoing part of the cyclical nature of your way of thinking.

The first reflective step involves thinking about what worked and whether any changes need to be made. New or further questions may also have arisen. The second part of the reflection involves evaluating any service change that was made, so as to determine if it had the desired effect. This can be done via measures of service quality such as benchmarking, performance measures and audit (Booth, 2004a). In reality, the former is more important if the evidence was used for advocacy or to help a stakeholder make a decision about your service, particularly if the decision wasn't a welcome one and led to large service changes. Evaluating service changes to see if they had the desired effect is part of the larger picture relating to quality improvement.

Reflection on the process

Reflection is noted as an important continuing professional development activity within EBLIP (Koufogiannakis, 2010b). In the UK, reflection is part of the process required for professional revalidation with CILIP, whereas in the USA the Medical Library Association has recognized the importance of reflection in the research process, challenging its members to ‘build a culture of reflective practice in which the profession's evidence base is routinely used’ (Grefsheim, Rankin, Perry and McKibbon, 2008, 115). Examinations of how librarians can be more reflective in their practice are becoming more prevalent in the literature (Booth, 2010; Forrest, 2008; Sen, 2010), with an easy approach being to think of reflection in terms of What? So What? Now What? (Alcock, 2014).

Summary

Introduction

Today more data and information are being produced and shared than ever before; data is streaming forth from new online social behaviours as well as high-specification digital tools and instruments. If we are to extract the maximum value from this data then we need to make use of the most appropriate tools and technologies. Ontologies, formal representations of knowledge with rich semantic relationships, are one such tool, and the focus of this book.

This chapter provides an introduction to ontologies, and considers their increasing importance to information professionals. Following a brief overview of the growing information overload and data deluge, the chapter considers the various definitions that have been applied to the term ‘ontology’ and how ontologies differ from associated and overlapping information concepts such as controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, metadata and knowledge bases. Finally, the chapter considers the potential of ontologies for information retrieval and discovering ‘undiscovered public knowledge’, and the role of the librarian in the development, maintenance and curation of ontologies.

The data deluge and information overload

It is important to start with an understanding of the changing information landscape, reminding ourselves of why we need new tools and technologies, and why it is no longer acceptable to continue with the way things have always been done. We are awash with a wide variety of information and data, but due to the tools that we are currently using the value of much of the data is going to waste. As John Naisbitt (1984, 17) put it, ‘We are drowning in information, but starved for knowledge’.

Information is coming from a wide variety of sources. There has been an explosion in the publishing and sharing of text across the whole of the communication spectrum, from the informal to the formal. Traditional formal publications, such as books and journals, have been joined by e-books and e-journals, with new publishing models based on combinations of self-publishing and open access: the number of self-published titles published in the USA rose from 85,468 titles in 2008 to 458,564 titles in 2013 (Bowker, 2014); whilst Chen (2014) estimated that the proportion of articles published in the previous year available as open access had either passed or was very close to 50%.

Summary

Introduction

Effective analysis, discovery and retrieval of digital cultural objects are reliant on the underlying data model adopted by an implementation. The manner in which the digital objects have been created will determine whether they can be interrogated for complex analysis. The type and scope of the metadata captured will determine the tools that can be provided for both browsing and searching, and the resulting discovery. The structure and content standards adopted for metadata creation and the formats used for digital object creation will determine whether they can be readily shared across technical implementations. Establishing the aims of the creation and delivery of a collection of digital cultural objects, and modelling the data and metadata requirements to fulfil the established aims, underpin the operational management of digital cultural objects in the custodial environment.

Defining requirements

Data modelling should not actually focus on the data to be delivered in the first instance. Rather it starts with two fundamental questions which will drive the creation of cultural digital objects and the technical specification for delivering them:

Summary

Introduction

Non-textual resources can prove to be elusive targets on the web. Searching for a specific film or video often requires both fortitude and perseverance because of the multi-layered complexity of these resources. According to Turner (2009), moving image materials are ill-served by the prevalent systems of organization designed for print materials. Neal (2012, 5) quoting from the arguments of O'Connor and Wyatt (2004) notes, ‘words are not pictures and vice versa’. Far too often, the experience of searching for moving images is strikingly similar to the plot of All Is Lost (Chandor et al., 2013), starring Robert Redford. Featuring a solitary and nearly silent protagonist facing a series of nightmarish and unfathomable disasters with heroic resilience, this film celebrates the triumph of the human spirit.

Providers of digital cultural objects face increasing pressure to provide seamless networked access to their collections and a growing sense of urgency to create interoperable, exchangeable metadata. Amidst this pressure, digital cultural asset managers are compelled to develop and co-ordinate standards that foster interoperability and remote access (Turner, 2009). The current landscape of web access to film and video is most often provided through surrogate representations (keywords, abstracts, etc.) in both free or subscription databases and catalogues, or directly via free or fee streaming film sites or film study portals, which often combine access with richly detailed metadata and associated content (Smeaton, 2004; Oberhelman, 2014).

Background

This chapter extends a previous study (La Barre and Cordeiro, 2012) that called for the creation of more robust access and discovery interfaces for films across a variety of digital platforms. It engages with both technical and strategic issues relating to film retrieval on the web by touching on issues such as distributed data structures, linked data and controlled and uncontrolled access points. A case study on the source of subject and authority metadata for films and the discovery and access structures for users across several different web environments – including YouTube, which enables ‘people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos’ (www.youtube/yt/about) and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), ‘a searchable database of more than 100 million data items including more than 2 million movies’ (www.imdb.com/about) – frames our discussion.

Summary

Introduction

The challenges of managing digital cultural objects have been considered by many academics in the fields of information sciences, archives, media and communications and computer sciences, to name but a few stakeholder disciplines (see for example Besser, 1997; Minzter, 1999; Gilliland-Swetland, 2000; Srinivasan et al., 2009; Beaudoin, 2012; Christodoulakis, 2014). Challenges are not only technical but often related to the semantic and communicative aspects of cultural objects. This introductory chapter seeks to contextualize the major themes relating to managing, searching, and finding digital cultural objects which are explored in this book by considering some of the broader issues relating to communication and practice. It explores the retrieval of digital cultural documentation with reference to communication and cultural theory, specifically social semiotics, and it will also explore semantic approaches to indexing and approaches which go beyond the conventional, such as emotional indexing and storytelling as indexing, before moving on to consider aspects of digital cultural collections, particularly crowdsourcing in conventional cultural memory insti - tutions and amateur collections. That cultural documentation brings with it certain semantic and interpretative challenges has long been recognized in the literature (see for example, Langridge's 1989 book on subject analysis, which examines questions relating to interpretation and meaning and remains a classic in the field, and Rafferty and Hidderley's 2005 Indexing Multimedia and Creative Works, which includes some theoretical discussion relating to the problems of interpretation of nontextual information). Kim Veltman (2006) outlines the challenges of developing an information retrieval and knowledge organization framework for representing and facilitating access to digital cultural documentation in the context of the semantic web. Veltman was writing at a time when the development of the putative semantic web was beginning to be discussed, and the scholarly literature surrounding the semantic web suggested that knowledge organization systems such as ontologies and taxonomies would be crucial to facilitating the development of the semantic web (see, for example, Weller, 2010 and Morville, 2005). Many of the issues that Veltman raised in that paper are still useful in forming a framework through which to examine digital cultural information retrieval systems.

Summary

Introduction

The British Library is one of the greatest research libraries in the world, serving business and industry, researchers and academics, in the UK and worldwide. Our collection items range from Chinese oracle bones over 3000 years old, the first edition of The Times in 1788 and the Magna Carta, to Beatles’ manuscripts, modern patents, maps and journal titles. Alongside these physical artefacts we hold an increasing amount of digital material. Digitization of our collection began as early as the 1990s, with the creation of digital surrogates of Library treasures such as the Beowulf manuscript, the Lindisfarne Gospels, Shakespeare Folios, and musical manuscripts from Handel, Bach and Mozart. More recently we have entered the world of mass digitization projects: for example, the Google Books project and the Brightsolid newspaper digitization programme. At the same time we have acquired an increasing amount of born-digital content and we now have a sizable collection of such content, ranging from digital audio/video recordings and digital maps to personal digital archives, e-journals and archived websites. In all, we estimate we already have over 300 terabytes of collection content – or over 12 million items – stored in our long-term digital library system, with more awaiting ingest. The rate of acquisition has significantly increased since the onset of nonprint legal deposit legislation in 2013, with around 4.8 million websites, 120,000 e-journal articles and 12,000 e-books collected in the first year alone. Current estimates predict that the total size of our collection will increase massively in future years to around 5 petabytes by 2020.

With acquisition comes responsibility. We must be able to adequately preserve our collection content for access by future users, regardless of acquisition form or format, and despite inevitable changes in not only storage media and hardware but also file formats, operating systems and software applications. We must ensure that bits do not rot and that the intellectual content of our digital collections remains available to users for the next 20, 50, 100, 200 years and beyond. For digital collections this requires investment in collection management and preservation practices across the entire lifecycle, from the point of acquisition onwards.

Summary

Introduction

Online music libraries available on the web contain a large amount of audio content that is usually the result of digitization of analogue recordings or the direct acquisition of digital sources. The acquisition process is carried out by several persons and may last a number of years, thus it is likely that the same or similar audio content is present in different versions. This chapter describes a number of possible similarities, which are called affinities, and presents a methodology to detect the kind of affinity from the automatic analysis and matching of the audio content. The automatic detection of duplicates and nearduplicates of textual documents has become an important research trend after the development of the web. In fact the same textual information may be contained, with minor modifications, in several web pages maintained by different organizations or individuals. One of the reasons why a large number of near-duplicate pages exists can be tracked back to a general tendency on the web to underestimate the importance of copyright. In fact, near duplicate identification also has important applications in patent analysis and in plagiarism detection.

With the increasing availability of multimedia content on the web and in cloud services, duplicate detection is also gaining relevance for media other than text, in particular to help manage large video collections and to improve image retrieval tasks. Most of these approaches are based on the concept of fingerprinting as a way to reduce the very large scale of the problem. The basic idea of fingerprinting is that multimedia objects can be represented by a compact array of features, with a size orders of magnitude smaller than the original object, allowing feature indexing and in general faster processing. Moreover, a robust fingerprinting algorithm is able to extract features that are mostly related to human perception, in order to identify duplicates of a given multimedia object even when some post-processing has been applied.

The approach can also be applied to the music domain, and in fact acoustic fingerprinting is a well-known technique commercially exploited for music identification, which is at the basis of Shazam!, one of the most popular music services on the Internet, and of many other systems, such as the MusicID software patented by Gracenote and the AudioID software used by MusicBrainz based on an application of computer vision.

Summary

Digital humanities researchers often collaborate with computer scientists, but most commonly with those computational researchers who work on the analysis of words and texts. Where collaborations have evolved around imaging, they tend to be on the capture of images, rather than analysis. Computer vision researchers spend their days extracting meaningful information from images and video, but there has been little work applying these techniques in the digital humanities field. In this chapter we describe preliminary work which collab oratively creates an approach to digital humanities that can deal with pictures as pictures, by analysing the visual properties of an image. This emerges through the development of a computational approach to modelling stylistic change, tested in a study of the work of Sir John ‘Kyffin’ Williams, a nationally renowned and prolific Welsh artist. Using images gathered from catalogues and online sources, we evaluate image-based descriptors that represent aspects of the paintings themselves: we investigate colour, edge orientation, and texture measures. We go on to estimate metadata from these descriptors using a leave-one-out methodology to classify paintings by year. We also investigate the incorporation of expert knowledge within this framework by considering a subset of paintings chosen as exemplars by a scholar familiar with Williams's work. This work shows a new avenue of research: analysing artefacts using their pictorial features and using this analysis to group and to classify the work directly. Such work is only possible, however, if the underlying data is openly accessible and suitable for analysis by emerging computational tools and methods.

Introduction

Digitally enabled research in the humanities creates new knowledge through the use of digital content, using tools and ICT-based methods for the analysis and interpretation of this data, and communicating the results of this work to the widest possible audience using traditional and non-traditional publishing methods, allowing greater engagement with research and research data than was previously possible. This has been called e-Wissenschaft, reflecting that the best examples of digital humanities are a new intellectual practice with elements that distinguish qualitatively the practices of intellectual life in this emergent digital environment from print-based practices.

Summary

Introduction

With effective and widely accessible image creation, storage and distribution technologies, digital images have become ubiquitous, woven into our daily lives in ways unimaginable a century ago. The web's current range of image hosting sites – from curated collections in museums and archives, to websites aggregating personal or group collections (Flickr), to an organization's collections or collections of specific interest, or where images are ‘simply’ an added form of communication, sharing events, ideas or everyday life (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr) – forms a worldwide anytime resource of unprecedented size for image participation and immersion. Images have become information resources used for a variety of endeavours, ranging from teaching and research to national security, or the object of leisure activities such as games (the ESP game) and shopping.

The digital age principles of interactivity (dynamic, user-controlled, nonlinear, complex information behaviour), connectivity (sense of community, construction of social worlds) and access (breaking longstanding information barriers) (Dresang, 2005, 183–90) interact to create what we now call the social web, where people find and create content, form communities where new and diverse perspectives can emerge, and interact with content and each other to create new content such as ‘tags’, comments and ratings. Lew (2001, vii) notes the extent of the transform - ation: ‘Digital visual information is here to stay. The major world nations are converting their cultural heritage into digital libraries…. Visual information permeates every facet of our life in the twenty-first century. Finding it is the next step.’ The production and use of social media sites themselves change the nature of the search process and its products. Social sharing sites complement traditional and digital libraries but also differ from them in important ways and introduce new issues, having multiple entry points, from user-supplied description to more traditional indexing. In social media searching there are few rules, often only requiring entering terms in an empty search box. What does remain constant across all these is a need for users to understand the nature of the descriptive ‘vocabularies’ used in these systems, where they come from, what motivates their creation, the collections they spring from, and the search goals they may fulfil.

Summary

Introduction

Though invented some decades earlier, sound recording emerged as a tool of research and commercial industry in the 1890s, and the first archives dedicated to preservation of sound materials emerged at the end of that decade. In the century and more that has followed, sound archiving as a discipline has on the whole not been embraced by archival academia, with little in the way of vocational training available to potential sound or audiovisual archivists anywhere. As a result, as Edmondson has observed, sound archivists have often come ‘from a variety of backgrounds, with or without formal qualifications in a collecting discipline, [and] were largely compelled to learn on the job in situations which required primary attention to the practicalities of archival operation, with little attention to the theoretical’ (Edmondson, 2004, 12).

In the absence of an accredited professional framework, those looking after sound collections have been required to be inventive and use their initiative, and smaller sound collections held within larger nonspecialized institutions have often been overlooked. Important and influential organizations such as the International Association of Sound & Audiovisual Archives (IASA) and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) have emerged, co-ordinating the development of much-needed international standards and codes of practice. A culture of self-sufficiency and initiative has in many ways served sound archivists well, not least in meeting the technological challenges of audio preservation through migration. As a result, audio archivists have been pioneers of digitization and digital preservation, with file-based mass storage solutions being planned by some broadcast archives as early as 1993.

The pressing case for digitization of audio content

As of 2016, the majority of holdings in audio collections are carrierbased, both analogue and digital, and the most pressing challenge is to move content into a sustainable file-based environment. Digital carrierbased content has been a feature of sound archives since the early 1980s. The public launch of the compact disc in 1982 ushered in the mass publication of digital audio, and by 1984, the British Library Sound Archive (then known as the National Sound Archive) and other institutions were creating and archiving their own digital content on domestic videotape, using the Sony PCM F1 format.

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8 - Practitioner-researchers and EBLIP

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7 - Adapt

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1 - What is an ontology?

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PART 1 - BACKGROUND AND MODEL

2 - Data modelling for analysis, discovery and retrieval

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9 - Film retrieval on the web: sharing, naming, access and discovery

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1 - Managing, searching and finding digital cultural objects: putting it in context

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5 - Managing and preserving digital collections at the British Library

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8 - Searching and classifying affinities in a web music collection

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Frontmatter

PART 1 - ANALYSIS AND RETRIEVAL OF DIGITAL CULTURAL OBJECTS

4 - Visual digital humanities: using image data to derive approximate metadata

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Contents

Contributors

Index

7 - Photos: Flickr, Facebook and other social networking sites

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List of figures and tables

PART 3 - SOCIAL NETWORKING AND DIGITAL CULTURAL OBJECTS

PART 2 - DIGITIZATION PROJECTS IN LIBRARIES, ARCHIVES AND MUSEUMS: CASE STUDIES

6 - Digital preservation of audio content

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