Situated at the intersection of people, technology, and information, the College of Information's faculty, staff and students invest in innovative research, collaborative partnerships, and student-centered education to serve a global information society. The college offers programs of study in information science, learning technologies, and linguistics.
This paper discusses building contextual mass in digital aggregations for scholarly use.
Physical Description
10 p.
Notes
Abstract: At present there are no established collection development methods for building large-scale digital aggregations. However, to realize the potential of the collective base of digital content and advance scholarship, aggregations must do more than provide search of sizable bodies of content. Informed by empirical understanding of scholarly information practices, the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project developed an aggregation strategy for building Opening History, one of the largest digital cultural heritage aggregations in the country. The strategy applied policy-driven collecting based on the principle of contextual mass, and conspectus-style evaluation of collection-level metadata to identify strong subject areas within the aggregation. Analysis of density, interconnectedness, diversity, and small/large collection complementary determined subject concentrations and thematic strengths to be prioritized for future collection development and used as organizational structures for browsing and visualization. The approach models how scholars build their own personal research collections, as they follow leads from collection to collection across institutions near and far, and adds value that cannot be achieved through conventional retrieval and browsing at the item-level.
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Palmer, Carole L.; Zavalina, Oksana & Fenlon, Katrina.Beyond Size and Search: Building Contextual Mass in Digital Aggregations for Scholarly Use,
paper,
October 2010;
[Silver Spring, Maryland].
(https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc71795/:
accessed April 19, 2024),
University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu;
crediting UNT College of Information.
