2013 Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School Workshop
1. Impact as a process:
considering the reach of
resources from the start
Eric T. Meyer & Kathryn Eccles
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Digital Humanities@Oxford Summer School
8th July 2013
@etmeyer
@KathrynEccles
#tidsr
#dhoxss
Slides at:
2. What is impact and why
consider it?
What do we mean by impact?
• Reaching intended audience
• Reaching new audiences
• Attracting users
• Attracting new usage
• Enabling new research questions
• Enabling new approaches to education
3. What’s the point?
Gather data for investors and stakeholders
Use your impact in future funding applications
Know that you’re reaching your audience
Be iterative and adapt
Develop and extend your resource
Ensure you’re a relevant part of the community
4. Where to begin?
Identify your audience and key stakeholders
Set your goals. What types of impact do you envisage your
resource having?
What steps are you taking to ensure these types of impact?
Identify connections
What resources do you see as successful in terms of audience
and impact?
Do you see your resource as part of a network of connected
resources?
5. Measuring usage and impact
What could you measure?
Users
Types of use
Awareness
Citation practices
Marketing strategies
Embedding
9. TIDSR: The first usage and
impact study
JISC funded project
July 2008-April 2009
Looked at five specific JISC-funded resources
Designed to test the TIDSR methods and review them for
the TIDSR toolkit
12. 88%
63%
39%
63%
69%
7%
27%
35%
28% 22%
3%
7%
18%
7% 7%
2% 2%
7%
1% 2%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
HistPop BOPCRIS BL News BL Sounds Med Backfiles
Use it regularly or
frequently
Use it on occasion
Have seen it, but don't
use it
I haven't heard of it
16. Perception: Specific niche community
Well known by target audience
Transforming access and usage patterns
User surveys:
Embedded in educational resources
Enhanced access to primary sources
▪ ‘Histpop made it possible to do a completely different project’
Continuing education, online resources, non-
traditional learners
17.
18.
19. 9%
36%
53%
38%
43%
55%
36%
38%
50%
48%
36%
21%
6%
13%
10%
0%
7%
2%
0%
0%
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
HistPop
BOPCRIS
BL News
BL
Sounds
Med
Backfiles
Original version Original + URL Online version Other
46%
29%
35%
20%
43%
0%20%40%60%
Have you ever published a piece
based on your work in this
collection?
If so, how did you cite the collection?
20.
21.
22. Time intensive, but productive if you are
careful about what you ask!
Different stakeholders:
Project team: Positive view of the work only
Broader stakeholders: While the digital project
was good, it also introduced tensions in the
broader setting of the library
New kinds of serendipity, wide range of users
28. Historians? (would be looking at older articles)
Not typical PubMed users
Search interface issues / limited search
Clinicians? (would be looking at newer articles)
Not typically reading 100 year old articles
Other users?
Paths of discovery?
29. Majority of downloads targeted more recent
material – opening up of new resources to
clinicians
More thorough and comprehensive searches
Historians reported more comprehensive search
results (quantitative results)
Also reported increased browsing, greater
serendipity, due to time saved finding articles
40. Quick impact
If you don’t have a lot of time or resources:
Twitter
Use it for quick polls
Put out news and look at your impact
Bitly links will give you click through data
User data
Keep in touch with your users
Use them to ensure you’re meeting their needs
43. Browsing and Searching
Libraries
Journals
Peers
79%
66%
Google
Google Scholar
59%
55%
62%
83%
48%
76%
95%
Visit the library
Browse library materials online
Search library materials online
Citation chaining
Browse printed journals
Browse online journals
Consult peers and experts
44. It’s a huge change. You can do things much
more quickly, read much more
widely, find connections…it’s very, very
important.“
45. What might take you several months if not years
of research, you could do in hours, days, a week.
So I think that means that it makes the nature
of your research different because it allows
you quantitative information much more
quickly, which then allows you to maybe
think about how you might use that
information differently, because you’ve got
so much more time.
“
47. Possible discussion topics
• Discoverability
• of what?
• by whom?
• by what means? (manual, automatic, guided, etc.)
• Citation habits and the link to impact
• Community engagement
• Engaging atypical communities
• Enabling unexpected uses
• Having the resources to measure your resources
• Impact ‘agenda’ versus increasing one’s impact
Editor's Notes
The information we gathered enabled us to look at which search terms were used to find the resource (most popular (649 searches) was ‘Histpop’ showing that this project chose a good, catchy name – next most popular ‘www.histpop.org’ at 68 searches, ‘Online Historical Population Reports’ just behind at 67 searches). The top referrer sites allowed us to see important information about where visitors were coming from, and by following the URLs of the top referrer sites, the context of the link. Access statistics allowed us to see when the site was most popular, and where visitors were coming from. All of this information allows you to learn more about your users and the usage of your site.