October 21, 2008

Ideas from Passion, Participation and Digital Projects Session

After presenting about Our Legacy - a project with materials relating to First Nations, Métis and Inuit people held in the seven institutions in Saskatchewan, I received some great feedback and ideas and questions. The slides are a below and summary of the presentation blogged by Marydee Ojala on the ITI blog.

Passion, Participation and Digital Projects
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: passion learning)


Questions and Feedback

Some of the questions related to cultural sensitivity and ceremonial information. Anything that our advisers recommended that not be provided publicly, we did not post. I was asked whether the complaint from one individual enough to take something down. This is a great question. Any request to remove something would be looked at seriously and we would ask for input and advice from appropriate community / cultural advisers.

Betsy from Tufts was keenly interested in marketing and findability. How could someone find this collection? Tufts has a unique collection of 6,000 books related to horses and they would like to get the word out. We compared and contrasted and brainstormed together ways and means of sharing information. There are different opportunities for published and unpublished works.

Some new ideas for Our Legacy to put into action are:
  • Suggest the site for inclusion Librarian's Internet Index and Anthrosource
  • An important reminder about finishing the OAI repository to enable harvesting and searching items via Google Scholar and OAIster
  • Discussed the possibility of adding the Our Legacy interpretive essays to Wikipedia and/or creating new articles that reference primary sources in the collection, an approach used by some other libraries to raise awareness of resources

This conversation definitely sparked some new ideas for marketing and promotion. While the site was designed to be search engine friendly .. persistent URLs, meaningful titles and also to be social media search engine friendly - social bookmark link widgets, there's definitely more work to do on the SEO (search engine optimization) side of things.

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Comments:
Darlene, the questions brought up about promoting a specialized database are ones that many libraries face. I had a cover story about such a project in the May/June 07 issue of Marketing Library Services. In it, the North Suburban Lib Sys (IL) had digitized a major local history collection, and they did lots of publicity to attract people who'd want to use this info if they knew it was available.

Here are some of the things they did to spread the word that this info existed in a searchable database:

* supplying free copies of explanatory brochures for related orgs to pass at at their events, fairs, historial re-enactments, etc.

* newsletter articles, blogs, podcasts, the local cable TV show, and speeches mention the database.

* semianual demonstration meetings that are open to any interested / related orgs & societies

* having credits included in TV shows, newspapers, and magazines that use images from the collection

* metadata harvesting (which you mentioned in your post)

* encouraging school teachers to use the database for local history studies

* adding to and updating the database to keep visitors coming back

Maybe some of these practices can spark ideas for other libraries that want to make sure their worthwhile databases and special collections get used to their fullest.
# posted by Blogger ~Kathy Dempsey : 8:23 PM
 
Kathy

Great ideas. A couple that struck me as critical and often overlooked: the commitment to say we will demo this semi-annually. And the second point about adding new content. That's also important. We are already adding new content and have another grant in the pipe so that helps with the "continuing story" and building a "long wow" instead of one go-live.

We could also learn from Google. They just talked about the 8 candles for the their toolbar and talked about it's evolution. Neat idea for digital sites and another story to tell.

Many of the ideas you shared, we have done but we could do more.

Here's some we've done:

1. We were fortunate to have some money for items of a semi-permanent nature (ball caps, bags, notebooks, etc. with the logo and URL) so people would take it away and have a reminder.

We did a one page summary but we don't have a nice 3 fold brochure. Simple, great idea and effective idea - gotta do that one.

2. We've done webcasts and face to face and tables at community events and newsletter and journal articles and will be doing inserts to scholarly magazines. We have some blog and some flickr coverage (but not enough yet). We've promoted on scholarly, librarian and archivists listservs and definitely reached key markets.

We could do more to reach the community organizations like North Suburban Lib Sys (IL) is doing.

Other Things We're Doing:

We're also publishing a book next month based on the interpretive essays (print and e-book versions).

If you're reading this and have a digital project, what ways have you promoted it?

Maybe we can get to 50 Ways to Promote Your Digital Project :-).
# posted by Blogger Fichter : 12:46 AM
 
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