Digital collections assessment - Have others already been here and have insight or thoughts?

[hav...@umich.edu]

Over the past few months, we at the University of Michigan have been starting an assessment of our digital collections (content we create and maintain, not subscriptions or bought from other sources). By assessment, I refer to what we can gather about the collections in terms of what we know. We're looking to migrate to a new digital content platform in a few years, and we need to know the current status of our 290+ collections (how big, what platform they're on/tech being used, kind of files, rights memo status, usage, stakeholders, quality, "prestige", etc.). Some of the collections were created decades ago, so gathering any information about any documentation is wonderful sometimes. So, ahead of the migration, we know that we need to get the collections in order from a technical standpoint as well as documentation and other aspects. 

I was wondering if others have done similar work. Looking online, I located examples of folks doing pieces of what we’re doing, like trying to measure usage of digital content and recommending best practices. While very useful for parts of what we’re doing now and planning for in the future, these articles haven’t covered the range of what we’re doing, so I’m hoping that folks on this list may be able to help me locate additional examples, either published or from your own experience communicated via email or phone.

I have found articles about measuring usage stats and other analytics.  The article “Altmetrics and analytics for digital special collections and institutional repositories" by Stacy Konkiel, Michelle Dalmau, and David Scherer, for example, has helped in thinking about long-term goals for how we’d like to gather and then present usage data from our collections. Right now we don’t have great ways to generate this data, but with the new platform that we’re hoping to build, hopefully we can gather the data in a better way and present it in ways such as these authors present. So, articles like this, while they only focus on pieces of what we're involved in right now, are helpful for considering the future and how we'd like it to be.

Have others done any work trying to assess “prestige” or “importance” of a collection beyond looking at the usage? This is a quality I’d like to try to assign some information to for each collection, but it’s obviously a very complicated item.

So far this isn't the kind of assessment that could have a script run to check for existence of titles or that sort of thing. However, I’m hoping that as part of our going through this now, we can identify ways to create scripts or otherwise have reports run later without the process being so manual and needing to be completely redone every year or so. Surely others have done something similar, so I’m looking for any information you all may be willing to share. 

Any assistance or thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Thank you for considering this.

Lauren Havens

Project Manager for Digital Collections

300B Hatcher North

University of Michigan Library