The GDDNetwork welcomed around 30 people from the fields of information management and digital humanities to this workshop in Glasgow in December 2019.
Key aims for the day were to:
- share the findings from the GDDNetwork research collaboration
- discuss potential uses for the datasets resulting from the project
- explore creative opportunities for working with the datasets.
Programme
Keynote and project overview
Professor Lorna Hughes, Professor in Digital Humanities, University of Glasgow, gave the opening keynote.
Paul Gooding, GDDNetwork Principal Investigator and Lecturer in Information Studies, University of Glasgow, gave an overview of the project.
Data Analysis and Aggregation
Natalie Fulkerson, Collection Services Librarian HathiTrust Digital Library, explained the methodology that was developed to guide the creation of one dataset from four different data sources: the HathiTrust, the British Library, The National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales.
You can read more about this process in Natalie’s blog post: Matching bibliographic records: exploration, issues and solutions.
Prototype Demo
Stuart Lewis, Associate Director of Digital, National Library of Scotland outlined the creaion of a prototype to meet two requirements:
- a search index, to ingest, index and make the data searchable, with the ability to produce data facets
- a web user interface to allow interaction with the search index.
You can read more about this process in Stuart’s blog post: From aggregation to prototype
Group discussions: Refining the proposition and taking the work forward
In the group discussions, the attendees were asked to consider a set of questions for two different areas.
Refining the value proposition for the two communities: researchers/scholars and librarians/information professionals.
Assuming the existence of a more complete/comprehensive dataset…
- How would the dataset be used?
- What problems might be solved or at least addressed?
- What new problems does this project raise, if any?
Taking the work forward
How might we conceive of the next actions to get to the more comprehensive dataset?
- What tools/services on top of the dataset would be useful for that same community of users?
- What further investigative work needs to be done?
- What role could you and/or your organisation play? (Not asking for a commitment).
The information gathered during the discussions will be incorporated into the final GDDNetwork report, due out in early spring 2020. Many thanks to everyone who came along and generously shared their experience and ideas.
Reactions and interactions
This is a selection of tweets from the day; you can see more at #GDDNet.