From Records to Data: It’s Not Just About Collections Any More

Leslie Johnston, Library of CongressBest Practices Exchange 2011

What are the Biggest Insights that we have

Learned in Fifteen Years of Building Digital Collections?

Researchers do not use digital collections the same way that they use analog collections

We Can Never Guess Every Way that Our Collections Will

Be Used

Stewardship organizations have, until recently, spoken of “collections” or “content” or “records” or even “files,” but not data.

We Have Data in our Libraries, Archives and Museums?

Yes.

Data is not just generated by satellites, identified during experiments, or collected

during surveys.

Datasets are not just scientific and business tables and spreadsheets: our collections are now considered data.

They are the building blocks for interpretation and discovery that transform and combine them into entities that we may not recognize.

More and more researchers want to use collections as a whole, mining and organizing the information in novel ways.

Researchers use algorithms to mine the rich information and tools to create pictures that translate that information into knowledge.

Researchers may want to interact with a collection of artifacts, or they may want to work with a data corpus.

Consider the Digging Into Data Challenge

The repositories available for research include not only scientific information—astronomy, geology, physics, biology, social science surveys—but images, film, sound, newspapers, maps, art, archaeology, architecture and government records.

http://www.diggingintodata.org/

What Constitutes “Big Data?”The definition of Big Data is very fluid, as it is a moving target — what cannot be easily manipulated with common tools — and specific to the organization: what can be managed and stewarded by any one institution in its infrastructure. One researcher or organization’s concept of a large data set is small to another.

Not too long ago, an organization would be surprised to need 10 TB of storage for a large digital collection. Now a collection can increase by 10 TB in a single week.

We still have collections. But what we also have is Big Data, which requires us to rethink the infrastructure that is needed to support Big Data services. Our community used to expect researchers to come to us, ask us questions about our collections, and use our digital collections in our environment.

Now our collections are, more often than not, self-serve.

Case Study: Web Archives• Web Archives, such as the one at the

Library of Congress, may be comprised of billions of files.

• When we began archiving election web sites, we imagined users browsing through the web pages, studying the graphics or use of phrases or links. But when our first researchers came to the Library, they wanted to know about all those topics, but they used scripts to query for them and sort them into categories. They were not very much interested in reading web pages.

http://www.loc.gov/webarchiving/

Case Study: Historic Newspapers• The Chronicling America collection

has over 4 million page images from historic newspapers with OCR from organizations in 25 states.

• The site gets approximately 4 million views per day.

• Some researchers want to search for stories in historic newspapers.

• Some researchers want to mine newspaper OCR for trends across time periods and geographic areas.

• Requests have come in to analyze all 4 million page images.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/

Case Study: Twitter• The Twitter archive has 10s of billions

of tweets in it.• Research requests have included users

looking for their own Twitter history, the study of the geographic spread of news, the study of the spread of epidemics, and the study of the transmission of new uses of language.

status

privacycommercial

personal

events

social media

visualization

social science

Can each of our organizations support real- time querying of billions of full-text items? Can we provide tools for collection analysis and visualization? Can we support the frequent downloading by researchers of collections that may be over 200 TB each?

These are among the questions that all of our institutions are grappling with as we build large digital collections and discover new ways in which they can be used.

So what are our institutions doing about preservation and access to our Big Collections and Big Data?

Collaboration

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance is an initiative of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress, with almost 100 member organizations that share a sense of dedication to digital preservation, and want to work collaboratively across the community.

The NDSA operates through five working groups: Content; Standards and Practices; Infrastructure; Innovation; and Outreach.

www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa

Tool Development

All stewardship organizations can and should participate in the development and use of open access tools for use across the community.

NDIIPP is revising its Tools and Services Directory to include a broader range of projects, some of which are always looking for other organizations to contribute to!

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/resources/tools

As an Example…

Seeing and Sharing Digital Cultural Heritage Collections Differently with ViewShare/Recollection

bigish ideas

› heterogeneous data › one big distributed collection› open distributed infrastructure› mindset: records -> data

Beyond thinking like records

to thinking like data

the ViewShare ideadigital cultural heritage collections include temporal, locative, and categorical data that, could be tapped to better dynamically interact with and understand those collections.

the challenges› we all have different kinds of metadata

› that data is in different kinds of systems

› much of that data is messy

› much of that data is not in the format we might wish it was

what ViewSharedoes

take this

or this

and make…

ingest collection descriptions from spreadsheets, MODS records, or ATOM and RSS

Augment: derive ISO dates, latitude and longitude coordinates, and break apart data

design views: graphical interface for assembling views

publish views on the site or embed views with one line of javascript into any HTML document.

visually review data

share data and viewsshare not only the end results, but also the raw data for other others to create their own views.

data use and re-use

recent work› support for public/private views and data› beta support for OAI and ContentDM data loading› full open source release on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/loc-recollect/

what’s next?› viewshare.org public launch on November 1, 2011› big data sets: in a while› remix across data sets: long view

contact us› Let us know if you are interested in participation in the NDSA through the web site› Let us know if there is a tool or service that is missing from our directory› visit http://recollection.zepheira.com/ to get a sneak peek at ViewShare› email NDIIPPaccess@loc.gov if you are interested in a ViewShare account

Questions?

Leslie Johnstonlesliej@loc.gov