From Digital Library to Open Datasets: Embracing a "Collections as Data" Framework

From Digital Library to Open Datasets: Embracing a "Collections as Data" Framework

Web Archiving

This article, written by four librarians from the University of Utah, introduces us to the idea of “collections as data” as a way to further improve and expand upon digital archiving methods used all over the world today. While librarians and archivists all over the world have digitized their collections and made them accessible online, collections as data is a movement specifically grounded in the digital libraries and digital humanities research area that aims to go beyond allowing access to archival items and include giving researchers access to the underlying data of these items. Myntti, Wittmann, Neatrour, and Cummings state that data such as text mining, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, data visualization and much more should be made easily available with their respective archive collections in order to go “beyond traditional use” of digitized collections. Allowing researchers to have access to the underlying data of collections is important, they state, because typically in digital humanities research, the data collected isn’t as digitally nuanced nor does it provide as much computational-related data as research in other departments like the sciences or social sciences. This is a sharp, intelligent article written by expert researchers explaining somewhat complicated concepts. Although the article is at times difficult, it’s content is important to the overall trajectory of Digital Humanities data and metadata.

Wittmann, Rachel; Neatrour, Anna; Cummings, Rebekah, Myntti, Jeremy

Information Technology & Libraries

2019

Lafontaine, Marisa

Article

ISSN: 07309295

Wittmann, Rachel, Anna Neatrour, Rebekah Cummings, and Jeremy Myntti. “From Digital Library to Open Datasets: Embracing a ‘Collections as Data’ Framework.” Information Technology & Libraries 38, no. 4 (December 2019): 49–61. doi:10.6017/ITAL.V38I4.11101.