Assessment

DLF Assessment Interest Group

The DLF Assessment Interest Group (AIG), founded in 2014, seeks to engage the community in developing best practices and guidelines for various kinds of digital library assessment. This wiki will be a central location for documentation and collection of resources to assist those seeking to assess their digital libraries.

Working Groups

Using the Digital Library Assessment Framework, we formed four working groups in the fall of 2014 in areas of strong interest to the DLF AIG community:

• Assessment:Analytics
• Assessment:Citations
• Assessment:Costs
• Assessment:User Studies

Each of these four groups worked to develop white papers and tools, which were presented at the 2015 DLF Forum.

In 2016, the following working groups formed/are meeting now:

• Assessment:Metadata
• Assessment:Cultural Assessment

Assessment:Analytics, Assessment:Costs, and Assessment:User Studies are continuing to evolve their work, and the latter has split into two sub-working groups. Results will be shared at the 2016 DLF Forum.

In addition to visiting each working group's wiki page above, you can also learn more about the AIG's most recent work by reading "Developing Best Practices in Digital Library Assessment: Year One Update" in D-Lib Magazine's November/December 2015 issue (Volume 21, Number 11/12).

Background

Research and cultural heritage institutions are, as a matter of course, providing online access to converted and born-digital scholarly and cultural content. As the amount of that content continues to grow, there is an increased need to strategically standardize our assessment efforts.

The DLF AIG is concerned with:

• determining how to measure the impact of digital collections;
• developing areas of commonality and benchmarks in how we measure collections across various platforms;
• understanding cost and benefit of digital collections; and
• exploring how can we best collect, analyze, communicate, and share such information effectively across our various stakeholders—from collection managers to scholars.

The DLF AIG was born in the spring following the 2013 DLF Forum after a working session called “Hunting for Best Practices in Library Assessment” garnered over 50 volunteers to continue the discussion after the conference, and a second working session on altmetrics was also met with huge interest. A Digital Library Assessment Google Group was established to provide a space for practitioners to discuss assessment efforts. At the following 2014 DLF Forum, an assessment panel discussed a new NISO initiative to develop standards for altmetrics, a new web-based cost estimation tool for digitization, and both qualitative and quantitative results from digital library user studies. The panel, like the working group the year before, was followed by a lively discussion about how to further the development of best practices for digital library assessment. Again, many community members volunteered to continue the discussion, and four working groups formed in November 2014. These groups were tasked with developing to best practices centered in the assessment of digital libraries, in the areas of user studies, analytics, cost, and citations.

A previous DLF AIG Working Group also focused on measuring benefits in digital libraries.

Get Involved

To take part in the conversation, join the Digital Library Assessment Google Group, which is open to anyone interested in learning about or collaborating on the improvement of digital library assessment.