Carolyn Caizzi, Technology Specialist for Yale’s Visual Resources Collection, Mike Friscia, Web Developer for the Yale University Library, and Aaron Hyman, graduate student in History of Art presented the new Library Digital Collections tool and how to incorporate it in teaching and learning scenarios.

Carolyn Caizzi chronicled the history of the Digital Collections tool. She indicated that it had undergone two major transformations in the past 2 years. From about 1998 until 2008 there was a unified interface to Yale’s digital collections, but it was only a front door to the separate interfaces of the collections themselves. Searching was really only practical for advanced users, who knew what they wanted, precisely and in some detail. There was no browsing capability. In 2008 there was a reformulation and redesign, creating Metagallery [for a CLC blog entry on Metagallery, click here]. Metagallery was the product of a collaboration by the Library and the Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation [CMI2]. The biggest feature addition was the ability for a user to create groups of images and share them with other users. Metagallery, however, only searched the Visual Resources Collection.

The latest tool, the Library Digital Collections tool searches 15 collections with over 600K items (not all of Yale’s current collections, but about half — there are plans to include more collections subsequently). This newest iteration provides for many different ways to search and browse, allowing searches by a broad range of users. The most significant advancement is the ease of creating, annotating, and sharing groups of images with others. The tool also allows a variety of browsing modalities that enable users to maximize relevant finds that they would be unlikely to uncover with standard searches. Site statistics reveal that the tool is being used for at least 20K searches per month. The biggest challenge for users is the lack of standardization of metadata across collections; searching may return skewed results depending on the field(s) used and the values entered. Mike Friscia, the tool developer, is working with the various collections to standardize metadata conventions used to pull in search items.

The major features of the site are convenient browsing (top down, bottom up, lateral); the visual presence of related items fields; tagging (which will become more useful as more students and faculty tag items); the ability to save an entire page of results or a subset of them; searching within a result set; the slideshow presentation mode for a saved group, useful for displaying a small group of images in class; the ease of downloading images singly or from a group, all with a metadata text file; sharing groups publicly or to a specified set of netids; allowing students or colleagues to edit groups (useful for class/section assignments and collaborative work); storing recently viewed items and searches for subsequent logins; and uploading non-Yale collection images to a user’s group.

Aaron Hyman of History of Art has been using the Library Digital Collections tool in his course for the past month. Though an admitted technophobe himself, the tool’s ease of use has made incorporating it into his course a no-brainer. He and his students have found that the tool enhances both in-class discussion and the execution of a wide range of assignments. It helps in History of Art courses to start with a selection of images relevant for a particular section meeting and build the session around the selection. The Digital Collections tool allows users to do exactly this. Aaron would regularly create and save off a group relevant for a particular section and share the link to the group with his students. Students can then be assigned a group of images to evaluate/investigate ahead of class, just like assigned reading. To enhance class discussion with concrete examples, the image group could then be presented during the class/section. Images found in Library Digital Collections searches and grouped together by the section leader are often better examples of the artwork under discussion than poor reproductions of textbook images. Aaron has found that for teaching, the group feature is very useful for preparing for section. The individual image view with metadata can be used like flash cards to help students prepare for an exam. Aaron proposed that graduate students in History of Art, or any other visual media-heavy discipline, could use the Digital Collections tool to prepare for their PhD orals as the group tool allows one to created collections of images relevant to certain overarching topics.

Mike Friscia then ended the session by sharing what’s in store for the Digital Collections tool in the future. Development projects currently include location-based browsing, a mobile version (expected summer 2011), collection-specific browsing methods (e.g. searching a periodical collection by year), and improved language awareness (e.g. in search results sorting and search suggestions).