Abstract
INTRODUCTION An attractive repository with clear, well-structured and accessible content can be a powerful recruitment and publicity tool for administrators, fundraisers, and others trying to bolster support for repositories. Digitizing ETDs is a lengthy and often arduous process. Once that process is completed, it is often a victory that suffices. As a result, collections frequently receive no further treatment. We demonstrate the benefits of visualizing repository content. DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT The goal of the project was to create an interactive visualization to make our newly digitized theses and dissertations more discoverable. By leveraging the institutional organization of College, Department and Year of Graduation, we visualized data to help users understand ETD content as a whole and find specific items more easily. BUILDING THE VISUALIZATION The process begins with data cleanup involving extracting and normalizing repository metadata, then the data is processed and the Data-Driven Documents (D3) JavaScript library is used to generate the actual visualization. Benefits of Visualizations to Users: The visualization allows for the sort of happenstance discovery of materials that are celebrated about shelf browsing and a way to compare the productivity of each college and department at our university. It also illustrates our institution’s changes in emphasis over time. NEXT STEPS Visualizations have vast potential for creating engaging user interfaces for digital library content. We would like to explore how people are using the visualization as we move forward with this process to visualize multiple collections.
Highlights
An attractive repository with clear, well-structured, and accessible content can be a powerful recruitment and publicity tool for administrators, graduate admissions officers, and others trying to bolster support for repositories
By employing an interactive visualization of these resources, we provide users an alternative to navigating menus and browsing text
The increased visibility of electronic thesis and dissertations (ETDs) is important locally as they make up the majority of the authors’ institutional repository, to the public as they hold great amounts of new knowledge, and to their research fields as they are given less formal publicity than other research products such as journal articles or monographs. This visualization provides an alternate, engaging pathway to our theses and dissertations, papers that provide a timely and broad view into the research produced on campus
Summary
As unique library collections items are digitized, libraries should take advantage of the opportunities of having well described, linked, digital items, and provide some means of accessing these collections. The increased visibility of ETDs is important locally as they make up the majority of the authors’ institutional repository, to the public as they hold great amounts of new knowledge, and to their research fields as they are given less formal publicity than other research products such as journal articles or monographs. This visualization provides an alternate, engaging pathway to our theses and dissertations, papers that provide a timely and broad view into the research produced on campus. We aim to engage scholars, administrators, and the public by facilitating discovery of these digital items
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