2003-2004 Progress Report: Curated Collections

See the complete progress report submitted to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation: [PDF]

The American West project assessed three closely related hypotheses:

• Users in an educational setting need coherently organized collections of information that are built specifically to support particular modes of inquiry and their user communities.
• Different users require a multiplicity of curated collections.
• The development of collection-building tools will enable libraries and other information organizations to cost effectively build such collections to meet user’s needs.

These hypotheses were tested in a series of 18 interviews conducted with 45 potential users drawn from educational institutions across California and Colorado. See the assessment report: [PDF]

See sections below:

• Curated Collections Are Enormously Valuable
• Well-Defined Collection Boundaries Matter
• Annotation is Important

Curated Collections Are Enormously Valuable

Respondents from each of the user communities preferred coherently organized or curated online collections, though for very different reasons.

• K-12 teachers, media specialists, and community college teachers are under enormous time constraints. They were most interested in quickly locating a few useful, high-quality teaching materials, especially pre-screened content appropriate for a particular subject and grade level.
• Academic and public librarians were enthusiastic about curated collections because they promised to extend the holdings libraries offered to patrons. Academic and public librarians also perceived well-curated online collections as an opportunity to showcase the digital materials they produced from their own analog holdings.
• Undergraduate students were interested in curated collections they perceived to be reliable, selective, and authoritative.
• Graduate students were interested in curated digital library collections because they promised to open out onto readily accessible and authoritative primary sources.
• Faculty were far more conservative in their information-seeking behavior. Many had already found and were satisfied with their most trusted online information sources.

Well-Defined Collection Boundaries Matter

While these user communities agreed about the value of well-curated online collections, they differed considerably with regard to the kinds of curated collections they needed.

• K-12 teachers, media specialists, and community college teachers were particularly interested in collections that were closely tailored to their immediate curricular needs. They valued collections that were organized in a way that enabled them to quickly and easily find appropriate materials for use at certain educational levels.
• Academic and public librarians were looking for collections that would be useful to patrons and that were narrowly defined with regard to scope, aims, and audiences.
• Undergraduate students combined the librarians’ interest in authority, reliability, and integrity with a keen interest in subject relevance.
• Graduate students were less concerned about a tightly defined collection. They wanted to quickly get to materials that would otherwise only be accessible inside disparate archives and special collections.

Annotation is Important

The assessment also demonstrated that these communities share an interest in tools that enable very different forms of annotation.

• K-12 teachers, media specialists, and community college teachers placed a premium on narrative essays that help students explore, interact with, and learn from the materials on display. They were also interested in lesson plans and teaching materials that could be slotted directly into a particular class. Of particular significance were tools that enabled users to select, annotate, and organize materials within a collection, and save selected materials for future use.
• Academic and public librarians were interested in federating some virtual curated collections with local holdings. In such cases, the libraries would be likely to use whatever federation tools they had locally. Therefore, virtual collections will need to expose information about their contents in a manner that conforms to metadata standards.
• Graduate students and faculty required specific suites of tools to capture and manage citations and to create and manage their own research notes on the materials they review.