Journal of the American Society for Information Science
The English literature researcher in the age of the Internet
Journal of Information Science
Using collection descriptions to enhance an aggregation of harvested item-level metadata
Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
Scholarly work and the shaping of digital access: Research Articles
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Trends in metadata practices: a longitudinal study of collection federation
Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
Information seeking by humanities scholars
ECDL'05 Proceedings of the 9th European conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries
Local histories in global digital libraries: identifying demand and evaluating coverage
Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
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At present there are no established collection development methods for building large-scale digital aggregations. However, to realize the potential of the collective base of digital content and advance scholarship, aggregations must do more than provide search of sizable bodies of content. Informed by empirical understanding of scholarly information practices, the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project developed an aggregation strategy for building Opening History, one of the largest digital cultural heritage aggregations in the country. The strategy applied policy-driven collecting, based on the principle of contextual mass, and conspectus-style evaluation of collection-level metadata to identify strong subject areas within the aggregation. Analysis of density, interconnectedness, diversity, and small/large collection complementarity determined subject concentrations and thematic strengths to be prioritized for future collection development and used as organizational structures for browsing and visualization. The approach models how scholars build their own personal research collections, as they follow leads from collection to collection across institutions near and far, and adds value that cannot be achieved through conventional retrieval and browsing at the item-level.