), Ellen M. Knutson (eknutson@uiuc.edu), Michael Twidale (twidale@uiuc.edu), Oksana Zavalina (zavalina@uiuc.edu)As part of a federation project providing integrated access to over 170 digital collections, we are studying how collections can best be represented to meet the needs of service providers and diverse user communities. This paper reports on recent results from that project on how digital resource developers conceive of and define their collections. Based on content analysis of collection registry records, survey and interview data, and focus groups, we identify collection definition trends including a broadening of target audiences, elaboration of subject representation, and a lack of clearly defined selection criteria. Our findings reveal high variability and ambiguity in the collection construct. We discuss how the concept of collection is being continuously defined through the processes of digital resource development and federation and how rapidly changing conceptualizations are likely to impact adoption, tailoring, and development of digital collections and their use.

A growing number of large-scale digital libraries, portals that aggregate millions of digitized or born-digital items of historical, cultural, or educational value that are organized into digital collections, have been developed in recent decades. While many of these large-scale digital libraries have been created for the general public, some serve more specific audiences of scholars and educators in different disciplines or domains, for example, history, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), etc.To improve user interaction with large-scale digital libraries and to make sure they successfully meet their users' information needs, the design and development of large-scale digital libraries' discovery and access systems should be informed by general user tasks such as finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining information as well as by the needs and information-searching patterns of their specific intended user communities.1 Various groups of users (e.g., researchers, educators, and enthusiasts) may use digital libraries differently because of their varying information needs; moreover, users' information-searching strategies may differ in the large-scale digital libraries that function in distinct domains, or subject areas. These differences may require specific policies regarding the organization and description of information objects in large-scale digital libraries.The extensive digitization and organization of large-scale digital libraries require in-depth research of current trends in use of these emerging and rapidly developing resources. However, systematic investigation into the user searching Dr. Oksana Zavalina (oksana.zavalina @unt

When many collections are brought together in a federation or aggregation, the attributes of the original collections can become difficult to discern. Collection-level metadata has the potential to provide important context about the purpose and features of individual collections, but the qualitative aspects of collections are difficult to describe in a systematic way. This paper reports on a content analysis of collection records in the Digital Collections and Content (DCC) aggregation, conducted to analyze the kinds of substantive and purposeful information represented across 202 cultural heritage collections. We found that the free-text Description field often provides more accurate and complete representation of subjects and object types than the specified fields; it consistently represents properties such as uniqueness, importance, comprehensiveness, provenance, and creator of items in digital collection, and other vital contextual information about the intentions of collectors and the value of collections for scholarly users. The results show that free-text collection metadata can be both concise and semantically rich, and can provide a valuable source of data for enhancing and customizing controlled vocabularies.

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.

Language archives are repositories of language data: material about or in a set of languages, including audio and video recordings, transcriptions, translations, and linguistic annotations. Beyond their value for academic applications, digital availability of language data holds potential to support language and cultural revitalization and maintenance. Until recently, language archives have not been considered in information science research. This article reports the first empirical investigation of various dimensions of organization and representation of recorded knowledge and information in language archives. The study used a combination of semistructured interviews and content analysis. Results demonstrate that, while some of the phenomena related to organization of information in language archives are specific to these types of archives, others are more typical and have been addressed by libraries in past research and practice. For example, authority control, sustainability, and software interoperability are among the primary issues identified by our study. This paper discusses the metadata-related opportunities and challenges for language archive managers and depositors observed in this study, and suggests directions for future research in this area.