Content Analysis of Google Alerts for Cultural Heritage Institutions

Abstract

This article outlines evidence-based methods for cultural heritage institutions to look for news and mentions about their collections and services online. Google Alerts were created for repository names, websites, and finding aid websites for 66 institutions randomly selected from the ArchiveGrid database. Results were analyzed to determine Google Alerts' accuracy, what types of institutions would benefit most from using Google Alerts, what the content of the sources found by the alerts was, what types of publications returned the most results, and if Google Alerts could also identify image reuse. While Google Alerts' accuracy for returning usable results for analysis was not very high, the structure of alert emails makes discarding irrelevant results simple and quick. Mid-to large-sized museums and institutions staging frequent exhibits and events, as well as those with active collections, return the largest number of alerts. News publications and social media publish the most content related to cultural heritage institutions. Though the sample set was small, Google Alerts also was able to identify image reuse.

Disrupting human resource management with people analytics: a study of applications, value, enablers and barriers in Italy

“…other Internet websites). To analyze the data, we followed Kelly's (2018) methodology and exported all alerts into a predefined spreadsheet. We removed duplicates (n 5 125) and verified the URLs of the remaining 577 records.…”

“…We removed duplicates (n 5 125) and verified the URLs of the remaining 577 records. At this phase, following Kelly (2018), we excluded 241 GA PR with "pages not available" (n 5 163) and spam sources (n 5 78). The remaining 336 GA were analyzed based on their full text.…”

Toward a definition of digital object reuse

“…Kousha et al (2010), Kirton and Terras (2013), Kelly (2015) and Reilly and Thompson (2017) leverage reverse image lookup technology to locate images posted across the Web. Kelly (2018a) conducts a case study tracking reuse via Google Alerts. Ladd (2015) and Kelly (2018b) investigate the ways that placing content on popular third-party sites (Flickr and Wikipedia/Wikimedia, respectively) can increase the exposure of digital collections.…”

Digital Cultural Heritage and Wikimedia Commons Licenses:

“…As detailed in their 2010 article, Eschenfelder and Caswell identified some beneficial uses of access restriction such as "regulating access and use of culturally sensitive materials in order to protect the source group that generated the material" and protecting the rights of individuals. While outside of the scope of this article, the Documenting the Now project advocates for the ethical collection of social media archives, and the Architecting Sustainable Futures project looks to enable community-based archives to document marginalized communities while emphasizing "the importance of controlled access and authority," an integral part of Mukurtu, an open-source content management system built with and for indigenous communities (Architecting Sustainable Futures, "About," n.d.; DocNow, "Documenting the Now," n.d.; Historypin, 2018). Considerations relevant to protecting the rights of source communities to their cultural heritage materials often fall outside of copyright law and require additional nuanced permissions and terms of use developed by or in consultation with source communities and creators.…”