Trove

So this blog is primarily about the website Trove. But first! I would like to comment on my Google Analytics. After not really checking my Google analytics for a while, I thought I would take a quick look today. Google Analytics allows me to track who is looking at my blog, from what country etc. Today I saw that I have a number of views from people in America, more specifically that I have 3 views from Charleston, Illinois! Not only this, but they spent an average time of 7 minutes and 25 seconds on my website! Now obviously this could be a complete mistake on the part of the viewer. But in my own little naive world, I'd like to pretend that someone in America is actually interested in what I have to say. I'm really enjoying using Google Analytics and it's a great way of viewing statistics of who is viewing your blog!

Anyway! back to Trove. As part of our assessment, we have been asked to write a 500 word critique on a Digital History website. At first I was a bit dubious about posting it on here and to be honest I have no idea why. So! here is my (not quite) 500 word critique. It is only a first draft and so it is not in its final form as of yet.

My Critique! 

Trove is a federated search engine that was launched by the National Library of Australia to the public in 2009 to gather material related to Australia. This site provides metadata for over ninety million items. It is a ‘federated’ site, which means that it centralises material and collates it from one thousand libraries via the Australian National Bibliographic Database. This is opposed to a unified catalogue, which is a single data catalogue that gives the user unrestricted access to all stored resources. Trove uses OAI-PMH, which is a web-based protocol that defines a standard way to move records between resources. It allows Trove to request records from a system in batches, the results are returned in XML format. A wealth of digital content is then produced and catalogued using a standard set of vocabulary terms defined by Dublin Core. From the digital metadata tags, material is separated into eight different zones; all view, books, photos, newspapers, sound, diaries, maps and organisations. Currently, the site holds 134,283,381 Journals and articles as well as 63,693,069 digitalised newspapers.[1] Trove has an excellent interface, which is aesthetically pleasing and laid out in a logical user-friendly fashion.

Fig 1: Homepage of Trove, http://trove.nla.gov.au 

 

When searching for books, Trove will group together multiple items and different editions together instead of displaying only one record. Trove achieves this by using FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographical Records), an approach to cataloguing, which takes into account the searching for different copies and specific editions. Figure 2 demonstrates how the different versions/editions of the work are displayed.[2]

                   Fig 2: The versions of the work. Found on http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march11/holley/03holley.html

 Trove’s material is derived from other organisations and museums, which may have their own access restrictions. Although Trove can take some steps to improve the interface usability, a large percentage of the responsibility falls on the contributing organisations. Some material advises the user to contact the publisher directly or purchase the item.  Trove uses the Australian Libraries Gateway (ALG) to source the library names. It also added ‘short library names’ (Fig 3) to the ALG which received positive feedback from users [3] However, when Trove undertook usability testing, it showed that “users expected to be able to borrow from any library listed in Trove,” even though many libraries have access restrictions.[4]

Fig 3: Short library names, found on http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march11/holley/03holley.html

One part of the project involved the digital cataloguing of scanned documents such as newspaper articles. These have been translated electronically into text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and although OCR is usually very accurate, the small font and uneven printing makes conversion difficult. Due to these conversion difficulties, more than 5,000 online users have manually corrected the text themselves.[5] This is an excellent example of crowdsourcing. The manager of Trove, Rose Holley, states that over two million lines of text are corrected every month.[6] However, work still needs to be carried out on some of the older newspapers and archives that OCR has failed to correctly read. 

Trove is a great example of how history can be presented online and the website has a number of great successes. However, it needs to improve its ability to obtain the material from its contributing sites. Furthermore, a percentage of its photos that are available are of poor quality, presumably to discourage users from using the image for their own use.

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[1] Statistics taken from http://trove.nla.gov.au/system/counts <accessed, 09/03/12>
[2] Rose Holley, ‘Resource sharing in Australia: Find and get in Trove – making “getting” better, information and diagram found on http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march11/holley/03holley.html <accessed 10/03/12>

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] National Library of Australia, ‘Online text correctors to be honoured’ posted 27^th January 2010 on http://www.nla.gov.au/media-releases/online-text-correctors-to-be-honoured <accessed 09/03/12>

[6] Rose Holley, ‘Crowdsourcing and social engagement in libraries: the state of play’ found on http://eprints.rclis.org/bitstream/10760/16385/1/Crowdsourcing%20State%20of%20Play%20June%202011.pdf <accessed 10/03/12>

Photo Credit: http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/gateways/issues/104/trove.html

Don McCullin

Considering Vietnam

Last Friday I went to the Imperial War Museum to attend a conference called 'Considering Vietnam.' Due to my Dissertation revolving around the media and the conflict in Vietnam I thought this was an excellent opportunity to take up.  This blog post is a way for me to talk about the first speaker of the conference, a man named Don McCullin.

Don McCullin
The first speaker was Don McCullin, a man who documented the Vietnam War through his photography and is more broadly recognised as one of Britain's most influential photographers. During the Vietnam War journalists, photographers and news crews had the ability to access all areas and photograph, film and publish a lot more material than they can now. Don McCullin was no exception, accessing dangerous war areas in Vietnam and even putting his life at danger, armed only with a camera. During the conference Don McCullin told us that he competed to take the best possible photographs, photographs that would represent himself, his career and humanity. He openly trespassed on uninvited territory, not to offer salvation but to take photographs. Whilst on tour in Vietnam, Don McCullin was in dangerous territory and even came so close to a bullet whilst crawling through a field that the bullet struck his camera.

Don McCullin has created some of the most memorable images of a number of different conflicts. The First image that I've chosen is of a shell shocked soldier, taken during the battle of Hue in 1968. It is so well known that in an interview with a journalist Don McCullin stated "It kind of gets on my nerves now. . . because it has appeared everywhere." An exhibition at the Imperial War Museum entitled "Shaped by War" is dedicated to Don McCullin's photography, even displaying the camera that took a bullet during the Vietnam War.







Photo Credit:
http://www.victoriagal.org.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibitions/don_mccullin_shaped_by_war.aspx
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/photographerframe.php?photographerid=ph041
https://people.creighton.edu/~spf54506/bookrpt.html
http://dulwichonview.org.uk/2011/12/20/don-mccullin-%E2%80%9Cshaped-by-war%E2%80%9D/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/10/don-mccullin-review

Google Analytics

During the workshop last Friday as well as creating a Wordle I also set up a Google Analytics account. After being completely confused by the whole thing I finally got it working. Google Analytics provided me with a html code to copy and paste into my blog's html. After this, Google Analytics accesses the information from your blog and lets you track who is using and viewing your website. Here are a few examples of what it can tell you;

• The location of the viewer
• Whether they are a returning visitor or a new visitor
• How long they spent on your website
• What web browser they are using
  

Just above I have print screened the overview page about my blog. Even though this hints at how hugely unpopular my blog is, I am able to track a number of things. On the time line at the top the dates range from the ninth of Feb (When I created my Google Analytics account) to the present day. With the information just under the timeline I can see that I have had thirteen page visits, eleven of these are new visitors and two are returning visitors. I am also able to see that the average time a visitor spends on my site is five minutes and fifty-seven seconds.

This second print screen comes under the 'Browser and OS' tab - This allows me to see what browser the visitor is using to view my blog. In relation to my blog, this shows that five views come from Firefox, four from Internet Explorer, three from Google Chrome and one from Android Browser.

Although I had difficulty setting up Google Analytics at first, it is well worth using. Blogger does provide you with some information, such as how many views your blog has received and where they are viewing it from. However, it does not provide no where near as much information as Google Analytics does. Well worth downloading.

A website everyone should try

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes."       

In week three of the Digital Histories module we were allowed to try and improve our blogs. As well as setting up Google analytics I had a little go on Wordle. I think the quote above taken from the website sums it up superbly. This website was really easy to use and the picture just above is a word cloud for my last blog post. (If you click on the image above it will take you to the website) As you can see the word that took greater prominence is "Internet!" closely followed by "web" This is because I am blogging about history online. The website has a number of tabs located at the top of the web page and one of these tabs is called 'create'. If you click on this tab all you have to do is insert the text you want to appear in your cloud and click submit! 

To make my cloud I copied and pasted the text from my previous blog post and clicked submit. After this there are a number of things you can do such as change the layout and the font. It was really simple and a lot of the themes looked really good and exciting. After you've found a layout you like you can save to the public library and retrieve the html code so it can be incorporated into your own blog. To put my word cloud onto my blog on the left hand side I created a new gadget and pasted the html code in. it's really quite fun to use and definitely worth a go!

Publishing online

Why do historians not publish more of their work on the internet?

 

The internet is nearly always described by lecturers as being unreliable and students are generally told to stay away from the likes of Wikipedia etc. However, I think if you know how to use the internet properly for research then there really is not any problem. Furthermore, with Wikipedia being such a highly maintained site, information that may be factually wrong is nearly always picked up on.

 

So why should historians be put off by putting their work on the internet? Perhaps the idea that a book holds more authority over a web site is still fairly rife amongst most scholars which puts academics off from publishing primarily on the internet. However, more and more is being added to the Internet everyday, just like musicians have started to make their music accessible to those online, books and documents are also being uploaded to the web. In 2007, the band Radiohead released their album, In Rainbows, as a digital download only available via the band's web site. Instead of paying a fixed price, people were prompted to pay whatever they wanted. It was the first major album whose price was determined by what the consumer wanted to pay, (and they didn't have to pay anything at all).

So why can't historians take a leaf out of their book, perhaps encourage the interested reader to pay what they like? There are many cases of scholars uploading their whole book/publication onto the internet to be viewed by the public. Dan Cohen is an associate professor at the George Mason University whose main focus is within digital humanities and the impact of new media and technology on all aspects of knowledge. An example of a scholar uploading their book for access to anyone is Cohen's Digital History: A guide to gathering, preserving,and presenting the past on the web.

photo credits: fanpop.com
http://www.ctculture.org/mt/mt-search.cgi?tag=Digital%20History&blog_id=1&IncludeBlogs=1

The Reason I like books

As much as I love the internet for all things historical, such as Jstor, Google Books and most sites ending with .edu. There are a couple of reasons I like to have books, (perhaps not for the most conventional reasons). In some cases I couldn't help but give a reason as to why the Internet is better..

1. First of all, I do love the way you can flick through a book so freely. (However, my love for flicking through books has been overtaken by my love for the use of "CTRL + F" and the search box in Google Books).

2. My bookshelf is 90% made up of history books (intelligent, huh?) perhaps not.. (even though I have a lot of history books I have probably only read a few pages from each book. It would appear I am spending money to just read a few key pages of a book).

3. Buying a book makes me feel like I'm doing revision.. Suffering from writer's block on your dissertation? head on over to Amazon, buy a relevant book and put off the work for 3 to 5 days whilst you wait for the book to be delivered.

4. Having books can make you feel intelligent. Books can be displayed at crucial times in front of people you want to try to impress. "Oh.. that? That's just my copy of War and Peace?. For when I want some light reading"

To be honest though, I feel like history on the internet has contributed more to my (limited) knowledge than books has ever done. The internet is at my fingertips. If I hear something that I find vaguely interesting, the first thing I tend to do is grab my laptop to Google it, not go out and find a book that contains the relevant information.

photo: http://heavenleecolton.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/books-vs-internet/