Visibility: Measuring the value of public domain data

This blog post was written during a presentation at the British Library Labs Symposium in November 2014. It is likely full of errors and omissions having been written real-time.

Peter Balman, software developer

“Visibility” is a project, funded by money from the ‘IC Tomorrow’ (BL and TSB initiative) v important to institutions like the BL who are releasing data publicly and want to understand the value and impact of doing this

The challenge:
“This challenge is to encourage and establish the necessary feedback to measure the use and impact o f public-domain content”

Looking at the BL release of images under CC0 licence on Flickr. What is the value? what is the ROI?

What can we look at?
* How often is an image used
* What are the demographics of those using the images
* What do people talk about when they use images or refer to images from the collection

Where to start?
BL know anecdotally of re-use, but no knowledge about which images being used, and what proportion of collection being used?
The ‘journey’ of an image in the collection isn’t a linear narrative – it is a tree branching off in different directions.

* Take small section of collection and examine in depth
* Look at all million images and crunch the data

Peter aiming to build an application where you can look at an image, and look at information about how it is being used, mentioned etc., and finally promote images in terms of how they’ve been used.

For each image:
* Search web for the image (e.g. with Tineye, Image Raider)
* Natural language processing on the related page looking for context
* Once you have data what do you do? Organisation of data into categories as per the LATCH theory (time, category, place)

Product ready and starting to crunch data, looking for more institutions to test the tool.

Leave a Reply
