[Metadatalibrarians] Research findings: how manual metadata enhancements make a difference in discovery

[Riley, Jenn]

Hi Joyce,

Thank you so much for posting this - I think it's a great example of a
relatively easy way to gather data to help us make better decisions in
this area. 

At UNC, we're getting ready to add item level description to some photos
that are part of a set that exist online as part of our mass digitization
of special collections workflow. This seems like it might be a good
opportunity for us to replicate this study at UNC, though we'd have to
control for (or understand) the fact that these enhanced items will be
linked from a newly released targeted collection which itself would
presumably add some traffic. Hopefully we can look into this in the fall
semester, though. 

Thanks for sharing - and I too am interested in others working in this
area!

Best,
Jenn

--------------------------------
Jenn Riley
Head, Carolina Digital Library and Archives
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
http://cdla.unc.edu/
http://www.lib.unc.edu/users/jlriley

jennriley at unc.edu
(919) 843-5910





On 5/31/11 10:30 AM, "Joyce Chapman" <joyce_chapman at ncsu.edu> wrote:

>0 0 1 266 1519 NCSU Libraries 12 3 1782 14.0 Normal 0 false false false
>EN-US JA X-NONE 
>  
>For several years, the Metadata & Cataloging department at NCSU
>Libraries has been exploring how our catalogers¹ skillsets can be
>applied to non-traditional metadata environments and remain relevant in
>the shifting landscape of bibliographic control. For the past two years,
>one of the ways we¹ve done this has been to provide staff time on a
>regular basis to enhance metadata for Special Collections¹ digitized
>materials, which otherwise do not receive any metadata enhancements.
>However, we had no data on how effective such enhancements were for
>increasing discovery for end-users. So this year we performed a research
>study to evaluate the effectiveness of this workflow. Using A/B testing
>and usage data from Google Analytics, we analyzed differences in unique
>page views for images that had undergone metadata enhancements versus
>images that had not (full methodology here http://go.ncsu.edu/llzhzy ).
>( http://go.ncsu.edu/llzhzy). )
>  
>We found that the images with metadata enhancements received quadruple
>the amount of unique page views as images with no enhanced metadata and
>we found also that 28% of the Google search strings that led to unique
>page views included person names, which were available only in enhanced
>metadata.  
>   
>We¹re wondering if anyone else had done similar studies, or if anyone
>is interested in replicating this study and seeing what you find. It was
>a pretty easy study to do. If you are interested in more details about
>findings or in replicating the study, you can read the entire report,
>including the methodology for reproducing the study, here:
>http://go.ncsu.edu/llzhzy
>   
>We also welcome any feedback or discussion of this research!
>   
>Joyce 
>  
>Joyce Chapman
>Libraries Fellow 
>North Carolina State University
>joyce_chapman at ncsu.edu
>919.513.1652 
>
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