Exploring Evaluative Methods for Large-Scale Local History

摘要

Local history is a topic of proven interest to library users.Digital cultural heritage collections and aggregations offeran ever-growing wealth of digitized, primary sourcematerials to support local history research. Yet methods forstrategic development and evaluation of local historycollections and aggregations remain sparse. In this paper wepresent a multimodal pilot study to explore methods forevaluating local history coverage in digital collections andaggregations. We explore the possibility of employingautomatic classification to identify items and collectionsrelevant to local history, and conduct an exploratorymetadata analysis to discern features of collections thatcontribute to their usefulness for local history research.