Exploring evaluative methods for large-scale local history

Abstract

Local history is a topic of proven interest to library users. Digital cultural heritage collections and aggregations offer an ever-growing wealth of digitized, primary source materials to support local history research. Yet methods for strategic development and evaluation of local history collections and aggregations remain sparse. In this paper we present a multimodal pilot study to explore methods for evaluating local history coverage in digital collections and aggregations. We explore the possibility of employing automatic classification to identify items and collections relevant to local history, and conduct an exploratory metadata analysis to discern features of collections that contribute to their usefulness for local history research.