SPEC Kit 341: Digital Collections Assessment and Outreach · 47
Newsletters, incorporated into classes/workshops, poster sessions/booths at symposia or other events
OAI-PMH harvesting of metadata to Google Scholar or OCLC Digital Collections Gateway
Online exhibits and blog posts—narratives that tell the story behind the digital collections
Open Access Week participation for several years running
Open Access Week presentations, other “brown bag” events, launches and other promotional activities open to
campus, to iSchool students linked to coursework
Outreach efforts are often sporadic and scaled to the size and impact of the project. It is challenging to dedicate time/
staffing/funding to promote projects as most grant funding/project rationales focus on the digitization/curation/
description of the content, and not towards promotion.
Participate in appropriate campus events, such as GIS Day, etc. to have more outreach.
Physical handouts, including postcards and bookmarks advertising the collection(s)
Press releases are drafted and submitted to media outlets following the creation of certain digital collections.
Press releases for selected collection rollouts
Press releases, related event with a speaker and reception
Printed material/handouts for distribution at events such as Open Access week
Promoting collections at campus events
“Promoting our Digital Collections” is an outline of previous, regular, and planned activities.
Relevant Wikipedia entries are gold!
Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, History Pin, etc.
We currently use several outreach and promotion methods including production of local radio broadcasts to promote
digital collections in the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program, blogs to promote both local and federal resources
through Government Documents, educational and scholarly publications, and conference presentations. We have
distributed educational publications through a number of venues including public schools, museums, conferences, and
public libraries. We also have developed dramatic productions and presented them to the public, written articles for our
alumni magazine, and offered Osher Lifelong Learning Classes that utilize our collections.
We do in some cases create individual websites providing interpretive and/or critical essays on the collection (e.g., Paris:
Capital of the 19th Century).
We link Wikipedia entries to our digital holdings as appropriate.
We participate in on-campus events like grad student orientation, and the LA as Subject archives bazaar.
Comments N=6
All outreach activities have yielded very little results. The community we can market to is not likely to be interested in
our covered topics. External researchers and students are more likely to be interested in our topics, but we cannot easily
do outreach for them.
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