Use Case Description – What happens?
Activity – Support special interests (ranging from research groups and study modules to public events and other initiatives) by building up and signposting a distributed collection based on a persistent or special theme (e.g. 1914, London 2012). This may involve crowd sourcing assets as well as drawing on formal collections; it may also create a platform for user contributions beyond the metadata, such as comments, discussions and memories and links to other web resources (in such as Youtube and Flickr). The eMusic commercial service offers such an approach, with themes including niche genres and specialist record labels.
Volumes – Thematic is likely to be selective to be effective and therefore relatively small in aggregation terms, though there may be many contributors
Actors – Data owners are potentially numerous and diverse, including the public; the aggregator is likely to have the driving thematic motivation
Data involved – Thematic aggregation will typically imply diversity of resource types and sources; metadata guidelines will therefore be crucial and may best be as openly inclusive as possible at the lowest level (e.g. a reduced Dublin Core attributes set)
Workflows – The value is likely to lie in constant updating and in some contributors coming with very few or even single records; it will therefore be important to support both direct data entry in to the aggregation and also incremental uploads.
Current Examples – Digital New Zealand, initially around World War 1 memories.
Intended Benefits – What is the business case?
Data Owner – Opportunity for the collection owners of all sizes and for the individual contributor; such an initiative is likely to cut across any collection, which implies management effort
Aggregator – This type of specifically purposed aggregation creates opportunity for the aggregator to generate participation, in the form contribution and community, involving both records and dialogue
End User – This model is strongly user-centric, surfacing dispersed and ‘grey’ resources through a platform with a good discoverability profile and potentially offering a participatory community.
