The LfI project is one of the seven JISC funded projects as part of the Impact and Embedding of Digitised Resources programme. Last week at the OII event, Eric Meyer (from OII) presented a report (drawn from the reports of the seven projects): Splashes and Ripples – Synthesizing the Evidence on the Impacts of Digital Resources.
In the report, a set of recommendations are presented to suggest ways how to potentially increase the impact of digital resources.
For Digital Resource Providers
1. Plan ahead to measure impact.
2. Use the media to your advantage.
3. The media and the public are influenced by numbers and metrics.
4. Make your resource easy to find.
5. Give your resource an unambiguous name and acronym/initials.
6. Create quick wins.
7. Leverage your wins.
8. Make resources easy to navigate without sacrificing functionality.
9. Adopt Cool URIs (i.e., human-readable web addresses).
10. Provide automatic citations that are easy to copy or download.
11. Provide the ability to export citations.
12. Create training materials using examples from real research.
13. Make teaching materials available.
14. Consider allowing users to comment on or modify items (with care).
15. APIs are the future.
For Improved Measurement
16. Remember in advance that you will want to contact your users.
17. Develop webometric tools that scale for larger collections.
18. Develop analytic tools that scale for larger collections.
19. Develop methods to better accommodate collections that are distributed via multiple
20. Develop strategies for archiving log file data and analytics.
21. Centralize hosting.
22. Develop standardized measures.
For Future Sustainability
23. Innovative revenue models should be explored.
24. Develop Cool URI standards.
25. Maintain active sites to attract users in the long term.
The full report: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1846535