Why are we reworking the AIDA toolkit?
The previous AIDA toolkit covered digital content in an HE & FE environment. As such, it made a few basic assumptions about usage; one assessment element was not really about the users at all, but about the Institutional capability for measuring use of resources. To put it another way, an Institution might be maintaining a useless collection of material that nobody looks at (at some cost). What mechanism do you have to monitor and measure use of assets?
That is useful, but also limited. For the new toolkit, I wanted to open up the whole question of usage, and base the assessment on a much wider interpretation of the “designated user community”. This catch-all term seems to have come our way via the OAIS reference model, but it seems to have caught on in the community. As I would have it, it should mean:
- Anyone who views, reads and uses digital material.
- They do it for many purposes and in many situations –I would like user scenarios to include internal staff looking at born-digital records in an EDRMS, or readers downloading ebooks, or photographers browsing a digital image gallery, or researchers running an app on a dataset.
To understand these needs, and meet them with appropriate mechanisms, ought to be what any self-respecting digital content service is about.
Measuring organisational commitment to users
I thought about how I could turn that organisational commitment into a measurable, assessable thing, and came up with four areas of benchmarking:
- Creating access copies of digital content, and providing a suitable technological platform to play them on
- Monitoring and measuring user engagement with digital content, including feedback
- Evaluation of the user base to identify their needs
- Some mechanism whereby they relate the user experience to the actual digital content. User evaluation will be an indicator here.
This includes the original AIDA element, but adds more to it. I’d like to think a lot of services can recognise their user community provision in the above.
After that, I thought about the other side of the coin – the people who create and deposit the material with our service in the first place. Why not add a new element to benchmark this?
Measuring organisational commitment to depositors
The OAIS reference model doesn’t have a collective term for these people, but it calls them “Producers”, a piece of jargon I have never much cared for. We decided to stick with “Depositors” for this new element; I’m more interested in the fact that they are transferring content to us, whether or not they actually “produced” it. As I would have it, a Depositor means:
- Anyone who is a content creator, submitter, or donor, putting digital material into your care.
- Again, they do it in many situations: external depositors may donate collections to an archive; internal users may transfer their department’s born-digital records to an organisational record-keeping system; researchers may deposit publications, or datasets, in a repository.
When trying to benchmark this, it occurred to me there’s a two-way obligation going on in this transfer situation; we have to do stuff, and so do the depositors. We don’t have to be specific about these obligations in the toolkit; just assess whether they are understood, and supported.
In reworking the toolkit, I came up with the following assessable things:
- Whether obligations are understood, both by depositors and the staff administering deposits
- Whether there are mechanisms in place for allowing transfer and deposit
- Whether these mechanisms are governed by formal procedures
- Whether these mechanisms are supported by documents and forms, and a good record-keeping method
For both Users and Depositors, there will of course be legal dimensions that underpin access, and which may even impact on transfer methods. However, these legal aspects are catered for in two other benchmarking elements, which will be the subject of another blog post.
Conclusion
With these two new elements, I have fed in information and experience gained from teaching the DPTP, and from my consultancy work; I hope to make the new AIDA into something applicable to a wider range of digital content scenarios and services.