The Marriage of Digitization and Web 2.0

My blog is called "Digitization Diva", so I figured that it's about time I start talking digitization!!

When I attended the DigCCurr conference in Chapel Hill last month, I attended a presentation given by Elizabeth Yakel of the University of Michigan. She spoke about the "Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections" which is a digitization project with Web 2.0 functionality.

This presentation piqued my interest and led me to wonder how many other sites have popped up recently that use digitized assets to build an online community. Here are my findings:

Polar Bear Expedition Collection (University of Michigan): This collection allows registered users to post comments about the digitized images, engage in virtual reference right on the site, and also has an Amazon-like functionality that reads "researchers who have viewed this item also viewed..." You can read more about the Polar Bear Expedition collection by reading Elizabeth Yakel's paper from DigCCurr, and reading her article in the May/June issue of D-Lib.

Maine Memory Network (Maine Historical Society): Allows registered users to comment on any digitized asset in the collection.

Walker Art Center: Offers blogs, podcasts, e-mail reminders, webcasts, and RSS feeds as part of their digital collections. To learn more about the site's functionality, read this blog post from Digitization 101.

Digital Collections (University of Washington): UW has started to integrate their digital collections into Wikipedia articles. Their experiment has resulted in a statistically significant increase in the usage of their digital collections. To read more about this innovative use of Web 2.0 to increase access, read this article in the May/Junes issue of D-Lib.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Offers RSS feeds for new content, and also allows registered users to annotate each diary entry to give readers more historical and biographical context about Samuel Pepys.

Everglades Digital Library (Florida International University): Allows registered users to rate resources. These ratings allow the site to automatically generate a list of "recommended resources" for the user. Registered users can also comment on resources.

Ohio Memory (Ohio Historical Society): Allows registered users to create their own customized scrapbook of digitized images. A user can add images to their scrapbook, write up descriptions about the image, and then openly share the scrapbook, so that others can benefit from it. To see a list of scrapbooks created by users, click here.