The Digital Library of the Commons is an initiative out of Indiana University that looks to bring together scholarship on commons or “aspect[s] of the relation between the physical resource and human institutions designed in the use and maintenance of that resource.” This includes such topics as agriculture, forestry, water resources, wildlife, and social organization. The Digital Library of the Commons provides free access to full-text articles, dissertations, and papers from the Indiana University and beyond. The Image Collection is a subsection of this digital library with images from commons-related research activities by Indiana University faculty and students.
Collection Principles
The collection currently consists of around 950 photographs taken by researchers in one particular program, the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. They anticipate 4,000-5,000 images in total when all of the workshop’s available photographs are included, and further anticipate opening the collection up for self-publication of images by others in the field. As far as I can tell, there is little curation of this collection planned – it seems that they’re simply in the process of digitizing all of the photographs from the last 25 years taken in conjunction with this workshop. Their goal to is serve as a central repository for all types of commons-related images, and presumably as many of them as possible.
Object Characteristics
The objects in this collection are all photographs taken during research trips throughout the world. Based on the date range covered by the photographs (1989-2007), it seems likely that some of the more recent photographs may have been taken digitally while older photographs were most likely scanned from the original prints. There is no information on the website that directly addresses the process of digitization that these images went through, however. The images are of a sufficient size for the user to actually see their contents- when an image appears with its record it fills about half of the browser screen and if you click this image a slightly larger one appears in a separate window.
Metadata
The following types of metadata are available for each image: keywords related to the content, country, region, sector (this refers to the area of commons research to which the image applies), photographer, caption (basically a title), abstract (a one sentence description), date taken, holding agency, workshop ID (which appears to be a unique identifier for the image), and in some cases conference. The collection is browseable by many of these fields and an advanced search option allows for limiting by a combination of these fields. Information elsewhere on the Digital Library Commons website indicates that the site is runs on Eprints2, which is OAI compliant. Although it isn’t clear whether this applies to the image collection in particular, it does speak well for the collection managers’ interest in interoperability.
Intended Audience
The intended audience of the Digital Library of the Commons as a whole appears to be academics and other researchers involved in studying various aspects of commons. While the image collection could be of some use to this audience, at times it seems more like a travel-log than anything else. While many of the images do document concepts related to commons research, others, such as those that show the group of people who made a particular trip, could only be useful as a kind of nostalgic memento for the individuals involved in that research and perhaps the department at Indiana University as a whole.
Overall, I thought this digital collection was serviceable. “Commons” seems to be quite a broad topic, so there may be uses for the information in this image collection that aren’t apparent to me. Still, I think that the main flaw with the collection is a lack of clarity about what exactly these photos would be useful for in the context of scholarly research, which is what the rest of this digital initiative purports to be about.
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