Digital scholarship and data provenance at The National Library of Scotland

As the collections as data movement increasingly gains momentum, and libraries seek to present collections in machine readable form, the gap between our print collections and how our digital collections represent these increases. What, then, is the role of data provenance, and how can this be conveyed?

At The National Library of Scotland, an in-house, mass-digitisation programme runs 14 hours and produces many thousands of images each day. As we produce data at scale, we need to ensure that our readers understand where the data they use has come from, what processes it has undergone, and why it exists in the first place. How to convey that information in an area that currently has few agreed standards, and how libraries can remain trusted sources of information when we are creating that information ourselves, is problematic.

This lightning talk will consider the importance of data provenance and discuss how The National Library of Scotland is seeking to contextualise its data collections as it establishes a new Digital Scholarship Service. Conveying structural, bibliographical and technical metadata, as well as rights information, for each digital object enables readers to piece together how data has been produced; in addition to this, by including further information about the reasoning behind why an item has been digitised, we are aiming for a level of transparency between library and reader which enables a clearer understanding of the library processes print items undergo when creating collections as data.

This ties in to the new responsibilities of libraries as we produce our own collections: with digitisation programmes creating not only OCRed text, but also additional data from scanners, software and digital production tools, transparency about our data creation processes become important. Enabling readers to contextualise the data creation process aligns libraries with the need for reproducible and authentic data, and ensures that we do not preclude some forms of research.