Final Performance Report Narrative: Getting Found

Abstract

The research we proposed to IMLS in 2011 was prompted by a realization that the digital library at the University of Utah was suffering from low visitation and use. We knew that we had a problem with low visibility on the Web because search engines such as Google were not harvesting and indexing our digitized objects, but we had only a limited understanding of the reasons. We had also done enough quantitative surveys of other digital libraries to know that many libraries were suffering from this problem. IMLS funding helped us understand the reasons why library digital repositories weren’t being harvested and indexed. Thanks to IMLS funding of considerable research and application of better practices we were able to dramatically improve the indexing ratios of Utah’s digital objects in Google, and consequently the numbers of visitors to the digital collections increased. In presentations and publications we shared the practices that led to our accomplishments at Utah. The first year of the grant focused on what the research team has come to call “traditional search engine optimization,” and most of this work was carried out at the University of Utah. The final two years of the grant were conducted at Montana State University after the PI was appointed as dean of the library there. These latter two years moved more toward “Semantic Web optimization,” which includes areas of research in semantic identity, data modeling, analytics and social media optimization