Commenting Features in Digital Collections

Searching for examples of public institutions, library or archival, which have added a commenting feature to their digital collection or catalogue is not easy! Type in any variation of the comment in a blog search engine, and you will likely retrieve every blog in existence because blogs often allow visitors to add a comment. Working with digitization blog, we wanted to compose a list of public institutions, particularly ones with digital collections, that offer a "add a comment" feature. If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, then a commenting feature in a digital collection may be priceless! Imagine how many visitors to a digital collection may have a story to tell about an image.

A commenting feature allows users to post a message on a web site for others to read. A visitor submits a message, which may be reviewed by an editor or screened by a filter, and the approved comments are displayed, often in chronological order, on the web site for the general public. Some commenting features require a person to type in a series of random, distorted letters (also known as CAPTCHA) in order to minimize the risk of spam. A commenting feature may also require some form of registration before a person is allowed to read or write a message.

SEARCH STRATEGY

We conducted a blog search to identify seven institutions worldwide using an “add comment” feature to enhance their collection. Let us know if there is another library or archive that we missed, since we plan on conducting a Delphi study:

1. Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections

2. Edmonton Activist Literature (Streetprint)

3. ERITREAN PRINT AND ORAL CULTURE (Streeprint)

4. Scrawl: Artwork from the Streets (Streetprint)

5. Hennepin County Library

A special thanks to LibrarianInBlack for writing about the commenting feature on Hennepin's web site in her blog, which was the first post that I found when searching for commenting features.

Another special thanks to Archivemati.ca for pointing out two more examples:

6. Zoekplaatjes.nl – municipal archives hosts a forum allowing visitors to comment on unidentified photographs.

7. The Diary of Samuel Pepys - blog for the digitized Gutenberg Project version of Samuel Pepys diary allowing visitors to annotate text.

Also, thanks to Jen P. for pointing out another digital collection offering a commenting feature:

8. Hudson River Valley Heritage. Some actual comments selected by Jen P. as examples: http://www.hrvh.org/u?/larc,81

This list is the start of more research into commenting features, since a lot of librarians seem to be curious about what works and what doesn't. The spark for our project to look more closely as commenting features came about as we evaluated options for making an existing digital collection more "Web 2.0ish" At one point, it looked liked we were going to turn our collection into a Flickr-like web site, so read the next post, which revolves around the question of how should we evaluate Flickr as a host for digital collections, as opposed to an open source solution, such as StreetPrint (University of Alberta).