Reverse Image Lookup: Assessing Digital Library Users and Reuses

ABSTRACT

Reverse image lookup technology was used to assess the users and reuses of images from the Library of Congress' Teaching with Primary Resources digital collection. After selecting 44 images for the study, researchers used Google Reverse Image Lookup to generate a dataset of over 1,400 URLs. Drawing upon a coding rubric designed for a previous study on the ultimate uses of digital library materials, researchers coded the data to identify who uses these images and for what purposes. They found that the most popular type of user was “personal,” which aligns with previous work and indicates that a pattern is emerging between ultimate use and the personal user type. Additionally, the study's results indicate that social media and popular culture research outnumbered any other type of reuse. This article introduces reverse image lookup as a viable and approachable tool for digital library assessment, and discusses its implications for assessment and content selection.

KEYWORDS:

• digital library
• reuse
• reverse image lookup
• ultimate use
• users

Acknowledgments

The researchers thank the following individuals for their contributions to the development of this research project: Emily Hanson, Sanjica Faletar Tanackovic, PhD (LIDA 2016), and Becky Severin.

About the authors

Michele Reilly earned her Master's in Library Science degree from Indiana University in Bloomington (2005) with a concentration in collection development and library management. As Associate Dean of Libraries for the Central Washington University Brooks Library, some of her duties include budget, library operations and human resources management, strategic planning, capital and space planning, and seeking external funding.

Santi Thompson is currently the Head of Digital Repository Services at the University of Houston Libraries. He earned a MLIS and MA (Public History) from the University of South Carolina.

Notes

1. For more on the usability assessment of digital library software, see Agosti et al. 2011; Alonso Gaona García et al. 2014; Dobreva and Chowdhury 2010; Hariri and Norouz 2011.

2. Includes information from a presentation made at International Conference Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA), Zadar, Croatia, June 13–17, 2016.

3. For an example of ephemera, see “An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera” from the Library of Congress' American Memory Web site: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=rbpe&fileName=rbpe12/rbpe122/1220360b/rbpe1220360b.db&recNum=0.

4. According to Google, the explore feature permits the user to “see automatic charts and analysis based on the data in your spreadsheet.” This allows the user to “find patterns in your data and add the charts directly to your spreadsheet.” (Google 2016)