To See or Not to See: Exploring and Visualizing Digital Collections Data with R Programming Language

Many libraries invest in developing digital collections to preserve unique historical materials and provide online access to these distinctive sources. One way to stimulate users to actively engage with digitized materials is harvesting metadata and creating different visual contexts for specific collections. These visuals provide an overview of a collection’s content and inspire online users to actively experiment with rich data stored in digital collections for research, scholarship, teaching, and learning.

R is a powerful tool to facilitate content analysis and its visualization. Examples of how R has been applied to exploit metadata in local digital collections will be discussed.