On 1 May 2008, at 13:51, Lowy, Stephen wrote:
> Colleagues
>
> As an attendee of the last night's seminar and a member of a NOF
> project back in the "early naughties" I feel Carole and Roy's
> guarded comments about mass digitisation were understandable.
>
> The failure of some NOF projects and that includes the one I was
> involved with (East of England Sense of Place) was that it geared to
> doing mass digitisation, which it did very well, but little or no
> thought was given to making it accessible or, and this is the
> killer, sustainable.
My experience of the NOF projects (torbytes.co.uk) was that the real
issue was not with digitisation, as you say it is relatively simple.,
but the really time and resource consuming issues surrounding
interpretation, cataloguing, identification and copyright management.
The Torbytes project originally identified a very large number of
objects to be digitised and in the end managed to get permission for
just 1500, the system for interpretation was designed to allow for
content creation at 6 learning levels initially, this got cut to two
and the system was to encourage local children to submit
interpretation as part of guided schoolwork, this too diminished
considerably due to lack of teacher support.
it also came to an abrupt halt, which is not the way a website should
be managed - websites are never *finished* in the way that books or
exhibitions are and that may be one of the issues here. Making
collections accessible should be a lifelong process and funding
specific digitisation projects with a finite end point isn't serving
that requirement.
I missed the seminar and have no other real input, but watch the topic
with interest.
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