Andy

You are quite right - our memories coincide perfectly. 

The Plan was always to aggregate NOF-digitise content - which is where
EnrichUK came from. The NOF (and Resource as MLA was called) was keen to
aggregate the content, but initial plans were scuppered by negative
feedback from one large national institution that felt that its brand
was under threat.

The idea resurfaced as the People's Network Discover Service, and is now
at the heart of the developing Culture24/Collections Trust work on the
Integrated Architecture Project. When completed, this will combine a
busy editorial site with in depth information from many different
institutions. From there, data can be shared with many others ...

Many people will know that I will be leaving MLA soon, and will be
working as Director of www.wiltshireheritage.org.uk - which is a small
independent museum (with Designated archaeology collections), and which
also has a fantastic library and an archive. I will be putting my
collections information where my mouth has been for the last few years
as my museum needs the visibility of Culture24!

D

Btw - the tech standards are still available at 
http://www.mla.gov.uk/programmes/peoples_network/impact_of_the_peoples_n
etwork/digi_tech_standards
and have been taken forward as the MINERVA Technical Standards - and
used across Europe.


David Dawson
Senior Policy Adviser - Digital Futures
Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA)
Victoria House, Southampton Row, London WC1B 4EA
Email: [log in to unmask]
www.mla.gov.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Andy Powell
Sent: 02 May 2008 11:08
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: 21st Century digital curation

I was going to respond to Nick's earlier email saying that I agreed with
most of it... but taking issue with a couple of minor things.  Having
seen Mike's response, I'd like to take issue with some of what he says.

Mike, I think you are slightly guilty of re-writing history - or at
least of judging what was done with the benefit of a heavy dose of
hindsight! :-)

I was involved in writing/editing the NOF-Digi Technical Guidelines that
went to projects.  I don't recall us suggesting that DC should be
embedded into Web pages.  I'd quote a URL if I could find one - but it
looks like we didn't hold a copy of the document on the UKOLN site and
it has been lost from the People's Network - so much for digital
preservation in the UK cultural heritage sector :-(.  Ah hang on,
Wayback Machine to the rescue, see

http://web.archive.org/web/20020611073540/www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/cont
ent/ts_index.asp

and in particular

http://web.archive.org/web/20020815133117/http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.
uk/content/ts_access.asp

"In order to facilitate potential exchange and interoperability between
services, item level descriptions must be capable of being expressed in
Dublin Core and should be in line with developing e-government metadata
standards. In order to facilitate searching across this corpus, and to
enable integration of nof-digitise funded collections into the wider
body of digital collections available in the UK, some consideration
should also be given to the creation of collection level descriptions."

So we did suggest that item level metadata was created for each
digitised object - our failing was not saying how such metadata should
be exposed.  There was also a lot of focus on collection-level metadata.

At the time that the EnrichUK portal was built we (UKOLN) made strong
representations to NOF (and whatever MLA was called at the time) to
suggest that we needed to harvest the item level metadata into it, to
provide some kind of aggregated item level search - but this was
rejected, possibly quite reasonably on the basis that OAI software was
not widely available 'off the shelf' at the time and that doing it would
have been too costly on individual projects at the time.

Whatever the reasoning, I still think it was a missed opportunity.  On
the other hand it would still have only resulted in the building of a
fairly isolated 'portal' (but a better one I guess) - which, as Mike
notes, IS NOT THE ANSWER.

I don't think an aggregated Google search would have been a possibility
at the time - not for largely image-based material at least.  I could be
wrong... but that is my recollection.

Funny how the world changes...

Perhaps a reasonable questions is, "are we still making the same
mistakes now?".

Andy
--
Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation
http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/
http://efoundations.typepad.com/
[log in to unmask]
+44 (0)1225 474319 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On 
> Behalf Of electronic museum
> Sent: 02 May 2008 09:56
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: 21st Century digital curation
> 
> All
> 
> I've been biting my tongue on this one - as usual got a lot 
> to say, but I'm going to do a blog post instead rather than 
> going on (too much) here...
> 
> Just a couple of quick things ;-)
> 
> Lack of foresight about sustainability was (and continues to 
> be) a huge issue about NOF-digi, but it's absolutely NOT 
> limited to that project. IMHO this has always been a problem 
> with the funding models that museums are forced to work with:
> 
> - someone comes along and offers you an enormous wad of cash to do X
> - X isn't *quite* what your museum wants to do, but because 
> you're short of money, you do it anyway
> - you're forced (usually) by the project schedule to spend 
> the lot in one go; no phasing, no timed release, no beta 
> period, no feedback mechanism
> - cash for sustainability is either not considered or frowned 
> upon by funders who simply don't recognise that this is an 
> absolute requirement in any successful (web) project.
> 
> Again, in my experience, NOF-digi as a series of individual 
> projects seemed to deliver to each of those projects as well 
> as it could have done given these circumstances. It also (as 
> others have pointed out) meant that hundreds of thousands of 
> digitised objects were created that wouldn't otherwise have 
> been created. What it didn't do was provide a cohesion
> *between* these projects. Given that we spent a monsterous 
> amount of time putting DC data into our NOFdigi web pages, 
> the end results - the badly-flawed "search" mechanism at 
> enrichUK (which I now notice is redirecting to Michael...) - 
> was an utter failure at providing any kind of 
> cross-collection, cross-institution access. What's 
> frustrating about this is that it would be pretty trivial to 
> build a search across these projects which delivered 
> meaningful results.
> 
> This brings me neatly back to the theme of my forthcoming 
> blog post. I'll precis it here: projects which are an 
> aggregate of content *WILL FAIL* (yes, that was a prediction. 
> Hold me to it) if they only produce a "portal" or "yet 
> another collections site" as the end result. I'll be saying 
> this to Bridget @ Flow Associates re x-museum collections 
> searching, I've been saying it to EDL. If there's anything 
> the Ofcom report (
> http://tinyurl.com/4vrkcz) tells us it's that users want 
> content *their* way, and not ours. One sure way of building 
> in sustainability AND cross-searchability into all our 
> projects is to embrace both openness (sorry
> Nick!) and the "API'd web".
> 
> ta
> 
> Mike
> ________________________________________________
> 
> electronic museum
> 
> ..thoughts on museums, the social web, innovation
> 
> w: http://www.electronicmuseum.org.uk
> f: http://electronicmuseum.wordpress.com/feed
> e: [log in to unmask]
> 
> 
> On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 9:22 AM, Nick Poole 
> <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> 
> > Hi Jerry,
> >
> > NOF-digi is widely regarded in political and funding 
> circles as having 
> > broadly failed. There are several reasons for this, but 
> primarily that 
> > the success criteria were never clearly articulated. There was a 
> > loosely-defined conception in the minds of funders I spoke to that 
> > NOF-digi would both 'solve the problem' by enabling large amount of 
> > material to be digitised and 'engage the public' by putting 
> in on the 
> > web. There were also expectations that the process would raise both 
> > skills and standards in the workforce, and help to 
> investigate models for sustainability for cultural content.
> >
> > Things started to break down very early in the NOF-digi 
> process when 
> > it became apparent that it was sponsoring the proliferation of very 
> > small-scale/niche online services with considerable duplication - 
> > hence the matchmaking exercise which happened about halfway 
> through, 
> > and which led to the creation of a number of uneasy alliances.
> >
> > The real chagrin for funders now comes from the relative 
> > inaccessibility of the content which was funded. Although you are 
> > right that there are a very few good services extant, a significant 
> > majority are dead, or moribund, or sitting on discs in 
> curator's drawers.
> >
> > One issue is that this kind of mass-digitisation (pace 
> Gunther) leads 
> > to very diffuse impacts - it is difficult for a funder to 
> survey the 
> > scene and easily recognise the impact they have had on the 
> landscape - 
> > as funders usually like to do. This, again, is one reason why the 
> > Enrich-UK portal was created almost as a means of 
> reverse-engineering 
> > collective impact for the process as a whole.
> >
> > This view, however, misses some critical points. Our industry could 
> > never have got so much better at technology had NOF-digi 
> (and the IT 
> > Challenge Fund before it) not happened. We learnt so much and 
> > developed standards like the NOF-digi technical standards (now 
> > adopted, as David Dawson says, throughout Europe as the MINERVA 
> > standards). We learnt about copyright and licensing, we learnt that 
> > creating the content doesn't lead to sustainability. It 
> was, in short, 
> > a huge and well-funded period of research and development for our 
> > industry and one which I think enabled us to move to the 
> point we're at now.
> >
> > The real pity of it, to me, is that the reviled Culture 
> Online chose 
> > to ignore the lessons of NOF-digi and instead went down the 
> > commissioning route using expertise predominantly from outside the 
> > sector. The impact of NOF-digi is, at least, still being 
> felt in some 
> > ways. Where is Culture Online (or its tendril Projects Etc) now?
> >
> > Nick
> >
> > Nick Poole
> > Chief Executive
> > Collections Trust
> >
> > www.collectionstrust.org.uk
> > www.collectionslink.org.uk
> > www.cuturalpropertyadvice.gov.uk
> >
> >
> > Tel:  01223 316028
> > Fax:  01223 364658
> >
> >
> > Until the end of April 2008, the Collections Trust's legal trading 
> > name
> > is: MDA (Europe) Ltd
> > Company Registration No: 1300565
> > Reg. Office: 22 Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 1JP.
> >
> > The Collections Trust believes that everybody, everywhere 
> should have 
> > the right to access and benefit from cultural collections. 
> Our aim is 
> > to develop programmes and standards which help connect 
> people and culture.
> >
> > The Collections Trust was launched from its predecessor 
> body, the MDA, 
> > in March 2008.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On 
> Behalf Of 
> > Jerry Weber
> > Sent: 02 May 2008 08:43
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: 21st Century digital curation
> >
> >  I also attended the session in London and was quite 
> surprised to hear 
> > the criticism of NOF-digi.  It is fair to say that the funding 
> > produced mixed results.  I felt at the time that there 
> could have been 
> > more agreement on protocols for standards and perhaps more 
> insistence on robust metadata.
> > However, there are some good examples of fully searchable 
> collections 
> > that came out of NOF-digi - try 
> > http://www.windowsonwarwickshire.org.uk/default.asp
> >
> > Best wishes
> >
> > Jerry
> >
> >
> > Jerry Weber
> > [log in to unmask]
> > 0796 1594401
> >
> > **************************************************
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> > the website at http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk
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> >
> 
> 
> 
> --
> 
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