Hi Mike,
Sorry for the slow reply, I spent all day yesterday interviewing - with
these issues near the front of my mind!
There's loads of stuff below that I completely connect with. As you know
we've also been through this, though just the once, whereas I think
you've endured the CMS selection/implementation process more than once,
and your current project is on a daunting scale.
Just with regard to the cheap=sustainable equation, though, one could
read it as "cheap to make AND to run". The cost to make an app is
probably easier to assess than the cost to run it (though many
government IT projects suggest that the build cost is also tricky to
predict!) Cheap to make, alone, is short-sighted and asking for trouble,
I agree. Although as you point out, if one goes into it with eyes open,
having done an assessment of the likely future utility of what you are
investing in (or the salient elements of it), the cheap option may still
be appropriate. This follows the very important principal of YAGNI,
which is useful to bear in mind before heading off down the road to OOP
or MVC Nirvana (translation: You Aren't Gonna Need It).
Nice example with the staff database, by the way. This is a great
example of where the "institutional" and "public facing" domains meet.
We all have systems that hold data that we might typically think are
solely for use in one domain or another. Collections databases are a
rare exception - it's pretty well accepted/expected that a subset of the
data they contain may be extracted and probably modified for public
consumption. But MS Exchange, obscure operational databases, accounts
software, and who knows what else may conceivably all contain content
(or functionality) that one day we may want to repurpose for public
consumption. Keeping this in mind when purchasing or building
applications must be good practice.
So, thanks for a great contribution. Another definition for me to
digest! Any more out there?
Cheers, Jeremy
Jeremy Ottevanger
Web Developer, Museum Systems Team
Museum of London Group
Mortimer Wheeler House
46 Eagle Wharf Road
London. N1 7ED
Tel: 020 7410 2207
Fax: 020 7410 2201
Email: [log in to unmask]
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Register for regular Museum updates with [log in to unmask] Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Ellis Mike
Sent: 25 September 2006 09:51
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] Sustainable new media
Nick, Jeremy, etc
Great thread..
I very much like the "value vs cost" as a way of measuring
sustainability, and I also think many of the points that Nick raises are
absolutely correct.
From a systems/technology perspective, I do have an issue with the
statement "cheap = sustainable" per se though, because this often leads
organisations up truly terrible paths where quick, cheap wins are
favoured over longer term (I would argue, "sustainable..") futures. I
guess I'm basically arguing about what "value" means here.
This is particularly pertinent to us at the moment - we are currently in
the middle of a frighteningly complex CMS project which aims to connect
a bunch of stuff across NMSI, and I have to say there's nothing like a
top-down systems audit like this to highlight what is sustainable and
what isn't...
What is important to stress here is that the cheap route isn't always
the worst, either. What seems to be the definer is the amount of
holistic thought that goes into developing content and systems. I think
is is always useful to ask "what might we want to use this content for
in 2, 5, 10 years time?". The answer could well be nothing - in which
case the cheap/easy=sustainable route is probably the best. But more
often than not, you'll find (probably with a CMS project!) that you're
coming back at the systems and content in 5 years time and wishing you
hadn't used some weird legacy text-format database which just happened
to be cheap at the time.
For example: just because you're only using your staff database as a
phonebook at the moment doesn't mean you won't want to use it as some
kind of source for an interactive showing expertise across the
organisation further down the line. Ditto, a piece of content written
for exhibition X is (or should be) valuable enough to not want to throw
it away when the exhibition closes. You may (next time some funding
comes available) want to get the same content onto a kiosk, or CD, or
cut it in a different way for a different audience. This isn't
necessarily complex, or expensive, but requires a kind of thinking which
is focussed on the content, and not necessarily just on the application
of that content.
So.."granular and useful content which you can easily get in and out =
sustainable content"
Haven't even touched on digital objects and preservation, but I think
I'll stop now...
ta
Mike
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From: Museums Computer Group on behalf of Nick Poole
Sent: Fri 22/09/2006 18:30
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sustainable new media
Nick,
I'm afraid I'll be giving next week's session a miss, but I look forward
to this email discussion with interest.
From my perspective, there is a unit cost of creating and keeping a
piece of digital information. That piece of digital information is
likely to have a value - whether in terms of realisable cash-value or
long-terms indirect 'cultural' value.
If the realisable value of the piece of information exceeds the unit
cost of creating it, then it should be sustainable (emphasis on
'should').
We have developed some dodgy habits which effectively break this value
chain...
1. We tend not to take into account the true cost of creating and
publish a piece of digital information.
2. Previous work on creating digital objects has focused on technology.
The lessons of the past 5 years tend to indicate that the real problem
lies in sustaining meaningful editorial/workflow around the objects
themselves.
Basically, servers cost less than staff.
3. We don't really know enough about which bits are likely to have
real-terms cash value, and there has been a tendency to overestimate the
commercial viability of the resources;
4. The availability of non-market-driven public investment for
digitisation creates an artificially inflated market which promotes mass
content creation over prioritisation;
5. The unit cost of creation, and particularly storage, is far higher
for individual ad-hoc/local projects than it is for large-scale
aggregated ones (because the further you go towards big content
repositories, the more significant the economies of scale become), but
we persist in developing the former.
Now, if there were a mechanism which allowed market forces to work on
the prioritisation and funding of digital cultural content, then the
resulting equilibrium would be properly sustainable...
Not sure about preservation...
Nick
Nick Poole
Director
MDA
The Spectrum Building, The Michael Young Centre, Purbeck Road,
Cambridge, CB2 2PD
Telephone: 01223 415 760
http://www.mda.org.uk
http://www.collectionsforall.org.uk
The revised edition of SPECTRUM, the UK museum documentation standard,
is now available. Download it for free at:
http://www.mda.org.uk/spectrum.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Ottevanger, Jeremy
Sent: 22 September 2006 11:10
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Sustainable new media
Dear all,
For those in a hurry, the short version:
Before next week's MA/DHRG conference "Fast Forward: Building a
sustainable new media future for UK Museums", I'd really appreciate your
definitions or understanding of a few terms:
* Sustainable/sustainability
* Digital object
* Preservation
The long version, for a bit more explanation:
The Museums Association and Leicester University's Digital Heritage
Research Group are organising next week's "Fast Forward" conference. In
my role as a research student with the DHRG, I am in the initial stages
of investigating precisely this area (the working title of the project
is "Sustaining public-facing digital assets in museums"). I am aware
that there are multiple meanings, assumptions and understandings with
regard to many key terms - indeed almost every word in the project's
title would be contested - and I would very much appreciate your
interpretations. It seems like a good idea to ask the question now,
before the conference - we can start with quite fresh "first takes", as
well as perhaps develop our ideas a little before the 29th. So your
thoughts, please, on the meanings of:
* Sustainable/sustainability
* Digital object/digital asset, and indeed any related term (I
suspect the word "virtual" may crop up, perhaps "learning object", what
else?)
* Preservation
At some point I'd also like to explore that old chestnut, the limits of
the museum and its responsibilities to digital material, but that might
be better left for another time.
I will of course ask your permission before citing any responses. Many
thanks in advance,
Jeremy
Jeremy Ottevanger
Web Developer, Museum Systems Team
Museum of London Group
Mortimer Wheeler House
46 Eagle Wharf Road
London. N1 7ED
Tel: 020 7410 2207
Fax: 020 7410 2201
Email: [log in to unmask] www.museumoflondon.org.uk
Glamour, grandeur, sleaze, disease - discover a great city in the making
with lots of holiday activities at the Museum for all ages Register for
regular Museum updates with [log in to unmask]
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