Jeremy,
I'm sorry you think this is gobbledygook, but it isn't a simple argument.
Happy to address any constructive thoughts!
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 jeremy
coote
Sent: 29 September 2006 09:29
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sustainable new media
There's gobbledygook and gobbledygook.
J
On 28 Sep 2006, at 23:01, Nick Poole wrote:
> Jeremy,
>
> Thanks for this reply. If we did a Hilbert-style list of the 10 'hard
> problems' facing our sector, I'd argue that the quantification of
> cultural
> value would be up there in the top 3.
>
> The lack of a justifiable link between real-terms value and
> cultural/public
> benefit infects every area of our discourse. I can argue that a web
> project
> delivers a 50% increase in school-age visitors, but what effect has
> it had?
> Did it make them better, or worse, or different? Did they learn
> anything of
> value and will it encourage them to become habitual users in
> future? Maybe,
> but there's no external evidence or externally-validated
> methodology which I
> can use to construct a business case for my HLF bid.
>
> Of course, this issue isn't limited to us. Viz the work done by the
> British
> Library, BBC and others into public value in recent years. I
> imagine that
> BBCi have a hairy time demonstrating delivery against the Charter.
>
> The problem is that the extent to which we can balance the value
> chain with
> intangible public benefit depends on how well-disposed the incumbent
> administration is to this kind of argument. The emerging Treasury,
> with its
> talk of 'zero baselines' and 'cost per user', is not really looking
> favourably on this slightly woolly equation.
>
> I really think it is time to take a leaf out of the books of the
> museum
> educationalist. This is exactly the issue confronted by them
> through the
> Inspiring Learning for All framework.
>
> 5 years ago educationalists had no consistent framework for
> articulating the
> value of delivering education in museums. Whatever your take on
> ILFA, it has
> provided a valid framework for balancing the equation, which has
> subsequently been adopted by external agencies such as funders. The
> net
> result is greater investment in, and more sustainable delivery of,
> museum
> education. Wouldn't it be nice to pull off the same trick for digital
> delivery?
>
> Btw. You are right in thinking that most of my comments are
> directed towards
> the more granular digitsed assets. On the larger scale (websites,
> galley
> interactives), this is a deep organisational issue. Investment in
> digital
> services (as opposed to digital objects) has enabled the creation
> of a meta-
> (digital) sector, but without the baseline infrastructure and
> capacity to
> manage the effective doubling of our offer. So, we're all playing
> catchup
> with the creation of a surrogate sector.
>
> 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: 25 September 2006 18:23
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Sustainable new media
>
> Nick,
>
> Many thanks for this. I lost my previous draft of this reply, so
> hopefully this one will at least be better!
>
> It's good to get the cost-benefit approach, and I agree with you in
> many
> ways. One gap in what you wrote, which may be to do with economy of
> writing rather than what you believe, is that although you mention
> both
> "realisable cash-value" and "long-terms indirect 'cultural' value",
> you
> then talk solely about monetary costs and benefits. I think that a
> major
> reason why we as a sector have been "breaking the value chain" for far
> too long - and I say this in all ignorance of the facts - is the
> difficulty of making these equations between the costs of building and
> maintaining resources (*relatively* straightforward to predict and
> monitor) and the benefits flowing from them. The latter, as you
> say, are
> hard to evaluate and especially to predict (hence our predictions of
> financial sustainability are so often awry), we've got it wrong too
> often and we don't know how to factor in the non-financial benefits.
> This is where I found Laurie Hunter's presentation at last year's DCC
> workshop so stimulating (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/docs/Wksppaper.pdf). You
> are doubtless well aware of what he has to say and I'm not going to
> attempt to characterise it, beyond saying that he suggests that when
> accounting for digital preservation we use the "balanced scorecard"
> approach, which is designed to weigh up the costs and benefits related
> to intangible assets. I'd suggest that this approach should probably
> transfer to other museum digital activities beyond simply data
> preservation. So at the risk of sounding like a pesky lefty ;-) your
> point 4, "The availability of non-market-driven public investment for
> digitisation creates an artificially inflated market which promotes
> mass
> content creation over prioritisation", may be neglecting to account
> for
> valuable but uncostable benefits that the market would fail, just as
> public investment can fail to reflect financial costs and rewards. Not
> that I'd argue against prioritisation, just about how we might do it.
>
> All the same, being financially self-supporting of -justifying is a
> valid aim, whether we're talking about content/data and file-based
> assets (which is what I infer you are mainly talking about), or
> whether
> we mean larger scale resources like websites, PDA tours or all the
> other
> myriad possible services we can offer users. As I say, I've sort of
> assumed that your thoughts are principally connected with so-called
> "digitisation projects", in which data and images are digitised,
> processed, stuck online somewhere. This content level, being
> pleasingly
> granular, may at least have plenty of options available in terms of
> future reuse. Many of the larger-scale entities don't. Building
> these in
> a transparently costable and reusable fashion is also a vaild aim,
> but a
> bit on the tricky side.
>
> Very good point about technology versus staff - it brings home that
> just
> keeping the plain content (or indeed application) available somewhere,
> even if it's for ever, is pointless if you do not also ensure that
> it is
> current, pertinent, accurate, readily accessible, *interesting*.
> This is
> one way in which I feel that "sustaining" is hugely different from
> "preserving" - <warning>thought in progress</warning> the latter
> perhaps
> seeks to maintain some sort of fixity of state whereas the former
> maintains fixity of intention....maybe - at least, some sort of
> continuation of an activity with a particular objective in mind.
> Preserving a website means freezing it. Sustaining it means
> ensuring its
> ever-changing mutation in support of the site's aims -
> communicative/educative/etc.
>
> Sorry we won't be seeing you on Friday but thanks again for your
> thoughts. Let's keep them rolling!
>
> 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]
> 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] Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Nick Poole
> Sent: 22 September 2006 18:31
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [MCG] 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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