Further to the discussion, those of you who haven't seen it might be
interested in John Holden's pamphlet on Capturing Cultural Value,
http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/culturalvalue
It outlines some of the issues in measuring the different types of value
that can be 'assigned' to culture.
Iain
Iain Watson
Assistant Director
Tyne & Wear Museums
Discovery Museum
Blandford Square
Newcastle, NE1 4JA
Tel: (0191) 277 2276
Text Direct: 18001 0191 2772276
Mobile: 07876 390980
Fax: (0191) 230 2614
Email: [log in to unmask]
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
MCG automatic digest system
Sent: 29 September 2006 00:00
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: MCG Digest - 27 Sep 2006 to 28 Sep 2006 (#2006-134)
There are 4 messages totalling 468 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Morag Hutcheson/NOTES/PC/CA is out of the office.
2. MCG emails getting corrupted (2)
3. Sustainable new media
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Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 01:01:57 -0400
From: Morag Hutcheson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Morag Hutcheson/NOTES/PC/CA is out of the office.
I will be out of the office starting 09/27/2006 and will not return un=
til 10/03/2006.
I will respond to your message when I return.
Je r=E9pondrai =E0 votre message d=E8s mon retour.=
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------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:08:38 +0100
From: Joe Cutting <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: MCG emails getting corrupted
I don't want to keep bashing this one but as far as I can see the
people who are sending emails which end up corrupted are unaware of this
and without having it pointed out to them might
wonder why they're not getting that much response.
In MCG Digest - 26 Sep 2006 to 27 Sep 2006
Andreas's emails appeared to me as
>>
Brian=20Kelly's=20remarks=20about=20MIME=20types=20is=20an=20issue=20we=
20=
have=20addressed
before=20(as=20he=20states=20in=20his=20email,=20when=20he=20refers=20to
=20=
our=20eBulletin=20MLA
News=20-=20although=20this=20user=20was=20having=20problems=20with=20MCG
=20=
not=20MLA).
>>
And David Dawson's email appeared as
>>
QWxsCgpZb3UgbWF5IGJlIGludGVyZXN0ZWQgaW4gdGhpcyBhbm5vdW5jZW1lbnQgZnJvbSB0
aGUg
TUxBIHdlYnNpdGUKCkQKCldlZG5lc2RheSAyNyBTZXB0ZW1iZXIgMjAwNgoKVGhlIE11c2V1
bXMs
IExpYnJhcmllcyBhbmQgQXJjaGl2ZXMgQ291bmNpbCAoTUxBKSB3aWxsIGNyZWF0ZSBhIGRp
Z2l0
YWwgYXJjaGl2ZSBmb3IgbW9yZSB0aGFuIDUwMCBnaWdhYnl0ZXMgb2YgaGlzdG9yaWMgbWF0
ZXJp
YWwgY3JlYXRlZCBsYXN0IHllYXIgdGhyb3VnaCBwcm9qZWN0cyB1bmRlciB0aGUgVUstd2lk
ZSwg
4oCcVGhlaXIgUGFzdCBZb3VyIEZ1dHVyZeKAnSBwcm9ncmFtbWUuCgpUaGVpciBQYXN0IFlv
dXIg
RnV0dXJlIGNvbW1lbW9yYXRlZCB0aGUgNjB0aCBhbm5pdmVyc2FyeSBvZiB0aGUgZW5kIG9m
IHRo
ZSBTZWNvbmQgV29ybGQgV2FyIGFuZCB3YXMgYSBqb2ludCBwcm9qZWN0IGludm9sdmluZyB0
aGUg
>>
All the others appeared fine. Incidentally there don't seem to be any
problems if you read the list on
the archive.
Hope we can get this one sorted.
Best wishes
Joe
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Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:01:26 +0100
From: Nick Poole <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Sustainable new media
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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Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:30:46 +0100
From: Leonard Will <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: MCG emails getting corrupted
In message <[log in to unmask]> on
Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Joe Cutting <[log in to unmask]> wrote
>I don't want to keep bashing this one but as far as I can see the
>people who are sending emails which end up corrupted are unaware of
>this and without having it pointed out to them might wonder why they're
>not getting that much response.
>Andreas's emails appeared to me as
>Brian=20Kelly's=20remarks=20about=20MIME=20types=20is=20an=20issue=20we
>=
>20=
>
>And David Dawson's email appeared as
>QWxsCgpZb3UgbWF5IGJlIGludGVyZXN0ZWQgaW4gdGhpcyBhbm5vdW5jZW1lbnQgZnJvbSB
>0
>aGUg
To expand a little on what Brian Kelly has explained:
Andrea's message has the headers
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
whereas David's has the headers
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
As Brian said, these encodings are ways of sending 8-bit data through
email systems which do not, in general, support more than 7 bits. They
are most commonly invoked by messages that include a pound
character, which is an 8-bit character not in the US-ASCII character
set.
Quoted-printable is used when there is just a few characters to encode,
as the rest of the message remains fairly legible. Spaces need not be
replaced by the "=20" code, but some mailing systems such as Andrea's
are over-enthusiastic and do this too.
Base64 encoding is used when there are many unprintable characters, as
when sending binary files such as images or word processor documents.
Perhaps David's use of the UTF-8 character set caused his mailing
software to treat his message as binary data.
So long as the appropriate headers are in place to show whether, and
how, a message has been encoded, most email software should be able to
decode the message and display it without any coding being visible.
The problem is probably the way in which digests are compiled for this
mailing list. The rules are in <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2046.txt>,
where the "multipart/mixed" format allows each message within a
compilation to have its own header, showing how it has been encoded.
As I never subscribe to digest versions of mailing lists, I cannot check
what headers the digests of this list contain, but I think that that is
the first place to look.
It is much easier to avoid the problem by subscribing to receive
individual messages and directing them to a separate folder in your
email database. This is just as convenient as receiving a digest, and
makes it easy to sort, move, delete or reply to individual messages.
Leonard Will
--
Willpower Information (Partners: Dr Leonard D Will, Sheena E Will)
Information Management Consultants Tel: +44 (0)20 8372 0092
27 Calshot Way, Enfield, Middlesex EN2 7BQ, UK. Fax: +44 (0)870 051 7276
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End of MCG Digest - 27 Sep 2006 to 28 Sep 2006 (#2006-134)
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