Nick, Mike et al
Bridget's done a great job seeding this discussion into the list; I'd
suggest her research (part of the National Museums Online project) is
bringing into the open some really useful threads of enquiry. At this
year's MCG UK Museums on the Web conference (June 19) we'll be hoping to
explore many of the issues raised in this list conversation.
Check out the conference page on the MCG site:
http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk/meetings/2-2008.shtml
Some brief points to throw into the mix:
1. Nick's right about Nof-digi; there are lots of lessons learnt, and
positives to build on. In many cases content produced can still be
accessed online, and if we want to mine the content produced using
automatic means, more use could be made from it. Those present at the
MCG spring meeting in Swansea saw an absolutely brilliant 'databurst'
session by Fiona Romeo about a great project (not yet launched) at the
National Maritime Museum where they've extracted new meanings from an
old database in CSV form. It's a great way to re-animate old but still
well-formed data.
2. Following on from Mike's points - in a web 3.0 world, a cultural
dataweb isn't about websites, but about feeds, about opportunities, and
about making meaning and connections. It's the last bit we really don't
know much about; that means training a new generation of museum and
gallery staff to realise the connective potential of a cultural web that
is joined up and interlaced with political, cultural and societal
possibilities. Perhaps the new MA in Digital Heritage at Leicester will
move on the skills/knowledge/debate on this point?
3. A persistent theme runs through other posts in this subject area on
the MCG list - look up the EDL thread started by Jeremy Ottevanger -
John Faithfull's posts led some great comments about what is practically
possible in the real museum world. We should continue to work with older
content. We should continue to digitise. We should work in simple
digital forms. We should make data available for others to use. Small
museums can do simple digital work. Those with bigger budgets can tune
up, turn on and feed out their content. For me, I think we can all be
part of the new cultural web if we use ubiquitous technologies, rather
than anything buried in layers or bespoke.
See you in Leicester - June 19!
Jon
Jon Pratty
Head of Content
Culture24
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01273 623336 (direct)
01273 623266 (main office number)
07739 287392 (mobile)
Culture24 is the new name for the 24 Hour Museum - an independent
charity who publish a family of websites including:
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www.show.me.uk
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P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Nick Poole
Sent: 02 May 2008 10:16
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: 21st Century digital curation
Mike,
When did I become the 'anti-open' guy? I'm just arguing for common
sense, a valid business model and some kind of prior knowledge about
consumer demand!
Our vision, with MLA and Culture24 for an Integrated Architecture to be
developed over the next 2 years is of a layered set of systems,
protocols, aggregators, light-weight standards and APIs which enable the
consumption of digital content in 3 broadly-defined ways...
1. Through direct 'value added' services like C24
2. Indirectly through 3rd-party aggregated services like VisitBritain
3. Openly via federated services, APIs etc
It is perfectly possible to publish the same piece of content 'freely'
and as part of a packaged (even monetised - horror!) offer without
undermining either.
At least one of the drivers behind this is *exactly* the need to expose
museum content into the EDL, but also to search services and other
mass-market channels. The logic of taking a service-oriented approach is
that it distributes the management overhead for the content itself, and
also (we hope) allows for a virtuous circle through which content is
improved/enriched by users and passed back into the sector.
Not to belittle the technological challenge, but this process is really
about marketing. It's about exposing the museum sector to the consumer
such that, when Ofcom decide to do their next report, they see a
turnaround in the quality, accuracy and overall presentation of digital
cultural content. HLF, MLA, DCMS and all the other funding agencies are
far more likely to invest when they see a strong and positive commitment
from within the community to raising our game.
What is perhaps most exciting about the developments we're undertaking
with Culture24 on behalf of museums in the coming months is that, to my
knowledge, there won't be a single website built. In fact, there'll be a
fair few taken out of commission. I absolutely agree that the second a
project decides to build a centralised/controlled point of access (like
a portal), it is giving itself a long-term overhead it will never be
able to meet.
All best,
Nick (enemy of freedom) Poole
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
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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