There's space here, I think, to imagine something like The Commons on Flickr
as the half-sister of a Collections Management System - for photo archives,
at least.
I'm not claiming for a moment that Flickr is a service a museum should rely
on to store their entire collection, but, it's interesting to view it as a
place where a copy - or many; the entire collection - of an original object
can be placed. If you look at the Application Service Provider model, I'd
tweak that to suggest something like an Application + Depository + People,
or ADP ;)
Given that I'm halfway through Ross Parry's "Recoding The Museum", at the
Disaggregation chapter, the idea that there will ever be One True Collection
Management System seems fruitless. *If* that's accepted, then the idea of
placing copies of objects (or photographs in this case) into a separate,
organic, adaptive information system *which can be harvested*, that's
supplied by an ASP of sorts, beholden to, oh, 20 million or so other
members, seems like a fairly secure alternate "storage facility."
I would hate to reduce the diversity and wonder of a place like Flickr to a
"storage facility," because there is so much more to it than that, but if
we're talking Collections Management, *perhaps* this is a baby step towards
institutions being able to transpose their own information systems into
somewhat agnostic "bucket."
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