Thanks so much everyone for your, as usual, combination of politically
astute and technically informed contributions, plus quite a few dashes
of creativity.
I'm trying to make sense of all of it now into some possible actions,
some of which can feed into the National Collections Online study but
also generally for the MCG, Culture 24, Collections Trust and wider
sector to consider.
I appreciate that this Show Us a Better Way competition is limited.
However,
- the press report did say that the Blue Plaques idea was one of their
favourites, and
- that they wanted to find some more prizes (so this could be an ongoing
and growing initiative),
- the discussion it stimulates can lead to ideas that can be funded from
other sources
- and, it could provide the model (and perhaps even the infrastructure)
for the museums sector to launch its own competition/prize fund for a
cultural collections data initiative.
If anyone has further ideas, keep them coming.
By the way, also many thanks for contributions to my piece on Flickr and
Museums, which is now posted and inviting comments:
http://bridgetmckenzie.blogspot.com/2008/07/flickr-and-museums.html
Best wishes
Bridget McKenzie
Martyn Farrows wrote:
> For those schooled in traditional ways of sales and marketing,
> releasing data into the network for creative use and re-use also opens
> up lots of new opportunities for valuable audience/market
> information. As long as you ensure that the feedback loop is in place
> to get the intelligence that you need. Why not build this in as the
> reciprocal part of the 'deal' for re-using the data in the first place.
>
> The beauty of many web 2.0 style services are that they are
> event-based and can generate lots of interesting usage/pattern data on
> the fly. We've been trialling a system in the schools sector -
> integrated with Google Docs so that the output is also readily shared
> - that generates usage reports at a pretty granular level for teacher
> and student use of freely-available collections data (and sub-sets of
> them).
>
> For very 'asset' we can show for example:
> - who used it
> - for what key stage
> - the specific curriculum point being addressed
> - the usage scenario (in class, independent learning, on an
> interactive whiteboard, etc)
> - whether it was combined with other assets and from which collections
> - if the created 'resource' was shared and re-used (and how many times)
> and so on and so on
>
> Surely info illustrating that type of 'reach' and engagement is
> evidence enough of downstream secondary benefit ... and that may even
> be useful reported to funders? And all it's doing is re-using
> investment that's already been made (in digitisation, etc) so no extra
> investement required to get the ball rolling.
>
> Martyn
>
>
> Ridge, Mia wrote:
>> Nick wrote:
>>
>>> It has to be said that the fundamental argument - that releasing data
>>> into the network leads to downstream secondary benefits which
>>> outweigh the scope for upstream transactional value - is far from
>>> made, even though it is becoming axiomatic in our community. It still
>>> looks like an awfully big risk to most managers schooled in the
>>> traditional ways of sales and marketing.
>>
>> Ok, since this is the one area where those of us without the
>> resources or skills for advocacy at a higher level can contribute,
>> how can we address this?
>> Would case studies help? We already have a lot of digitised data
>> online, could we re-purpose some of that (make it more re-usable,
>> interoperable, discoverable) and compare use/engagement with the
>> traditional web publication?
>>
>> Flickr Commons is another good place to start, and it provides lots
>> of lovely stats, though we'd also need to be able to quantify
>> existing use of similar resources and the impact on overall
>> collections/revenue of releasing some photos on Flickr.
>>
>> Or we could look at the effect of OpenSearch implementations on
>> existing collections.
>>
>> Obviously anything we did to change how we're publishing data would
>> still require institutional agreement and care to make sure we didn't
>> break copyright/use agreements, and that any usage information could
>> be reported with other web stats to the DCMS/funders, so we can't
>> just leap in there, and perhaps getting agreement to try case studies
>> would require a certain amount of advocacy in parallel.
>>
>> I'm going to shut up now because there are hundreds of subscribers
>> and some of you must have some genius ideas. Or are you all
>> wondering why the same people keep banging on about this?
>>
>> cheers, Mia
>>
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>>
>
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