Gail,
Of late this mailing list has had more than a few ill-considered posts
so it's nice to see someone providing an informed and balanced view.
Cheers!
Paul
On 11 May 2009, at 15:52, Gail Durbin wrote:
> I have just returned from holiday to see the long correspondence about
> ‘Every object ….’
>
> I do not subscribe to the either/or arguments about digitisation and
> projects. To me it is vital to put enormous resources into digitising
> the collections because they are then the core of any other web
> activity
> and the foundation of online user engagement with the content and
> ideas
> of museums. But it is equally important to find ways of developing
> functionality that allow visitors to contribute their knowledge,
> ideas,
> and creativity, in order to create faceted sites that appeal to all
> sorts of people and meet their individual needs and aspirations.
>
> I agree with all the comments that Frankie Roberto and Janet Davis
> make
> about the value of ‘Every object…’. The V&A has not abandoned the
> site and we are working on getting it back online. When the project
> ended two or three years ago the site had a collection of really good
> content contributed by museums and the public where people talked in
> various of ways about the significance of objects to them. The site
> had
> weaknesses in its administrative system and its filters could not
> withstand increasingly sophisticated attacks by spammers. Its
> technical
> architecture proved difficult for us to patch up and it started to
> fill
> with deeply inappropriate material. We could not leave the site
> online.
>
> We considered rebuilding it as a stand alone facility but wanted to
> use
> a more sustainable environment. We have employed a developer to
> rebuild
> the site in Drupal, which is the framework we will use in future for
> all
> our user generated content, and we are about to receive a Drupal theme
> to recreate the appearance of the site. We will then go through a
> process of testing and will relaunch the site later in the year.
>
> One of the group also mentioned PeoplePlay. The site functioned for
> longer that the JISC agreement required but was then taken over by a
> malicious spammer sending out comments to blogs and forums
> purporting to
> come from the PeoplePlay server. Rather than struggle with old
> technology we decided to take it down and migrate the valuable content
> to our main site which we are doing as time allows.
>
> The speed with which we have dealt with these issues has not been good
> but it reflects the constant pressures in large and ambitious
> institutions where exhibitions and new galleries with real deadlines
> or
> the administrative problems related to the collapse of a stats package
> (not to mention the urgent need for an overall redesign) take
> precedence
> over projects that no longer have immovable deadlines.
>
> The conclusions I draw are many. I do not dismiss these large funded
> projects: JISC has enabled valuable digitisation, Culture-On-Line made
> new types of site possible. We need to resolve the conflict between
> content and technology within the criteria for projects. In our case
> outsourcing the technical elements of a project rather than building
> on
> what we have has not always been helpful although for small museums
> outsourcing is often vital. We need to find ways to make advice and
> small sums available to deal with issues that arise after project
> funding has ended. We should perhaps also accept that some of the
> problems raised are inevitable within new technology projects. What we
> know now was not what we knew four or five years ago: APIs were not
> widely seen as a solution, frameworks like Drupal have only recently
> become mature and copyright and licensing issues were not and have
> still
> not been resolved. I agree that a meeting of people who have been
> involved in previous projects to discuss what has been learnt about
> sustainability and issues of legacy would be helpful.
>
> Yours
> Gail Durbin
> Head of V&A Online
>
>
>
>>>> Danny Hope <[log in to unmask]> 09 May 2009 >>>
> 2009/5/8 Dan Zambonini <[log in to unmask]>:
>> To me, these feel like perfect examples to illustrate the 'central
>> repository' vs 'open APIs' debate.
>>
>> Had these projects exposed full, rich, obvious APIs (perhaps they
> did, in
>> which case this argument is invalid!), then the valuable content may
> - and
>> probably would - now be in multiple other locations, sustained
> forever more
>> (of course this would also rely on the content having the relevant
>> licensing: Creative Commons, etc).
>
> Digitisation projects generate value in data rather than functionality
> so, in terms of an APIs, what's needed, could be provided simply by
> authoring sites with POSH, Microformats and a RESTful site
> architecture.
>
> --
> Danny Hope
> User Experience Consultant, Brighton (UK)
> 07595 226 792
> @yandle
>
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