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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