Dear MCGers,
I wanted to pick up on the earlier thread about UGC and to use it to ask for your views about current proposals for the development of the SPECTRUM Collections Management standard.
SPECTRUM is now an international standard - with active communities in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, Ukraine and South Africa. The national partners are part of an overall programme called 'SPECTRUM Local', under which we agree to work together to identify current and future priorities for the development of the standard. In this, we also work with our SPECTRUM Partners - the software vendors and developers responsible for SPECTRUM-compliant Collections Management Systems. You can find out more at http://www.collectionslink.org.uk.
We are now working on the Forward Plan for next year, and so far the following areas have been identified as proposals for development:
- Integration of Digital Asset Management alongside Collections Management as a core strand running through SPECTRUM procedures (such as procedures for Loan, Acquisition, Disposal etc.)
- Procedures for acquisition and management of user-contributed narrative content as part of core Collections Management
- Procedures for the acquisition and management of born-digital art
- Integration of policies/methodologies for digital photography
- Integration of digitisation as a new Procedure
- Integration of new platforms (such as ResearchSpace) which aggregate and repurpose collections content from multiple sources
Our overall aim in the next 3-5 years is to evolve towards a situation in which the acquisition, management, use, loan, transfer and disposal of physical and digital material is integrated into a common set of procedures. This is part of the ambition to 'mainstream' digital collecting that I spoke about in my address to the MCG at the Museum of London last year, and to bring curatorship and digital curatorship together into a common, integrated practice.
The Collections Trust would really welcome views and comments both on the overall direction of the development of SPECTRUM and on the specific areas outlined above. We would also be glad to receive comments about other elements or procedures which the MCG community think we should be looking into.
With thanks in advance for your help.
Nick
Nick Poole
CEO
Collections Trust
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mike Lowndes
Sent: 14 January 2012 12:29
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Storing and re-using UGC.
Hi all,
Been a while since I've posted so hi to you who remember me and maybe a beer sometime in London or Oxford?
UGC can come in many forms, those forms will change, and some of them won't really be under your control.
Where you can get the information in to your core system easily then there's maybe merit in that, but I don't think there's a need to get hung up on the 'one big database' approach in most cases.
There are many ways to gather ugc, but so long as some basic principles are followed reuse should not be a problem. Web systems lend themselves to distributed sources of content because we can easily hyperlink between them. So long as there is a simple identifier shared between the systems, it's not such a big deal where the data is, it's still available and identifiable and reusable. You should store that identifier with the narrative - this narrative is about Item x. So long as x is permanent, eg a record number, the ugc data can be literally anywhere connected to the interwebs.
Just ensure that the software or service you use for UGC, be it local or remote, OS or commercial, allows the storing of metadata like identifiers and technically and contractually allows you to extract the data. Obviously that's a crude example, but the argument can hold if identification has more than one dimension!
As management systems develop they may allow the incorporation of this data, but they should also become flexible enough to incorporate 'calls' to or views of other systems also holding relevant information. The need for one system to hold everything isn't really relevant any more and can often lead to overcomplexity, when simpler more distributed web enabled systems can do the same job cheaper, but can be more responsive to change as innovation occurs.
So, for a start, don't let the fact that your CMS can't incorporate UGC stop you from gathering as much as possible now.
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