Dear Trevor, Mike,
Thanks very much for your responses about the Culture Grid. I'll respond
more fully once we've had a few more, but I wanted to address the 'why'
question.
My vision for the Culture Grid has always been as a service not a
destination. It's a cornerstone of the COPE ('Create Once, Publish
Everywhere') strategy that there needs to be middleware that extracts
the collections data, stores it and makes it available to 3rd party
platforms like Europeana, Google Cultural Institute, Digital Public
Space (potentially) and anything else that might come along.
So the 'why' is that a museum would decide to promote themselves to
online audiences by putting their data into these platforms, but instead
of doing it several times for each separate destination, they put it
into the Culture Grid and then tell us who we can share it with. In the
process, we wanted to take some of the cost and some of the risk out of
collections data-sharing so that it is an easier decision for a museum
to make.
I always assumed that once everyone had an API, the need for this kind
of middleware service would evaporate. In practice, one of the key
outcomes of this consultation so far is that this is far from being the
case - people want the Culture Grid to build out the use case,
demonstrate value and actively broker cultural data into things like
hacks and new platforms.
Which brings me to one of the big challenges with the Culture Grid. The
Culture Grid is a free-to-use service (to answer Mike's question), but
to get funding for it, we had to build a search front-end (the website
at http://www.culturegrid.org.uk). Because this was a secondary aim for
us, it's never been promoted as a public-facing destination. However, as
soon as you put up a front-end, everyone wants you to make it something
the public would really want to use. This is one of the challenges
that's faced Europeana all along, and one of the reasons why they're now
focusing on improving the end-user experience of their main website.
It's a critical question in terms of our future strategy - do we:
a) Stick to the vision that the Culture Grid is an enabling service, not
a destination in its own right (which makes it hard to pay for), or
b) Focus on developing it as an end-user destination (which would
involve us getting a lot more involved in quality, standards, rights and
metadata enrichment, or
c) Both, or
d) Neither
Answers on a postcard!
All best,
Nick
Nick Poole
Chief Executive Officer
Collections Trust
Join Collections Trust's Collections Management Group
Follow us on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
www.collectionstrust.org.uk. Company Registration No: 1300565 Registered
Charity No: 273984
Registered Office: Collections Trust, WC 209, Natural History Museum,
Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Reynolds, Trevor
Sent: 03 November 2014 20:15
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] Consultation over the development of the Culture Grid
Hi Nick
Some first thoughts.
Lack of participation by museums:
(I may be wrong) but when I have looked at participation in Culture Grid
it appears to require you to have your collection on-line somewhere
before you can participate. I suspect this is still a barrier to many.
(For various reasons, we still don't have our collections on-line).
Many museums have no IT expertise in house and without a button in
whatever they use to catalogue their collection they will struggle to
participate. What does this mean? In order to increase participation
Culture Grid will need to get suppliers to include "export to culture
grid" as a function of their collections software and will need to be
prepared to host data or find ways of facilitating data hosting (Ideally
the UK could do with something like the New Zealand project that
resulted in ehive).
What is culture grid for
I have never really seen Culture Grid as a destination in itself and I
am not sure that this should be a focus. For me its focus should be on
being the definitive, up to date, source of information about museum
objects in the UK. I don't want (or have the time or resources) to
provide data to PCF or Europeana or all the other very worthwhile
projects that are out there.
Trevor Reynolds, Registrar
English Heritage, 37 Tanner Row, York, YO1 6WP
+44 (0) 1904 601905
________________________________________
From: Museums Computer Group [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nick
Poole [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 03 November 2014 15:00
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [MCG] Consultation over the development of the Culture Grid
Dear MCG'ers,
Some of you may have spotted that we've launched a consultation about
the future development of the Culture Grid (www.culturegrid.org.uk), the
aggregator which currently provides access to 3m+ records from UK
museums, archives and libraries. We have been running the Culture Grid
with the good people at Knowledge Integration for nearly 8 years now
(and its origins predate this considerably in the form of the Peoples
Network Discover Service) and it is time to step back and develop a
clear plan for the way forward.
I hope you won't mind if I shamelessly use you as a focus group for
this, but as the nation's hive mind on all things digital and cultural,
I would like to ask you to share your thoughts and opinions about the
value of the Culture Grid, its strengths and weaknesses and your ideas
both about aggregation in general and the Culture Grid in particular.
I've posted on our blog about our thinking about the Culture Grid - see
http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/blog/culturegrid and we are also
receiving comments directly via this email address or on twitter using
the hashtag #cgfuture.
I would be especially grateful for any views you are able to share
on-list - we are keen for this to be as open and constructive a
consultation as possible, and to ensure that whatever happens next with
the Culture Grid it delivers genuine value for the people who expend
time and effort participating in it.
With many thanks in advance for your ideas and comments!
All best,
Nick
Nick Poole
Chief Executive Officer
Collections Trust
<http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/copyright-seminar/copyright-seminar-
2015>
<http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/>
<http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=3280471&type=member&item=12
7734931&qid=f3e77705-7ec2-44c7-99db-7fe325bb16fc&trk=group_most_recent_r
ich-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmr_3280471> Join Collections Trust's Collections
Management Group
<http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=3280471&type=member&item=12
7734931&qid=f3e77705-7ec2-44c7-99db-7fe325bb16fc&trk=group_most_recent_r
ich-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmr_3280471>
<http://www.twitter.com/collectiontrust> Follow us on Twitter
<http://www.twitter.com/collectiontrust>
<https://www.facebook.com/hiddentreasuresuk?ref=hl> Like us on
Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/hiddentreasuresuk?ref=hl>
www.collectionstrust.org.uk. Company Registration No: 1300565 Registered
Charity No: 273984
Registered Office: Collections Trust, WC 209, Natural History Museum,
Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD
****************************************************************
website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
[un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
****************************************************************
This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain
personal views which are not the views of English Heritage unless
specifically stated. If you have received it in error, please delete it
from your system and notify the sender immediately. Do not use, copy or
disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it. Any
information sent to English Heritage may become publicly available.
Portico: your gateway to information on sites in the National Heritage
Collection; have a look and tell us what you think.
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/archives-and-collections
/portico/
****************************************************************
website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
[un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
****************************************************************
****************************************************************
website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
[un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
****************************************************************
|