Hi Kate,
There have been quite a few UK projects in the past few years looking at how UGC can be managed, stored and re-purposed as part of the overall collections management and interpretation of the collections. The Collections Trust led on a project called 'Revisiting Collections' which developed a methodology and data structure for incorporating UGC (narratives) alongside collections data. You can find out more at http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/programmes/revisiting-collections.
We have since incorporated the metadata structure into the SPECTRUM standard, so that in theory narrative UGC can be incorporated into museum Collections Management Systems. We are also soon going to be starting work on how we integrate Digital Asset Management workflows alongside core Collections Management in SPECTRUM, and I am sure that UGC (assets) will be a key concern here. More information on SPECTRUM 4.0, which integrates the Revisiting Collections structure, is available from http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/programmes/spectrum.
I say 'in theory' above because there were some really interesting lessons we learned from the Revisiting Collections project. Although a lot of the museums we were working with were very keen to acquire, store and manage user-generated narratives, there was a very significant resistance to internalising this material alongside the 'orthodox' collections documentation.
Some people, like the London Transport Museum, did some really interesting work setting up infrastructure to manage UGC (I'd love to hear from them about how this has progressed since), but from my understanding this was largely as a separate dataset from the core collections data. There were some projects that actually internalised UGC into core systems (thinking about the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology in Cambridge, where Robin Boast had some very interesting projects underway) but for the most part there seems to be a strong impulse to 'quarantine' UGC from the main collections data of the institution.
I'd love to hear more about your findings on this, and any updates from colleagues on the list - most of the things I've mentioned above are 2-3 years old and I'm not sure how the picture has evolved.
With best regards,
Nick
Nick Poole
CEO
Collections Trust
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Kate Woodall
Sent: 12 January 2012 01:12
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Storing and re-using UGC.
Dear all
I work at Te Papa Tongarewa, the national museum of New Zealand and am keen to get some feed back about some ideas we are having here.
Across Te Papa we are slowly getting interested in UGC and co-creation for different exhibitions, and I'm keen for all of that material to be deposited within one large database. My, probably naïve, thinking being that this database can then be mined from onsite as well as online and be used to 'pull' out user generated content for the exhibitions, dialogues, school programmes, event etc beyond the purpose that people originally created the material for.
We would (as we do mostly now) make sure upfront that people are aware how their material could potentially be used.
Does any of this make sense?! And even sound vaguely sensible? Is anyone anywhere else collecting UGC material and reusing it?
Kate Woodall | Snr Concept Developer Digital Projects
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa |
PO Box 467 | Cable Street | Wellington
Direct Dial: +64 4 3817079
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