Nick,
Many thanks for this. I lost my previous draft of this reply, so
hopefully this one will at least be better!
It's good to get the cost-benefit approach, and I agree with you in many
ways. One gap in what you wrote, which may be to do with economy of
writing rather than what you believe, is that although you mention both
"realisable cash-value" and "long-terms indirect 'cultural' value", you
then talk solely about monetary costs and benefits. I think that a major
reason why we as a sector have been "breaking the value chain" for far
too long - and I say this in all ignorance of the facts - is the
difficulty of making these equations between the costs of building and
maintaining resources (*relatively* straightforward to predict and
monitor) and the benefits flowing from them. The latter, as you say, are
hard to evaluate and especially to predict (hence our predictions of
financial sustainability are so often awry), we've got it wrong too
often and we don't know how to factor in the non-financial benefits.
This is where I found Laurie Hunter's presentation at last year's DCC
workshop so stimulating (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/docs/Wksppaper.pdf). You
are doubtless well aware of what he has to say and I'm not going to
attempt to characterise it, beyond saying that he suggests that when
accounting for digital preservation we use the "balanced scorecard"
approach, which is designed to weigh up the costs and benefits related
to intangible assets. I'd suggest that this approach should probably
transfer to other museum digital activities beyond simply data
preservation. So at the risk of sounding like a pesky lefty ;-) your
point 4, "The availability of non-market-driven public investment for
digitisation creates an artificially inflated market which promotes mass
content creation over prioritisation", may be neglecting to account for
valuable but uncostable benefits that the market would fail, just as
public investment can fail to reflect financial costs and rewards. Not
that I'd argue against prioritisation, just about how we might do it.
All the same, being financially self-supporting of -justifying is a
valid aim, whether we're talking about content/data and file-based
assets (which is what I infer you are mainly talking about), or whether
we mean larger scale resources like websites, PDA tours or all the other
myriad possible services we can offer users. As I say, I've sort of
assumed that your thoughts are principally connected with so-called
"digitisation projects", in which data and images are digitised,
processed, stuck online somewhere. This content level, being pleasingly
granular, may at least have plenty of options available in terms of
future reuse. Many of the larger-scale entities don't. Building these in
a transparently costable and reusable fashion is also a vaild aim, but a
bit on the tricky side.
Very good point about technology versus staff - it brings home that just
keeping the plain content (or indeed application) available somewhere,
even if it's for ever, is pointless if you do not also ensure that it is
current, pertinent, accurate, readily accessible, *interesting*. This is
one way in which I feel that "sustaining" is hugely different from
"preserving" - <warning>thought in progress</warning> the latter perhaps
seeks to maintain some sort of fixity of state whereas the former
maintains fixity of intention....maybe - at least, some sort of
continuation of an activity with a particular objective in mind.
Preserving a website means freezing it. Sustaining it means ensuring its
ever-changing mutation in support of the site's aims -
communicative/educative/etc.
Sorry we won't be seeing you on Friday but thanks again for your
thoughts. Let's keep them rolling!
Cheers, Jeremy
Jeremy Ottevanger
Web Developer, Museum Systems Team
Museum of London Group
Mortimer Wheeler House
46 Eagle Wharf Road
London. N1 7ED
Tel: 020 7410 2207
Fax: 020 7410 2201
Email: [log in to unmask]
www.museumoflondon.org.uk
Glamour, grandeur, sleaze, disease - discover a great city in the making with lots of holiday activities at the Museum for all ages
Register for regular Museum updates with [log in to unmask] Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Nick Poole
Sent: 22 September 2006 18:31
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] Sustainable new media
Nick,
I'm afraid I'll be giving next week's session a miss, but I look forward
to this email discussion with interest.
From my perspective, there is a unit cost of creating and keeping a
piece of digital information. That piece of digital information is
likely to have a value - whether in terms of realisable cash-value or
long-terms indirect 'cultural' value.
If the realisable value of the piece of information exceeds the unit
cost of creating it, then it should be sustainable (emphasis on
'should').
We have developed some dodgy habits which effectively break this value
chain...
1. We tend not to take into account the true cost of creating and
publish a piece of digital information.
2. Previous work on creating digital objects has focused on technology.
The lessons of the past 5 years tend to indicate that the real problem
lies in sustaining meaningful editorial/workflow around the objects
themselves.
Basically, servers cost less than staff.
3. We don't really know enough about which bits are likely to have
real-terms cash value, and there has been a tendency to overestimate the
commercial viability of the resources;
4. The availability of non-market-driven public investment for
digitisation creates an artificially inflated market which promotes mass
content creation over prioritisation;
5. The unit cost of creation, and particularly storage, is far higher
for individual ad-hoc/local projects than it is for large-scale
aggregated ones (because the further you go towards big content
repositories, the more significant the economies of scale become), but
we persist in developing the former.
Now, if there were a mechanism which allowed market forces to work on
the prioritisation and funding of digital cultural content, then the
resulting equilibrium would be properly sustainable...
Not sure about preservation...
Nick
Nick Poole
Director
MDA
The Spectrum Building, The Michael Young Centre, Purbeck Road,
Cambridge, CB2 2PD
Telephone: 01223 415 760
http://www.mda.org.uk
http://www.collectionsforall.org.uk
The revised edition of SPECTRUM, the UK museum documentation standard,
is now available. Download it for free at:
http://www.mda.org.uk/spectrum.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Ottevanger, Jeremy
Sent: 22 September 2006 11:10
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Sustainable new media
Dear all,
For those in a hurry, the short version:
Before next week's MA/DHRG conference "Fast Forward: Building a
sustainable new media future for UK Museums", I'd really appreciate your
definitions or understanding of a few terms:
* Sustainable/sustainability
* Digital object
* Preservation
The long version, for a bit more explanation:
The Museums Association and Leicester University's Digital Heritage
Research Group are organising next week's "Fast Forward" conference. In
my role as a research student with the DHRG, I am in the initial stages
of investigating precisely this area (the working title of the project
is "Sustaining public-facing digital assets in museums"). I am aware
that there are multiple meanings, assumptions and understandings with
regard to many key terms - indeed almost every word in the project's
title would be contested - and I would very much appreciate your
interpretations. It seems like a good idea to ask the question now,
before the conference - we can start with quite fresh "first takes", as
well as perhaps develop our ideas a little before the 29th. So your
thoughts, please, on the meanings of:
* Sustainable/sustainability
* Digital object/digital asset, and indeed any related term (I
suspect the word "virtual" may crop up, perhaps "learning object", what
else?)
* Preservation
At some point I'd also like to explore that old chestnut, the limits of
the museum and its responsibilities to digital material, but that might
be better left for another time.
I will of course ask your permission before citing any responses. Many
thanks in advance,
Jeremy
Jeremy Ottevanger
Web Developer, Museum Systems Team
Museum of London Group
Mortimer Wheeler House
46 Eagle Wharf Road
London. N1 7ED
Tel: 020 7410 2207
Fax: 020 7410 2201
Email: [log in to unmask] www.museumoflondon.org.uk
Glamour, grandeur, sleaze, disease - discover a great city in the making
with lots of holiday activities at the Museum for all ages
Register for regular Museum updates with [log in to unmask]
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