>Wouldn't it be nice to pull off the same trick for digital
> delivery?

Isn't a significant part of the problem how 'digitial delivery' is
perceived?  Shouldn't it be a tool to acheive other ends rather than
an end in itself?  Provision of access to collections and
collections-based information to anyone from a school child to an
academic researcher to a tourist is obviously of crucial importance to
those interested in using and developing digital tools for the
cultural and hertiage sectors.  It shouldn't just be in the interests
of those providing these tools to push for recognition as a
fundamental aspect of cultural provision.  It rather needs to be at
the core of educational projects, curatorial projects and exhibition
projects.  Digital delivery must be seen by those who hold the purse
strings not as an optional extra but as an essential part of providing
a service which is valued in its own right.

I am convinced one of the biggest reasons why so many digitisation
projects have remained stagnant since the end of NOF, for example, is
because the senior managers, stakeholders, members, trustees or
whoever, have not been convinced that there is a need to sustain and
improve them as a core activity (I speak from personal experience
where my then head of service rather saw the project as a 'monument'
rather than a living resource that deserved sustaining).  I wonder if
the lack of understanding about the power of digital delivery to
provide imformation, particularly of collections (my interest), is
because it has a reputation as being 'something separete' from the
essential activies of a library, museum, archive service,
archaeological unit or whatever, rather than integral to it.  Now we
have become used to public library catalogues online, we would not
dream of not maintaining them in the future, and neither would those
who provide and use the service.  Why should it not be the case of
other collections and information?  Why should online catalogues not
be expanded into repositories?  It will never replace the value in the
'real thing', quite the opposite.

The last point, which is believe is part of the problem for funding
the maintenance of digital resources is the lack of cooperation and
communication among organisations who could usefully pool their
resources and expertise and work together. There seems to be a mutual
suspicion that working together will somehow relinquish control over
what 'happens' to the collections or other information.  Consequently
you might have a local museum or museum service going off and applying
for money to do one thing, a record office going elsewhere and a
library service going elsewhere again, with little effort to
co-ordinate.  What a waste of money, time and resources?  And what a
shame.  I know there must be exceptions to this but I have spoken and
worked with enough people to know this territorial attitude towards
collections and information exists and won't be broken down until a
shared ideology of the purpose of cultural and historical collections
is established.  Libraries, museums and archives, as you won't need
reminding, view their collections in very different ways, as they do
their public provisions.  And what of historic environment records and
archaeology units?  Why are they not integral to the other providers
of heritage and cultural information?  It will take time for these
separate traditions to either decide they should abandon co-ordination
on any basis (possibly too late for this), or will find a way to keep
the distinctiveness of their traditions but still be committed to
working closely together when it comes to delivering to the public.
Surely the best way to do the latter is to use digital tools?

Thank you for the opportunity to write about this on this damp Friday morning!

Tehmina




On 29/09/06, Nick Poole <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Jeremy,
>
> I'm sorry you think this is gobbledygook, but it isn't a simple argument.
>
> Happy to address any constructive thoughts!
>
> 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 jeremy
> coote
> Sent: 29 September 2006 09:29
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Sustainable new media
>
> There's gobbledygook and gobbledygook.
>
> J
>
> On 28 Sep 2006, at 23:01, Nick Poole wrote:
>
> > Jeremy,
> >
> > Thanks for this reply. If we did a Hilbert-style list of the 10 'hard
> > problems' facing our sector, I'd argue that the quantification of
> > cultural
> > value would be up there in the top 3.
> >
> > The lack of a justifiable link between real-terms value and
> > cultural/public
> > benefit infects every area of our discourse. I can argue that a web
> > project
> > delivers a 50% increase in school-age visitors, but what effect has
> > it had?
> > Did it make them better, or worse, or different? Did they learn
> > anything of
> > value and will it encourage them to become habitual users in
> > future? Maybe,
> > but there's no external evidence or externally-validated
> > methodology which I
> > can use to construct a business case for my HLF bid.
> >
> > Of course, this issue isn't limited to us. Viz the work done by the
> > British
> > Library, BBC and others into public value in recent years. I
> > imagine that
> > BBCi have a hairy time demonstrating delivery against the Charter.
> >
> > The problem is that the extent to which we can balance the value
> > chain with
> > intangible public benefit depends on how well-disposed the incumbent
> > administration is to this kind of argument. The emerging Treasury,
> > with its
> > talk of 'zero baselines' and 'cost per user', is not really looking
> > favourably on this slightly woolly equation.
> >
> > I really think it is time to take a leaf out of the books of the
> > museum
> > educationalist. This is exactly the issue confronted by them
> > through the
> > Inspiring Learning for All framework.
> >
> > 5 years ago educationalists had no consistent framework for
> > articulating the
> > value of delivering education in museums. Whatever your take on
> > ILFA, it has
> > provided a valid framework for balancing the equation, which has
> > subsequently been adopted by external agencies such as funders. The
> > net
> > result is greater investment in, and more sustainable delivery of,
> > museum
> > education. Wouldn't it be nice to pull off the same trick for digital
> > delivery?
> >
> > Btw. You are right in thinking that most of my comments are
> > directed towards
> > the more granular digitsed assets. On the larger scale (websites,
> > galley
> > interactives), this is a deep organisational issue. Investment in
> > digital
> > services (as opposed to digital objects) has enabled the creation
> > of a meta-
> > (digital) sector, but without the baseline infrastructure and
> > capacity to
> > manage the effective doubling of our offer. So, we're all playing
> > catchup
> > with the creation of a surrogate sector.
> >
> > 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: 25 September 2006 18:23
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: Sustainable new media
> >
> > 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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