Nick wrote:
> It has to be said that the fundamental argument - that releasing data
> into the network leads to downstream secondary benefits which
> outweigh the scope for upstream transactional value - is far from
> made, even though it is becoming axiomatic in our community. It still
> looks like an awfully big risk to most managers schooled in the
> traditional ways of sales and marketing.
Ok, since this is the one area where those of us without the resources or skills for advocacy at a higher level can contribute, how can we address this?
Would case studies help? We already have a lot of digitised data online, could we re-purpose some of that (make it more re-usable, interoperable, discoverable) and compare use/engagement with the traditional web publication?
Flickr Commons is another good place to start, and it provides lots of lovely stats, though we'd also need to be able to quantify existing use of similar resources and the impact on overall collections/revenue of releasing some photos on Flickr.
Or we could look at the effect of OpenSearch implementations on existing collections.
Obviously anything we did to change how we're publishing data would still require institutional agreement and care to make sure we didn't break copyright/use agreements, and that any usage information could be reported with other web stats to the DCMS/funders, so we can't just leap in there, and perhaps getting agreement to try case studies would require a certain amount of advocacy in parallel.
I'm going to shut up now because there are hundreds of subscribers and some of you must have some genius ideas. Or are you all wondering why the same people keep banging on about this?
cheers, Mia
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