Dear Linda et al,
I'll let Phill update the list directly concerning getting Culture Grid records into Europeana, but I just wanted to respond on the broader point of promotion.
Both Europeana and the Culture Grid have adopted similar approaches in trying to get the platform built and part-populated before promoting it to end-users.
For Europeana, the latest FP7 funding call issued by the European Commission includes a specific, large-scale fund to pay for the promotion of the service to end-users. You are therefore likely to see a far more active approach to marketing and promotion in the next 12 months, particularly as Europeana fights to demonstrate its value prior to adoption for core-funding by the Commission in 2014.
For the Culture Grid, we are running it on one strand of a threadbare shoestring, and don't have the resources to promote it directly to end-users. Even if we did, this is not our intention - the aim with Culture Grid is explicitly not to provide a destination site, but instead to provide the middleware which brokers cultural content into 3rd party services.
To facilitate this, our emphasis in the coming year will be on developing or supporting the development of applications and platforms which consume feeds of content from the Culture Grid and re-present them to users, as well as relationships with broadcast and digital content providers to persuade them actively to repurpose Grid content for consumers.
Your point about content is well-made, though. Aggregation is a fundamentally important business model in the digital domain, and a fundamentally important way of ensuring that the sector is represented in large-scale digital consumer offerings, but it depends entirely on scale. Achieving scale depends on buy-in and thus far the appetite from most of the sector to participation has been fairly lukewarm. It's a catch-22 situation - people tend to be less enthusiastic about buying into something like this until they have seen others take the plunge, but someone has to do it in the first place!
Not that we are exactly empty at 1.2m records, and when the Culture Grid search has seen significant spikes in traffic (such as when it was listed on the homepage of DirectGov back in October), users have been very positive about the breadth of the metadata it currently contains.
I profoundly wish we could buy our way out of the catch-22 in order to accelerate the pace of new people participating in the Culture Grid, but without the resources we are effectively dependent on goodwill and vision. If people on the list were willing to share their thoughts about (a) whether they can see the value in participating (in either Culture Grid or Europeana) and (b) the factors which might be holding you back from picking up the phone, it would make a huge difference to us!
All best,
Nick
Nick Poole
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Linda Ellis
Sent: 22 January 2011 15:24
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Does Europeana make you think culture?
I don't know of anyone within my organisation that uses it or Culture Grid to search for museum objects or art works. The problem is that it still only contains so few datasets. Most people will always try Google first.
Whilst we're talking about Europeana please could Phil Purdey update the group on progress with getting Culture Grid records into Europeana?
Linda
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mia
Sent: 22 January 2011 14:50
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Does Europeana make you think culture?
On 22 January 2011 10:41, Linda Ellis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Do you have any research to say how many museum, library and archive
> professionals know about Europeana, let alone how many use it?
>
> My own gut feeling is that there are very few people outside of those
> actually working on getting their data onto Culture Grid / Europeana
> that know about the site.
I know the mainstream news items about it at the time of launch
reached some art historians and academics, but I don't know whether
they've gone back to use it since. I still get occasional emails from
people telling me about this cool new site they've found (bless).
I'm not sure how datasets become embedded in research practice -
visibility in Google and listings in library catalogues/websites is
probably a good place to start.
Cheers, Mia
--------------------------------------------
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