Nick and list
As the project manager of an MLA funded project which has resulted in over 110,000 records being fed into Culture Grid I am one of those who have 'taken the plunge'.
Our project has involved four museum services and four archive services in the Black Country and has created a one stop website (blackcountryhistory.org.uk)where users can search across all 8 collections to find out about the wealth of material we hold.
From a user point of view this type of aggregation must surely be good - from our local users point of view they don't have to go to eight different websites to find resources for local history research they can go to just one. And visitors seem to be voting with their feet (or is it their fingers in the context of online resources?) as visitor numbers to our joint website has increased 10 fold in four months since launching the combined website from 1,000 visitors to 10,000 visitors a month (I just hope they like what they find and keep coming back).
We are also building audience targeted websites that focus on a subset of our collections - so we have a Geology Matters website (geologymatters.org.uk) to showcase our geology collections, Inspired Designs (inspired-designs.org.uk) to showcase our decorative art collections etc. This allows partners that only have small numbers of items from these separate collections which wouldn't stand on their own to still get their records out there because between us we have enough items to make it worthwhile. It also means that geologists / artists etc can browse items that appeal to them without having to wade through thousands of, to them, uninteresting things (one of the drawbacks of a site like Europeana). A win - win result for users and for museums.
Then, of course, we feed our data into Culture Grid and then onto Europeana where our items can be seen side by side with other collections from across Europe and I'm also excited about the potential for third parties to create their own apps / widgets using our data API or using the Culture Grid API so our data could end up anywhere... scary or what?
Right from the begining of the project I was determined that whatever we finally created I wanted to make the data and images we put online freely available and to promote re-use - an approach that lead to one potential partner dropping out very early on, not everyone is comfortable with the idea of ther data and images disappearing into the ether and out of their control.
We only put low res images online so we are still hoping to make some money from selling our images and prints but now instead of only 5% of our collections being on display (in our physical spaces) we have about 20% and that percentage should increase year on year as more of our collections are put onto our computer databases and uploaded onto our websites.
I think it's very sad and very short sighted of funders, politicians, the 'powers that be', whoever they are, that this whole area isn't better funded - as you say Nick, CT are running Culture Grid on one strand of a threadbare shoestring, it just isn't enough.
Our customers just don't understand why we haven't got all our collections digitised and online. We were very fortunate to get MLA funding for a part time photographer to support what we wanted to do, but even then we have only photographed the tip of the iceberg that is our collections. Lets just hope that some new funding comes the museums sector way to allow us to digitise more collections.
Finally to anyone thinking of putting their collections online I'd say go for it.
For us the techinical side of this has been relatively painless (which is just as well as I am no techie) due to the brilliant support we have had from James Grimster at Orangeleaf who built the data aggregation back end including the data feed to Culture Grid. The hardest part is getting the collections data into some sort of order so that it can be seen by the public and trying to standardise on terminology etc. And if anyone has cracked how to deal with dates - our collections databases allow us to input values like 19th century, circa 1900, mid 19th cent, 1825 - 1835 which is causing me one big headache at the moment - please get in touch.
One last word - to Mike, I will write a blog article for the MCG website about our project, just a bit overwhelmed with other stuff at the moment.
Linda
Linda Ellis
Project Manager Black Country Collections Online
email [log in to unmask]
tel 01902 552048
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nick Poole
Sent: 22 January 2011 16:29
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Does Europeana make you think culture?
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
Chief Executive
Collections Trust
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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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http://twitter.com/mia_out
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