Hi Nick,
It's an exciting proposition and not before time. Without reading the
vision document, my reaction to your four questions below is:
1. Is the provision of content (metadata, data and images) in a
proactive way to the HE/FE sector a current priority for your museum?
[Jeremy]
Yes.
2. How willing is your institution to make the body of your
collections-based information available for aggregation so that it can
be shared (for free) with researchers and learners?
[Jeremy]
The signs at present are: willing to very willing
3. What would prevent you from making Collections data available
to the HE/FE sector in this way?
[Jeremy]
Although this one's really best answered by our collections
management/documentation people (who may add some caveats around data
quality, but I suspect would not), I think the principle barrier would
be technical, and that's a temporary situation. The other issue that's
emerging relates to data licensing, which I think people have thought
about so little in comparison to licensing media that when they realise
there's a question there it could make things grind to a halt whilst
they consider the implications...
On that subject, actually, it's worth taking a look at the DCC guide to
licensing research data. It's a different area to ours but there are
areas of similarity and there's lots of though-provoking stuff in there:
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/license-research-data
4. What is the most valuable thing we could do to increase the
value for museums of making content available to the HE/FE community?
[Jeremy]
1) Measure use and impact. This means that your data services have to
be good, because if they're not sophisiticated then people will have to
take the data away somehow, at which point you may lose the capability
of measuring its use (I'm not saying it shouldn't be possible for
researchers or other users to download datasets, only that it's better
if you can provide a service that makes it unnecessary). It also means
providing good ways to cite data in publications so that this can be
tracked.
2) Return to the data providers anything that actually enriches their
original dataset.
Cheers, Jeremy
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