This seems to a NOF-digi reminiscence session, and to have a and a
chance to check whether 'it is still there' so I thought I'd join in.
I don't think much in the way of strategy has moved on even though the
means and wherewithal to do the things many of us wanted to at the
time are so much easier now--at least not in my current experience of
another digi project.
There were however smaller scale attempts at aggregation between
partner projects in the same consortium but all of these were
contrived by the people who bid for the money and had little knowledge
or direct involvement in procuring the services to make, for example,
data directly available to search engines.
So although the project I worked on (www.hantsphere.org.uk) shared a
CMS with four other projects (Sense of Place South East
www.sopse.org.uk) and you could search across all five, Google nor
whatever else we were using at the time would have known. I remember
significant complaints at the time about this, and also the lack of
decent over-arching standards--many people banged on about Dublin Core
but didn't really know why and with limited time there was great
pressure just to get stuff catalogued and scanned/photographed or
whatever. Resource Discovery was an item on the agenda that rarely
reached resolution. Many project workers/managers were also brought
into the process far to late down the line when important things like
CMSs were already procured and website design outsourced. All these
points have been made many times before.
The biggest challenge to getting all this data far more widely
available before it gets lost is the fragility of the groupings within
institutions that bid for and later looked after the sites -- some of
which have completely disappeared in institutional restructures.
It would be great if some time and resources could be invested in
tracing the current owners of these sites and create a list first of
'at risk' data first.
It really doesn't seem like almost 10 years ago.
Tehmina
On 28 June 2011 19:30, Fiona Romeo <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> One of the small steps we've taken at the National Maritime Museum is to post our NOF-digi historic photographs to The Commons (over time and where rights allow):
>
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmaritimemuseum
>
> Fiona
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
>> Behalf Of Jon Pratty
>> Sent: 28 June 2011 11:27
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: MCG historical query - criticisms of Culture
>> Online programme?
>>
>> Nick's NOF-digi response, and Mike's subsequent points, bring
>> up all sorts of memories for many of us on this list, I'm sure!
>>
>> Whilst at 24 Hour Museum [in around, say 2002/3 onwards] I
>> was interested in linking to, and perhaps re-presenting
>> NOF-digi content in some form or another. There were [and
>> still are] some really nice sites developed as part of the
>> programme; and yet there was little sense that there had been
>> an over-arching strategic publishing view of the resources
>> proposed before things were commissioned. EnrichUK came along
>> and seemed to me to be about simply indexing the sites, also
>> that it was intended to 'top off' the whole project; a kind
>> of final act.
>>
>> The 2009 JISC-inspired opportunity to re-animate the NOF-digi
>> sites that Nick mentions came about because of my continuing
>> interest in the lottery-funded content; Mike Ellis had just
>> splashed on his great Hoard-It idea at MW2009 in Indianapolis
>> [http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/abstracts/prg_335001935.html]
>> which seemed like just the tech to use to go back and
>> establish a consistent top-down audit or index of NOF-digi sites.
>>
>> My proposal, which I took to Leicester Uni as a partnership
>> idea and to Collections Trust for support, was a two stage
>> approach: firstly, to research the state of the content and
>> see if it was feasible to work with, and secondly to produce
>> some sort of scraped, indexed, taxonomically re-interpreted
>> [curated, if you like] re-published version.
>>
>> As Nick said, the proposal didn't go forward; my own view is
>> that our proposal didn't get the basics across in the way
>> that we should have done, but there you go! It's important to
>> record however, that our first stage would have been a
>> Hoard-It [quite brutal] spidering of the inventory of sites,
>> then a more reflective audit of the content to see how much
>> of it was feasibly re-publishable. The second stage idea
>> would have been to use an online journalistic approach to
>> appraising the content, considering IP status of the images
>> and text, and also the shape and form of it. It was about
>> re-curating again, after that point.
>>
>> That said, the 2009 proposal was actually about R&D, not
>> necessarily to produce a magical re-awakening of the
>> material. What might we have learned? Perhaps, new ways to
>> data-mine old content and invest it with new cultural value;
>> maybe, ways to index and sort content into currently popular
>> themes; approaches to copyright indemnity schemes for older
>> digital content; some knowledge of ways to shape content
>> better in the first place.
>>
>> Putting the bid together it seemed that a lot of the NOF-digi
>> content would have been hard to link to as it was, anyway.
>> Titles were often separate from body text, images floated
>> free from text and captions, titles weren't keyworded,
>> copyright info and captions lived separately from the stories
>> they belonged to. All of things publishing states make it
>> hard to aggregate content.
>>
>> I think the big NOF-digi learning point needs to be around
>> considering, in the first instance, the real lifecycle of
>> your content. Make it simple; keep text, rights info, pics
>> and titles in archivable blocks, and always think how else it
>> might be published on other platforms.
>>
>> JP
>>
>>
>>
>> Jon Pratty
>> Relationship Manager, Digital and Creative Economies Arts
>> Council England
>> +441273 763037
>> 07872419194
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>> Achieving great art for everyone - our 10-year framework is
>> now available Sign up for our e-newsletter -
>> http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/utilities/newsletter/
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>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
>> Behalf Of Nick Poole
>> Sent: 28 June 2011 09:46
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: MCG historical query - criticisms of Culture
>> Online programme?
>>
>> Hi Mike,
>>
>> Cross-project aggregation/metasearch for the NOF-Digi
>> projects was certainly an afterthought, but it did happen in
>> the form of the EnrichUK platform. Sadly, this was
>> short-lived. I am not entirely sure why, but I suspect that
>> it was not widely used.
>>
>> As you know, the Collections Trust worked with Leicester
>> University on a proposal to JISC for a post-hoc aggregation
>> of the content produced by the NOF-digi projects. At the
>> time, this didn't proceed - partly because of the relative
>> complexity of resolving the challenge of retrospectively
>> licensing the content for re-use.
>>
>> We haven't given up, however, and are on the case once again
>> to try and aggregate the legacy NOF-digi content into the
>> Culture Grid. The registry of NOF-digi projects produced by
>> Alastair Dunning at JISC provides a useful way of
>> reconnecting to approximately 2/3 of the material, but there
>> remain real problems in working out exactly how it can be
>> used. One difficulty is that it is neither alive nor dead,
>> but in a state of suspended animation.
>>
>> Personally, given that this represents the largest single
>> body of public investment in Digitisation in the sector from
>> the 'golden age' of museum funding between 1999 and 2005
>> (yes, that was a golden age...), I think we really should
>> collaborate to ensure that the current and next generation of
>> services can make use of it.
>>
>> I'm also *very* keen not to present this as just a technology
>> problem. Yes, there are a number of simple search apps that
>> would do the job, but if that's all we do, we're going to be
>> creating another EnrichUK. So, what is the model for re-use
>> and persistent access which would ensure not only that these
>> things exist, but are actively used by a significant number
>> of normal humans?
>>
>> All best,
>>
>> Nick
>>
>> Nick Poole
>> Chief Executive
>> Collections Trust
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>> Tel: 0207 250 8340
>>
>> OpenCulture 2012
>> The Greatest Collections Management Show on Earth!
>> London, 19th & 20th June 2012
>>
>> http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk
>> http://www.collectionslink.org.uk
>> http://openculture.collectionstrustblogs.org.uk
>>
>> Follow us on Twitter: @collectiontrust
>> Follow me on Twitter: @nickpoole1
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>> Connect via LinkedIn:
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> rk=tab_pro
>>
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>> East Road, Old Street, London N1 6AH
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
>> Behalf Of Mike Ellis
>> Sent: 28 June 2011 09:29
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: MCG historical query - criticisms of Culture
>> Online programme?
>>
>> This is slightly off-piste...
>>
>> But one of the things I never understood about the NOF
>> project was that there was never any cross-project aggregation.
>>
>> We spent months (probably like most people involved in the
>> project) getting our metadata (head tags) right for
>> http://www.ingenious.org.uk, and adhering to what I
>> understood was a NOF-wide standard. The natural next step -
>> and probably not a terribly hard one once all the work had
>> been done by the various projects - would surely have been
>> some aggregation / search?
>>
>> Not a sausage.
>>
>> Maybe someone burnt the money, but still a shame. A £15k
>> Google Search Appliance would have done it :-)
>>
>> cheers
>>
>> Mike
>>
>> Mike Ellis
>> Digital Strategist
>> eduserv
>> t: 01225 470522
>> m: 07017 031 522
>> twitter: @m1ke_ellis
>>
>> www.eduserv.org.uk
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
>> Behalf Of J DAVIS
>> Sent: 27 June 2011 23:05
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: MCG historical query - criticisms of Culture
>> Online programme?
>>
>> I'd remembered City Heritage Guides - once I saw them in the list.
>> They seemed to overlap - quite a lot in some places - with
>> what we were trying to do in the NOF-Digitise Sense of the
>> Place projects that were already well under way or finishing
>> by that time. But it provided more jobs, which is always a
>> good thing, and gathered info in one place where it hasn't
>> vanished, which is A Very Good Thing.
>>
>> One thing that I think came out of 2000-2005 funding for
>> digital projects in public culture was that it would be good
>> to have better overview and coordination across funding
>> streams for future projects.
>>
>> Is there an up-to-date list now of all digitisation & digital
>> culture projects? I'm aware that Alastair Dunning put
>> together a NOF-Digi and HLF projects list a while ago.
>> Janet
>>
>> --- On Mon, 27/6/11, Bridget McKenzie
>> > Ah yes, completely forgot Icons. City
>> > Heritage Guides wasn't in my
>> > consciousness as a collections-based project.
>> ...
>>
>>
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--
Dr Tehmina Goskar, MA AMA
[log in to unmask]
http://tehmina.goskar.com/
Research Officer: ESRC Global and Local Worlds of Welsh Copper
History & Classics
Prifysgol Abertawe / Swansea University
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