Great thread Mike, very big interesting questions and great answers.
My (maybe niche) perspective from a moving image archive, where sometimes we conceptualise the moving image work as an ‘unfinished work’: putting the entire collection online as searchable metadata has led to many other moving image archives, rightsholders, researchers, finding film or tv in our collection that would never reach a curated set, but that:
a. Was believed lost or
b. Had untapped cultural value that they were able to unlock or
c. Helped us generate revenue via access agreements or
d. Enabled academic research viewing and findings or
e. Enabled personal / family research viewings
And so on. I think doing both is obviously the ideal, and we do things like Britain on Film and BFI Filmography where we deliver richer engagement stuff for a selected subset. But enabling access to the entire dataset delivers benefit across multiple categories: transparency, revenue, access, reputation, etc For little overhead.
Why not?
Stephen McConnachie
Head of Data and Digital Preservation,
BFI
Sent from my iPhone
On 26 Feb 2019, at 16:19, Tony Crockford <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> On 26 Feb 2019, at 14:33, Alyson Webb <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> My concern is that if we continue to privilege opinion over evidence we will continue to have make generalisations that perhaps aren’t right for every audience or organisation.
>
> Wasn't Mike's question actually about 'where is the evidence' to answer why museums push to get their entire collections online.
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> "why do collections get a special place at the table? Granted, they’re what makes museums special and unique, and I understand that some museums have a “get X% of your collection online” mandate, but why? "
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> You've answered that from the perspective of a large museum.
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> Like Mike, I'm wondering why smaller museums, with inadequate resources, are seeking to tackle the Big Thing first.
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> Is there any evidence to support a small museum prioritising having their entire collection online?
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> We've pretty much given up on this sort of project, since they all seem to grind to a halt. The tools are there to do it aplenty, but the resource overhead (and drive for inter-operability of data) tends to reduce the depth of the data in favour of completeness.
>
> At one point we (Xebit Ltd) gave serious consideration to a 'collections-in-a-box' solution where we would provide not only the software tools, but also the human resources to digitise and expose collections online - specifically for smaller collections that often remain hidden, unfortunately it's clear that there isn't a one size fits all *best* solution and the amount of bespoke work from one organisation to the next would make the proposition uneconomic for the target market, or make the solution bland and uninspiring.
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> I can't dispute that generalisations wouldn't fit every audience, or organisation.
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> I'll read Mike's blog post with interest.
>
> :o)
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> --
> Tony Crockford
> [log in to unmask]
>
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