OpenCulture

Two events this week have reay got me thinking. The first was the excellent JISC Digital Content Conference 2009 (#jdcc09) which brought together 200 HE/FE techies and librarians to talk about how to get more content to more people via the Web.

The second was today’s Museums Copyright Group conference, held in the beautiful (air conditioned!) Sackler Wing at the V&A.

The difference between the two was striking. As the JISC Confernce unfolded, the low steady chant of the first day (’free your data, free your data, free your data’) became a roar by the second. This was a room to which you could say ‘crowdsource’ without 200 people thinking ‘git’.

Among this community, the principle of aggregation - most eloquently expressed by Mike Ellis of Eduserv - was simply a truth that was universally acknowledged. ‘Locked in’ data is wasted data? Oh yes. Everything should syndicate to everything else? No doubt. Set it free? Yes, yes, yes.

And the barriers? ‘THEM’. Those people over there on the other side of the island - the weird managers, the recidivist copyright purists, the clueless funders and politicians.

So I took this idea to my presentation to today’s Museum Copyright Group under the title ‘The Challenges of Aggregation’. I told them of the passion and enthusiasm for open data in the technology community, of API, REST and SWORD and of Tim Berners-Lee and his call-to-arms paper for the Cabinet Office.

Copyright, I said, depends on licensing, and licensing depends on transitions and states. It depends on a ‘licensor’ and a ‘licensee’. Transactional economies depend on constraining supply and monetising the addition of value through labour. Open data says we need to move beyond this, to embrace radical trust and to accept the proposition that over there, on the other side of the valley, lies a world of stable, repeatable downstream revenue and a new kind of social equity with our consumers.

But unsurprisingly, this proposition, so eagerly accepted the day before, went down like a Demon server with the copyright community. Achieving quality costs money, the thinking went. Newspapers are withdrawing free services and going back to subscriptions and micro-transactions because radical trust wouldn’t pay the wages of a sub-editor.

Without damning the MCG room, there was a view of the Open Data movement as a bunch of hyperthyroid script kiddies with a limited grasp on the reality of business. It was only when one of their number said ‘I’ve spent the past decade creating a carefully thought-out business based on selling images of our core collection. Perhaps that business is dying’ that there was a thrill of realisation that this could be something more than a transitory moment.

But most of all, here are voices - serious, intelligent professional voices with a passionate commitment to the sector and its users. These voices want to achieve change and progress, but they exist in almost complete isolation from one another. And both exist in similar isolation from the community of managers who could actually take their passion and turn it into organisational priority. So, as ever, the question remains - how on earth do we get them all in a room and working together?

Innovation, it seems, is all the rage. The final Digital Britain report refers to it no less than 76 times (compared to 5 mentions of the word ‘museum’) - although to be fair this compares pretty favourably to the 91 mentions of ‘users’ and 80 of ‘value’.

Reading through the report, it is clear that whatever the unique selling point of UK Plc may be, much of it rests on our ability to innovate - to generate new ideas, techniques, products and business models. The real economics of the Digital Economy are opaque at best, but they certainly seem to depend on monetising both our ability to generate new Intellectual Property and our first-mover advantage (such as it may be) in fields from gaming to infrastructure and possibly even culture.

This is, itself, no bad thing. The UK has a long heritage of boffinry and invention and our contribution to the global advancement both of technology and humanity (give or take some expansionist Colonial behaviour) has consistently outpaced our size and the scale of our public investment.

But there is also a risk in placing too much emphasis on innovation. Innovation is fluid, heterogenous and dependent on momentum. It leaves the humdrum work of generating real, stable services to those who trail in its wake. It doesn’t have to think about sustainability and user-support because it is a locomotive driven by the relentless force of progress.

The reason I have been thinking about this lately is that I have been involved in the assessment process for a Government funding programme. Among the many criteria for the programme was that the proposals should demonstrate ‘innovation’.

But what does innovation look like? Here were almost 200 proposals setting out ambitious programmes of work using social media, mashups, interoperable data, computer console interfaces and the like. All of them were good projects. Not one of them did anything which hadn’t been done before, broke new technological ground or significantly advanced the collective fund of knowledge. All of them, without exception, claimed to be ‘innovative’.

I happened to be discussing this with a senior academic specialising in the frontiers of interface design. He spoke of haptics which use temperature to refine the sensation of virtual objects, of smart gels and new ways of using social media to generate more telling forms of evaluation. Here was true innovation, but none of it is ready to be applied to the current generation of real-world services.

It seems to me that in pursuing innovation, we are doing a disservice to the process which takes these new ideas and turns them into something usable, stable and profitable (in every sense of the word). Perhaps we should be thinking about funding programmes which prize not innovation, but stability and the use of technologies which, despite being 2-3 years old, are accessible and familiar to a critical mass of real-world audiences?

The Collections Trust is currently involved in an AHRC/EPSRC Science and Heritage Programme project called EGOR. ‘EGOR’ stands for Environmental Guidelines: Opportunities and Risks, and the aim of the project is to re-assess the environmental impact of the various standards frameworks used by museums, archives and libraries.

While the recent Museums Association enquiry into sustainability for museums was a bit all over the place, EGOR is defined much more tightly around the technologies and protocols we use to modulate risks to collections and buildings presented by environmental factors such as heat, light, ventilation and pollutants.

The project is led by Nancy Bell of the National Archive’s Collections Care Department, and is seeking to address some of the fundamental questions including:

• How valid is the science underpinning current ‘best practice’ models?
• Are our current tolerances for environmental control best-suited to the needs of the collections?
• What are the metrics we need in order to map the impact of varying standards?
• Are passive technologies viable alternative for active Environmental controls?

This question about the reality of our beliefs about Environmental control in cultural organisations has been running for some time now. Following the dramatic increases in fuel prices of the past 2-3 years and broader developments in the Conservation and Climate Change communities, there is an increasing tendency to look on active Collections Management as a significant overhead for museums. For some larger Hub and National Museums, the costs of heat and light are accounting for almost 40% of their operational overhead.

Collections Management has always been about the active management of a careful equilibrium between preservation, use and cost. Tweaking one variable has a profound effect on the others. The reality for museums is that the demand for their services has increased, and their operating budgets are in decline. This can only result in a gradual diminution first of Collections Care and ultimately of collecting itself.

The unfortunate truth, then, is that the cultural community may need to adjust its view of what constitutes the responsible long-term management of the collections in our care.

There is a vision, a bright shiny vision of a new future in which museums and their users become conspirators in the process of capturing, preserving and interpreting culture. These new museums will be open, democratic, agile and able to reflect the shifting patterns of life in contemporary society.

This vision is informed in part by the vocabulary of the Digital Revolution - a post-Web 2.0 vocabulary of ‘prosumers’ and ’perpetual beta’ which denotes a basic attitudinal shift in the process of producing and delivering services.

These new models, even where they don’t involve technology, are intrinsically connected to a technological world-view. A picture in which there are no barriers to entry, a Digital meritocracy where both tools and content are open to all to use, where you can go from idea to business to millionaire in the space of a week.

This picture is, of course, mythical. Ever since the 1950’s, technology has earned its keep by promising more than it is capable of, and the new era is no different. Although the code may be open-source, the community of people who are able to do anything with it represents just as much of an oligarchic closed shop as the Athenian aristocracy.

This glamour - the illusory and fleeting appeal of vogueish technologies which makes it impossible to discern real, lasting social movements from tiny whorls of Digital possibility - is dangerous for any sector which embraces it too readily, and particularly so for one as delicately positioned in society as Cultural Heritage.

There is a thrusting, ambitious and enegetic new media movement in museums, and previous suggestions that the place of museums is not at the bleeding edge has been met with a kind of stunned opprobrium - but only ever from a handful of people. For the rest - those who are fighting against constrained circumstances and small politics - there is a real need to translate all of this possibility down to real, achievable outcomes which can be implemented locally and which will deliver local value.

Because we are at risk of the front-runners becoming completely dissociated from the mass of museums, of the realites of practice becoming divorced from the possibilities of the social web. Yes, our users could (perhaps should) become our collaborators. And yes, the process of assigning meaning to collections should become more democratic. And yes, too, technology has the potential to provide channels and platforms through which some of this could be achieved. But these things are luxuries which many museums can ill-afford.

So, yes to prosumers. But yes, too, to my Gran who wants a nice place to go and be told about interesting things.

Things are (finally!) moving on the Culture Grid front. If you missed it in previous posts, ‘Culture Grid’ is the working title for the MLA-funded project to connect cultural data and the online mass-market, mopping up the last 10 years of legacy services on the way.

Stage 1 is to invest in the Peoples Network Discover Service platform so that it can handle a variety of different content formats, supported by API, SOAP and OAI harvest in and a variety of web services to get the content back out.

This investment began with the BBC CenturyShare project, which we’ve just signed off with the BBC and Knowledge Integration. CenturyShare runs on the PNDS infrastructure, and allowed us to develop towards a new more extensible version (v3.0!)

Stage 2 is to implement a managed withdrawal from the legacy services - Cornucopia, MICHAEL and the MLA Institution Server. This is tricky, because about 7 individual services depend on Cornucopia for backend infrastructure, not to mention the SSNConnect platform, which draws on Cornucopia data.

As part of this withdrawal, we’ll be harvesting these datasets into the PNDS/Culture Grid architecture, and doing some testing to make sure they’re nice and stable.

Stage 3 gets really interesting. We’ve got 3 dependent projects which will be putting data into the Grid and drawing it back out again via web services to develop web interfaces. The Peoples Record is a London 2012/Cultural Olympiad project which will use the Grid as backend infrastructure. The Grid will also power our contribution to the EuropeanaLocal prototype in September (the last staging post before full Europeana integration). Finally, we’ll be working to get the Grid content exposed to GoogleBase for indexing via Google.

Alongside all of this, we’ve got a whole lot of development going on. Naomi Korn is going to be working with us on the Rights framework (and we’ve got a discussion going on with DACS and the UK IPO to set up a licensing scheme to make it work). We’ve been talking about the Digital Preservation angle and thinking about setting up a long-term preservation strategy for all this metadata.

Then we’ll need to sort out sector address data so we can start running location-based services through the Grid. All of which while we’re running the parallel redevelopment of Collections Link. Oh yeah, and we’ve got to make a proposal for the use of Persistent Unique Identifiers under Europeana.

Don’t say we never tell you what we’re doing!

A profoundly exciting conversation with Richard Light yesterday has got my head buzzing about Linked Data and the real ambition of the next phase of development in cultural services.

Collections Trust is working on a project called the Grid, which is basically a next-generation evolution of the Peoples Network infrastructure which aggregates metadata from cultural institutions and serves it up to mass-market services such as Google, the BBC and - interestingly - anyone else who wants to consume it via an open API.

I spent some time this morning looking at Tim Berners-Lee’s TED presentation about Linked Data and two thoughts struck me:

1) The guy is way too young to be the inventor of the Internet and

2) The net result of the last generation of publicly-funded digitisation is not services, it’scritical mass. It’s about the sheer volume of more or less catalogued data forming part of the global collective effort to extrapolate meaning from connected datasets.

Richard is a genius, in many ways, and at least partly because he just does stuff. So, he’s been working with the Wordsworth Trust’s dataset (with the permission of Jeff Cowton, another hero of museum information world) to dismantle it and express it as RDF triples…(sound of roughly half the audience for this post disappearing).

It means that the dataset is transformed from being a database of records into a database of references - every concept in the system is assigned a unique URL, and every assertion it makes about the world is then available to other systems as a reference.

What does it mean in practice? I’m still working that out. On the one hand, it means that the culture sector steps out of the dark web and is able to contribute to the collective global fund of knowledge and meaning. On the other, it means that our organisations can connect to, consume and repurpose the collaborative efforts of countless others, all over the world. In the same way that DBPedia is different from Wikipedia, the next generation of cultural services seems to be based on openness and interconnectedness.

Could it be that we are finally seeing the point of interoperability?

‘The Geek shall inherit the Earth’. As jokes go, it was never really all that great, but about 5-6 years ago, it really seemed to fit. We were entering the Digital Age, which perhaps more than any which preceded it split the cognoscenti from the layman.

Either you could ‘code’, or you couldn’t, and if you couldn’t you were excluded from having a right to an opinion about all sorts of things. Suddenly, the geek was king and your 30 years of experience in sales or marketing didn’t matter at all, grandad.

And so, for much of the past decade, it has been. Funders, dazzled by the glory and promise of the Web, lost their senses and began funding things like mass-digitisation, which a few short years before they would have sent away to write a proper Business Plan. Technology became the industry which earned its keep by promising more than it could really deliver.

But recently, things seem to have changed. We have lived with the new generation of web tools (which don’t require you to do anything more than drag and drop - check out Weebly if you don’t believe me) for long enough that technology just doesn’t hold the same kind of terror for non-geeks anymore.

Suddenly, the old world of common-sense and supply and demand seems to be reasserting itself. I say this because in the past few months I have encountered a new breed of policymaker. The PlayStation Generation is coming into its own and they’re seeing through the glamour of technology. we can’t say to them ‘you don’t get it’ because they do, they just don’t agree that IT is the universal panacaea it was once presented as being.

Evidence? The Semantic Web has gone very quiet. Politicians are suddenly talking about funding infrastructure not websites. Senior, important people are saying things like ‘couldn’t we just build that in Wordpress?’. People have stopped talking about a ‘Digital’ agenda as an end in itself, and have started talking about cross-platform multi-channel marketing in which the Web is just one of many components.

Welcome to the Brave Old World!

This post is based on the text of an email to the Museums Computer Group responding to the announcement of the publication of the BSI PAS197:2009: A Code of Practice for Cultural Collections Management.

The BSI release is the first part of an ongoing series of communications activities around this standard.To clarify what it is - the full title is ‘BSI Publicly Available Specification 197:2009, Code of Practice for Cultural Collections Management’.

It is a  joint Code of Practice with the British Standards Institute which the Collections Trust has sponsored (with the support of the Museums, Libraries and  Archives Council) and which has been developed in broad consultation with the sector over the past 18 months with direct input from a Steering Committee of museum, archive and library practitioners.

The starting proposition for the Code of Practice for Cultural Collections Management is quite simple. After 30 years of Collections Management practice, and 10 years of concerted investment, the museums, libraries and archives sector has reached a stage of considerable knowledge and sophistication about the processes and implications of acquiring stuff, caring for it, interpreting it and making it available to the public (the eternal continuum, in the words of the PAS, between collections development, collections information, collections access and collections care).

We at the Collections Trust believe that our industry is at the intersection of some very profound shifts - in technology, in consumer behaviour, in our understanding of economic and environmental sustainability and in our behaviours and values about collections and collecting. This tipping point represents both an opportunity and a risk.

The opportunity is to define a next generation of professional practice which builds on our collective experience, consolidates it and enables us to move forward with confidence. The risk is that we abandon this knowledge and busily set about reinventing the wheel.

The ‘role’ of the standard, then, in the sector is to act as a catalyst. It is to capture the value of decades of professionalisation in Collections Management, to give it a focus and to use it to set the agenda for the next generation of services.

Underpinning this are some critical developments in the sector. For one thing, there is no longer such a thing as a ‘pure’ museum, archive or library.  Instead there are organisations managing an increasingly complex range of content and material and presenting it to an increasingly sophisticated audience in increasingly multi-faceted ways.

This is why the entire focus of the work on the Code of Practice has been on creating something that is as ‘platform-independent’ or inherently cross-domain as possible. In so doing, the Steering Group has created a ‘lingua franca’ - a common definition of the scope of Collections Management which we believe will work for curators, archivists and librarians (and in the process encourages them to share their knowledge and skills more explicitly). It is, in this sense, a ground-up approach to interoperability as an inherent property of management systems, rather than as a feat of retroactive engineering.

This bit is critical - it attempts to resolve the ‘either/or’ question about how you approach your collections. ‘Do I have to use SPECTRUM to manage my archive? Can I use CALM for my object records?’. The answer is that the PAS 197 Code of Practice provides an overarching framework which lets you ‘assemble’ an approach to managing your collections that is appropriate to your collections and the uses you want to put them to. It means not having to say ‘I am *this* kind of organisation, and this alone’.

The second key development is the reduction in silos between functions and systems across different parts of these institutions. A key aim of this work is to move from a system in which there is a division between front and back-of-house, between education and documentation, towards something much more holistic and better-integrated.

The emphasis here is on resolving the division between collections knowledge and other types of information and working towards integrated information systems which allow knowledge to flow freely between different parts of the organisation.  And before you ask - yes, this is how we see the future of SPECTRUM. Ultimately, we believe that Information Management in museums, archives and libraries will be a utility, happening in the cloud, but for now we have to content ourselves with integration and exchange.

So…to try and reduce all that down to a simple proposition - it is a standard for the next generation of Collections Management practitioners which builds on the knowledge and experience of the current and previous generation. It provides an integrated, holistic and proportionate approach to defining Collections Management practice in your institution.

It is also, absolutely, emphatically, a starting point for discussion. You’ll know that we make a habit of not doing these things unilaterally and we are totally aware that this thing will only fly if you lot want it. Hence the standard was developed with comments from more than 200 of you, and its publication kicks off a 2-year review period. More information about how to contribute to this will be circulated shortly.

As for the other questions you’ll want answers to…

Is it part of Accreditation? No, but we hope it will inform the review of the Accreditation Scheme happening in the next 2 years.

Do I have to buy it? We’ll be circulating some information about what’s in it and who is likely to need a copy as part of our comms about it.

Do I have to do it? Chances are you already are, in some form, but no - it’s not an obligation.

Does it replace SPECTRUM? Nope, it mainstreams SPECTRUM (and other archive/library infomatics standards) within a broader framework of organisation-wide Information Management which serves the interests both of the collections and their users.

I attended this morning’s session at NESTA at which Stephen Carter gave the keynote address about the Digital Britain review (really his first public statements since the publication of the interim report a couple of weeks back) - thanks to Bridge Mackenzie at Flow for the heads-up about the event!

A fascinating session, it was yet another tantalising glimpse of how significant Digital Britain could be for museums, archives and libraries.

NESTA have posted full video of the event here.

The session was chaired by Jonathan Kestenbaum of NESTA. He really hit the nail on the head when he said that Digital Britain was really giving voice to a feeling, a sense of convergence which is happening across the Media, Tech, Cultural and Creative industries.

Stephen Carter is an interesting guy - ex of James Walter Thompson and the founding CEO of OfCOM, he is a great speaker and it is well worth listening to his 20-minute unprepared commentary if you can. His three-word mantra ‘poetry, plumbing, proficiency’ pretty much sums up the digital agenda in the culture sector for the past decade or so. It’s all about content, infrastructure and developing the skills and confidence to wield the tools of technology to best effect.

He spoke a lot more ‘about’ the review process than he did about the review itself, but what is clear is that there is a real recognition within Government that the Digital Economy *could* have a profound impact on the stability of the real economy if (and only if) we can work out some viable long-term business models around both content and next-generation Broadband access.

What was probably most interesting for museums, though, was the absolutely unequivocal view that eGovernment and online public service delivery (including access to the creative output of the Creative & Cultural Industries) are two of the most important foci and drivers for this work. Ultimately, as Carter pointed out, all of the great strides in technology in the UK have depended on public money from public markets, and the next phase will be no different.

Peter Bazalgette (media pundit and partially responsible for bringing Big Brother to the UK) gave some excellent insights into the realities of the situation. Again, he highlighted the Cultural and Creative Industries as key agents and drivers of content, which in turn generates demand. He also pointed out the tremendous shift which has taken place in recent years in which prosumers are driving an unprecedented increase in the content flowing across the network.

Absolutely, said Neil Berkett from Virgin Media, but we’re not in the game of giving it all away. All of this future prosperity depends on realising that the old monolithic transactional industries (CD anyone?) are dead, and that the next generation of business, funding and legal models will have to stop shoring up the old industries, and focus instead on fostering the new ones.

In this world, he noted, you and I have two forms of currency - our attention span and our own content. The future depends on establishing non-transactional models which understand that the dividend, the payoff, may be two or three transactions away from the point of consumption.

Heady stuff indeed, but Kestenbaum is right - there is an atmosphere, a commitment, a momentum behind this one which marks it out. Digital Britain may not change the world, certainly for museums, but if it is any indication of the scope and quality of Government thinking on this issue, there are exciting things to come!

What is the biggest problem with paper-based Documentation systems? The biggest problem is that they require direct manual intervention from an intelligent human being to make them useful. This places the burden of responsibility, and hence the overhead, on the side of the human and essentially places a statute of limitation on how much information we can hande.

So why is this a problem? Well, it’s a problem because we haven’t got enough time, money or people in museums to pursue a completist approach to Documentation. Our sector is suffering collectively from the indigestion of acquiring far too much stuff during the 80’s and 90’s, and it is an unfortunate fact that this means that far too much of our collections are largely unrecorded.

Machine-readable technologies such as barcoding, Radio-Frequency ID tags and event newer technologies such as DNA sprays have the potential to revolutionise our approach to this problem for one simple reason - they make objects ‘intelligent’.

If the object can shoulder more of the responsibility for describing itself, if it can literally shout ‘here I am, here’s my unique number’, then a whole raft of interesting things happen. Firstly, there can be a direct connection between the object and the database record about it - something that is still laborious in  current practice. The technologies can be used to automate important and time-intensive activities such as Location and Movement Control, Security, and even interesting in-gallery location-based services.

This thinking is not new - it has been floating around for the past 5 years at least. The Museums Association spent some time looking at it a few years ago and more recently, Julian Tomlin was commissioned to do some useful reasearch on this area by the London Hub.

What seems to be changing however, is that the traditional barriers to entry (specifically, cost) are less of a factor than they were a few years ago - the technologies are both more sophisticated and more affordable. Perhaps it is time to revisit this area and look at how these technologies might contribute to an Automation Revolution for Collections Management?