OpenCulture

The Collections Trust has recently been involved in a series of meetings organised by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport looking at the modernisation of the Public Libraries service. The aim of the meetings is to define a series of areas which will be investigated through open consultation next year.

Public Libraries face a really interesting challenge. They need to continue to serve their core purpose while at the same time defining new services which are future-facing and make sensible use of technology. It’s a challenge, not least because there’s a lot of disagreement about what the core purpose of a library is.

There was a lot of agreement about the priorities for libraries…an integrated offer between online and offline, sensible services like book-borrowing by post and the idea of a library card which can be used in many different libraries and, indeed other places such as High Street retailers.

One interesting question was about where interesting thinking happens in public services such as libraries. The challenges, in many ways, are clear, but what is less so is how good ideas can be brought to life and then rolled out throughout the entire sector. As is always the case, technology may well turn out to be the least of our problems…

Europeana, the Europe-wide, multi-lingual search engine for digital cultural content went live on the 20th November. And promptly fell over!

It was the best kind of system failure, however. It resulted from more than 10 million unique hits on the Europeana servers in a little under an hour following the launch announcement. The web host had provided extra capacity for 5m+ users, but nobody was expecting 10m!

Work is currently underway significantly to extend the capacity available to Europeana, which continues to see a huge amount of interest throughout Europe - even though it is only at the prototype stage.You can find out more by visiting dev.europeana.eu.

The scope and vision for Europeana are breathtaking - its aim is to provide a single point of access to cultural content throughout Europe in more than 23 languages. The Collections Trust is the UK coordinator for the work, and will shortly begin work on EuropeanaLocal - an initiative to encourage UK organisations to submit content to Europeana via the Peoples Network Discover Service.

Sustainability. In many ways it’s like happiness - everybody’s chasing it, there’s a million different ways of defining it, yet nobody’s entirely sure what it looks like.

Sustainability presents a huge challenge to publicly-funded digital content. Although public administrations can invest in creating material, individual organisations need to understand and plan how to maintain and build on this content in the long-term.

Now, the Strategic Content Alliance has funded consultants Ithaka to carry out an in-depth investigation of 8 Case Studies, each of which demonstrates a different kind of business model for digital content. the aim of the process is to explore how business and revenue models contribute to (or inhibit) the sustainability of the content.

The Case Studies span the SCA sectors, including culture, broadcast, publishing and HE/FE in the UK, Europe and the US. Some of the revenue models under consideration include:

• Advertising
• Content licensing
• Author payments
• Donations
• eCommerce (including microtransactions)
• Endowment
• Membership
• Pay-per-view
• Premium services
• Subscription

The SCA can’t put a foot wrong at the moment, and this project is another case in point. It builds on the excellent work already completed on Business Models for eContent and also on Chris Batt’s work for them on Audience Needs. The Collections Trust will be adding to this fund of knowledge with the outcome of the ‘In from the Cold’ project - a UK-wide survey of Orphan Works in public collections, due for delivery early in 2009.

You can find out more on the SCA Blog.