Aggregation, it’s what you need
Education, education, edcuation. It was Tony Blair’s mantra at the 1997 Labour Party conference and set the tone for the next decade’s worth of investment in cultural content. Under the banner of education (formal, informal, lifelong and curriculum-based) we have digitised and produced a vast quantity of content.
The results have been mixed. A huge amount of value has been generated, but the system is straining to find ways of bringing all this content to market and making it sustainable. At worst, we run the risk of creating a whole new kind of documentation backlog as we struggle to manage our virtual collections.
In many ways, ‘aggregation, aggregation, aggregation’ is fast becoming the new mantra, both in Government and in the culture sector. The basic principle is that everyone should do what they need to do to manage their material and deliver it to their audiences, but that they should also make it openly available to be aggregated into national services.
The thinking is that it won’t scale for every one of the UK’s 2,500 museums, 3,500 public libraries and 2000 archive collections to deliver services aimed either at the mass-market or the education sector. Instead, we need to develop models whereby this content can be aggregated into single points of value at a national level, which can then broker the content into services such as Google, the BBC, VisitBritain and others.
The key point here is trust - I can trust the services I deliver because I am in control of them. But can I trust a national service to act appropriately and add value at a national level? As we move into a phase of development to build this national cultural content aggregator (based on the Peoples Network Discover Service) we’re going to be finding out. I’ll post more about how this will work soon, but for the time being I’d welcome any and all comments on the issue of aggregation!
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:42 am
Regarding scale - it should be noted that in attempting aggregation the data of the museums - and I’m thinking local, volunteer and history society - needs to be in state to interchange at the national level in the first place. Will each local data point have the resources to surface their data in a harvestable format? Or should consideration be made of regional or sub-regional mapping / pre-aggregation support and clustering projects at this point?