OpenCulture

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?

‘Digitisation in Europe’, the very phrase sends a thrill of excitement through most people. It’s right up there with a Premiership goal or a Big Brother eviction. But what happens in Europe is important, whether you realise it or not. Most of the issues which museums are grappling with - copyright, digitisation, funding - are being addressed across Europe and in the European Commission, and their work often has a direct impact on us.

Last week I was in Luxembourg for the 4th meeting of the European Member States Expert Group on Digitisation. The purpose of the Group is to share knowledge and information about what is happening in European Member States and to work on issues of common interest.

The theme for this meeting was ‘Europeana, Europeana, Europeana’. For those of you that haven’t read my previous posts, Europeana is the European Commission’s search engine of cultural information, and it also happens to be one of the EC’s proudest achievements.

This means that any and all European funding streams which even vaguely relate to creating digital content are being diverted to drive content into Europeana. Put it this way, in the next 4 years, you won’t be able to get money from Europe (and from a number of UK funders too) unless the content you produce is available to Europeana.The drive to get metadata and thumbnail images into Europeana is even having a direct influence on the current EC Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy.

So how will the UK respond to this priority? Well, in several ways. In a formal sense, the main element of our participation in Europeana is to aggregate cultural information into the PN Discover Service, and from there to serve it up to Europeana. The Collections Trust has also agreed to participate, on behalf of the UK, in the Europeana Content Contributors Advisory Panel. This means that content which you make available to the PNDS will also automatically be made available to Europeana.

The Collections Trust is also the UK coordinator for the EuropeanaLocal and ATHENA projects. The aim of these projects is to support smaller local and regional museums in getting their content online and into Europeana. Expect to read much more about this topic on this blog soon!

Finally, the main announcement at the Luxembourg meeting was that the European Commission’s Structural Funding Programme is set to release millions of Euros into the digitisation of cultural content over the next few years. The Collections Trust is liaising with the Information Society Directorate at the Commission about these funds, and further information is to be posted here in the coming year.