OpenCulture

The Digital Preservation Coalition was established in January 2001 to ‘foster joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base.’

The sense of urgency was born of the recognition that we stood at the dawn of the digital age, without the strategies, knowledge, tools or practices we needed in order to ensure the long-term preservation and access of what we were about to create.

Fast forward 8 years, almost a decade, and where are we? Are funders placing intelligent obligations on their recipients, requiring good practice and long-term thinking? Do museums, archives and libraries maintain Digital Preservation Policies that are connected to the management and development of their organisations? Are the Digital Assets themselves well described, using appropriate standards?

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OK, hang on to your hats for this one. Corresponding with James Grimster of the wonderful Orangeleaf, we came across one of those deep conundrums which you don’t often have time to stop and think about.

The point is broadly this - the underlying mores of social media and the emerging practice of open, democratic interpretation of collections both depend on software systems. All of this information - user-generated Interpretation, folksonomic tags, wiki contributions - has to be kept somewhere. So is it possible to reinforce prejudice and exclusion by keeping it in a separate place from the ‘authoritative’ information about our objects?

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The Collections Trust has been commissioned to deliver the Community Engagement strand of Stories of the World, one of the 10 major projects of the Cultural Olympiad in the run-up to 2012.

Stories of the World is enabling 14 museum projects to deliver innovative exhibitions which have been co-curated with their audiences, which include children and young people. The aim of our programme (which we are working on with the National Youth Agency) is to work with these delivery partners to ensure that their Community Engagement has the maximum possible impact.

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Saturday morning saw me arrive bleary-eyed in Leeds to give a presentation to the Social History Curators Group about ‘Social History and Social Media’ - essentially a look at three key questions confronting the Social Historian in the digital age:

• Given that everyone’s experience and creative output is now spread across an extraordinary range of channels and platforms, how can we hope to curate digital Social History?
• Given that two of the central tenets of the new generation of digital services are collectivism and radical trust, what is the redefined role of a curator going to look like and how do we communicate it to the public?
• To what extent can the new technological tools, and the philosophies hich underpin them, be harnessed to the work of capturing and curating social history?

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Two events this week have really 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’.

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