Comments on: Information Apartheid - Can a Database be Prejudiced?

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:12:03 +0000

I think there needs to be separation of this and that citizen curators are generally accepting of the separation. The museums play a role of checking content in the same way that information sent to a news organisation should not be treated as authoritative until someone has checked the source.

What museums do need to do is to have processes in place to ensure new information from social media sites is checked and incorporated into the authoritative record. This adds additional workload to the museums, but it also harnesses the public to gather information about collection items that would otherwise remain undiscovered.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:20:44 +0000

An interesting question, Nick, but I think it’s going to be a variable picture, with different models for how the data are held and what’s accepted into the sanctum of the Collections Management System, and how the UGC is presented and reused over the long term - does it end up reinvigorating the institution’s own understanding of its collections?
This may have little to do with architecture. Yes, the LTM has a UGC server, and perhaps this suggests something of a firewall between that data and the CollMS data; but perhaps it was really just an easier way of adding the capacity (data structure, functionality) than extending the CollMS to take in UGC. In other examples where a separate system (such as Flickr Commons) is the locus for the UGC creation, it’s later ingested into the CollMS. And if the internal architecture places the UGC into separate a database or tables, well, does it really mean it’s isolated? Surely wherever there exists a link between the object and the comments etc., you can reuse and display that network of data as you please. I don’t see that even if your system led to users adding new notes directly into your CollMS it would necessarily be different: in your multi-valued note table in MimsyXG or whatever each record would have its source attached to it, and then it’s a question of how you choose to interpret and represent the source (as authoritative, inferior, equal, comic, whatever).
In other words, it’s all reversible as long as the link is there. What might be more insidious than the issue of whether UGC is in the same database/table/server as the “master” record is whether the data structure allows for people to express what they wish to with as much power as the curator can. Can they represent their knowledge and their mental map of relationships as they wish to? If not, perhaps they’re subservient to the museum voice after all.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:41:33 +0000

Nick - just quickly as I’m in a dash

I actually think that users *like* the way in which we (at least visually, on-page) separate the “real” reviews/editorial/etc from the UGC stuff. I think at present this is one of the ways in which we come to build up a picture of the way that resource / book / collection item / insert other thing here “is”. We see a YouTube video which is the “original” and then scroll through the pages of inane commentary, or read a publisher review before working out the stars given by readers. Personally, this works for me. As soon as you start bringing in information and making it equal, you lose the edge that UGC brings. I think.