How to Save NOF Digi?
For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, NOF-Digi refers to the New Opportunities Fund Digitisation Programme - a £50m Government-backed initiative to digitise the nations cultural heritage, and in the process to generate a new generation of learning resources online.
For many, it was the first large-scale investment in Digitisation, and heralded a new era in terms of skills and understanding. Sadly, however, as is sometimes the case with project funding, many of these online resources have not been actively maintained by their host institution.
A fairly recent survey by Alastair Dunning at JISC revealed that most of this content still exists, but effectively in a state of suspended animation, without investment or manpower to bring it to its intended audience.
Recently, the Creative Industries Minister, Sion Simon, expressed an interest in the issue of online collections, and Culture MInister Barbara Follett has also requested some information about the sector’s needs and ambitions in terms of future Digitisation.
In response to this, some Twitter contacts and I decided to establish an online petititon, to gauge the strength of feeling across the sector about the issue. The petition is online at http://www.petitiononline.com/savedigi, and the text reads:
To: Sion Simon, Creative Industries Minister
Between 2001-2003, the New Opportunities Fund (now the Big Lottery Fund) took the unprecedented step of investing millions of pounds into a programme to Digitise the nation’s Cultural Heritage.
The NOF Digitisation Programme was a remarkable collective effort involving hundreds of museum, archive and library professionals. It created tens of thousands of interesting and useful digital images, learning resources and other material - an astonishingly rich resource that is still current today.
Sadly, however, by 2009 much of this wonderful content has fallen into disuse. While the vast majority of it is still hosted on servers across the UK, it is not being promoted and the public have no idea it is there.
Efforts to pull this content together, refresh and promote it have so far failed. We urgently ask the UK Government, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the relevant non-Departmental Public Bodies and funders to establish a fund so that this content can be rehabilitated and made available for the enjoyment and education of generations to come.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
The response so far has been fantastic, with 123 people having put their name to the petition in the 2 days since it began. We’re now pushing hard to get more signatures, but in the meantime, a parallel discussion has emerged via Twitter, asking a simple question - ‘OK, we want to save it. But how?’
Now, I have my own opinions about this, but I’m going to keep them to myself for a bit. What I would like to do is invite you, dear reader, to comment on this post and let me know how you would like to see this content discovered, exposed, used and generally brought to the eyes of a mass audience.
All comments are welcome, but I have one rule: please don’t suggest any named products or platforms as the ‘right’ answer. There are too many of these, and too much politics about their use. What I am really interested in is the answer to the question ‘what would a successful outcome for the NOF Digi legacy content look like’? No idea too outlandish!
And thanks, hugely, to all of you that have already signed up to Save NOF-Digi!
August 27th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
In order of priority I’d like to see:
1) Gathering together of the entire dataset as a reference ‘master’ copy
2) Distribution of that master copy to anyone with the desire and resources to host and present it to the public
3) A central ‘master site’ presentation of the data on Wiki-like lines (sorry, I mentioned a platform) but with editing rights reserved to digital curators who may be from institutes, organisations or supervised volunteers.
4) The facility for users to create narrative-like ‘trails’ + commentaries through the master site’s pages, which can be saved, approved and made available to other visitors.
Hope that’s useful.
August 27th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
I was involved in the standards work around NOF-digi, and remain convinced that a wealth of content was captured by the projects that the Programme funded. That content remains valuable (in many senses of the word) today, and steps should certainly be taken to ensure that it reaches a whole new audience.
Some of the projects found viable paths to sustainability, and remain actively curated, refreshed and used to this day. Others were less successful at achieving sustainability and - at best - stagnate on some corner of an institutional web site.
I wonder if a fresh injection of cash to enable some NOF-digi renaissance makes sense? The world has moved on, and lottery largesse doesn’t come to the Heritage sector as often as it once did. Do we really want to point to a £50,000,000 investment and ask for *more* money to prop up the unsustainable projects it created?
Surely it would be better to do two things;
Firstly, celebrate the (sadly few) examples of sustainability, and learn the lessons that they can teach about using injections of public funds to start, to pump-prime and to enable something larger (rather than the more traditional model of simply moving from one funding programme to the next)
Secondly, explicitly invite *anyone* to come and take appropriately licensed content from the projects, and do new and interesting things with it. The raw images that were digitised, the stories that were transcribed; these can be used again and again… and should be aggressively pushed to the four corners of the world. A model based upon management, control, and the drawing of eyeballs to websites may no longer be a model that makes sense to anyone other than the website creators. We have licenses such as Creative Commons, Open Data Commons and the new OPSI licensing framework that would be perfect in enabling all sorts of innovation.
It’s not immediately clear what proportion of the content could immediately be set free as I propose; almost certainly less than half. That’s still an awful lot, so let’s get on and do it.
After that, there may be scope in some targeted activity to assess the value of securing appropriate rights to release more, but that should be on a case-by-case basis, and within a context of use, rather than presenting the NOF-digi corpus (which merely exists by dint of a funding exercise) as some meaningful whole to potential users.
The remainder - the learning trails, games, and packaged web sites - should perhaps be left to stand or fall by their own merits, rather than appealing - once again - to the centre for a bail-out.
August 27th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Following on from what Paul Miller says:
Note: I’ve made a few gross assumptions here in the absence of any real knowledge of what works or content was handled by the project.
In the first instance it seems to me that the very least that could be done is to collect up copies of all the content that languishes in remote places and place them with The British Library, potentially as both an online and offline resource. This is a relatively low-cost option that ensures the collection is preserved..
Second instance: distribute copies to the Libraries of every UK University and/or College which is willing to host an online copy: in particular one might consider some form of engagement with either or both The Open University and The Open University of The Arts. Again, this isn’t a high cost option for the distributors/organisers - but may entail added costs for the recipients.
These two approaches at least guarantee that the content is preserved and maintained, but do nothing much to deliver that content to a wider public, or to raise people’s awareness of the resources available.
I’m not entirely sure how one might raise such awareness.
August 29th, 2009 at 1:12 am
Agree in a way with Paul. It’s simply disgusting that £50 million - let’s reflect on that a second - £50 MILLION has been invested with no discernable outcome or benefit to the public that have funded it.
It’s about time the arts sector gets real and realises that normal rules DO actually apply - show zero benefit and we don’t deserve a fresh injection of cash. The public purse is stretched enough without wasting it on digitised content that no-one apparently wants or ever sees.
August 31st, 2009 at 2:43 pm
the pragmatism that got this done carried with it short-termism - we knew at the time there would be serious issues with sustainability. There should have been NOF Police. We did think about it but by not actually imposing strong standards, it made it harder to sustain. I don’t think a ‘master copy’ is viable.
Technically there were so many platforms used that ‘taking over’ datasets abandoned would also be quite tricky. Having said that, modern ISPs are often quite agnostic about the platforms they host, so ‘keen techies’ may be enough to support a virtual orphanage if funding could appear.
Perhaps we start with a wiki or semi structured db, just cataloguing the status quo (unless this work exists?) and suggesting case by case practicalities.
Avaiablility? Not looked into how this stuff is exposed at the moment, but would suggest that a mixture of a solid SEO strategy perhaps based on some keyword harvesting used to drive a ‘browser’ of as much of it as possible, would help and not be too costly to set up - assuming good metadata was implemented as rigorously as requested!
Marketing? Culture 24 would be a good place to co-ordinate this, and perhaps curation IMO.
cheers
Mike
September 1st, 2009 at 4:33 pm
The problem seems to be lack of use rather than lack of availability. In our case (www.transportarchive.org.uk) we regarded digitisation as the first half of a project to create online learning activities. It was hoped that teachers would build learning activities around the digitised resources and share their lesson plans and students work by uploading them to the site. We have learned the hard way that most teachers do not have the time and technical skills to do this without further funding. (NOF funding covered digitisation only.) I would very much like to see a national programme of funding to facilitate the creation and sharing of teaching and learning activities by teachers based on these rich resources, as a parallel to initiatives in other parts of the education sector , such as the JISC Jorum project.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
,..] openculture.collectionstrustblogs.org.uk is another interesting source of information on this subject,..]
January 22nd, 2010 at 10:20 am
I think in a lot of cases the providers of the data which was digitised were ambivalent about the projects. One sad case was a NOF-funded project which was carefully developed at one site and ready for release, then a few months before the launch it was decided (at a level some remove from those working on the project) to move it to another host. The new host promised a content management system, but just couldn’t handle the quantity of the digitised data and much of it never went online at all.
On the other hand another site which was part of the same NOF bid won an award and is still much used. I think much depended on the working relationship between the data providers and the technical support in each case. The way NOF worked meant that projects were bundled together with unconnected ones so this relationship could be something of a ’shotgun wedding’.