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’.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.