People talk a lot of rubbish about the Recession. From green shoots to Global deflation, it’s astonishing how many armchair pundits have arisen to take up the gauntlet of speculation and use it to thrust into the public consciousness phrases like ‘double-dip’ and ‘fiscal stimulus’.
Following a brief Twitter discussion this afternoon, @miaridge asked me to put together a use case for an idea which has been rolling around my hind-brain for a good few years now. The idea first, then the use case.
The idea comes from four places:
A meeting this morning with Judy Faraday of the John Lewis archive has prompted me to return to the theme of the economics of Digital Cultural Content. Judy, in partnership with training providers FPM Training, has been working wwith 18 archive services on issues relating to their strategic planning, fundraising and sustainability.
These services, like many others throughout the UK (and indeed internationally) have been funded to digitise their collections. As with so many other parts of the industry, their primary motivation was more to do with the availability of funds than because of a connection to their core organisational mission, or an understanding of the implications of acquiring a huge quantity of new digital material.
And so many of them find themselves in the classic contemporary Catch-22 situation of holding a large number of digital objects on servers, but without the institutional resources or infrastructure to transform them into Digital Assets, and thence to bring them to market in a structured and sustainable way.
