Shooting the Digitisation Puppy
OK, that’s it. Pack up the scanner. Tear those bin-bags down from where you duct-taped them to the windows. Digitisation is done.
If I had a penny for every time someone senior in the sector said to me ‘of course, our main priority is to digitise our collection and get it online’, well, I’d have enough to buy a part-share in a Titian. And when they say it, their eyes wide with expectation and hope and enthusiasm, I find myself filled with inner turmoil.
What do I say? Oh good, yeah, great, good luck with that. And then watch them go ahead and burn public money by photographing objects and cunningly concealing them by putting them on their website. Or do I shoot the puppy?
In the spirit of ‘he’s just not that into you’, I think it may be time to accept that the public at large is just not that into the idea of Collections search. As anyone who has ever been given a guided tour of an archaeological archive by its curator can attest, we sometimes lack a sense of proportion when it comes to the degree of value and interest in our Collections.
I am not sure what collective mania it was that first kicked off the principle that digitisation and online collections were a good thing, but I do know that it has lasted for 10 years, cost us an awful lot of blood, sweat, tears, politics, time and effort and has largely passed the general public by.
Usually at this point, someone from a National museum leaps to the defence of online collections, pointing out that they get 50bn hits on their Collections Search every day, and that this proves the public demand for collections online. It doesn’t, it proves that (some) national institutions have the power and the money to establish compelling online brands.
But then, by not shooting the puppy, I feel I am doing the sector a disservice. If we could shake the apparently unshakeable love affair with digitising stuff (very much like our equally besotted relationship with owning stuff) then we could refocus our efforts on something much more valuable - like ensuring that every institution is professionally managed with effective strategic and marketing plans in place.
Because, of course, it’s not digitisation’s fault. It’s the way we approach it as though it were an end in itself. Creating compelling online content should be a vital component of any effective on and offline Marketing and Communications Strategy. But that’s exactly the point, digitisation in context, for a purpose, with sufficient infrastructure to bring it to the audience and sufficient skill and capacity to editorialise it is just dandy. Digitising things because we can, because we think we should, because someone down the road did it, or because the money was there - that’s just as bad as acquiring something and chucking it in a cupboard for someone else to Accession in 100 years time.
Back to the wide-eyed ingenue - do I think, they ask, that there’ll be more money for mass-digitisation along soon? Will there be a funding programme? No, there won’t (actually, through Europeana, there probably will, but god willing it will be a commissioning fund and not a digitisation programme). Hopefully, other than books - and they should probably just let Google come in and do their thing - there will never be another mass-digitisation programme again. Because like a 9-year old with a crisp tenner in an old-fashioned sweet shop, we just can’t be trusted.
So yes, I think it is probably time to shoot the Digitisation puppy, get over it and get on with doing something much more productive instead. Hand me the revolver.
October 17th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Ooh Nick, you are a devil!
I dunno, I think there’s lots of sense in this. But another way of looking at it is to say, if online collections are not a worthwhile goal in themselves, then digitisation should be a basic duty of the organisation in any case and online collections the by-product. Museums need to get their digital records in shape and they really should have some digital photos or scans of what they have if only for insurance or conservation purposes. They may not be publication quality images and the records may not be written for public consumption, but this is the kind of digitisation that should be going on regardless of the online collections question, so there’s really no excuse (though I hear plenty) for not making that stuff available. Better than nothing.
But as for big digitisation projects with web as the objective, maybe I’d reluctantly agree that the gravy-train should stop (well, it has). Money for infrastructure is a better plan, and intelligent use of digital assets beyond the walls of collection web silo. In fact, perhaps digitisation funds should simply come with a requirement that you have a plan to use the outputs beyond that collection search engine, for example channeling it into virtual learning environments, Flickr, WikiMedia or somesuch (and of course Europeana). And finally, of course, there should be requirements on licencing.
October 19th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
[...] 1. Shooting the Digitisation Puppy 2. Business Model Innovatie voor het Cultureel Erfgoed 3. Protestbrief KVAN aan Tweede Kamer over OCW bezuinigingen 4. Archieven als open source 5. Meanwhile in India 6. Open Beelden: Beeldcollecties gebruiken 7. Van Gogh Museum lanceert iPhone applicatie 8. Buma/Stemra zwalkt verder: toch wel embedtarief 9. Onrust onder beeldbanken over Google Book Settlement 10. TopPop is cultureel erfgoed 11. Nationaal Archief op LibraryThing [...]
October 19th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
[...] October 1. Shooting the Digitisation Puppy 2. Business Model Innovatie voor het Cultureel Erfgoed 3. Protestbrief KVAN aan Tweede Kamer over [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
I’m sure there are actually 2 Nicks who write on this blog. Or maybe one Nick who is sometimes sober.
Anyway. I could write a lot, but won’t.
I think my take is:
1. There should (as Jeremy says) a digitisation programme which includes photography, description writing, metadata, storage, backup
2. The output shouldn’t [necessarily] be another ******* museum website but an available API plus effort into putting digitised objects where the public are: Wikipedia, Freebase, etc. The [necessarily] is in brackets because I believe it should be secondary in importance to the other stuff but is sometimes necessary to keep stakeholders and funders happy
So maybe the puppy should just be put into a new kennel. Or hobbled. Or cross-bred with a camel. Or…[insert increasingly wrong analogy expansion here]
November 8th, 2009 at 3:38 am
I keep listening to the news speak about public records so I have been looking around to read up on the topic. Thank you for your help!
November 27th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
[...] Another websites with more searchable images. Joy. I have to agree to Nick Poole. [...]