Comments on: Shooting the Digitisation Puppy

By: kiyafet oyunu

kiyafet oyunu — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:55:14 +0000

Thank You forrrr that post ! Keep It Up posting posts like this

By: Museums and Google | newcurator

Museums and Google | newcurator — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:37:43 +0000

[...] Another websites with more searchable images. Joy. I have to agree to Nick Poole. [...]

By: Pima County Public Records

Pima County Public Records — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:38:20 +0000

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!

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:33:32 +0000

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]

By: Images for the future – Research blog » blog archive » Interesting links digest

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:50:03 +0000

[...] October 1. Shooting the Digitisation Puppy 2. Business Model Innovatie voor het Cultureel Erfgoed 3. Protestbrief KVAN aan Tweede Kamer over [...]

By: Images for the future – Research blog » blog archive » Interesting links

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:46:44 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:26:48 +0000

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.