OpenCulture

Every once in a while, things shift imperceptibly but fundamentally on their axis. Devout views, long-held, become the laughable fancies of childish innocence. Entrenched positions become blurred as tectonic plates beneath them start to grind into motion. And so it is, it seems, with ‘Digital’.

Digital. The banner under which museums, libraries and archives unite. The ultimate priority of Governments across the Western world. The word has become axiomatic - ‘Digital Britain’, ‘Digital Economy Bill’, ‘Digital Culture’. But like all axioms, it is ultimately meaningless. Or at least, it means so many things that it has lost its way in a semantic miasma.

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I have recently been assessing a number of applications on behalf of a UK funder. The purpose of the funding programme is to support innovative research into different technologies with potential application to Collections Management.

As I work my way through the piles of papers, business cases and ‘aspirational’ timetlines I find myself becoming both increasingly excited and increasngly concerned.

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With typical journalistic aplomb, the Telegraph article (Nicolas Sarkozy fights Google over classic books - Telegraph, 06.01.10) focuses on the easy story, and in so doing focusses on entirely the wrong thing. The real news is not so much the French Government’s well-documented antipathy to the Google Books settlement, but that embedded within France’s £30bn fiscal stimulus package is an investment of more than £680m in the Digitisation of ‘our museums, our libraries and our cinematographic heritage’. (See also articles in the FT, Lesoir.be and in the French press )

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