OpenCulture

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 )

£680m, even taking into account the exachange rate, is a big chunk of public change. It puts France straight to the top of the big league in national Digitisation programmes - head and shoulders above the recent investments in Greece, Taiwan, the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. At this level, it ranks alongside China’s similar investment in Digital Culture.

Politicians are funny creatures when it comes to funding Digitisation. Although the rhetoric is often about access to and preservation of collections, the real motives are more often to do with a kind of Digital content arms-race that has been running for much of the past decade. Even the mighty Europeana can sometimes seem primarily like a numbers game (we have 2m assets online! we have 3m!). What is interesting about the French investment, however, is that it seems to be motivated by two fairly valid and visionary arguments.

On the one hand is the sense of the contribution Digital Cultural content can make to French cultural life - this is a theme ably and eloquently championed by Christophe Dessaux and his team in the French Culture Ministry - who spend a lot of time spreading this message across the whole of the French Government. It’s not so much a Digital jingoism, which is how it’s being portrayed in the foreign press (including our own), as a recognition of the need to establish competitive advantage in delivering online access to collections.

On the other hand is the interesting proposition that investing in digital culture is a valid part of an investment designed to stimulate the economy. This theme can be found in the Digital Britain report too - but here we see Monsieur Sarkozy putting real cash money into testing this proposition.

It seems likely that a large part of the investment will be put through Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr/). Gallica is run by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and, for those Digital Content Business Model watchers out there is well worth a look - it’s essentially a Digtal content portal, but one with a finely-tuned and highly sustainable business-model based on revenue sharing and public/private partnership.

So far, so good. But - and it’s a big but - if there’s one thing we and other early-adopter Cultural Digitisation nations around the world have learned, it’s that there is good Digitisation, and there is bad Digitisation. The former can be transformative, and the latter worse than no Digitisation at all. And, to make matters worse, the latter has an awful tendency to look like the former while you’re in the middle of it.

I’m not trying to patronise the agencies and individuals responsible for this programme - they have tremendously skilled and experienced people and a rich recent history of Digital projects - but I really desperately hope that part of the establishment of the programme will involve looking to other nations including the UK and hopefully avoid some pitfalls by learning both from our successes and our failures.

So what are the primary things the French administration could do to avoid some of our biggest mistakes? Here’s my all-time, top-5 plea-from-the-heart to Monsieur Sarkozy (and any other nation considering large-scale investment in Digitisation):

1. Don’t pay for content without paying for the infrastructure to make use of and preserve it
2. Work with media providers (including, yes, Google) with existing market share
3. Allow people to use public funds to pay for rights clearance and licenses
4. Require people to clear content for maximal use including aggregation and open sharing/use
5. Let people spend the money to care for their Digital collections the way they do their physical ones

The list could go on, and on - but the point is that this investment represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the French culture sector. They could use this opportunity to create an unprecedented quantity of rich, repurposable content which could drive creativity, sharing, collaboration and learning - and in the process inspire other nations including the UK to overcome our doubts about the value of Digitisation.

Or they cold blow it on expensive big national administrative structures, mass-digitisation machinery and short-termist thinking. So please, Monsieur Sarkozy, do the right thing - the eyes of Europe are watching!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Business Models, Digitisation, Europe, Nick Poole. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.