OpenCulture

OK, so it’s been a little while since I’ve been able to update you about the development of our Digital Agency (see previous post on this topic), but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy!

Following extensive consultation and some really valuable comments and contributions from colleagues in the sector, we have refined the scope of the proposal, and are now nearly ready to launch it at the forthcoming COLLECT2010 event on the 28th June.

The general feeling was that there is already a thriving market for Digital consultancy in the sector and that it might confuse people about the Collections Trust’s role to enter this market. In fact, we already do some Digital consultancy, but only ever at a strategic level and only where it fits with our strategic mission.

Where people did feel we could add value, though, was in negotiating access to (or providing directly) Digital infrastructure and services which could, in essence, reduce the costs of sharing content online and increase reach.

This role connects very neatly with our work on the Culture Grid, which is all about providing scalable infrastructure to connect content providers to content users and to open up digital cultural content to mainstream audiences in partnership with mainstream media partners. Hence, from the 28th June, we will be offering the following services (with more coming online in the following months):

FREE (with the support of MLA and the European Commission)

• Aggregation/harvesting of metadata into the Culture Grid
• Syndicaton of your collections metadata into 3rd party services, including Google, the BBC CenturyShare platform and Europeana
• The abilty to use our QueryBuilder tool to create embeddable and configurable searches of your own and other people’s content from the Culture Grid
• The SPECTRUM Software Survey, including information about SPECTRUM Partners and compliant systems
• A Culture Grid Contributors Network on the new Collections Link
• A Culture Grid HelpDesk to provide support in uploading your metadata

PAID:

• Low-cost hosting of datasets, images and other media ‘in the Cloud’
• Higher-cost hosting and Digital Preservation of datasets, images and other media
• A subscription-based tool which archives a snapshot of the records from your Collections Management System and holds them in ‘deep storage’ - essentially a digital Acquisitions Register
• Subscription-based online access to SPECTRUM Business Processes, a new tool which supports critical assessment and simplification of your in-house systems

PARTNERSHIP:

• A joint service to offer Print-on-Demand services to museum, archive and library collections aggregated via the Culture Grid
• The possibility for large-scale public/private partnerships involving the upfront funding of Digitisation costs in return for a share of the lifetime revenue
• A joint initiative to review the images of your collection, identify the parts of the collection with commercial potential and license them to global image distributors and image libraries on a commercial basis

In addition, we will be working with the SPECTRUM Partners on a comprehensive update of our information about their systems, and also with partners such as Media Equation to promote next-generation solutions based on Digital Asset Management.

This is only the beginning, but we feel that this first generation of services offers real support to the sector in making the transition into the next phase of Digital development. We welcome your thoughts, comments and observations - you are our market and we want to ensure that we get it right!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Digital Agency, 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.