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 )

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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.

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A meeting this morning with Judy Faraday of the John Lewis archive has prompted me to return to the theme of the economics of Digital Cultural Content. Judy, in partnership with training providers FPM Training, has been working wwith 18 archive services on issues relating to their strategic planning, fundraising and sustainability.

These services, like many others throughout the UK (and indeed internationally) have been funded to digitise their collections. As with so many other parts of the industry, their primary motivation was more to do with the availability of funds than because of a connection to their core organisational mission, or an understanding of the implications of acquiring a huge quantity of new digital material.

And so many of them find themselves in the classic contemporary Catch-22 situation of holding a large number of digital objects on servers, but without the institutional resources or infrastructure to transform them into Digital Assets, and thence to bring them to market in a structured and sustainable way.

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Saturday morning saw me arrive bleary-eyed in Leeds to give a presentation to the Social History Curators Group about ‘Social History and Social Media’ - essentially a look at three key questions confronting the Social Historian in the digital age:

• Given that everyone’s experience and creative output is now spread across an extraordinary range of channels and platforms, how can we hope to curate digital Social History?
• Given that two of the central tenets of the new generation of digital services are collectivism and radical trust, what is the redefined role of a curator going to look like and how do we communicate it to the public?
• To what extent can the new technological tools, and the philosophies hich underpin them, be harnessed to the work of capturing and curating social history?

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Two events this week have really got me thinking. The first was the excellent JISC Digital Content Conference 2009 (#jdcc09) which brought together 200 HE/FE techies and librarians to talk about how to get more content to more people via the Web.

The second was today’s Museums Copyright Group conference, held in the beautiful (air conditioned!) Sackler Wing at the V&A.

The difference between the two was striking. As the JISC Confernce unfolded, the low steady chant of the first day (’free your data, free your data, free your data’) became a roar by the second. This was a room to which you could say ‘crowdsource’ without 200 people thinking ‘git’.

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I attended this morning’s session at NESTA at which Stephen Carter gave the keynote address about the Digital Britain review (really his first public statements since the publication of the interim report a couple of weeks back) - thanks to Bridge Mackenzie at Flow for the heads-up about the event!

A fascinating session, it was yet another tantalising glimpse of how significant Digital Britain could be for museums, archives and libraries.

NESTA have posted full video of the event here.

The session was chaired by Jonathan Kestenbaum of NESTA. He really hit the nail on the head when he said that Digital Britain was really giving voice to a feeling, a sense of convergence which is happening across the Media, Tech, Cultural and Creative industries.

Stephen Carter is an interesting guy - ex of James Walter Thompson and the founding CEO of OfCOM, he is a great speaker and it is well worth listening to his 20-minute unprepared commentary if you can. His three-word mantra ‘poetry, plumbing, proficiency’ pretty much sums up the digital agenda in the culture sector for the past decade or so. It’s all about content, infrastructure and developing the skills and confidence to wield the tools of technology to best effect.

He spoke a lot more ‘about’ the review process than he did about the review itself, but what is clear is that there is a real recognition within Government that the Digital Economy *could* have a profound impact on the stability of the real economy if (and only if) we can work out some viable long-term business models around both content and next-generation Broadband access.

What was probably most interesting for museums, though, was the absolutely unequivocal view that eGovernment and online public service delivery (including access to the creative output of the Creative & Cultural Industries) are two of the most important foci and drivers for this work. Ultimately, as Carter pointed out, all of the great strides in technology in the UK have depended on public money from public markets, and the next phase will be no different.

Peter Bazalgette (media pundit and partially responsible for bringing Big Brother to the UK) gave some excellent insights into the realities of the situation. Again, he highlighted the Cultural and Creative Industries as key agents and drivers of content, which in turn generates demand. He also pointed out the tremendous shift which has taken place in recent years in which prosumers are driving an unprecedented increase in the content flowing across the network.

Absolutely, said Neil Berkett from Virgin Media, but we’re not in the game of giving it all away. All of this future prosperity depends on realising that the old monolithic transactional industries (CD anyone?) are dead, and that the next generation of business, funding and legal models will have to stop shoring up the old industries, and focus instead on fostering the new ones.

In this world, he noted, you and I have two forms of currency - our attention span and our own content. The future depends on establishing non-transactional models which understand that the dividend, the payoff, may be two or three transactions away from the point of consumption.

Heady stuff indeed, but Kestenbaum is right - there is an atmosphere, a commitment, a momentum behind this one which marks it out. Digital Britain may not change the world, certainly for museums, but if it is any indication of the scope and quality of Government thinking on this issue, there are exciting things to come!

Sustainability. In many ways it’s like happiness - everybody’s chasing it, there’s a million different ways of defining it, yet nobody’s entirely sure what it looks like.

Sustainability presents a huge challenge to publicly-funded digital content. Although public administrations can invest in creating material, individual organisations need to understand and plan how to maintain and build on this content in the long-term.

Now, the Strategic Content Alliance has funded consultants Ithaka to carry out an in-depth investigation of 8 Case Studies, each of which demonstrates a different kind of business model for digital content. the aim of the process is to explore how business and revenue models contribute to (or inhibit) the sustainability of the content.

The Case Studies span the SCA sectors, including culture, broadcast, publishing and HE/FE in the UK, Europe and the US. Some of the revenue models under consideration include:

• Advertising
• Content licensing
• Author payments
• Donations
• eCommerce (including microtransactions)
• Endowment
• Membership
• Pay-per-view
• Premium services
• Subscription

The SCA can’t put a foot wrong at the moment, and this project is another case in point. It builds on the excellent work already completed on Business Models for eContent and also on Chris Batt’s work for them on Audience Needs. The Collections Trust will be adding to this fund of knowledge with the outcome of the ‘In from the Cold’ project - a UK-wide survey of Orphan Works in public collections, due for delivery early in 2009.

You can find out more on the SCA Blog.