OpenCulture

The Collections Trust has recently been involved in a series of meetings organised by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport looking at the modernisation of the Public Libraries service. The aim of the meetings is to define a series of areas which will be investigated through open consultation next year.

Public Libraries face a really interesting challenge. They need to continue to serve their core purpose while at the same time defining new services which are future-facing and make sensible use of technology. It’s a challenge, not least because there’s a lot of disagreement about what the core purpose of a library is.

There was a lot of agreement about the priorities for libraries…an integrated offer between online and offline, sensible services like book-borrowing by post and the idea of a library card which can be used in many different libraries and, indeed other places such as High Street retailers.

One interesting question was about where interesting thinking happens in public services such as libraries. The challenges, in many ways, are clear, but what is less so is how good ideas can be brought to life and then rolled out throughout the entire sector. As is always the case, technology may well turn out to be the least of our problems…

Europeana, the Europe-wide, multi-lingual search engine for digital cultural content went live on the 20th November. And promptly fell over!

It was the best kind of system failure, however. It resulted from more than 10 million unique hits on the Europeana servers in a little under an hour following the launch announcement. The web host had provided extra capacity for 5m+ users, but nobody was expecting 10m!

Work is currently underway significantly to extend the capacity available to Europeana, which continues to see a huge amount of interest throughout Europe - even though it is only at the prototype stage.You can find out more by visiting dev.europeana.eu.

The scope and vision for Europeana are breathtaking - its aim is to provide a single point of access to cultural content throughout Europe in more than 23 languages. The Collections Trust is the UK coordinator for the work, and will shortly begin work on EuropeanaLocal - an initiative to encourage UK organisations to submit content to Europeana via the Peoples Network Discover Service.

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.

I attended today’s Museum Computer Group meeting at the London Transport Museum and gave a short (7 minutes!) presentation about OpenCulture and some of the wider strategic and political issues affecting the Digital agenda.

It was a great meeting - a lot of the usual suspects, but also many new faces. Particularly striking was the sheer quality of the work being presented - from the London Transport Museum’s website to the use of Google Maps on My Yorkshire. Lots of good clean design, interesting interfaces and some really powerful ideas.

Bryan Wills from LT museum gave an excellent presentation on the issues they had faced when incorporating User Generated Content into their site. The system they have used - built for them by System Simulation Ltd - is interesting. It’s an ‘offsite’ UGC server which has a minimal impact on the museum’s systems. This looks like a really promising mechanism for embedding UGC around collections with minimal risk.

James Watson from the National Maritime Museum gave a really storming (albeit brief) exposition of their experience of putting their collections into Flickr Commons. Although he didn’t make a big deal about it, one of the most interesting things is that they did some work on the copyright risks, and decided that the benefit of large-scale public access outweighed the risks. I think they will turn out to be right on this one.

Finally, the ever-brilliant Claire Sussums gave an overview of her experience of planning and developing Information Management Policies across both the Museum of London and the other Hub museums. Structurally and theoretically very sound, it was also really impressive for the depth of thought which went into it and the way in which Claire has secured management buy-in.

Ultimately, it’s a similar proposition to the idea which did the rounds when Freedom of Information was first mooted - information is what museums do, and even if they aren’t covered by FOI, an Information Management Policy is a very important thing to have.

Overall, a really good day. Museums are really forging ahead with technology and online service delivery and it was great to see such interesting and innovative work.

To Birmingham last Friday, where Linda Spurdle had organised ‘Making Connections’, a forum for the UK Hub Museums funded through the Renaissance in the Regions programme.

The aim of ‘Making Connections’ was to provide an opportunity for the Hub museums to share the insights and experiences gained over the past 2-3 years of technical development, to identify areas of common interest and to test the appetite for further collaboration between Regions.

I gave a presentation looking at the tension between the ‘command and control’ method of developing technical programmes and the more fluid but diffuse model adopted in recent years. It was also an opportunity to talk about the need to provide simple, single points of access to the sector’s information for services such as Google and other public/government sites.

Jane gave an excellent presentation looking both at the development of the new Culture24 website, and at the role of C24 in bringing cultural content to a far wider audience. There was an interesting discussion of the need to ‘emancipate’ cultural sites from Local Authority web services, which was also the subject of a paper we published last year.

Finally, we agreed that communication - the simple sharing of knowledge, experience and current work - is perhaps the thing which people valued the most. We agreed to look into ways in which the Collections Trust can help this communication happen over the next 2-3 years.

The first meeting of the OpenCulture network took place on the 25th September. Jointly organised by the Collections Trust and Culture24, the meeting included representatives from DCMS, MLA, Arts Council, the BBC, London2012, the British Library, the National Archives and a wide range of others.

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