People talk a lot of rubbish about the Recession. From green shoots to Global deflation, it’s astonishing how many armchair pundits have arisen to take up the gauntlet of speculation and use it to thrust into the public consciousness phrases like ‘double-dip’ and ‘fiscal stimulus’.
Following a brief Twitter discussion this afternoon, @miaridge asked me to put together a use case for an idea which has been rolling around my hind-brain for a good few years now. The idea first, then the use case.
The idea comes from four places:
OK, hang on to your hats for this one. Corresponding with James Grimster of the wonderful Orangeleaf, we came across one of those deep conundrums which you don’t often have time to stop and think about.
The point is broadly this - the underlying mores of social media and the emerging practice of open, democratic interpretation of collections both depend on software systems. All of this information - user-generated Interpretation, folksonomic tags, wiki contributions - has to be kept somewhere. So is it possible to reinforce prejudice and exclusion by keeping it in a separate place from the ‘authoritative’ information about our objects?
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:
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’.
Innovation, it seems, is all the rage. The final Digital Britain report refers to it no less than 76 times (compared to 5 mentions of the word ‘museum’) - although to be fair this compares pretty favourably to the 91 mentions of ‘users’ and 80 of ‘value’.
Reading through the report, it is clear that whatever the unique selling point of UK Plc may be, much of it rests on our ability to innovate - to generate new ideas, techniques, products and business models. The real economics of the Digital Economy are opaque at best, but they certainly seem to depend on monetising both our ability to generate new Intellectual Property and our first-mover advantage (such as it may be) in fields from gaming to infrastructure and possibly even culture.
This is, itself, no bad thing. The UK has a long heritage of boffinry and invention and our contribution to the global advancement both of technology and humanity (give or take some expansionist Colonial behaviour) has consistently outpaced our size and the scale of our public investment.
The Collections Trust is currently involved in an AHRC/EPSRC Science and Heritage Programme project called EGOR. ‘EGOR’ stands for Environmental Guidelines: Opportunities and Risks, and the aim of the project is to re-assess the environmental impact of the various standards frameworks used by museums, archives and libraries.
While the recent Museums Association enquiry into sustainability for museums was a bit all over the place, EGOR is defined much more tightly around the technologies and protocols we use to modulate risks to collections and buildings presented by environmental factors such as heat, light, ventilation and pollutants.
There is a vision, a bright shiny vision of a new future in which museums and their users become conspirators in the process of capturing, preserving and interpreting culture. These new museums will be open, democratic, agile and able to reflect the shifting patterns of life in contemporary society.
This vision is informed in part by the vocabulary of the Digital Revolution - a post-Web 2.0 vocabulary of ‘prosumers’ and ’perpetual beta’ which denotes a basic attitudinal shift in the process of producing and delivering services.
These new models, even where they don’t involve technology, are intrinsically connected to a technological world-view. A picture in which there are no barriers to entry, a Digital meritocracy where both tools and content are open to all to use, where you can go from idea to business to millionaire in the space of a week.
This picture is, of course, mythical. Ever since the 1950’s, technology has earned its keep by promising more than it is capable of, and the new era is no different. Although the code may be open-source, the community of people who are able to do anything with it represents just as much of an oligarchic closed shop as the Athenian aristocracy.
This glamour - the illusory and fleeting appeal of vogueish technologies which makes it impossible to discern real, lasting social movements from tiny whorls of Digital possibility - is dangerous for any sector which embraces it too readily, and particularly so for one as delicately positioned in society as Cultural Heritage.
There is a thrusting, ambitious and enegetic new media movement in museums, and previous suggestions that the place of museums is not at the bleeding edge has been met with a kind of stunned opprobrium - but only ever from a handful of people. For the rest - those who are fighting against constrained circumstances and small politics - there is a real need to translate all of this possibility down to real, achievable outcomes which can be implemented locally and which will deliver local value.
Because we are at risk of the front-runners becoming completely dissociated from the mass of museums, of the realites of practice becoming divorced from the possibilities of the social web. Yes, our users could (perhaps should) become our collaborators. And yes, the process of assigning meaning to collections should become more democratic. And yes, too, technology has the potential to provide channels and platforms through which some of this could be achieved. But these things are luxuries which many museums can ill-afford.
So, yes to prosumers. But yes, too, to my Gran who wants a nice place to go and be told about interesting things.
Things are (finally!) moving on the Culture Grid front. If you missed it in previous posts, ‘Culture Grid’ is the working title for the MLA-funded project to connect cultural data and the online mass-market, mopping up the last 10 years of legacy services on the way.
Stage 1 is to invest in the Peoples Network Discover Service platform so that it can handle a variety of different content formats, supported by API, SOAP and OAI harvest in and a variety of web services to get the content back out.
This investment began with the BBC CenturyShare project, which we’ve just signed off with the BBC and Knowledge Integration. CenturyShare runs on the PNDS infrastructure, and allowed us to develop towards a new more extensible version (v3.0!)
Stage 2 is to implement a managed withdrawal from the legacy services - Cornucopia, MICHAEL and the MLA Institution Server. This is tricky, because about 7 individual services depend on Cornucopia for backend infrastructure, not to mention the SSNConnect platform, which draws on Cornucopia data.
As part of this withdrawal, we’ll be harvesting these datasets into the PNDS/Culture Grid architecture, and doing some testing to make sure they’re nice and stable.
Stage 3 gets really interesting. We’ve got 3 dependent projects which will be putting data into the Grid and drawing it back out again via web services to develop web interfaces. The Peoples Record is a London 2012/Cultural Olympiad project which will use the Grid as backend infrastructure. The Grid will also power our contribution to the EuropeanaLocal prototype in September (the last staging post before full Europeana integration). Finally, we’ll be working to get the Grid content exposed to GoogleBase for indexing via Google.
Alongside all of this, we’ve got a whole lot of development going on. Naomi Korn is going to be working with us on the Rights framework (and we’ve got a discussion going on with DACS and the UK IPO to set up a licensing scheme to make it work). We’ve been talking about the Digital Preservation angle and thinking about setting up a long-term preservation strategy for all this metadata.
Then we’ll need to sort out sector address data so we can start running location-based services through the Grid. All of which while we’re running the parallel redevelopment of Collections Link. Oh yeah, and we’ve got to make a proposal for the use of Persistent Unique Identifiers under Europeana.
Don’t say we never tell you what we’re doing!
‘The Geek shall inherit the Earth’. As jokes go, it was never really all that great, but about 5-6 years ago, it really seemed to fit. We were entering the Digital Age, which perhaps more than any which preceded it split the cognoscenti from the layman.
Either you could ‘code’, or you couldn’t, and if you couldn’t you were excluded from having a right to an opinion about all sorts of things. Suddenly, the geek was king and your 30 years of experience in sales or marketing didn’t matter at all, grandad.
And so, for much of the past decade, it has been. Funders, dazzled by the glory and promise of the Web, lost their senses and began funding things like mass-digitisation, which a few short years before they would have sent away to write a proper Business Plan. Technology became the industry which earned its keep by promising more than it could really deliver.
But recently, things seem to have changed. We have lived with the new generation of web tools (which don’t require you to do anything more than drag and drop - check out Weebly if you don’t believe me) for long enough that technology just doesn’t hold the same kind of terror for non-geeks anymore.
Suddenly, the old world of common-sense and supply and demand seems to be reasserting itself. I say this because in the past few months I have encountered a new breed of policymaker. The PlayStation Generation is coming into its own and they’re seeing through the glamour of technology. we can’t say to them ‘you don’t get it’ because they do, they just don’t agree that IT is the universal panacaea it was once presented as being.
Evidence? The Semantic Web has gone very quiet. Politicians are suddenly talking about funding infrastructure not websites. Senior, important people are saying things like ‘couldn’t we just build that in Wordpress?’. People have stopped talking about a ‘Digital’ agenda as an end in itself, and have started talking about cross-platform multi-channel marketing in which the Web is just one of many components.
Welcome to the Brave Old World!
