OpenCulture

‘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!

This post is based on the text of an email to the Museums Computer Group responding to the announcement of the publication of the BSI PAS197:2009: A Code of Practice for Cultural Collections Management.

The BSI release is the first part of an ongoing series of communications activities around this standard.To clarify what it is - the full title is ‘BSI Publicly Available Specification 197:2009, Code of Practice for Cultural Collections Management’.

It is a  joint Code of Practice with the British Standards Institute which the Collections Trust has sponsored (with the support of the Museums, Libraries and  Archives Council) and which has been developed in broad consultation with the sector over the past 18 months with direct input from a Steering Committee of museum, archive and library practitioners.

The starting proposition for the Code of Practice for Cultural Collections Management is quite simple. After 30 years of Collections Management practice, and 10 years of concerted investment, the museums, libraries and archives sector has reached a stage of considerable knowledge and sophistication about the processes and implications of acquiring stuff, caring for it, interpreting it and making it available to the public (the eternal continuum, in the words of the PAS, between collections development, collections information, collections access and collections care).

We at the Collections Trust believe that our industry is at the intersection of some very profound shifts - in technology, in consumer behaviour, in our understanding of economic and environmental sustainability and in our behaviours and values about collections and collecting. This tipping point represents both an opportunity and a risk.

The opportunity is to define a next generation of professional practice which builds on our collective experience, consolidates it and enables us to move forward with confidence. The risk is that we abandon this knowledge and busily set about reinventing the wheel.

The ‘role’ of the standard, then, in the sector is to act as a catalyst. It is to capture the value of decades of professionalisation in Collections Management, to give it a focus and to use it to set the agenda for the next generation of services.

Underpinning this are some critical developments in the sector. For one thing, there is no longer such a thing as a ‘pure’ museum, archive or library.  Instead there are organisations managing an increasingly complex range of content and material and presenting it to an increasingly sophisticated audience in increasingly multi-faceted ways.

This is why the entire focus of the work on the Code of Practice has been on creating something that is as ‘platform-independent’ or inherently cross-domain as possible. In so doing, the Steering Group has created a ‘lingua franca’ - a common definition of the scope of Collections Management which we believe will work for curators, archivists and librarians (and in the process encourages them to share their knowledge and skills more explicitly). It is, in this sense, a ground-up approach to interoperability as an inherent property of management systems, rather than as a feat of retroactive engineering.

This bit is critical - it attempts to resolve the ‘either/or’ question about how you approach your collections. ‘Do I have to use SPECTRUM to manage my archive? Can I use CALM for my object records?’. The answer is that the PAS 197 Code of Practice provides an overarching framework which lets you ‘assemble’ an approach to managing your collections that is appropriate to your collections and the uses you want to put them to. It means not having to say ‘I am *this* kind of organisation, and this alone’.

The second key development is the reduction in silos between functions and systems across different parts of these institutions. A key aim of this work is to move from a system in which there is a division between front and back-of-house, between education and documentation, towards something much more holistic and better-integrated.

The emphasis here is on resolving the division between collections knowledge and other types of information and working towards integrated information systems which allow knowledge to flow freely between different parts of the organisation.  And before you ask - yes, this is how we see the future of SPECTRUM. Ultimately, we believe that Information Management in museums, archives and libraries will be a utility, happening in the cloud, but for now we have to content ourselves with integration and exchange.

So…to try and reduce all that down to a simple proposition - it is a standard for the next generation of Collections Management practitioners which builds on the knowledge and experience of the current and previous generation. It provides an integrated, holistic and proportionate approach to defining Collections Management practice in your institution.

It is also, absolutely, emphatically, a starting point for discussion. You’ll know that we make a habit of not doing these things unilaterally and we are totally aware that this thing will only fly if you lot want it. Hence the standard was developed with comments from more than 200 of you, and its publication kicks off a 2-year review period. More information about how to contribute to this will be circulated shortly.

As for the other questions you’ll want answers to…

Is it part of Accreditation? No, but we hope it will inform the review of the Accreditation Scheme happening in the next 2 years.

Do I have to buy it? We’ll be circulating some information about what’s in it and who is likely to need a copy as part of our comms about it.

Do I have to do it? Chances are you already are, in some form, but no - it’s not an obligation.

Does it replace SPECTRUM? Nope, it mainstreams SPECTRUM (and other archive/library infomatics standards) within a broader framework of organisation-wide Information Management which serves the interests both of the collections and their users.

What is the biggest problem with paper-based Documentation systems? The biggest problem is that they require direct manual intervention from an intelligent human being to make them useful. This places the burden of responsibility, and hence the overhead, on the side of the human and essentially places a statute of limitation on how much information we can hande.

So why is this a problem? Well, it’s a problem because we haven’t got enough time, money or people in museums to pursue a completist approach to Documentation. Our sector is suffering collectively from the indigestion of acquiring far too much stuff during the 80’s and 90’s, and it is an unfortunate fact that this means that far too much of our collections are largely unrecorded.

Machine-readable technologies such as barcoding, Radio-Frequency ID tags and event newer technologies such as DNA sprays have the potential to revolutionise our approach to this problem for one simple reason - they make objects ‘intelligent’.

If the object can shoulder more of the responsibility for describing itself, if it can literally shout ‘here I am, here’s my unique number’, then a whole raft of interesting things happen. Firstly, there can be a direct connection between the object and the database record about it - something that is still laborious in  current practice. The technologies can be used to automate important and time-intensive activities such as Location and Movement Control, Security, and even interesting in-gallery location-based services.

This thinking is not new - it has been floating around for the past 5 years at least. The Museums Association spent some time looking at it a few years ago and more recently, Julian Tomlin was commissioned to do some useful reasearch on this area by the London Hub.

What seems to be changing however, is that the traditional barriers to entry (specifically, cost) are less of a factor than they were a few years ago - the technologies are both more sophisticated and more affordable. Perhaps it is time to revisit this area and look at how these technologies might contribute to an Automation Revolution for Collections Management?

‘Digitisation in Europe’, the very phrase sends a thrill of excitement through most people. It’s right up there with a Premiership goal or a Big Brother eviction. But what happens in Europe is important, whether you realise it or not. Most of the issues which museums are grappling with - copyright, digitisation, funding - are being addressed across Europe and in the European Commission, and their work often has a direct impact on us.

Last week I was in Luxembourg for the 4th meeting of the European Member States Expert Group on Digitisation. The purpose of the Group is to share knowledge and information about what is happening in European Member States and to work on issues of common interest.

The theme for this meeting was ‘Europeana, Europeana, Europeana’. For those of you that haven’t read my previous posts, Europeana is the European Commission’s search engine of cultural information, and it also happens to be one of the EC’s proudest achievements.

This means that any and all European funding streams which even vaguely relate to creating digital content are being diverted to drive content into Europeana. Put it this way, in the next 4 years, you won’t be able to get money from Europe (and from a number of UK funders too) unless the content you produce is available to Europeana.The drive to get metadata and thumbnail images into Europeana is even having a direct influence on the current EC Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy.

So how will the UK respond to this priority? Well, in several ways. In a formal sense, the main element of our participation in Europeana is to aggregate cultural information into the PN Discover Service, and from there to serve it up to Europeana. The Collections Trust has also agreed to participate, on behalf of the UK, in the Europeana Content Contributors Advisory Panel. This means that content which you make available to the PNDS will also automatically be made available to Europeana.

The Collections Trust is also the UK coordinator for the EuropeanaLocal and ATHENA projects. The aim of these projects is to support smaller local and regional museums in getting their content online and into Europeana. Expect to read much more about this topic on this blog soon!

Finally, the main announcement at the Luxembourg meeting was that the European Commission’s Structural Funding Programme is set to release millions of Euros into the digitisation of cultural content over the next few years. The Collections Trust is liaising with the Information Society Directorate at the Commission about these funds, and further information is to be posted here in the coming year.

Education, education, edcuation. It was Tony Blair’s mantra at the 1997 Labour Party conference and set the tone for the next decade’s worth of investment in cultural content. Under the banner of education (formal, informal, lifelong and curriculum-based) we have digitised and produced a vast quantity of content.

The results have been mixed. A huge amount of value has been generated, but the system is straining to find ways of bringing all this content to market and making it sustainable. At worst, we run the risk of creating a whole new kind of documentation backlog as we struggle to manage our virtual collections.

In many ways, ‘aggregation, aggregation, aggregation’ is fast becoming the new mantra, both in Government and in the culture sector. The basic principle is that everyone should do what they need to do to manage their material and deliver it to their audiences, but that they should also make it openly available to be aggregated into national services.

The thinking is that it won’t scale for every one of the UK’s 2,500 museums, 3,500 public libraries and 2000 archive collections to deliver services aimed either at the mass-market or the education sector. Instead, we need to develop models whereby this content can be aggregated into single points of value at a national level, which can then broker the content into services such as Google, the BBC, VisitBritain and others.

The key point here is trust - I can trust the services I deliver because I am in control of them. But can I trust a national service to act appropriately and add value at a national level? As we move into a phase of development to build this national cultural content aggregator (based on the Peoples Network Discover Service) we’re going to be finding out. I’ll post more about how this will work soon, but for the time being I’d welcome any and all comments on the issue of aggregation!

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…

Welcome to the OpenCulture blog. My name is Nick. I’m Chief Executive of the Collections Trust and I am also responsible (with Jane Finnis from Culture24) for conceiving, developing and generally getting OpenCulture off the ground.

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