OpenCulture

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak yesterday at the West Midlands Museums Federation event on A Sustainable Future? It was interesting, partly because it has coincided with a real rush of Green Museum events and discussions elsewhere this week, and partly because I think that some of the messages coming out of yesterday have a much deeper resonance across the rest of the sector.

The first thing that struck me, as I arrived at the BMAG Collections Center in Duddeston, was Chair Phillipa Tinsley’s badge of office, suspended from a ribbon festooned with the names of past chairs stretching back to the mid-Fifties. Here, in the form of the Federation, is an organisation that is all about the long now. Outlived only by the Museums Association, it has seen strategies, wars, strikes, recessions, changes in practice, the invention of the Internet, and has calmly carried on serving a useful purpose through all of them.

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Some of you may be aware that the Collections Trust is mid-way through rolling out the Culture Grid, a new service which brings digital content produced by museums, archives and libraries to a mainstream audience via services like Google, Flickr, Wikipedia and the BBC.

More information about the Culture Grid - what it is and how it works - is online on the Collections Trust’s YouTube channel at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/CollectionsTrust

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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?

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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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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!

A profoundly exciting conversation with Richard Light yesterday has got my head buzzing about Linked Data and the real ambition of the next phase of development in cultural services.

Collections Trust is working on a project called the Grid, which is basically a next-generation evolution of the Peoples Network infrastructure which aggregates metadata from cultural institutions and serves it up to mass-market services such as Google, the BBC and - interestingly - anyone else who wants to consume it via an open API.

I spent some time this morning looking at Tim Berners-Lee’s TED presentation about Linked Data and two thoughts struck me:

1) The guy is way too young to be the inventor of the Internet and

2) The net result of the last generation of publicly-funded digitisation is not services, it’scritical mass. It’s about the sheer volume of more or less catalogued data forming part of the global collective effort to extrapolate meaning from connected datasets.

Richard is a genius, in many ways, and at least partly because he just does stuff. So, he’s been working with the Wordsworth Trust’s dataset (with the permission of Jeff Cowton, another hero of museum information world) to dismantle it and express it as RDF triples…(sound of roughly half the audience for this post disappearing).

It means that the dataset is transformed from being a database of records into a database of references - every concept in the system is assigned a unique URL, and every assertion it makes about the world is then available to other systems as a reference.

What does it mean in practice? I’m still working that out. On the one hand, it means that the culture sector steps out of the dark web and is able to contribute to the collective global fund of knowledge and meaning. On the other, it means that our organisations can connect to, consume and repurpose the collaborative efforts of countless others, all over the world. In the same way that DBPedia is different from Wikipedia, the next generation of cultural services seems to be based on openness and interconnectedness.

Could it be that we are finally seeing the point of interoperability?