OpenCulture

Wikipedia describes itself as a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. With over 14 million articles (of which some 3.1m are in English) it is used by people all over the world as a source of reference, a place to share knowledge, and sometimes as a source of amusement.

Anyone responsible for managing a public-facing website in the past 5 years will have watched the proportion of hits originating from Wikipedia gradually creep up alongside the all-encompassing Google clickthroughs. The reason for this is that Wikipedia has achieved that magical online double-whammy of combining breadth with market-share, and it shows no sign of diminishing (recent news stories notwithstanding!).

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I’m delighted to introduce the first in a series of guest blogs from friends and colleagues who work with the sector to explore innovative uses of technology. Please welcome Marieke Guy, who blogs regularly for UKOLN.

Marieke is a research officer in the Community and Outreach Team at UKOLN, a centre of excellence in digital information management, based at the University of Bath. UKOLN provide advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities. Marieke is a regular Twitterer (http://twitter.com/mariekeguy) and can be emailed using m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk.

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It is time to think big about future roles for Museums, Archives and Libraries in civic society.

Whatever the impact of the next 18 months on public subsidy for arts & culture, we need to be able to present a strong, confident and forward-looking vision of our role in and value to a society that is experiencing great change.

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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, 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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I am sorry it’s been a little while since I tweeted offering to write to you about what museums, archives and libraries can do for Digital Inclusion. I’ve been busy, though, talking to people across the sector about our offer and how it might help people who aren’t active users of digital media, whether through choice or circumstance, to get involved and perhaps more importantly to feel that getting involved is something they want to do.

There are approximately 10,000 museums, archives and libraries in the UK. When people talk about our sector, they usually think of the big nationals like the Tate, the British Library or the British Museum. But the reality is that the vast majority of cultural organisations are much more like Post Offices once were - trusted, local institutions embedded in the hearts of local urban and rural communities.

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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:

1. The adage ‘knowledge grows through use’, which I acquired some years ago from a quotes website. The principle being that knowledge is dynamic and emergent, and that it thrives through the process of exchange
2. The fact that there is a physical manifestation of this principle in the way that neural pathways in the brain form, strengthen, detach and re-combine in response to changes in external stimulus
3. The way in which procedural AI in computer games can generate apparently complex, individual and motivated behaviours by combining a few simple starting conditions and essentially linear algorithmic rules
4. A bar in the City of London which shows prices for drinks on a ticker-tape - the prices fluctuating constantly in response to the demand for particular drinks

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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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The Collections Trust has been commissioned to deliver the Community Engagement strand of Stories of the World, one of the 10 major projects of the Cultural Olympiad in the run-up to 2012.

Stories of the World is enabling 14 museum projects to deliver innovative exhibitions which have been co-curated with their audiences, which include children and young people. The aim of our programme (which we are working on with the National Youth Agency) is to work with these delivery partners to ensure that their Community Engagement has the maximum possible impact.

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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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