OpenCulture

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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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.

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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.

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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.

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?

I attended this morning’s session at NESTA at which Stephen Carter gave the keynote address about the Digital Britain review (really his first public statements since the publication of the interim report a couple of weeks back) - thanks to Bridge Mackenzie at Flow for the heads-up about the event!

A fascinating session, it was yet another tantalising glimpse of how significant Digital Britain could be for museums, archives and libraries.

NESTA have posted full video of the event here.

The session was chaired by Jonathan Kestenbaum of NESTA. He really hit the nail on the head when he said that Digital Britain was really giving voice to a feeling, a sense of convergence which is happening across the Media, Tech, Cultural and Creative industries.

Stephen Carter is an interesting guy - ex of James Walter Thompson and the founding CEO of OfCOM, he is a great speaker and it is well worth listening to his 20-minute unprepared commentary if you can. His three-word mantra ‘poetry, plumbing, proficiency’ pretty much sums up the digital agenda in the culture sector for the past decade or so. It’s all about content, infrastructure and developing the skills and confidence to wield the tools of technology to best effect.

He spoke a lot more ‘about’ the review process than he did about the review itself, but what is clear is that there is a real recognition within Government that the Digital Economy *could* have a profound impact on the stability of the real economy if (and only if) we can work out some viable long-term business models around both content and next-generation Broadband access.

What was probably most interesting for museums, though, was the absolutely unequivocal view that eGovernment and online public service delivery (including access to the creative output of the Creative & Cultural Industries) are two of the most important foci and drivers for this work. Ultimately, as Carter pointed out, all of the great strides in technology in the UK have depended on public money from public markets, and the next phase will be no different.

Peter Bazalgette (media pundit and partially responsible for bringing Big Brother to the UK) gave some excellent insights into the realities of the situation. Again, he highlighted the Cultural and Creative Industries as key agents and drivers of content, which in turn generates demand. He also pointed out the tremendous shift which has taken place in recent years in which prosumers are driving an unprecedented increase in the content flowing across the network.

Absolutely, said Neil Berkett from Virgin Media, but we’re not in the game of giving it all away. All of this future prosperity depends on realising that the old monolithic transactional industries (CD anyone?) are dead, and that the next generation of business, funding and legal models will have to stop shoring up the old industries, and focus instead on fostering the new ones.

In this world, he noted, you and I have two forms of currency - our attention span and our own content. The future depends on establishing non-transactional models which understand that the dividend, the payoff, may be two or three transactions away from the point of consumption.

Heady stuff indeed, but Kestenbaum is right - there is an atmosphere, a commitment, a momentum behind this one which marks it out. Digital Britain may not change the world, certainly for museums, but if it is any indication of the scope and quality of Government thinking on this issue, there are exciting things to come!

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…