OpenCulture

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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A meeting this morning with Judy Faraday of the John Lewis archive has prompted me to return to the theme of the economics of Digital Cultural Content. Judy, in partnership with training providers FPM Training, has been working wwith 18 archive services on issues relating to their strategic planning, fundraising and sustainability.

These services, like many others throughout the UK (and indeed internationally) have been funded to digitise their collections. As with so many other parts of the industry, their primary motivation was more to do with the availability of funds than because of a connection to their core organisational mission, or an understanding of the implications of acquiring a huge quantity of new digital material.

And so many of them find themselves in the classic contemporary Catch-22 situation of holding a large number of digital objects on servers, but without the institutional resources or infrastructure to transform them into Digital Assets, and thence to bring them to market in a structured and sustainable way.

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For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, NOF-Digi refers to the New Opportunities Fund Digitisation Programme - a £50m Government-backed initiative to digitise the nations cultural heritage, and in the process to generate a new generation of learning resources online.

For many, it was the first large-scale investment in Digitisation, and heralded a new era in terms of skills and understanding. Sadly, however, as is sometimes the case with project funding, many of these online resources have not been actively maintained by their host institution.

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So, the Digital Britain report has been with us for long enough now for people to have started accusing the Government of ignoring it. The popular press is making hay out of the apparent reverse double-switch on ISP lockdown for filesharers following Peter Mandleson’s latest round of international meetings. In the meantime, the publicly-funded world holds its breath waiting for a General Election and, more importantly, *that* Spending Review.

It was interesting, in this context, to have been involved in a series of recent discussions about the role the Department for Culture can play in the evolving world of Digital. As part of these discussions, I was asked to do two things. Firstly, to produce a short ’state of the nation’ piece highlighting the current activity in museum tech. Secondly, to suggest some areas which might benefit from DCMS’ attention.

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The Digital Preservation Coalition was established in January 2001 to ‘foster joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base.’

The sense of urgency was born of the recognition that we stood at the dawn of the digital age, without the strategies, knowledge, tools or practices we needed in order to ensure the long-term preservation and access of what we were about to create.

Fast forward 8 years, almost a decade, and where are we? Are funders placing intelligent obligations on their recipients, requiring good practice and long-term thinking? Do museums, archives and libraries maintain Digital Preservation Policies that are connected to the management and development of their organisations? Are the Digital Assets themselves well described, using appropriate standards?

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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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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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