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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People talk a lot of rubbish about the Recession. From green shoots to Global deflation, it’s astonishing how many armchair pundits have arisen to take up the gauntlet of speculation and use it to thrust into the public consciousness phrases like ‘double-dip’ and ‘fiscal stimulus’.

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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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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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