Ithaka report ith a catastrophe (for me)

I am tho thcrewed.
Ithaka S+R has produced a report for JISC, the SCA, NEH and NSF entitled "Sustaining digital resources: an on-the-ground view of projects today". It's a great report, outlining a sensible approach to what sustainability actually means, strategies to achieve it, and how a number of current projects put these strategies into practice. It's a follow-up to "Sustainability and revenue models for online academic resources" (2008).
The problem, for me, is that much of the originality that I hoped my PhD work would offer has vanished overnight. Their definition of sustainability; their explicit linking of financial sustainability to the value offer; their arguments for leadership that offers clarity of purpose and evidence of success; their clear-eyed distinctions between the financial versus mission-based value on which non-profits must base their measures of success and arguments for their future: all of these could have been plucked from my private writings and debates with my supervisor over the last 3 years. Yet of course they haven't been; they're the result of parallel thinking, but these guys have gathered the evidence that I'm still at the early stages of assembling.
It's not that my thoughts were especially profound, but I've never previously found any authors linking sustainability and the value proposition so clearly to the digital work of cultural heritage institutions. Now that niche is no longer empty. I'm really pleased to see that there are others of like mind out there, and of course a report like this gives me a great reference in support of my work, but the problem for me is not just one of dented pride, because I have to demonstrate considerable originality in my work and without that, no PhD. It's a pickle.
On the upside, there are some differences. The Ithaka report emphasises how important it is to be clear on the sources of value (and cost) in order to make the case to funders for continued support. I will too, but I hope to investigate more deeply the influence of decision-making processes and the sources of "friction" that may cause a discrepancy between what a resource is "worth" and what people are prepared to invest in it (complicated, of course, by questions of opportunity cost and uncertainty). Ithaka mainly looked at digitisation projects, in the sense of those offering sets of digitised material such as images, maps, papers or databases. I'm just as interested in the value of learning objects, games, mobile phone tours, exhibition websites (though admittedly my core case studies are less diverse than this), and only in a cultural heritage context, not education. I'm interested in certain "modalities of constraint" (c.f. Lessig) that aren't addressed by Ithaka, and in questions of risk management. I am looking at three varied partnerships and the effects that collaboration has on decision-making, value and funding, and partnership is an area that the Ithaka report, by its own admission, examines only briefly. So perhaps all is not lost, but whilst I genuinely think that this report is excellent and provides a lot for people in the digital humanities to chew over, it's given me quite a tricky challenge. I'm not about to give up my PhD, but with everything else that's happened over the last year I have to confess it's taken me pretty bloody close.

P.S. Ah bollocks, now Nick's at it too (para 6). Shows how un-original I was in the first place.

*Nancy L Maron, K Kirby Smith and Matthew Loy, 2009. "Sustaining digital resources: an on-the-ground view of projects today. Ithaka case studies in sustainability" http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/strategy/ithaka-case-studies-in-sustainability

Cross-post: thougts from SWTT at V&A

I thought I would get down a few notes from our meeting at the V&A (and I promise to do something for the earlier ones too, to add to the reports and transcripts already there). The subject of that session – collections – both drew me and made me a little wary. Collections are the most obvious case for doing SW in museums since they are so central to our activities and purpose, but I suspect that a lot of the time we are tempted to broadly equate SW in our context with multi-institution collections search, because we’ve dreamed of this for so long. This is rather lazy, albeit unsurprising, and I am hoping that we’ll develop a much bigger vision that this in these think-tank meetings. Happily I can say that we are doing so, and of course collections are vitally important to all of us, so a meeting like this is absolutely core to the whole series.
We had some new faces at the V&A session and some stimulating debate, but I thought when things drew to a close that only a couple of ideas had really captured my imagination. Actually, looking back on it, there was plenty, but I think this hadn’t sunk in partly because my brain went into hibernation in the air-con (until Dan figured out how to definitively kill it) and it took me a long time to emerge from my torpor. I’ve done a little digesting and here are the things that made most impact on me personally (not really in an order but it wouldn’t show the unordered list properly). Most if not all of these are points that were raised in the meeting, though I’ve not always identified an individual for fear of mischaracterising their ideas. Some of them might be my own responses to the discussion and demonstrations – my notes are a bit confusing :-}

1. Semantic Web approaches could be helpful in designing internal systems architecture: the learning potential of systems like JEROME and the ability effectively to represent/understand business processes via RDF etc. may make this aspect a good way of building a service-based system (obviously not the only way, but an intelligent way
2. Making the business case for SW as a solution for internal problems that also has benefits beyond the institution may be more productive than trying to convince directorate and funders of the need to go SW just for the sake of the Web
3. Despite my reservations about over-emphasising collections, outlined above, they are the obvious place to start for both external SW and for re-jigging the internal architecture – the key, as Suzanne Keene and Nick Poole pointed out, to knowledge management.
4. Suzanne suggested a future role for museums as “information broker” instead of information source/authority. A weighty idea.
5. Frances Lloyd Baynes pointed to the scale of the problem and possibilities arising from SW as a threat to curatorial control/authority because of the need to make certain choices about the creation and management of information. There’s no sector-wide view, either, and we often see each other as competitors.
6. Our measurements are wrong. Big problem if a lot of our activities and the value that arises from them then go un-measured. Not that many measures we currently use are great proxies for value anyway… and not that we know what we value online either.
7. There are complications in getting funding – if collections-related activities are seen as core then they won’t get project funding; but if they’re project funded then they won’t get ongoing support. Often museums are unaware that they need to provide this support themselves and expect project funding to continue indefinitely. Consequently we need a model for moving towards SW that recognises this reality – or else we need some external force to change the rules, for example by changing the standards expected of documentation or of web presence.
8. Documentation and search are not the same as presentation (Areti Galani, Nick Poole and others). However SW is in large part about search/discovery of resources* (although this function may be used for user experiences that don’t feel much like search) so this may not matter.* SW is also about building a framework of knowledge, a source of information to analyse, and we shouldn’t forget this aspect and think only of resource discovery.
9. Aside from RDF and (if you want to include them) microformats, a few useful data structures are already in play that may serve, e.g. FOAF, SIOC (for online communities) and stuff like DOAP that I’ve even less idea about.
10. JEROME! Wow, fantastic, and also very encouraging in that it offers an example of the merging of what we’ve started to refer to as “SW” and “sw”. By mapping microformats, UGC, profile information, FOAF etc onto RDF via graphs (I think?!?), great semantic power is extracted from diverse material. I’ve banged on about finding a path to SW that allows museums to take lots of small steps in that direction with a pay-off at each one, and JEROME lets me see a little more how this might work. Thank you, Sebastian Kruk and his gang.

[cross-posted from the UK Museums and the Semantic Web blog]