Amazon Exposes 1 Terrabyte of Public Data

Hmm, never did anything with this when I saw it and amn't going to. It's a cool development, though: lots of new datasets through Amazon from (mainly) US sources, from DNA sequences to census and traffic data. It's more evidence that Amazon is shaping up as Google's real competition in the coming years, not Microsoft or Yahoo! (put that one in for those asleep at the back).

What can we offer from museums?

Anyway, here's the link to the RWW story: Amazon Exposes 1 Terrabyte of Public Data - ReadWriteWeb

Luke's Elegy and Ascent

Well I'm not the best placed to review Saturday evening's performance of Luke's new work, Elegy and Ascent, what with being a musical ignoramus and a very biased brother. I enjoyed it immensely, though, and his excellent talk beforehand (and our chats), and his reflections on how he reached this point in his artistic development, added a lot to the listening experience. It was fascinating to hear how he had, in the first half of the composition, taken part of a piano piece and redrawn it for orchestra. The original piece was composed using the chance (the drawing of cards) and Luke used a set of rules and his aesthetic sense to thread his way through this in a way that, as he pointed out, could only be his - another composer would have found another route through the chaos and made a different sort of beauty of it. To orchestrate this then, I suppose, added an extra layer of "human intervention" to the original randomness, as of course do the processes of conducting and performing the music. The second half of the Elegy and Ascent was very different but complementary: ordered but complex, and built around many interlocking, subtle and erudite ideas, as is usually the way with Luke's music. I won't say more for fear of sounding like I'm flattering my little brother, and we really can't have that. It would be even worse and kind of irrelevant to say we're proud of him, but...

I do hope that out there on't interweb somewhere somebody competent has done a proper job of reviewing the performance. One thing I have found, though, Karl Henning's blog where he previewed the concert and included Luke's notes. Also, if' you like to read scores, you can find lots of Luke's work on Scribd here (although not as yet Elegy and Ascent, I think). Hopefully in due course there will be a recording to listen to, too.

Digital preservation for da masses..? Archive Team, meet the DPC

Jeremy Keith (Adactio) has been fretting over the loss of his bookmarks with the dead-pooling of Magnolia, not to mention Pownce last year. Fortunately for Jeremy, he's a true alpha geek (not to mention trail-blazing, platform-pounding, left-clearing, good guy), so his response is to wonder how he can scrape, spider, and grab by hook or by crook all the stuff of his that he leaves scattered across the Web. Turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that he's not the only one with both the coding prowess and the strong sense of proprietorship over their stuff to try to do something like this. The spanking new Archive Team is up for it, guerilla-stylee, and hatching plans to help yer average Joe: as they put it, "We're gonna rescue your shit". Which is nice.

I like this. There's an active and sophisticated digital preservation community that has developed over many years. It has its roots, as far as I know, largely in the research and higher education communities, libraries, and the IT industry, all with their own priorities and preoccupations (museums are late-comers and minor players at best right now). And of course, lay people must have always played a part in some of this stuff, and some initiatives that could come under the DP banner - like the Internet Archive, I expect - rely heavily on informal communities to stash and curate stuff. Over the years ad hoc groups have sprung up to try to resuscitate corpsed forums, to salvage stuff from dying web-rings, to plan exit strategies for flaky virtual worlds and so on. But I don't think that there's really been a concerted approach to help individuals to keep a-hold of their stuff, spread as it often is across an array of sites from your many Google services, to Flickr and Delicious, to Twitter and your blog, Facebook, Slideshare and as many more as you care to mention. This is a huge variety, and what we might want to preserve in each will vary, as will the context required to make sense of it, so each service may need its own assessment for each individual (convergent evolution of the "significant properties" concept seems inevitable). It's a huge challenge but the Archive Team seem up for it.

I hope that these guys (and Jeremy K) and the "formal" DP community (DPC/DCC etc.) hook up and share knowledge. My guess is the latter have lots to offer in terms of technical expertise, connections, hardware and software, good theorisation, whilst the former group have wicked coding skills, motivation, inside-out knowledge of social software and its users, and a focus on the needs of individuals. They could offer each other a lot.

Something for the weekend

An(other) off-topic post intended for those small number of you who either (a) hang about in Leicester (hello!), or (b) are long-standing fans of the work of Luke Ottevanger (wow, how the hell did you find out about him?)
There's a concert this coming Saturday at the Fraser Noble Hall on London Road, Leicester, conducted by Michael Sackin and featuring Luke's Elegy and Ascent sandwiched between a Beethoven piano concerto and symphony. Luke is, let's say, not the greatest at publicising his work, and it's very rare that we in his family (or anyone else for that matter) get to hear what he has composed, so this is really exciting for us, and we have Michael to thank for asking Luke to write this piece, which I think he developed out of two previous works. Luke will be talking before the concert, hopefully explaining how the direction of his work has changed since its last public outing probably 10 years ago. Should be good, so come and hear the première!
Read more here.

There must be a name for this

That's it, I've had enough! Browsing the latest flurry of flim-flam from TechCrunch I found myself getting more and more cheesy at the current crop of crap names. OK so we're all used to mini-trends in the names that no-hoper start-ups go with - like the batch of second-ratrs (sic) that followed Flickr's success and ended their name with "[$consonant]r". Dopplr, Grazr, Etceterr. Funnily enough it's the fact that Twitter chose to name itself using the final vowel in the midst of that lame craze that makes me hate it less.

Nowadays it's all about the Ell: crap names ending with "...l" or "...le". OK so some names have been round for ever and make sense in their own way - to whit, Apple, Google - and others are more recent but might make sense still - Clickable, for example (no, "for example" is not a name, yet), even Pipl. I sort of forgive Amazon's Kindle (it's hardware anyway) but despite the fact it sort of relates to it's function I start to lose patience with Huddle, and having passed through Moodle, Oodle and Wonderfl we reach Trackle. Truly execrable. And slightly off the racing line, there's Twhirl.

Finally on the subject of appalling names from startups which will 90% certainly go to the wall, how about TwtQpon. Say it to yourself: TwtQpon.

WTF?

Hey ho, perhaps I should lighten up and rename this blog Doofkl.

The new NPG website: lots of stuff to see

Well I've got little to say about this, not having actually checked it out yet, but it's exciting to hear that London's National Portrait Gallery has a brand new website which now gives access to what sounds like most or all of their collection. Here's the 24HM story. Doubtless there'll be interesting things to learn technically and organisationally about the thing (for one, it was outsourced to CogApp - I'm interested now to know about the skills they maintain in-house). Basically though I'm just excited to be able to go and use it myself. Cool!

Museum of London API enhancements

I've been extending the MOLA publications database lately so that it now includes archaeological sites to which the publications relate. For pretty much all of these we have decent geographical point data (as we should, having dug most of them) and of course this is great for playing around with the data. So I've got a KML output going for that web API, which returns placemarks for sites corresponding to publications returned by your query. In the placemark are links to all the publications related to the site. You can also go the other way round: either query by the publication's ID to get its details and (in KML mode) related sites; or query by site, which returns simple XML for each related publication or, if you choose KML, returns all points related to books linked to that site (potentially lots of points, not just the one in your query). What it all means is that you can see your search results in Google Earth or on a map if you like by pasting in the URL for the KML e.g. http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/museumoflondon/food/rest.aspx?source=pubs&mode=kml&period=roman
So far I've not put this into the public interface because I think to do so requires some consideration, but this will come. I'm pleased in part because I can start to use this API in my own behind-the-scenes integration. For example I've also just done a load of work on the site summaries that we publish for all the work that MOLA does. The KML for these is cleaned up and the old ASP/XSLT thing I did to search across these (and other reports) by borough has been refreshed. It now lets you search by site code, and now that I can get at publications via site code it's a pretty small step to get it also to return related publications, which should come very soon (perhaps before going-home time). Because they're in very different data sources (XML files and SQL Server) it wasn't so straight forward before, now it is. The publications API is mainly for internal consumption like this (it also runs the user-facing publications page itself, at a lower level). I'd be really pleased, though, if others find a use for this, and any thoughts about the rights and wrongs of how I've done it would be gratefully received.

Ideum's multi-touch table

Nice to see an alternative multi-touch table to the MS Surface one coming out of the ever-interesing Ideam: Multi-touch, Multi-user Table Prototype. This is a company working with museums very much at the centre of their concern. I don't know if that has any impact on how an interface like this might be designed, but in any case it looks like there's going to be choice in the market. Fingers crossed I might get to see it at MW2009, though the chances of wheedling the necessary cash from the accountants' talons look slim.

Being for the benefit of Mr Shite

...like me. This is just a post for the poor .Net coder out there in some remote corner of the world who, like me, will find themselves wondering why the hell their XSL transformations using disable-output-escaping are ending up with their output being escaped. For me this meant invalid KML, where hte CDATA sections I needed weren't being output correctly. I knew the transformation worked just by putting the XML and XSL together, but my cheapo web service did the transformation via C# and was screwing it up.

So if you're that coder of modest capacity like myself, here's where I got my clues:

• This thread told me that the XmlTextWriter which is part of my Transform class would be ignoring "disable-output-escaping", and that I should write to a stream instead.
• Never having actually done much with streams, I found these utility methods perfect for cut-n-paste MemoryStream-to-string conversion

Job done.

If you happen to be wondering how you can output a CDATA section in your XSLT, I wanted to put that in here too but unsurprisingly Blogger doesn't like that code. I'll see if I can find a way around that. Google "disable-output-escaping CDATA", that should get you somewhere!

Now that's what I call sustainable. Not.

Well, I didn't realise that my PhD might have such a tragi-comic example to illustrate the need for an examination of digital sustainability in museums, which is its subject matter, but the BBC's report (and a longer one on the telly) on the situation faced by The Public in West Bromwich even before it opens does throw up a lot of questions about who makes decisions and how, and who is best placed to decide when to pull the plug. Tens of £millions spent and yet facing the possibility that it will be scrapped before it fully opens - and at the heart of it, in the interactive gallery that's not yet open, lies digital media that may be out-dated before its launch. Will it be any good, will it look exciting and cutting edge, will it break, will it be worth the money already spent, and is that important when deciding about its future - or is it only the money yet to be spent that matters, that required to keep it working or useful? Who will decide what money will be spent and on what: the Arts Council, Sandwell Council, Advantage West Midlands, the European Union? The story's not over yet, and good luck to them since they've come this far. Hopefully it will be brilliant. But there must be questions to ask.

WorldCat/OCLC get the rough end of the Guardian's stick

Well I've always had huge admiration for OCLC and for their WorldCat service (and FindInALibrary, built upon it). My admiration has arisen in large part from the papers and reports that have come out of its distinguished personnel, and I've never known that much about its core business and how it works with libraries to make WorldCat what it is. The Guardian has a pretty critical piece (Why you can't find a library book in your search engine), which does allow OCLC's Karen Calhoun to come back but lays into a proposed rule changes that, says author Wendy Grossman, basically stops the reuse of any WorldCat data as of next month.
Now the article leaves me pretty confused about just what's to be protected. Is it the descriptive metadata about individual publications that OCLC people wrote, or data about which libraries those publications may be found in, or both? Can libraries themselves can use their own data? Does WorldCat exclude Google from its pages? Grossman would seem to imply so. I'm certainly in favour of WorldCat being truly open with a public API, and getting its stuff in all the search engines; and anything that makes it easier to know whether something is in your local library is good. AFAIK WorldCat doesn't have a really open and powerful API and this, frankly, is not sustainable. But I wonder whether Grossman is conflating metadata about books and that about copies of books in libraries in her article, in which case some of the contrasts she makes between what OCLC do and what OpenLibrary, Talis, LibraryThing etc offer may be false and unfair.

I guess I need to do some investigation myself, really. On the face of it the proposed rule change sounds unwelcome, but I'm too much of a fan of OCLC to take that criticism unquestioningly.

Davy Graham, goodbye

Davy Graham, goodbye. What a wonderful and inspiring musician, and what a legacy he leaves in his own music but, perhaps even more, in the music of others.

From his website:

It is with great sadness that we have to announce that Davy died yesterday [15th December 2008] amongst friends and family from a massive seizure at home after a short battle with lung cancer. There will be a private family funeral held in the next few days and a public memorial in January; details of which will be available at http://www.lescousins.co.uk/ shortly. Davy will be missed by those of us who loved him. The many fans who came to see his last concerts gave him much joy and satisfaction and was something he drew great strength from.

Zemanta: another channel for Europeana content?

OK there are several ways I could frame this post, but obviously one is that here is another opportunity for Europeana to channel its content.

So what is Zemanta? Well TechCrunch just wrote about the launch of its public API, and from what they say Zemanta is looks to be amongst a burgeoning sector of semantic enhancement tools - another with an API announcement this week was uClassify, and you can also look to OpenCalais, Hakia, AdaptiveBlue's BlueOrganizer and others including Yahoo!. These are tools that take in (text) content, analyise it, and identify entities within or characteristics of that text. These might be embedded into the text, or returned as recommendations, classifications, or links to related material. Sometimes we're talking about a machine-facing service, sometimes an end-user one e.g. the BlueOrganizer plugin. With Hakia and Yahoo!, these are services built on the power of their search engines. Zemanta sounds like it's squarely in this area, digesting content and returning links, images, keywords etc. from a database including (of course) Wikipedia, Amazon and Flickr. Looks like it's a plugin too.
uClassify is a little different - it learns to classify your text as you train it. I'm characterising it as a semantic enhancement technology but that may not be right in a strict sense. In any case, it will "enrich" the content you submit by putting it into categories you've assigned. That said, when I used oFaust, one of the apps built on top of its API, it took my snippet of Moby Dick and told me it was like Edgar Allen Poe, but needed work! Hmm. Whether that was down to the classifier or the training, though, I don't know.
So to go back to how Zemanta might fit in with Europeana, it's basically that we could work with them to digest our content and create relevant links to Europeana's vast (hopefully) and authoritative collection of cultural heritage content: artefacts, media, documents, people, events, and places. This is where I expect it helps to be big and standardised, as it should be easier for companies like Zemanta to work with one provider of cultural heritage content than with thousands of museums, libraries and archives.
To read more about Europeana (formerly EDL) check out my earlier posts: Europeana and EDL

Building communities pt.2

In my previous post about "Building Communities in the Digital Arts and Humanities", the workshop I recently attended, I mentioned that one concrete suggestion had caught my imagination, and that of others, in the final discussion, but I forgot to actually write about it. Rather than heavily editing that post, I'll outline it here.

John Byron, Executive Director of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, proposed a sort of helpdesk for the digital humanities. The situation at present for anyone with a problem can be tricky: non-specialists may have no clue where to turn to find advice on, say, digital preservation, whilst techies might wonder who to ask about, for example, reconciling two metadata schemas; and yet, if you knew who to ask, there's almost certainly someone out there who could answer that query, in a centre of expertise, a grass-roots network, a software house etc. But what if there was one website (or just an e-mail address!) you could go to with your problem, which would direct the query to the right place to get it answered? The model might be one of triage - a crack squad of dedicated elves with a deep knowledge of the sources of expertise decide who to send the question to - or of an expertise marketplace, akin to Experts Exchange and the like, where a problem would be posted to a suitable forum (perhaps by elves again) and the community there would propose answers. The beneficiary might be able to assign points for the help they're given.
The proposal is not at heart about how to build communities, of course, but it would face that problem in two areas - building the community of experts, and that of users. Perhaps it would also build on what we learned from the meeting, too, because the idea would be to build on existing communities, creating a community of communities in fact, although quite how would I guess depend upon each community. It would also, hopefully, adapt itself to the needs of the target (user) community too, providing services that it needs rather than what someone else thinks it needs.
I really liked the idea, which would need some funds to get off the ground and to keep going, but which I think is quite easy to explain and show the benefits of. The problem may be one of gaining resources for a project that benefits people worldwide. But there are examples of this working (OCLC, for one). I hope it goes somewhere.

New hope for Swanee Kazoo?

Those of us who adored I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue with the late Humphrey Lyttleton*, and wondering if it will ever return or could be the same without him do at least now have an opportunity to participate in a very exciting project you can address with either a swannee whistle or a kazoo, as is your wont. I'm not sure if there are any parts written specifically for either intrument, but feel free to co-opt any part that takes your fancy. Go on, make it happen, bring back Swanee Kazoo! (apologies to those of you unfamilar with the game, you probably live in the wrong country)


* Apparently Humph was once president of the Society for Italic Handwriting.

NEDCC conference

"Persistence of Memory:Sustaining Digital Collections" is a conference being run shortly in Chicago by the NEDCC (December 9-10), and I should have stuck up a note about it yonks ago but it's mainly strictly "digital preservation" stuff as opposed to sustainability in the way I treat it. However there are a couple of papers that look closer to my research interests, notably Simon Tanner's (of KCL), entitled "Making Digital Preservation Affordable: Values and Business Models": the emphasis on valuation is key. Katherine Skinner's "Collaborative Adventures in Digital Preservation: Creating and Sustaining External Partnerships" may be relevant too, although it looks as though it's in essence about developing networks of partners for preservation activity. Having spent the first part of this week hanging out with various very interesting people from KCL, it's clear the place is stuffed with people I should be pestering for insights in my research area. If I whisper, perhaps they won't hear me coming....

Building communities

<<<<<BIG WARNING>>>>>
Major pontification with no real conclusions follows. Look away now.

[UPDATE: I forgot to include the Big Idea I mention below, which I've now written about separately]

I got back late [last] Wednesday from a meeting/seminar/workshop/conference thing (papers now here) in at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh which I'm still digesting [a week after I started writing this...] but which gave me plenty to think about and introduced me to many interesting people from the digital arts & humanities world (DAH*). Weird though it seems when written down, this world intersects all too rarely with that of museums, libraries and archives(MLAs). That said, one aim of the organisers seemed to be to develop ideas for filling the void left by the Arts and Humanities Data Service, which was wound up this year and did have some relationships with MLAs, not least my own via the LAARC.

Anyway to the point. The object of the exercise was to explore community-building in DAH. What conditions favour this, what sorts of communities may fare best, what structures within the sector can or would help? I must confess that I frequently felt confused about whether we were speaking about the AHDS-related problem or a wider question, and whether the communities in question were partnerships and networks, or audiences for some product/service that the former might provide. Nevertheless there were several interesting presentations on day 1 (Tuesday), and I think fruitful discussion on day 2, when we worked in breakout groups to brainstorm a few questions around the topic., with at least one really stimulating idea emerging, courtesy of an antipodean mind (now why isn't that surprising?) I'll pick out a few of the things that grabbed me.

Themes

• demonstrating value. Value to funders, if you're going to get their support for your network/partnership/wha'evah. Value to those you want as partners. Value to the people you want to use whatever it is you're promoting. It wasn't the idea that was interesting but the increasing recognition of the need not just to have a good idea, but to sell it. There's an ever-widening discussion of what makes a good indicator of value in various contexts - I know this from the museum and cultural world, but of course the humanities/academic world is grappling with the same hydra. Perhaps for my circle it's a debate over the appropriate usage of web stats, whilst for many at the meeting it was about citations. Same problem.


• marketing. Plenty of cross-over with the above, in fact. As well as the obvious sales pitch aspect, if you're trying to build a community, there's the flipside of marketing: learning your market's needs in order to create the product that it wants.


• plumbing. There was a lot of talk about infrastructure, which means a great variety of things: in a way what is the facilitated at one level becomes the facilitator at another (i.e. infrastructure), much as data and metadata can seem to be the same thing seen from different angles. There was a kind of infrastructure that cropped up more than once, though I'm hard pushed to characterise it other than by negatives. It's not generally physical: no cabling, not necessarily servers. It's not the provision of some fundamental service. It's where an agent/network/partnership helps to hook up or facilitate services and, umm, servicees (sorry). A kind of metaservice, if you like. So we had Bamboo, CLARIN, DARIAH and tge-ADONIS, TextGrid all considering or planning to act as intermediaries of one sort or another between DAH services or data and consumers (machine or human). I was struck by the parallels with some of the work I already knew about in the cultural heritage area. Collections Trust has exciting plans about where it will position its Culture Online venture, and Lexara [read my disclaimer] have realigned their Magic Studio to make it the "plumbing" between content providers (including services like Flickr) and other services or end-users/creators. In the commercial world, Gnip is also putting itself in this space, between social apps and those built upon them.


• Roles and responsibilities. Really I suppose I just mean that a need for new roles is becoming apparent without us yet knowing who in our communities (or outside, perhaps) should be responsible for fulfilling them. We look at the rapid changes in the red-in-tooth-and-claw commercial sector, where networks of networks and a swirling and intermixing of content and services constantly throws up new ways of doing things, and we start to see the opportunities for new services to accomplish our parochial aims, recognise that we can't provide them, or that they're better provided collectively, or that our peers would benefit from them too; but we can be held back from turning this collective need/benefit into collective action in part because we haven't got conventions for assigning/allocating/assuming the new roles implied by these possibilities.
  
• Building on what we have. Starting a new community initiative from scratch, including the community, may be unwise for a number of reasons. Often it may be better to look at existing organisations and see how their role could be adapted or expanded, whether by the creation of a special interest group, a regional su-committee, a project or whatever. This way you start with a community and you have an established brand to build from, with both the name and the objectives/values pre-existing to an extent in the minds of (potential) stakeholders. I had in mind the likes of the MCG, MCN, CNI: organisations that could provide the foundations for specialist sub-groups or initiatives.

As you can tell, I guess, a week later I still haven't reached any conclusions. I was hoping that reading my notes and writing this would bring some revelations or clarity, but no. The Edinburgh meeting was more like the exercise stirred up a lot of mud that I'd always known was there and I still don't know how to deal with it, but I think at least I now have a slightly better idea of what it's made. I guess, with my scant experience of big collaborative projects, I am poorly equipped to interpret what I heard from the point of view of the question at hand: community building. All the same I did hear about lots of cool stuff and met fascinating people, and attending was well worthwhile for me - I hope I gave something back. So thank you, Seth Denbo (source of my invitation) and all of the organisers of the seminar. I hope it gave you some clues as to where to take DARIAH, and I hope we can find new ways to knit the digital heritage and digital arts and humanities closer together.

* Apologies. I tried to write this avoiding initials for this but it proved too much work. I doubt it will catch on.

Google kills Lively, advises on digital preservation

Google's well-reported putting-out-of-misery of Lively was announced here, where pragmatically and somewhat amusingly they advise on the digital preservation methods available to those poor suckers who took a chance on a Google Labs experiment. It's pretty simple, really:
"We'd encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms"
Fair enough. I think plenty of DP types would accept that at the moment there aren't that many options for virtual worlds. It's certainly another argument for improving the transportability of material between VWs environments, but presumably this would mean compromising on innovation to some extent. Hey ho, there's plenty more VWs to go around (and I never go to any of them. Not exactly an early adopter, me)

UK press on Europeana's launch

Some UK press on the launch of Europeana:

BBC online: European online library launches
Guardian: Dante to dialects: EU's online renaissance
Associated Press: European history, culture and art goes digital (well not really UK but never mind)

I'll keep editing this stuff as I find more. Plenty of concentration on the awesome content as well as the fact the site was brought to its knees by huge traffic, which I'd see as a success of sorts - best see how the traffic holds up over the next few weeks, though.

Securing endowment

No, not endowments. Decision-making literature* addresses the "endowment effect". In a nutshell, I mean that phenomenon whereby people value what they have more than what they might have, although they be the same. This is tied to the observation that loss of utility is felt more keenly than a gain of the same utility. If I am given a mug (to follow Beach and Connolly's example) I may well require a larger payment to give it up that I would be prepared to pay for it.

This is probably a useful tool to wield when trying to get support for some resourcing decisions in an organisation, particularly those that can be expressed as relating to assets the organisation already possesses, rather than new ones it might acquire. In a scenario where I am seeking funds to support old digital resources, careful preparation of the ground to develop an endowment effect amongst the executive before taking the proposal to the board may be fruitful (this is obvious to the point of being banal, right?) If I just tell then what we have, what it could do in the future, and how we plan to maintain it, it's like saying "here's a mug that will hold your coffee and make you happy, it will cost you a fiver, gimme!" If instead I encourage a sense of pre-existing ownership - an emotional committment - a feeling that this thing is already part of the museum and its loss reduces us, then the costs I propose that we bear are more like the purchase offer for the mug that is turned down: in other words the board may be more likely to turn down the opportunity to avoid those costs. It's like saying "you've got a mug, you love it, if you want to keep the cash then I'm afraid you'll lose the mug. Bummer, but that's life. So cough up!"

How you actually cultivate within the executive that sense of ownership is another question. You could also argue that this is little different to just identifying and drawing out the value of an asset to the decision-makers, but it's a more emotional proposition than simply making them aware of an assets existence and potential future utility, and it may be worth exploring how one can play the psychological game and encourage emotional engagement and attachment to pre-existing digital resources when fighting for the funds to suppport them. It may actually be as important as the rational explication of value, however much we might like to believe decisions would be rational.

Nina Simon amongst others has talked extensively and profoundly on Museum 2.0 about developing engagement amongst our audiences, and I'm starting to realise how this could be equally important within the organisation: if we want to persuade people of the rightness of what we're arguing for, there can be more to it than pure reason, Kant there? (apologies for the shameless mis-referencing here of something I clearly don't understand. I only understand puns.) It's internal marketing, I suppose, and nothing new.





* OK, let's be honest, all I know about is the book I'm reading right now and blogged about previously