The LOD-LAM star system....

....is not in a galaxy far far away, although I believe it came out of San Francisco so that may not be too much of a stretch. The recent LOD-LAM workshop there on the question of Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums seems to have been a very lively and stimulating event and resulted in, amongst other things, a star rating system for linked open cultural metadata.
Mia yesterday posted a question to the MCG list asking for reactions to the scheme, which addresses in particular the issue of rights and rights statements for metadata - both the nature of the licence, which must reach a minimum level of openness, and the publication of that licence/waiver. Specifically she asked whether the fact that even the minimum one-star rating required data to be available for both non-commercial and commercial use was a problem for institutions.

My reply was that I felt it essential, in order for it to count as linked data (so I'm very pleased to see it required for the most basic level of conformance). But here I'd like to expand on that a bit and also start to tease out a distinction that I think has been somewhat ignored: between the use of data to infer, reason, search, analyse, and the re-publication of data.

First, the commercial/non-commercial question. I suppose one could consider that as long as the data isn't behind a paywall or password or some other barrier then it's open, but that's not my view: I think that if it's restricted to a certain group of users then it's not open. Placing requirements on those users (e.g. attribution) is another matter; that's a limitation (and a pain, perhaps) but it's not closing the data off per se, whereas making it NC only is. Since the 4 different star levels in the LOD-LAM scheme all seem to reflect the same belief that's cool with me.

The commercial use question is a problem that has bedevilled Europeana in recent months, and so it is a very live issue in my mind. The need to restrict the use of the metadata to non-commercial contexts absolutely cripples the API's utility and undermines efforts to create a more powerful, usable, sustainable resource for all, and indeed to drive the creative economy in the way that the Europeana Commission originally envisaged. With a bit of luck and imagination this won't stay a problem for long, because a new data provider agreement will encourage much more permissive licences for the data, and in the meantime a subset of data with open licences (over 3M objects) has been partitioned off and was released this very week as Linked Open Data. Hurrah!

This brings us to the question of how LOD is used and whether we need a more precise understanding of how this might relate to the restrictions (e.g. non-commercial only) and requirements (e.g. giving attribution) that could be attached to data. I see two basic types of usage of someone else's metadata/content: publication e.g. displaying some facts from a 3rd party LOD source in your application; and reasoning with the data, whereby you may use data from 3rd party A to reach data from 3rd party B, but not necessarily republish any of the data from A.

If LOD sources used for reasoning have to be treated in the same way as those used for publication you potentially have a lot more complexity to deal with*, because every node involved in a chain of reasoning needs to be checked for conformance with whatever restrictions might apply to the consuming system. When a data source might contain data with a mixture of licences, so you have to check each piece of data, this is pretty onerous and will make developers think twice about following any links to that resource, so it's really important that aggregators like Culture Grid and Europeana can apply a single licence to a set of data.

If, on the other hand, licences can be designed that apply only to republication, not to reasoning, then client systems can use LOD without having to check that commercial use is permitted for every step along the way, and without having to give attribution to each source regardless of whether it’s published or not. I'm not sure that Creative Commons licences are really set up to allow for this distinction, although ODC-ODbL might be. Besides, if data is never published to a user interface, who could check whether it had been used in the reasoning process along the way? If my application finds a National Gallery record that references Pieter de Hooch’s ULAN record (just so that we’re all sure we’re talking about the same de Hooch), and I then use that identifier to query, say, the Amsterdam Museum dataset, does ULAN need crediting? Here ULAN is used only to ensure co-reference, of course. What if I used the ULAN record’s statement that he was active in Amsterdam between 1661-1684 to query DBPedia and find out what else happened in Amsterdam in the years that he was active there? I still don’t republish any ULAN data, but I use it for reasoning to find the data I do actually publish. At what point am I doing something that requires me to give attribution, or to be bound by restrictions on commercial use? Does the use of ULAN identifiers for co-reference bind a consuming system to the terms of use of ULAN? I guess not, but between this and republishing the ULAN record there’s a spectrum of possible uses.

Here's an analogy: when writing a book (or a thesis!), if one quotes from someone else's work they must be credited - and if it's a big enough chunk you may have to pay them. But if someone's work has merely informed your thinking, perhaps tangentially, and you don't quote them; or if perhaps you started by reading a review paper and end up citing only one of the papers it directed you to, then there's not the same requirement to either seek their permission to use their work, nor to credit them in the reference list. There's perhaps a good reason to try to do so, because it gives your own work more authority and credibility if you reference sources, but there's not a requirement - in fact it's sometime hard to find a way to give the credit you wish to someone who's informed your thinking! As with quotations and references, so with licensing data: attributing the source of data you republish is different to giving attribution to something that helped you to get somewhere else; nevertheless, it does your own credibility good to show how you reached your conclusions.

Another analogy: search engines already adopt a practical approach to the question of rights, reasoning and attribution. "Disallow: /" in a robots.txt file amounts to an instruction not to index and search (reason) and therefore not to display content. If this isn't there, then they may crawl your pages, reason with the data they gather, and of course display (publish) it in search results pages. Whilst the content they show there is covered by "fair use" laws in some countries, in others that’s not the case so there has occasionally been controversy about the "publication" part of what they do, and it has been known for some companies to get shirty with Google for listing their content (step forward, Agence France, for this exemplary foot-shooting). As far as attribution goes, one could argue that this happens through the simple act of linking to the source site. When it comes to the reasoning part of what search engines do, though, there's been no kerfuffle concerning giving attribution for that. No one minds not being credited for their part in the page rank score of a site they linked to – who pays it any mind at all? – and yet this is absolutely essential to how Google and co. work. To me, this seems akin to the hidden role that linked data sources can play in-between one another.

Of course, the “reasoning” problem has quite a different flavour depending upon whether you’re reasoning across distributed data sources or ingesting data into a single system and reasoning there. As Mia noted, the former is not what we tend to see at the moment. All of the good examples I know of digital heritage employing LOD actually use it by ingesting the data and integrating it into the local index, whether that's Dan Pett's nimble PAS work or Europeana's behemoth. But that doesn't mean that it's a good idea for us to build a model that assumes this will always be the case. Right now we're in the earliest stages of the LOD/semweb project really gathering pace - which I believe it finally is. People will do more ambitious things as the data grows, and the current pragmatic paradigm of identifying a data source that could be good for enriching your data and ingesting it into your own store where you can index it and make it actually scale may not stay the predominant one. It makes it hard to go beyond a couple of steps of inference because you can't blindly follow all the links you find in the LOD you ingest and ingest them too – you could end up ingesting the whole of the web of data. As the technology permits and the idea of making more agile steps across the semantic graph beds in I expect we'll see more solutions appear where reasoning is done according to what is found in various linked data sources, not according to what a system designer has pre-selected. As the chains of inference grow longer, the issue of attribution becomes keener, and so in the longer term there will be no escaping the need to be able to reason without giving attribution.

This is the detail we could do with ironing out in licencing LOD, and I’d be pleased to see it discussed in relation to the LOD-LAM star scheme.

UKMW2009

Yesterday the V&A in London hosted first the UK Museums on the Web 2009 conference, run by the Museums Computer Group (MCG, spanking new website here), and then the Jodi Awards. both of which I attended and both of which I found immensely stimulating. As always, it was fantastic too to catch up with various peers, some of them old friends (or indeed supervisors!), others people I knew only from Twitter or their blog, or not at all. I only wish we'd had a week to spend so that all the discussions I found myself in could have flourished fully, but that's the nature of events like this. Hopefully those nascent conversations started with @janetedavis, @psychemedia, Dave Patten, @gsturtridge, Carl Hogsden and so many others will continue elsewhere, soon.
UKMW09 had a very lively back-channel on Twitter. Check out the tag #ukmw09 to see what I mean. I had enough of a job keeping up with what the people I follow were tweeting but I dropped in every now and then to see what others were saying and would find 60, 80, 100, new tweets: too much to follow and still pay attention, so I may do some catching up today. Some papers really seemed to get people excited, though, notable Paul Golding's, and perhaps this showed how well the organising committee had identified what MCG people needed to hear about.
In the middle of the conference there was a break for the MCG AGM. The Group has had a major constitutional overhaul and the changes implied by this are only beginning to be evident, starting with that website and new logo. A very exciting research partnership is in the offing, and together with membership rules that now include mail list members as formal members of MCG, plans for sandboxes and evolving relationships with strategic bodies, it looks like the MCG is getting a real shot in the arm, thanks to an imaginative committee and valuable facilitation by Flow Associates.
This stuff is the notes I took down live at #UKMW09. I'm not planning to edit it*, that will only slow it down so much I never publish this, so naturally you'll find it somewhat impenetrable and full of bits of that amount to straight transcription coz you don't know where the speakers leading you, and other parts lacking enough context to make any sense but hey, if you find anything of interest I'd urge you to look deeper into that speaker's work because all of these papers were way more fascinating than my notes could ever convey - even if I did edit them!
* but you never know.
Enough preamble and caveats, here you go. Oh, any stuff in [square brackets] is my own interjections [or is it Someone Else?]

UKMW 2009
Ross Parry, chair
[...basically I missed Ross pt. 1. Shame, he sets this stuff up so well but if you've heard him before you'll know this.]
Mike Ellis
Today's experiment: QR codes on delegate badges so we can stalk each other. Will get e-mailed vCard of whoever we scan (or key the number in for). Done through Mike's onetag.org service

Session 1: Social (Bridget McKenzie, chair)
BMcK intro: Social is deep: connected with museological issues of contested ownership, authority etc. Web can power a civic society.
Matthew Cock (British Museum) & Andrew Caspari (BBC)
A History of the World partnership (AHOW) BM+BBC, 2010-2012 and beyond. 100 episode Radio 4 series, involving 350 museums, local radio stations, website, kids' programmes, plus 100 objects from BM. Radio rather than TV for speed: story rather than visual focus. MC: opportunity for a social site and engagement.
AC: 100 BM objects woven into a history of past 2 million years by Neil Macgregor on R4, 13 then done for CBBC. 600 objects from round the country telling regions' relevance to story of UK & world. Beyond that, UGC: public invited to upload their objects to weave into the story. World Service will overlap with this. Hope to encourage conversation off AHOW i.e in Twitter etc.
Forcing partnerships, encouraging wide participation, building new audiences for digital, museums and history. Pan-platform. "Permanent" collection [very interesting to see how this will work]. Each object has own page, journeys through geography and time via objects.
MC: priority for BM object pages is to get people to listen again to radio show. There will be video, 3D for some, related objects, other contributions, (requested) comments from others as well as open for public comments and, for limited time, questions.
Other museums and public can tag their objects in the same way as BM has done for findability, a simple uploader with variable levels of detail. This open to people worldwide, moderated too.
Launch January.
Qs
BMcK: will the collections gathered through this feed into Culture Grid? MC: not decided, governed by BBC T&Cs at present.
Denise Drake (Tower Hamlets Summer University): Staying social online
Small independent charity. Free summer courses to all young people (11-25) in TH. Actually year round. 26 staff. Have helped set up similar summer uni in every London boro, coordinated but independent, 50k places in all.
2 websites, active on 13 social network sites/accounts. Bursaries for film/photo projex, blogs for these.
Asked for a vote for an award, got some strong negative responses but regarded as an opportunity to react positively, quickly. -ve comments left visible. Tries not to do social stuff out of office hours, partly for protection. Child protection issues: don't make "friends" of u-18s; be careful with images (make them small, no name)
Nadia Arbach (now @ V&A)
Wikipedia Loves Art campaign, a way of generating images for WikiPedia, Feb '09. BMA led 16 museums, V&A only UK participant. Next year V&A will lead a proper UK project, Britain loves Wikipedia, and they're looking for museums that want to take part. [see also Nick Poole's blog here]. BMA encouraged their users to join in, V&A targeted the "London" Flickr group. Each museum had own guidelines and routes to participation, interesing use of existing networks.
Hosted a special day blitzing the museum (though could do any time in Feb). Competitive in terms of numbers uploaded by inds/teams on that day.
Official WLA photopool, museums checking correct data attached to photos. Process changing nect time so that quality priotirised over quality - an uploader?
Museums have had people asking them to photograph particular artefacts for them via WLA, or to add images to Flickr groups.
CC licence required for all contributions.
Session Q&A
Q from Jude Habib: how did BBC engage local museums? A: Local radio has a buddy in each station for museums to contact.
Ruth Harper: [my summary: sounds like C24 want in on AHOW]
Q from Mike Ellis: should we build it or should we use what's there? MC: never considered using e.g. Wikipedia because they had the BBC platform.
From me: the "permanent" collection? MC/AC: no plan yet, too busy getting this ready to support the Cultural Olympiad etc. though definitely intend to find a way to sustain this, perhaps through integration with the offer in the BBC History site and the like.

Session 2: Situational (Loic Tallon, chair)
Clients asking how to create a web-like experience in the museum - is that confusing? Mobile growing, also calls for another experience.
Paul Golding (wirelesswanders.com): Situational web
How you give an experience based on where you are, overview of technologies.
Cells have IDs we use to tell where roughly phones are. Public info which e.g. Google can use. Location gateways queried for this, with estimates of uncertainy. "self location" UI important coz errors can be big, want to override. Dense urban areas 300m, semi-urban:600-1200m, rural up to 10kms.
GPS way better. Devices like iPhone offer this plus cell and wifi fallbacks. Getting location info as a programmer can be done on handset (note: location API in HTML5 JS). Or can ask phone servers for location; then use Fire Eagle, GMaps etc.
Proximity services: RFID and the like; barcode and QRs; Bluetooth/WiFi/SigBee; visual recognition. Wifi works where the network has been mapped and is quite dense e.g. in a warehouse. Visual recognition ie cameras recognising images - good for museums?
AR apps like Layar, Wikitude, Junaio. Markup not necessary. Cd create a "digital fingerprint" for artwork and connect to information record. Camera as "third eye" "Disintermediation" of exhibitor/producer's presentation i.e. can bypass the information you're presented with directly in the space.
VWs: massive growth in the tweenies market, our market of tomorrow.
"Conversation via place": e.g. flook.it. "Leave" a note in a space to be picked up by someone moving into that space.
Trends and predictions: 80% penetration of smartphones by 2015, ready for mass consumption. HTML5 browsers on them. AR will be done via these rather than specific gadgets. Location key "web 3" enabler. Indoor location sensitivity/AR popular for enhancing events, shopping etc by '13. VWs will be the popular UI metaphor for some handsets.
Andy Ramsden (University of Bath - UB): QR codes
UB project: what does QR offer to learning opportunities? What do they offer museums, are they a fad?
QRs connect something physical to something electronic. Souped-up barcode readable by phone. Alternatives coming tho using similar principles. Require an activity/task suited to a small screen device. Will cost users if they aren't connecting thru WiFi. When you read a QR, a URL is decoded, you decide if you want to follow this i.e. perform the action.
Creating a QR code: can do on the Bath Uni site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/barcodes.
Thinking about how QR codes could be used in a more social constructivist approach to learning. Tie to a blog. QRs in library for adding books to your reading list. Subscribing to RSS feed: loads easier than plugging long URLs into phone.
Connecting phys to virtual learning materials, because these can be dislocated rather than obliging learner to perform learning task at a PC.
Students becoming much more aware of QRs, 10% have now used them (UB survey)
Mike Ellis: how's this work in museums?
Convergence of technologies finally making lots of thing possible, at last. Networks getting cheaper and mass-market. Data the norm with mobile devices now. Computing power increasing and APIs flourishing, copyright barriers lowering/easy licencing too. And Google. Highly available services.
"Vastpoint sensing" using massive contribution of content esp location-based. With many consumers' devices as sensors, masses of data can be added in realtime to e.g. GMaps.
Predictions: city-wide wireless networks; increased understanding of the tech into our psyche; less geek, more invisible.
Session Q&As
ME: cost shouldn't be a huge barrier, it's dropping
Linda Ellis: Where should people put their stuff to get it picked up by these services? Paul: wherever there's a public API e.g. Flickr. Mike: where the people are.
Joe Cutting: how have things changed in terms of contract/PAYG phones, replacement of handsets? Paul: contract phones replaced on avg every 18 months, but 80% estimate by 2015 for smartphones.
Gail Durbin: ideas for how to use the QR codes they already have on their object labels. Andy: treasure hunt activities tied to OPAC (UBath library expt). Paul: run a competition to answer this question!

Open Mic session
Linda Spurdle (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery): Pre-raphaelite Online Resource
BMAG-built, JISC and MLA funded. Targetted at HE students and researchers. Audience research indicated low demand for social features, commenting etc. Not about fun! "Wikirage" of lecturers a deterrent to making it social. Instead put objects at the heart with zoomable images (via moderately controversial but beautifully effective Sliverlight interface)
Julian ...(Manchester Art Gallery): QR codes in practice
Revealing Histories display hooked into website, ability to submit content.
Current trial: Manchester public sculptures interpreted via QR codes. There's already a GMap of where the sculptures are. Should they try RFID? Small redesign of pages for mobile leads to questions over main collections pages, which aren't mobile friendly. [if end-points were, say, Wikipedia pages, might it be easier to pull into Layar etc?]
Tim Boundy, JANET UK: Use JANET for video-conferencing! Please!
JANET hooks up museums with schools for VC [including the Museum of London]. Both the infrastructure and the booking system made super-easy; number of registered schools growing rapidly (4k now). You need the hardware, JANET can provide the software.
Andrew @ V&A: blogs
Audience, contributors and plan all needed! Knowing limits of your technology and agreeing a schedule. The plan: if for an exhibition, start well before launch!
Shona (Museum of Hartlepool): Articus
Educational resource aiming to increase footfall in the galleries (specifically, booked school groups), aimed at children and teachers. Various activities include creating art offline and uploading, curating own galleries, gathering images to use on IWBs. Launched February but less uptake than expected - is this because of registration requirement?
[They really want school groups to book visits following from this. I wonder, how is the site positioned to tempt people in rather than do it all online? Are they not encouraged to submit and place value in the statistics of thes sites usage in itself, because it seems a bit C20th to value only the visits to the physical museum that it may encourage. It's treating it a bit like fancy brochure-ware, when really what it is, is a valuable service for schools in its own right that simply needs them to find a workable way of measuring its impact in terms of MH's mission. As for why they're losing visitors, what do the stats say on bounce rates, is there real evidence from there that registration is off-putting? Tweet @snowflakeshona with your suggestions]

Next, Ross does some defragging.

Keynote - Richard Morgan (V&A): Making the digital museum relevant in people's everyday lives
[the following, in retrospect, makes not a lot of sense, which is my fault not Richards! By brain was failing.]
What's people's daily experience of museums? Are they as likely to see the commercial arm as anything else?
Making money is important; our digital presence is scattered, how do we make sense of it for people? Will SW do anything for this?
The Q: "maverick activity" that leads to all this, fitted into the corporate narrative (and defragmenting that corporate narrative too).
Capture your data, tho this requires a leap of faith. V&A's new Search The Collections has got 1M records out there, from a low base. Put focus on relationships between records, to be articulated in UI and underneath, to encourage reuse (API).
Interfaces: browsing; visualising through mapping
Browing continuous variables and topologies? FABRIC, TSB-funded project about content-based image retrieval, variables including colour, "texture" (shape and angles, really).
World Beach Project: bringing world into collections.
V&A Wedding fashion site: data includes where clothes bought, an implicit link.
Lots of curatorial stuff and lots of UGC stuff now. How to join it up with real semantic connections?
Collections of photos/paintings of localities, being places of significance, have a fair chance of being in e.g. Flickr too (and tagged). So can we dynamically hook our content into this?
Museums good at finding strong niches we can build networks around. We can delegate to these what the museum cannot provide. Might this even be a way to make cash, selling services around, say, weddings or fashion?
Moving from niches to "web intelligence and insight", looking for stuff that's not so obvious, the signal in the trends. We do have lots of data after all. Can also identify weaker signals, can we een anticipate trends? Helps us argue to funders about the value we (could) give.
Finding the stories in the data is one of the things a technologist in a museum should be doing. [a key point slipped in right at the end there! I'm really interested in where we might find the boundaries of our work moving, or where we might wish to expand them, as we find that digital media peeps have maybe accidentally found themselves to be information curators, analysts, interpreters, and disseminators. There are professionals in museums trained exactly for some of this, but if the webby people know how to hook it all together, plumb in the visualisation tools and the metadata enrichment tools and so on, are we gradually moving onto that turf too? The role of the information or computing professional is always evolving, whether in large or small organisations; I think it's good sometimes to reflect on where it's evolving to]

Session 3 (Mia Ridge, chair): Sensory
Joe Cutting: Telling stories with games
Company of Merchant Adventurers of York: good-looking teading game [did they refactor the code from Elite?] Instructional and fun, that's what it's all about. So what is a game anyway? JC's practical proposition: given goals in a situation, choices, feedback, make more choices i.e back to step 2. Learning through iteration. "Active prolonged engagement", a term coined at Exploratorium. [think I ballsed up the definition a bit here, sorry]
Need enough info to make a good choice. Success or failure must be gradual.
Game models: lots of console games played obsessively by a small audience. Not really what we're after. Arcade games better. Web-based MMORPGs better still, but 3D makes things harder, not easier.
Anne Kahr-Hojland (DREAM in Denmark): Ego-trap
Ego-trap comes out of her PhD work. Visitors guided by mobiles through exhibition at Experimentarium. 2 narrative layers, three levels. Personality test, questions from a woman who has called you; a level at which suspicion is aroused by another person contacting you; ...
AR gameplay, digital narrative determined by physical setting.
Targeting secondarry students. Objectives: to stimulate interest in science, improve learning in that setting by prompting reflection. Reflection prompted by predictions and evaluations, narrative structure, discussion with others. Works well as an exhibition guide; high levels of engagement and recall of exhibitions after play.
The meta-narrative gets less committment than the personal test; is it coz they know what to do in context of a test? Does this interfere with the critical reflection aspect?
[once again, I couldn't really keep up with the ideas properly whilst tweeting and writing this and this definitely shows! There's a lesson there, but I'm too preoccupied with the personality test to realise it]
Victoria Tillotson (iShed, c/o Watershed Media Centre)
Project to bring together practitioners, researchers and users in immersive experiences. "A space for risk", inspire innovation and share ideas, create market place.
Includes artists, creative industry, IT co's, community etc.
mscapers.com: software to create location-based mobile games, which will be hosted on the mscapers site. Cool!
HP facilitate annual festival: mScape Fest.
mScape only works in iPaqs. Oh. But work underway to port to Android and iPhone. Uses GPS so currently only outdoors, indoors version coming[?], also downloadable versions of games.
Pervasive Media Studio: pmstudio.co.uk will be home to cool stuff in due course...
Pervasive gaming gradually spreading in pockets. Face to face, on the streets, on the 'net, without technology. All sorts of genres and timescales.
Simongames.co.uk: game built around location of a Romany caravan, parked around London. Done for Soho Theatre. Interaction between public and travellers in the caravan. [not too sure what the game part was tho, same old story: too distracted. Oops]
Duncan Speakman: sound to navigate public spaces. "subtle mobs" of people gathering to listen to a set of instructions and act on them. "As if it were the last time": a subtle mob in Bristol, coming to London soon. See http://youtube.com/watch?v=FY6S4GkCZ9c

Final session (Marcus Weisen, chair): Accessible digital museums
Lots physical exhibitions still failing accessibility for people with physical or sensory impairments.
Helen Petrie & Christopher Power: Accessible digital culture
Trying to make this an interesting challenge rather than a burden often tackled as an add-on must-do at the end.
The digital past in large part about about websites. There was a burst of interest (following WCAG) with DRC investigation into web accessibility, eGov targets for govt websites, Culture Online funding dependent on accessibility, MLA audit. Then govt unit closed down, sites got more complex - moving target - DRC merged into EHRC, no legal cases brought against failing orgs. EC push, but have the targets been set too high? "Is it too hard to implement accessibility in digital culture and related areas?". UK gov now has Digital Inclusion Champion in Martha Lane Fox. New EC initiatives will target culture more.
Christopher moves us on to the present: WCAG has aged poorly; technology, interaction and user changes; new WCAG out last year tho not much fanfare. Few tools to address WCAG2 conformance. Is it harder to understand than v1? Guidelines are mainly tech-independent and so "future-proofed", grouped into 4 principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, robust. It's about "transmitting meaning" after all.
Success criteria don't tell you how to test your technology, perhaps this just makes it trickier - you have to go to "techniques" section, dealing with implementation. These only deal with W3C technologies. Often not evidence-based but value-based.
Outcome: WCAG has moved the responsibility for developing the correct tests onto the development community.
The future: interacting with content, focusing on users' objectives not the technology. Communicating meaning is the point. About content, not delivery, whether digital or not. Personalisation of content to match user preferences. How do we measure experience and communication of meaning? [the self same problem we have for assessing effectiveness of our digital media even if we were oblivious to accessibility questions]
Contract soon with EC to investigate this problem in the digital culture arena.

Jodi Awards
I didn't take any notes during the awards, and only part way through did I start to tweet coz I couldn't see anyone else doing it (until I looked at my twitter stream!) It was the first time I'd been along to these awards, perhaps because it was also the first time we'd been up for anything and whilst I can't claim any credit at all for that (or for MOL ultimately winning the award we were nominated for) it felt like I had some small justification for attending what was an over-subscribed event.
I found it all pretty moving. The last year has brought disability closer to home, well, into the home for me and I'm some way through a process where the sort of knowledge and values about disability that I've always known in a sort of factual "of course that's the right way to think" kind of way, are turning into the sort of knowledge that is more internalised, that is felt and truly believed, not simply accepted. There's a difference between that knowing and believing. I guess it's called awakening. Anyway, attending the awards was a privilege and an inspiration and I want now to make sure that I embed a righter way of thinking into my work, rather than doing the things I know (or am told) need to be done and assuming that is sufficient.
I was struck in Helen and Chris's talk before the awards (enough to tweet it in very compressed form) that they had identified the communication of meaning as the core of what accessibility should mean, and that this resonated so well with the way I've been thinking about sustaining/sustainability: the purpose of sustaining is not to continue with the thing the way it is, but with it serving what it's for (even this might change, in fact), and a radical change in form might be the best way for something to carry on serving the same purpose. I like this synergy very much, this fact that perhaps we can focus on what a resource is for and serve both sustainability and accessibility ends.
You can read who was nominated, who was commended and who won here, for this and previous years. What you probably can't read, or relive in any way, was the wonderful Skype moment we had with the Karlovy Vary recipients of the jointly-awarded International Award, who couldn't hear us at all. Turns out that the very excellent Matthew Cock was using the wrong mic. Thank you Matthew for the ensuing comedy on a heartwarming but quite serious evening. Thank you too to Martha Lane Fox, who announced the awards and took us through a bit of her own journey. And finally humble congratulations to all the winners and nominees on that list, not least our own Lucie Fitton and Jude Habib (not our own) who deservingly won the Digital Access Online award.

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.

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.

Decision making psychology

My current reading is Beach and Connolly’s “The Psychology of Decision Making: People in Organizations” (Sage, 2005), which I’ve found incredibly stimulating and which is providing a suite of tools that I’m certain will prove invaluable for interpreting the material I’m gathering through my case studies. I’m going to resist the temptation to put up all my notes on the book, but I’ll pull out a couple of the things that I’ve found in there that I think will be useful to me, even though when they’re put as baldly as this they may seem banal: the book is replete with further insights, experimental evidence, and models for particular situations, and if you’re interested in finding a theoretical basis or empirical support for interpreting decision making, I’d recommend you to have a look at it. I may also run through an example or two from my case studies, suitably anonymised. OK, so, some of the ideas I’ll be trying to weave into my work:

Framing. The way the outcomes of a decision (the action to be taken to solve the problem) are framed is vital. With outcomes framed as gains, people will take more risks; framed as losses they’ll be conservative. When considering whether to invest resources in maintaining a digital resource, we could think in terms of the potential loss of value from that resource, or additional value to be gained, or the opportunity cost of using the resources to this end.

The gambling analogy. Whilst the gambling analogy played a key part in early theory, and indeed has a role in current theories for particular kinds of decisions, there are many kinds of decisions where the analogy fails utterly and many analogies that can work better. Lots of decisions in digital resource management could probably be assessed quite well using normative gambling theory, at least in terms of evaluating probable outcomes and weighing them up against gains or losses. But figuring out the last part of that equation – the value of the gains or losses – can’t be achieved with gambling theory alone.

Scenario theory. One of these alternatives revolves around the construction and testing of scenarios (or stories, if interpreting past events). By creating a web of cause-and-effect relationships (some of them interdependent), weighting them for the likelihood of their outcomes, and again for the value of those outcomes, decision-makers can evaluate which has the best chance of success, and which the best pay-off.
Figuring out an application’s dependencies (and their own inter-dependencies), the likelihood of any of these being disrupted, mitigating strategies and their costs, running the scenarios and figuring out the value of the probable outcomes: this is a complex process, but it’s perhaps one worth pursuing (together with a “significant properties” approach) in evaluating sustainability strategies for museum digital resources.

The nature of the unknown. Even where gambling can seem appropriate, in dealing with uncertainty, it’s not all about the likelihood of a given action succeeding as intended: there is the question of how the scenario will unfold, and even uncertainty as to the value of the outcome in the event of success, since this value may change for the “player” over time. This is pretty pertinent for museum digital sustainability problems, since these will often involve planning well in advance when there is a high degree of uncertainty about not just future conditions and problems, but the value of the resource (or aspects of it) in the future. For example, a learning resource may prove to be much less valuable if there are curriculum changes; the likelihood of this happening may be hard to assess, but the risk might make it injudicious to invest significant effort in making the resource “future-proof”, whatever that is.

Decision making in groups. As well as offering the chance to share knowledge and, one would hope, use this to make better decisions, group decision making throws up hazards, not least the possibility that, instead of sharing new knowledge, groups will focus their discussions on common knowledge and reject anything outside this, thus narrowing the evidential base for their deliberations. Procedural, structural and social barriers can also bias decisions towards one faction or another.

The role of social pressure, morals and ethics. Although “normative” theory has no space for these factors, they are clearly inherent in many decisions. Etzioni has distinguished between three classes of factor influencing decisions:

• utilitarian influence – the economic assessment
• social influence - social pressure to conform, risk of approbation etc.
• deontological influence [deontology is effect of moral obligation and commitment upon behaviour]. May include internalised reflections of social factors e.g. guilt, but covers internal drivers of behaviour.

An institution acting as one of my case studies – let’s call it Framley Museum and hope they don’t sue – threw up an example wherein a number of middle managers were found to be unnecessary to the continued operation of the institution, although objectively one might view the obvious staff shortages in some affected areas as indicating that claims of “redundancy” were logically false. The deliberations that led to decision to dismiss staff may have included many factors, but one conceivable influence could have been the fact that a key member of the executive, with whom all the targets had been in conflict, was leaving the museum on the day that the redundancies were announced to Framley's staff. Exiting the social context (and the country) in which that director would have been held accountable may have liberated him, for better or worse, from any social influence upon his decision. Whether this also meant liberation from the responsibility to make sound and profitable decisions for the benefit of Framley Museum is an open question; and one has to ask how wise it can be for any organisation to take advice on such vital decisions from people on the point of departure, who then cannot then be held accountable for them in any way. It should also be said that it’s likely that incomplete information contributed to the staff-shedding decision, wherein the directorate was probably unable to obtain or comprehend the information necessary to assess the role of some managers, in part because they’d need to gather the information from the affected parties. Clearly the question of the influence of ethics is complex; likewise the role of information which I have barely touched on here, but which is a significant component Beach and Connolly's work.

These are poor caricatures of concepts from the book, and I haven’t even finished yet (two chapters to go) but I really wanted to write something about it. Perhaps in future I’ll work through some fuller, more detailed examples. If that’s of interest let me know with the usual sound of one hand clapping ;-)

New Photosynth release

Photosynth v.2: Brady Forest over on O'Reilly Radar has a thorough post on the new release of Photosynth from MS, which (most significantly) includes the ability to create your own "Synths", all of which are shared with/hosted by the community, and which are built with heavy use of your local machine. Clever, and very exciting as far as creating views of museum objects goes. Obviously I have yet to try it out, and who knows, it might turn out to be cheaper and easier to spend a few tens of thousands on a 3D scanner instead, but somehow I doubt it.... Coolcoolcool

IMLS looks to the future

Once again, kudos to Nina Simon for her latest post, Notes from the Future: Reflections on the IMLS Meeting on Museums and Libraries in the 21st Century. I have to admit I've not read it thoroughly yet but (a) there's lots going on in the IMLS study that overlaps with my research interests and (b) as usual, she has a pretty strong take on it and interesting things to say, and it's productive perhaps to triangulate between her strong perspective and the equally strong conservative perspective she cites. Have a look. If I have time I'll try to digest it properly and give a proper response - both here and on her blog since they want our thoughts (perhaps even non-US thoughts...)

Showing us the way

I presume it's uncontroversial to say that it would be useful to have terminologies available as web services. Right now, you can browse various sources of reference terms that are useful to museums (amongst others): sources like the british & irish archaeological bibliography (including its approved term lists); the National Monument Record Thesauri; and the museum codes and SPECTRUM terminology termbank maintained by the Collections Trust (to highlight some UK examples). I'm certain it would be useful to have these available as web services (some more so than others); likewise other thesauri that AFAIK aren't available to programme to: ULAN and AAT, for example, which are collected under the CCO initiative.

There's every chance that I misunderstand some or all of these "services" in terms of how they're used and by whom (I'm very shaky on the status of CCO and its relationship to AAT, for a start). But I'm sure that there are many ways in which a programmatic interface to their contents could be used. Which is why (to get to the point of this post) the service that OCLC's top geeks have come up with here is a great example for us in the museum world to look at (blogged here on Hanging Together). This is a collection of esssentially library-related thesauri onto which they have created web services. I like the look of FAST best of all; it could be really useful for us in the dusty bones world too.

Lorcan Dempsey also blogs today about the WorldCat identities API and other cool services. I fancy the name look-up service: aside from anything else it gives us a URL to refer to for those individuals in the WorldCat database. Here's a not-so-random entry.


So once again we can learn a lot from libraries leading the way. One of the cool things, though, is that OCLC are a cross-domain organisation, and people like Dempsey think constantly about breaking down the barriers between libraries, archives and museums. If they've sprinkled their magic onto library terminologies, I'm sure they'll be only too happy to help the museum world to take similar steps.

Leuven that aside...

I'm not quite sure where to go with a pun of profound lameness even by my own pitiful standards, but I'm giving it a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike licence in case anyone can make it pay. Not holding my breath.

Anyway, to the point: bloody hell, railways! Well there are other points, but just wanted to get that off my chest. To Beligium by Eurostar is lovely, unless there's a strike. Eurostar to their credit did all they could to help, moving me onto a later train in the not-quite-certainty that it would get past Lille. They also told my hotel I'd be late. I got there, well, the right side of dawn but the wrong side of midnight. And travelling back I had the more day-to-day joy of British trains being titsup. Not forgetting Junior puking on the journey to the train before all of that. I must have offended St Christopher or something.

But the travel trauma was all worthwhile. The meeting itself was really good and I would love to return to Leuven, it's a beautiful and tranquil place. Imagine a city centre so quiet at rush hour that most of the traffic consists of parent cycling next to their infants on the way to school.

My take-homes from the meeting were many. Here are some.

• There seem still to be divergent thoughts on whether there will be a record page, although I think it's looking very likely (as seen in the maquette). This means different things for different types of institution and material. Where the original DO on the institution's website is more than an image of moderate size, the visitor will have a motivation to leave Europeana and visit the original. For films and audio this will be clearcut. For assets where the surrogate is in any case an image, they may be less likely to leave. Perhaps this depends upon the size of the largest image that Europeana will show. It does bring home, however, how vital it will be to demonstrate to content contributors that there will be superb reporting of usage of their material on that site.


• linked to the previous point, if EDL hosts only image surrogates (and occasional small derivatives of multimedia?), it keeps its costs down and traffic to institutions high, but we must keep in mind quality control of the originals hosted elsewhere - what will be acceptable standards for different formats, and how do we control this when they're actually never ingested?


• a drawback to the plan of ingesting only thumbnails is that for institutions with no existing online presence this is not very helpful. Perhaps EDL should offer a premium service, or one for limited numbers of surrogates per institution, where they can offer to hold a full size image/media asset and display this in a modified details/record page. I'm very keen on this, as a means to attract the participation of tiny museums by, essentially, offering to get them online for the first time. The current model presupposes that every partner is already online - we need a 180 degree turn on this. It's also possibly a modest source of revenue.


• EDLLocal is obviously the plan to encourage the participation of the minnows at the moment, and I need to find out more about this. Nevertheless, if it still presupposes a web destination outside of Europeana for all DOs it's not enough, IMHO. We need to see just how low we can set the barrier to participation, and how big we can make the reward. Rather than requiring a URL for each DO, it would be better to be able to take whatever a contributor can give - a DVD of images and a spreadsheet of metadata, say - and offer them
  
  
  
  • fuller record pages on Europeana
  
  
  • API access and code fragments for dropping onto a blog or whatever


• I like the idea of using a wiki for UGC related to objects. It has the advantages of being
  
  
  
  • cheap and out of the box
  
  
  • very easy to create new pages
  
  
  • EDL GUIDs/DOIs usable for page names
  
  
  • microformat/POSH friendly?
  
  
  • familiar to many
  
  
  • clearly distinct from the "authorised" content


• The new home page that Jon Purday showed looks like progress. The concept is a good step, the graphical side isn't finished but getting there


• There was plenty to read and discuss about reorganising EDL for the next phase of the project, the build of version 1.0 (first we have to launch a series of prototypes). It's too early to talk about this.


• We worked on the vision and mission, which was quite fun and threw into relief some differing ideas of what the whole thing is about. Personally I like for a vision something like: Europeana.eu: culture and heritage, connected and shared. It's short, it emphasises both the connections being made between knowledge and the sharing of this with people.


• Money is tight, realistically EDL will be relying on a subsidy of some sort for a good while to come, but there may be some good commercial opportunities. These needn't conflict with either the ownership of the source data and digital assets by contributors, nor the public service/public good ethos. The semantic graph derived from the combined dataset will belong to EDL, and this could be very marketable. I have to work up ideas here, I have OpenCalais in mind as some sort of model.

One other outcome was that the cabbie who finally got me home solved a UFO mystery I'd been intrigued by for a few months. One evening last autumn I watched a string of lights for about ten minutes as they emerged over the horizon and slowly rose through the clouds. Either it was something fast but a long way off - I was thinking shed-loads of planes from one of the Suffolk airbases - or actually as slow as they appeared and nearby. Turned out they were the latter - a whole load of candles floating under balloons, released from Gosfield School to confuse those who Don't Even Want To Believe But Are Intrigued By The Lights

National Collections Online: why, what, how...in fact, ?!?

Friday afternoon we gathered at the Science Museum's Dana Centre, perhaps two dozen people sampling a variety of disciplines but all, for one reason or another, interested in the National Collections Online project. This was a workshop for the feasibility study being run by Flow Associates (Bridget McKenzie and Mark Stevenson) following up the discussions they've had with, presumably, all or most of those there. NMSI and the V&A had good representation, not just techy and new media but curatorial and from the collections data side. The National Maritime Museum, the third museum partner in the project, had a couple of representatives too. Culture24 is another partner, and Jane and Jon were there. The NMDC, who I take to be the initiating partner, had no direct representation but wil hopefully learn the lessons anyway. The rest of us included e-learning experts, a couple of people from other museums and the Wellcome Trust, Ross flying the flag for academia, Ben Hayman of Lexara that for the commercial sector, Nick of Collections Trust, Jill Cousins from EDL (which I thought was brilliant, unfortunately she couldn't stay until the denouement but I have a feeling that her presence may have swayed some sentiments in the direction of EDL), and finally Tom Steinberg, director of mySociety. A very interesting crowd.

The biggest problem with the session was, I guess, exactly the same as that which it was trying to address, and perhaps will have helped us to break through it before the next gathering. That problem is the vagueness of the project, which made it almost impossible to talk incisively about it. Someone mentioned a 10,000lb gorilla at one point; all I could see was a big cloud in the middle of the room, who knows what was at the heart of it. I've not talked about NCO before so I should do the basics: Flow's inquiry is into the "viability of an online resource to integrate national museum collections", and perhaps we can orient ourselves as to what this might mean by the well-known points of reference that they have mentioned: CHIN/CCO, CAN, culture.fr, Artstore, Powerhouse. It seems that many people said "not a portal", which was the common response at the session too. Given this, we both needed to decide what we were talking about if not a portal, and know that in advance to make much progress on questions like whether a "single point of access" would be of use to various audiences. This isn't a criticism of how the session was run, it was sure to be tricky as a natural consequence of the fact that, even before the project properly starts, it maybe engaged in a major change of direction (and this is the time to do it!).

Anyway, it was a useful process and it did seem to bring out a good degree of consensus on the unsuitability of an old-skool "portal" approach. I took away a couple of key points though, including a useful reminder:

1. Fiona Romeo made a remark that inspired a "doh!" moment in me: why not talk to Google about them ingesting our content directly? This time last year we were talking about this very prospect at the UK Museums Semantic Web Think Tank, and it still seems like a really good plan (Yahoo! too, especially since they seem at least as keen on adopting semantic technology). Still, somehow, I'd stopped thinking about this line of attack having been concentrating on the opportunity (or threat, if done badly) offered by EDL. And in the session I didn't shy away from pushing EDL as the obvious place in which collections data should be aggregated, so as to scale to all museums and not duplicate efforts. I argued that NCO should wait for this to firm up before deciding what to do that would compliment or build upon it. However when Fiona mentioned the prospect of working with Google, I realised that over the last 6 months of talking to EDL about how to make sure that it wasn't seen as irrelevant by museums, I'd started to forget that it needn't be the only path down which we go to achieve our goals - just the one that grabbed my attention late last year. I think that the two approaches can be complimentary, and in fact EDL itself would be well advised to talk directly to the search providers about their ingesting structured data. NCO could, in theory, provide something of a breakthrough that would be genuinely extensible and scalable. This would also put the lie to one of my contentions, which was that there was little point in doing something that only involved a small number of nationals. On the contrary, if it opened a very wide door for cross-collection search as this approach might, it would be very worthwhile.
   
2. I had a moment of clarity, which followed on from the recent hooha on the MCG list concerning the disappointment or otherwise of the NOF Digitise programme. One of my arguments was that it would be better to make distinctions in projects between those that do digitisation, those that build functionality, and those that build user experiences. I realised that I'm talking basically about slicing funding differently, changing from vertical to horizontal slicing, and that it's not unlike talking about markets. I'm going to post separately with more thoughts on that.
3. We had useful input from Tom. Though he was kind of preaching to the converted about the idea of making our content as widely available as possible, it's not surprising, and he also furnished us with some useful parallels and metaphors. From our later chat at the pub it's clear enough that he's as keen on the lightweight dissemination of semantic data as I am (albeit sceptical about the Semantic Web - but then in a sense so am I, it's semantic technology that is making the headway, and there are riches to be found there that do appear to be speeding us in the general direction of a more semantic web in any case)

Listening Post at the Science Museum

I like the sound of this (no pun intended): a fascinating new artwork at the Science Museum, although this is not its first stop: apparently this piece was launched in 2002 and recently purchased for £120k+. It will be supported until 2010, and draws upon live internet chat, using screens and synthesised voice. I need to talk to the NMSI team about the arrangements they have for supporting this, and what will happen after 2010.

Museum 2.0: Setting Expectations: The Power of the Pre-Visit

Museum 2.0: Setting Expectations: The Power of the Pre-Visit
A well thought out reminder of the importance of the pre-visit role of the website in contrast to the oft-emphasised post-visit role. Timely whilst we're planning the role of the digital experience in Capital City.

Brooklyn Museum and social software

Nins Simon has posted this interview with Shelley Bernstein on Museum 2.0. Interesting from the POV of museums experimenting with various current social software gubbins, and how they feel this fits in with their mission.

Cross-post: SL memorial to 9/11

[also on The Attic]

Museums and memorials both deal with memory (I know, the clue's in the name) and both need sustaining for this to work. Of course many museums act as memorials and sometimes it's not really clear which we're looking at.

The memorial to 9/11mentioned in 3pointDs post sounds like a case in point (I haven't seen it, still no SL account but slowly getting keener on trying it out). "Artworks" in SL are, it would appear, common enough, indeed so are museums and galleries; but something like this memorial seems to be on a level very appropriate to the question I want to ask regarding experience-level resources, and when and how we decide what will happen to them in the future. There are many other questions of a more museological bent: who can feel ownership of this? does that matter anyway? can we be confident of what we see there?

Maybe I'll sign up soon and decide for myself. If it's as powerful as it sounds I hope the memorial is durable, but the chances of that are hard to assess in these hosted virtual worlds. Empty as it may sound, my thoughts go out to those who lost loved ones that day six years ago, and indeed to those who were lost or scarred. The media is doing a good job of memorialising right now, and my mind is quite full of those terrible events; they never seem to settle down into becoming assimilated knowledge, bleached of much of their original emotion, in the way that other disasters so often seem to. The shock is still there.

Fair referencing

A little bit of a dilemma. I did a lot of work over the last few weeks on a new section for my paper on definitions. I've greatly expanded and restructured a section on value, especially parts on reality and authenticity. Now I have come across a chapter by Evans, Mull and Poling in "Perspectives on object-centered learning in museums", and another by Frost in the same volume, which make a number of the same points that I had thought I'd been somewhat original in. In fact they cite some of the same sources as I'd already done. I suppose it just brings home how much we build on the work of others, that we have used the same sources and drawn similar conclusions. The dilemma is whether I should reference these Evans, Mull and Poling, and Frost, when in fact they were not the source of what I wrote (though they got there first). It's just pride, though, that makes me hesitate - after all, what they are really is useful citations in support of what I've written and it's not that important to lay claim for the original thought - especially when it turns out not to be so original!
So get on with it, cite them!