The announcement yesterday that the Europeana Foundation had officially adopted the new Europeana Data Exchange Agreement may have passed you by, but it seems to me to be a vital moment in Europeana's history, or if you prefer, its future. This agreement is key to its sustainability – by which I mean, not that it is a guarantee of long-term viability, but that it couples the resourcing and the value proposition of the service more transparently than ever before. Let me expand on this.
For Europeana to be more than just a portal website it must be part of the data landscape, an ever-growing circle on that famous Linked Data diagram. I don’t think anyone concerned with the project could conceive of it as anything else nowadays. The “Distribute” strand of the 2011-15 Strategic Plan (PDF) pivots on the re-use of content away from the Europeana site, via the API or Linked Data channels. This is the Europeana that I am talking about sustaining, and this is what the EDEA makes possible. Without it, the offer could only be the ghost of that: a portal site. With it, it could become pervasive. It’s the difference between a drinks machine and mains water supply. Coca Cola like to slap on a label saying “Buxton” and sell water for 10,000 what it costs from the tap to those people that come to the drinks machine. Thames Water, by contrast, put it in pipes and get it everywhere – unbranded, plentiful, pervasive. The EDEA brings into focus a similar choice for content providers: do they want their water in the mains, or would they rather put it in bottles and try to find buyers on their own? Europeana has staked its future - I do mean that - on the mains supply approach.
The two most significant resources that Europeana relies upon are finance and content*. You might also add users, or you might prefer to count them on the “benefit” side of a cost/benefit equation. Crudely put, finance comes largely from the European Commission and content largely comes from cultural heritage content partners (either direct data providers or, more commonly, via aggregators). These two stakeholder groups, providing the grist to Europeana’s mill, are looking for different things, although their interests overlap greatly. To sustain a social enterprise, which is at heart concerned with generating public good rather than a net profit, requires whoever is providing the resources for it to perceive that the value thus generated is worth the cost. If this value proposition is not strong enough to persuade them to supply the necessary resources, well, it won’t be resourced and will fail.
Europeana has now laid out its value proposition to content providers, along with what it requires in return. Given the vision of the Strategic Plan's “Distribute” strand, this requirement could never really be less than the CC0 license the EDEA requires, but equally the “mains supply” model of cultural content is the foundation of the value proposition that the EDEA offers to museums, libraries and archives that sign the new agreement: you will find your content hosed across the internet, heliping you to deliver your public mandate but also carrying new traffic back to your site and opening up commercial opportunities. The word “exchange” in the title of the Agreement also highlights the other part of the value proposition: that the enrichments Europeana makes to the raw metadata it receives will also be CC0 licensed and will be given back to the providers. Note also that whilst the EDEA is not a contract with the funders, it again reflects the value proposition to them: culture on tap through openly licenced, reusable data.
So the EDEA is not just a new licensing agreement. If you like, it is the sustainability plan in super-brief form: give us your content and let us set it free, and here’s what you get in return - oh and funders, this is why we're worth the €€€. Since the Strategic Plan laid out a vision of open-licensed, distributed and open data, this was really the inescapable conclusion. If it finds sufficient favour, that vision of a mains supply of culture may have a long life, and that bubble on the Linked Data diagram may keep growing. If it doesn’t, well, it’s either back to the drinks machine or back to nothing. It's worth the gamble, I reckon.
* Oh, and political support. This is a big one, and is the source of powerful backing for the open data train to which Europeana has hitched its wagon. If Commissioner Neelie Kroes has anything to do with it this train is going to gather speed rapidly – see her speech to the OpenEurope Summit this week for starters.
About Me
- Jeremy
- Web person at the Imperial War Museum, just completed PhD about digital sustainability in museums (the original motivation for this blog was as my research diary). Posting occasionally, and usually museum tech stuff but prone to stray. I welcome comments if you want to take anything further. These are my opinions and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else (unless they thought of them too). Twitter: @jottevanger
Showing posts with label sustainability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sustainability. Show all posts
Friday, September 23, 2011
Saturday, August 21, 2010
No decisions without value/s
I was getting hot under the collar the other day listening to an interview with some religious type who was upset by the decision to prevent a Catholic charity from excluding same-sex couples from using their adoption service. The Charities Commission ruled that they could either change their policy, or stop acting as an adoption agency, and as far as they were concerned the former was not an option so the latter was the only possible outcome. Now, nothing is likely to bring me round to their antediluvian* point of view re parenthood and sexuality, but it did help calm me down to remember that, whilst the discussion may often hover around "facts" (because they're easier for everyone to get a grip on, even when flaky), it's actually not about something that has a right or wrong answer: it's about a decision to support one side or another of the argument, and decisions are fundamentally dependent upon values: these are the only thing that give the "facts" any weight for the decision maker.
"Facts", in principle, are established by gathering objective evidence. Decisions, on the other hand, are the reverse: they always involve value. Value, whilst it can be a purely emotional response (a desire for something, or a positive feeling towards it), can also be transformed into values (not the same thing), which in a sense provide a template for valuing a given phenomenon. In other words, value is the outcome of an assessment, whilst values are a tool that for making that assessment.
Further, values (the tool/template) may be the internal values of an individual, perhaps embedded sub-consciously in a decision or even somatic ("instinctual", if you like, though that's a debate to avoid); or they may the externalised values embodied as a set of rules guiding a decision. This ostensibly makes the decision objective, but only by removing the value judgement into an earlier stage of the decision-making: the framing stage, where the rules for the decision are composed. These rules might even be ossified into an automated process, where rules are coded as machine instructions. They may also have been distorted along the way, so that in fact the rules represent no values held by a person at all. Whichever is the case, the values of a person or a group of people have been injected at some stage in order to make a decision possible.
The push and pull of emotion are a tide that can move our internal values incessantly, and this is one reason why it is often helpful to turn values into a set of explicit rules. Another is to externalise them so that they can be discussed and referred to as law, policy, doctrine or maybe something more informal. Of course, there's a psychological cost if this then results in dissonance between the codified values and the internalised values.
So in making decisions, or trying to influence the decisions made by other people or systems, or merely trying to understand the perspective of someone who argues in a direction that you just don't get, should we focus on the facts or on the values? Should we try to gather more evidence to demonstrate that the facts are as we see them? Should we examine the values held by another party and attempt to present the facts consonantly with them? Should we even try to change the values that are so critical in turning facts into value into decisions? Well, that's a tough one. But the one thing you can't do is address value directly: value is the product of the perceived "facts" of a scenario and the process or template for assessing the value of those facts. You can address the facts, and you can address the process of assessing but it's pointless to simply state that the value is something other than the assessment itself.
Ultimately, values themselves can be shaken by enough well-aimed evidence, but these may be of a quite different category to those facts that are put together with established values in order to reach a decision. For example, the evidence or experience required to make me a Catholic and subscribe to the values of the person I heard interviewed I cannot even imagine, even though ultimately it must be possible (perhaps on the road to Damascus). On the other hand, there are some facts through which I might be persuaded that it was wrong to prevent that particular charity from handling adoptions as it chose - for example, if it were the only agency in the country and the result of this decision was that there would be no adoption agencies at all, I might (might) feel, for purely pragmatic reasons, that it would be better to let them carry on even if that meant living with their discriminatory policy. Thankfully that's not the situation!
I don't know if this framework I've outlined is useful or right. I'm not a psychologist, a philosopher or a logician. Perhaps there are people out there who have very different ways of making decisions and this model of splitting out values from assessments of value doesn't work for them. I myself can see complications in examining the adoption agency question, which is nothing if not a clash of values. For my research into the role of decision making in digital sustainability, though, I think it may be a useful distinction to make, extending the insights given by Lessig's modalities of regulation (PDF) (this is typically looked at as a legal theorem but it's really about the "regulation" of decisions).
*yes, I know
"Facts", in principle, are established by gathering objective evidence. Decisions, on the other hand, are the reverse: they always involve value. Value, whilst it can be a purely emotional response (a desire for something, or a positive feeling towards it), can also be transformed into values (not the same thing), which in a sense provide a template for valuing a given phenomenon. In other words, value is the outcome of an assessment, whilst values are a tool that for making that assessment.
Further, values (the tool/template) may be the internal values of an individual, perhaps embedded sub-consciously in a decision or even somatic ("instinctual", if you like, though that's a debate to avoid); or they may the externalised values embodied as a set of rules guiding a decision. This ostensibly makes the decision objective, but only by removing the value judgement into an earlier stage of the decision-making: the framing stage, where the rules for the decision are composed. These rules might even be ossified into an automated process, where rules are coded as machine instructions. They may also have been distorted along the way, so that in fact the rules represent no values held by a person at all. Whichever is the case, the values of a person or a group of people have been injected at some stage in order to make a decision possible.
The push and pull of emotion are a tide that can move our internal values incessantly, and this is one reason why it is often helpful to turn values into a set of explicit rules. Another is to externalise them so that they can be discussed and referred to as law, policy, doctrine or maybe something more informal. Of course, there's a psychological cost if this then results in dissonance between the codified values and the internalised values.
So in making decisions, or trying to influence the decisions made by other people or systems, or merely trying to understand the perspective of someone who argues in a direction that you just don't get, should we focus on the facts or on the values? Should we try to gather more evidence to demonstrate that the facts are as we see them? Should we examine the values held by another party and attempt to present the facts consonantly with them? Should we even try to change the values that are so critical in turning facts into value into decisions? Well, that's a tough one. But the one thing you can't do is address value directly: value is the product of the perceived "facts" of a scenario and the process or template for assessing the value of those facts. You can address the facts, and you can address the process of assessing but it's pointless to simply state that the value is something other than the assessment itself.
Ultimately, values themselves can be shaken by enough well-aimed evidence, but these may be of a quite different category to those facts that are put together with established values in order to reach a decision. For example, the evidence or experience required to make me a Catholic and subscribe to the values of the person I heard interviewed I cannot even imagine, even though ultimately it must be possible (perhaps on the road to Damascus). On the other hand, there are some facts through which I might be persuaded that it was wrong to prevent that particular charity from handling adoptions as it chose - for example, if it were the only agency in the country and the result of this decision was that there would be no adoption agencies at all, I might (might) feel, for purely pragmatic reasons, that it would be better to let them carry on even if that meant living with their discriminatory policy. Thankfully that's not the situation!
I don't know if this framework I've outlined is useful or right. I'm not a psychologist, a philosopher or a logician. Perhaps there are people out there who have very different ways of making decisions and this model of splitting out values from assessments of value doesn't work for them. I myself can see complications in examining the adoption agency question, which is nothing if not a clash of values. For my research into the role of decision making in digital sustainability, though, I think it may be a useful distinction to make, extending the insights given by Lessig's modalities of regulation (PDF) (this is typically looked at as a legal theorem but it's really about the "regulation" of decisions).
*yes, I know
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Ithaka report ith a catastrophe (for me)
I am tho thcrewed.
Ithaka S+R has produced a report for JISC, the SCA, NEH and NSF entitled "Sustaining digital resources: an on-the-ground view of projects today". It's a great report, outlining a sensible approach to what sustainability actually means, strategies to achieve it, and how a number of current projects put these strategies into practice. It's a follow-up to "Sustainability and revenue models for online academic resources" (2008).
The problem, for me, is that much of the originality that I hoped my PhD work would offer has vanished overnight. Their definition of sustainability; their explicit linking of financial sustainability to the value offer; their arguments for leadership that offers clarity of purpose and evidence of success; their clear-eyed distinctions between the financial versus mission-based value on which non-profits must base their measures of success and arguments for their future: all of these could have been plucked from my private writings and debates with my supervisor over the last 3 years. Yet of course they haven't been; they're the result of parallel thinking, but these guys have gathered the evidence that I'm still at the early stages of assembling.
It's not that my thoughts were especially profound, but I've never previously found any authors linking sustainability and the value proposition so clearly to the digital work of cultural heritage institutions. Now that niche is no longer empty. I'm really pleased to see that there are others of like mind out there, and of course a report like this gives me a great reference in support of my work, but the problem for me is not just one of dented pride, because I have to demonstrate considerable originality in my work and without that, no PhD. It's a pickle.
On the upside, there are some differences. The Ithaka report emphasises how important it is to be clear on the sources of value (and cost) in order to make the case to funders for continued support. I will too, but I hope to investigate more deeply the influence of decision-making processes and the sources of "friction" that may cause a discrepancy between what a resource is "worth" and what people are prepared to invest in it (complicated, of course, by questions of opportunity cost and uncertainty). Ithaka mainly looked at digitisation projects, in the sense of those offering sets of digitised material such as images, maps, papers or databases. I'm just as interested in the value of learning objects, games, mobile phone tours, exhibition websites (though admittedly my core case studies are less diverse than this), and only in a cultural heritage context, not education. I'm interested in certain "modalities of constraint" (c.f. Lessig) that aren't addressed by Ithaka, and in questions of risk management. I am looking at three varied partnerships and the effects that collaboration has on decision-making, value and funding, and partnership is an area that the Ithaka report, by its own admission, examines only briefly. So perhaps all is not lost, but whilst I genuinely think that this report is excellent and provides a lot for people in the digital humanities to chew over, it's given me quite a tricky challenge. I'm not about to give up my PhD, but with everything else that's happened over the last year I have to confess it's taken me pretty bloody close.
P.S. Ah bollocks, now Nick's at it too (para 6). Shows how un-original I was in the first place.
*Nancy L Maron, K Kirby Smith and Matthew Loy, 2009. "Sustaining digital resources: an on-the-ground view of projects today. Ithaka case studies in sustainability" http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/strategy/ithaka-case-studies-in-sustainability
Ithaka S+R has produced a report for JISC, the SCA, NEH and NSF entitled "Sustaining digital resources: an on-the-ground view of projects today". It's a great report, outlining a sensible approach to what sustainability actually means, strategies to achieve it, and how a number of current projects put these strategies into practice. It's a follow-up to "Sustainability and revenue models for online academic resources" (2008).
The problem, for me, is that much of the originality that I hoped my PhD work would offer has vanished overnight. Their definition of sustainability; their explicit linking of financial sustainability to the value offer; their arguments for leadership that offers clarity of purpose and evidence of success; their clear-eyed distinctions between the financial versus mission-based value on which non-profits must base their measures of success and arguments for their future: all of these could have been plucked from my private writings and debates with my supervisor over the last 3 years. Yet of course they haven't been; they're the result of parallel thinking, but these guys have gathered the evidence that I'm still at the early stages of assembling.
It's not that my thoughts were especially profound, but I've never previously found any authors linking sustainability and the value proposition so clearly to the digital work of cultural heritage institutions. Now that niche is no longer empty. I'm really pleased to see that there are others of like mind out there, and of course a report like this gives me a great reference in support of my work, but the problem for me is not just one of dented pride, because I have to demonstrate considerable originality in my work and without that, no PhD. It's a pickle.
On the upside, there are some differences. The Ithaka report emphasises how important it is to be clear on the sources of value (and cost) in order to make the case to funders for continued support. I will too, but I hope to investigate more deeply the influence of decision-making processes and the sources of "friction" that may cause a discrepancy between what a resource is "worth" and what people are prepared to invest in it (complicated, of course, by questions of opportunity cost and uncertainty). Ithaka mainly looked at digitisation projects, in the sense of those offering sets of digitised material such as images, maps, papers or databases. I'm just as interested in the value of learning objects, games, mobile phone tours, exhibition websites (though admittedly my core case studies are less diverse than this), and only in a cultural heritage context, not education. I'm interested in certain "modalities of constraint" (c.f. Lessig) that aren't addressed by Ithaka, and in questions of risk management. I am looking at three varied partnerships and the effects that collaboration has on decision-making, value and funding, and partnership is an area that the Ithaka report, by its own admission, examines only briefly. So perhaps all is not lost, but whilst I genuinely think that this report is excellent and provides a lot for people in the digital humanities to chew over, it's given me quite a tricky challenge. I'm not about to give up my PhD, but with everything else that's happened over the last year I have to confess it's taken me pretty bloody close.
P.S. Ah bollocks, now Nick's at it too (para 6). Shows how un-original I was in the first place.
*Nancy L Maron, K Kirby Smith and Matthew Loy, 2009. "Sustaining digital resources: an on-the-ground view of projects today. Ithaka case studies in sustainability" http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/strategy/ithaka-case-studies-in-sustainability
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Catching up with Europeana v1.0 [pt.1]
Last November, a prototype Europeana launched. Many (perhaps even both) of you will know that the results were mixed: the index itself was successful, at least given its proof-of-concept status, but personalisation features were not optimised and led rapidly a crash as the user sessions racked up. It seems that the solution to this was essentially configuration, but politics meant that more had to be seen to be done and so hardware was thrown at the problem. A couple of weeks later the site was back but under the radar and without the personalisation bit ("My Europeana"), and more recently this too has returned - go and have a play here.
Prototyping done, the bid was assembled to develop a full-blown service, "Europeana v1.0". This bid to the European Commission was successful and just before Easter a kick-off meeting was held at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Hague to initiate the project. This is actually but one of a suite a of projects under the EDLFoundation umbrella, all working in the same direction, but I guess you could say it's the one responsible for tying them together.
So how is Europeana shaping up now? Having spent three days finding out I can tell you now that I came back feeling good - and not just because I was heading straight off again on holiday. Day 1 was about travel and (obviously) a long and lovely trip to the Mauritshaus, but it ended with an hour in the company of Sjoerd Siebinga, lead developer on the project, and a session with Jill Cousins, Europeana's director. I went to see Sjoerd because I wanted to find out how Europeana's technical solution would fit with our plans at the Museum of London for a root-and-branch overhaul of our collections online delivery system. I knew that they'd be opening the source code up later this year, and I also knew that in essence what Europeana does is a superset of what we want to do, so I figured, find out if there'll be a good fit and whether there are things I could start to use or plan for now. Laughably, I thought that we might actually be able to help out by testing and developing the code further in a different environment - as if they needed me! I'll save this for another post, but in short Sjoerd took me on a tour of what they use as the core of the system (Solr) and blew me away. There are layers that they have built/will build above and below Solr that make Europeana what it is and may also prove helpful to us, but straight out of the box Solr is, quite simply, the bollocks. I've known of it for ages, but until given a tour of it didn't really grasp how it would work for us. Many, many thanks to Sjoerd for that.
Next I met with Jill for an interview for my research on digital sustainability in museums, where we dug into the roots of Europeana, its vision, key challenges, and of course sustainability (especially in terms of financial and political support). This was fascinating and revealing and added a lot to my understanding of the context of the project's birth and its fit in the historical landsacpe of EC-funded initiatives in digital/digitised cultural heritage. As a research exercise it was a test of my ability to work as an embedded researcher; one who is not just observing the processes of the project but contributing and arguing and necessarily developing opinions of his own. I really don't know how well I did in this regard - I'm not sure how often my attempts to be probing may in fact be leading, or whether my concerns with the project distort the approach I take in interviewing. Equally I don't know if this matters. A debate to expand upon another time, perhaps.
Days 2 and 3 were the kick-off meeting, and I'll put that in another post.
Prototyping done, the bid was assembled to develop a full-blown service, "Europeana v1.0". This bid to the European Commission was successful and just before Easter a kick-off meeting was held at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Hague to initiate the project. This is actually but one of a suite a of projects under the EDLFoundation umbrella, all working in the same direction, but I guess you could say it's the one responsible for tying them together.
So how is Europeana shaping up now? Having spent three days finding out I can tell you now that I came back feeling good - and not just because I was heading straight off again on holiday. Day 1 was about travel and (obviously) a long and lovely trip to the Mauritshaus, but it ended with an hour in the company of Sjoerd Siebinga, lead developer on the project, and a session with Jill Cousins, Europeana's director. I went to see Sjoerd because I wanted to find out how Europeana's technical solution would fit with our plans at the Museum of London for a root-and-branch overhaul of our collections online delivery system. I knew that they'd be opening the source code up later this year, and I also knew that in essence what Europeana does is a superset of what we want to do, so I figured, find out if there'll be a good fit and whether there are things I could start to use or plan for now. Laughably, I thought that we might actually be able to help out by testing and developing the code further in a different environment - as if they needed me! I'll save this for another post, but in short Sjoerd took me on a tour of what they use as the core of the system (Solr) and blew me away. There are layers that they have built/will build above and below Solr that make Europeana what it is and may also prove helpful to us, but straight out of the box Solr is, quite simply, the bollocks. I've known of it for ages, but until given a tour of it didn't really grasp how it would work for us. Many, many thanks to Sjoerd for that.
Next I met with Jill for an interview for my research on digital sustainability in museums, where we dug into the roots of Europeana, its vision, key challenges, and of course sustainability (especially in terms of financial and political support). This was fascinating and revealing and added a lot to my understanding of the context of the project's birth and its fit in the historical landsacpe of EC-funded initiatives in digital/digitised cultural heritage. As a research exercise it was a test of my ability to work as an embedded researcher; one who is not just observing the processes of the project but contributing and arguing and necessarily developing opinions of his own. I really don't know how well I did in this regard - I'm not sure how often my attempts to be probing may in fact be leading, or whether my concerns with the project distort the approach I take in interviewing. Equally I don't know if this matters. A debate to expand upon another time, perhaps.
Days 2 and 3 were the kick-off meeting, and I'll put that in another post.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
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.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
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)
"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)
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
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
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
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:
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 ;-)
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.
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 ;-)
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Why Gnip caught my eye: a bit more depth (just a bit)
Eric Marcoullier commented on my last post on Gnip and I wrote him the following e-mail because, as I say, it's about time I worked through a little bit the reason why his baby caught my attention (not that it's a particularly worked through working through, but hey, it's a start). It was a bit much for a comment but enough for a post, so here you go.
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Many thanks for taking the time to look at my brief notes, you must be a busy man so I really appreciate it. It's definitely time I tried to put some flesh on the bones because it's true, I've barely sketched the link between Gnip and my own preoccupations.
My research is looking at how museums keep their digital stuff useful; in other words, how and when we keep on trying to squeeze value out of the digital stuff we've invested in. I'm trying to put a particularly museum-y spin on it because it would be all too easy to look, for example, at general questions related to digital preservation (yawn). Hence I'm exploring the specific conditions and challenges that museums have to face, as well as the way in which they value what they hold - as a "memory institution" with a remit to preserve and to serve the public, a museum has potentially got a slightly different way of valuing what it holds, though arguably this won't really apply to digital material except in special cases (like digital art). So that's the basic thread of my research: looking at how museums can and do decide a strategy for maximising value from their digital assets, and for planning new ones.
Of course, no museum is an island (that's kind of the point of the 'net, right?) and I'm inevitably thinking a lot about the relationships between museums and other parties that might provide or use services and data to/from them - this is key to extracting value, but it's also a dependency for which we need to understand the risks. In the museum community, a lot of the talk (for a couple of decades or more, now) is about how we share our most obvious USP: our collections data. Loads of work has been done on this and yet we still seem to be a long way from the dream of a way of effectively integrating the collections of more than a few institutions. This is why I've been working with the European Digital Library/Europeana project. The reason that Gnip caught my eye was because it suggests another model for data interchange. It may be not be appropriate for the scenario of sharing collections data, and one could argue that in some ways other museum initiatives share some of its characteristics (federated search, metadata harvesters etc.), but I was interested in whether we could learn from the model of a neutral mediating agent as rather than a central pool of data. We're not short of standards but we are short of co-ordinating mechanisms that we can all trust and feel we leave us with some control over "our" data.
The actual purpose of Gnip as an exchange for social data was probably of secondary interest to me, but of interest all the same - it's just an area I don't know much about. I think that on the whole museums won't need to concerns themselves directly about how whatever it is they do will relate to Gnip: I presume that if they incorporate a third party service in their site, or perhaps have an installation of WordPress, then a lot of the mechanics may be dealt with already (or will be in due course). But concern about interoperability and data portability may well be a reason why many museums (my own included) haven't yet done an awful lot with social software - although there are some notable exceptions. If Gnip helps to address these concerns then all that will still be lacking is our imagination!
One other possibility is that museum applications could indeed work with Gnip to integrate individuals' public information with their own services - say, by drawing links between a person's list of interests or music preferences, and what's in a museum's (or a library's)collection; or by suggesting events to attend based on user location, age and interests. I don't understand Gnip well enough to know if this is plausible, though, but it's an intriguing prospect.
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Thanks again to Eric for taking the time to contact me, I think it speaks well of new ventures like this (OpenCalais was another) when the key people go out out of their way to make contact with the people that are talking about them.
*******************************************************************
Many thanks for taking the time to look at my brief notes, you must be a busy man so I really appreciate it. It's definitely time I tried to put some flesh on the bones because it's true, I've barely sketched the link between Gnip and my own preoccupations.
My research is looking at how museums keep their digital stuff useful; in other words, how and when we keep on trying to squeeze value out of the digital stuff we've invested in. I'm trying to put a particularly museum-y spin on it because it would be all too easy to look, for example, at general questions related to digital preservation (yawn). Hence I'm exploring the specific conditions and challenges that museums have to face, as well as the way in which they value what they hold - as a "memory institution" with a remit to preserve and to serve the public, a museum has potentially got a slightly different way of valuing what it holds, though arguably this won't really apply to digital material except in special cases (like digital art). So that's the basic thread of my research: looking at how museums can and do decide a strategy for maximising value from their digital assets, and for planning new ones.
Of course, no museum is an island (that's kind of the point of the 'net, right?) and I'm inevitably thinking a lot about the relationships between museums and other parties that might provide or use services and data to/from them - this is key to extracting value, but it's also a dependency for which we need to understand the risks. In the museum community, a lot of the talk (for a couple of decades or more, now) is about how we share our most obvious USP: our collections data. Loads of work has been done on this and yet we still seem to be a long way from the dream of a way of effectively integrating the collections of more than a few institutions. This is why I've been working with the European Digital Library/Europeana project. The reason that Gnip caught my eye was because it suggests another model for data interchange. It may be not be appropriate for the scenario of sharing collections data, and one could argue that in some ways other museum initiatives share some of its characteristics (federated search, metadata harvesters etc.), but I was interested in whether we could learn from the model of a neutral mediating agent as rather than a central pool of data. We're not short of standards but we are short of co-ordinating mechanisms that we can all trust and feel we leave us with some control over "our" data.
The actual purpose of Gnip as an exchange for social data was probably of secondary interest to me, but of interest all the same - it's just an area I don't know much about. I think that on the whole museums won't need to concerns themselves directly about how whatever it is they do will relate to Gnip: I presume that if they incorporate a third party service in their site, or perhaps have an installation of WordPress, then a lot of the mechanics may be dealt with already (or will be in due course). But concern about interoperability and data portability may well be a reason why many museums (my own included) haven't yet done an awful lot with social software - although there are some notable exceptions. If Gnip helps to address these concerns then all that will still be lacking is our imagination!
One other possibility is that museum applications could indeed work with Gnip to integrate individuals' public information with their own services - say, by drawing links between a person's list of interests or music preferences, and what's in a museum's (or a library's)collection; or by suggesting events to attend based on user location, age and interests. I don't understand Gnip well enough to know if this is plausible, though, but it's an intriguing prospect.
*******************************************************************
Thanks again to Eric for taking the time to contact me, I think it speaks well of new ventures like this (OpenCalais was another) when the key people go out out of their way to make contact with the people that are talking about them.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Delayed post #1: aspects of [web] preservation
[[this post never got finished but I'm having a clear-out of my drafts and they're getting published or deleted, ready or not]]
Brian Kelly just blogged [[hmm, well, back in July, I think....]] on the JISC-PoWR site about "three key aspects of web preservation": experience, information, and access. I have a fourth, but I've been using it in the context of "sustainability" (the subject of my thesis), and so first I want to say a couple of words about this vs preservation, since although I've been writing papers for Ross for a couple of years arguing about the distinction between the concepts, I've not really rehearsed this in public before.
For the last couple of years I've been arguing that the problem of sustainability (S) is distinct from that of archive-style preservation (P). I won't go into the details of the distinction here but in essence I see P as concerning the persistence of a state, and S as the persistence of a process or activity. Recent work by Chris Rusbridge and others has been blurring the boundary ever more, although in a useful way: by questioning the purpose of preservation and weighing up what are the important aspects ("significant properties") of resources, they have been starting to argue for an approach to preservation that looks a lot more like what I was previously describing as sustaining. I still sort of believe that it is useful to distinnguish between the two concepts, but there's a lot of overlap.
The aspect that I think is especially pertinent to sustaining is "purpose". I don't think this is the same as the "experience" that Brian cites Kevin Ashley on (although experience and information may feed into purpose). It's focused on the objectives of the resource, which may be attainable through radically different experiences; for example (in the case of the environment in which KA operates), the learning objectives that an educational resource was created to serve. For a museum, perhaps a resource was prepared for use in a temporary exhibition, with the objective of enriching the experience visitors to that physical space by illustrating relationships betweeen objects, and providing media resources to bring them to life. When that exhibition closes, the original objective is partially voided - there is no physical visit to enrich - but aspects of it may still be viable - the objects probably still exist and the tales about them are still worth telling, perhaps more so than ever since we've stuck them back in the store-room out of easy access. Brian was talking about web preservation, of course, and I've taken a non-web resource as an example, but my interest in the question of sustainability extends beyond the web and the point applies regardless.
In any given digital resource that we're talking about preserving/sustaining, experience and information at least (perhaps access, too, sometimes) will have contributed to the original purpose to varying degrees - sometimes the experience is the whole purpose, sometimes it's an unimportant side effect of providing access to information. And sometimes it's important to the preserver regardless of its significance to the original purpose.
So if the original purpose is no longer served by a resource, what then for our "preservation" plans? There are still often reasons to preserve (freeze) or sustain (keep alive) an application, or aspects of it - in other words, some sources of value, ranging from historical interest to new uses, which may let a resource adapt and survive. The "significant properties" idea fits in to this. For me, if you are trying to maintain some quality of the original it's more of a preservation activity; whereas if you are more fundamentally interested in continuing to extract value through maintaining utility of whatever sort, we're talking sustaining.
Brian Kelly just blogged [[hmm, well, back in July, I think....]] on the JISC-PoWR site about "three key aspects of web preservation": experience, information, and access. I have a fourth, but I've been using it in the context of "sustainability" (the subject of my thesis), and so first I want to say a couple of words about this vs preservation, since although I've been writing papers for Ross for a couple of years arguing about the distinction between the concepts, I've not really rehearsed this in public before.
For the last couple of years I've been arguing that the problem of sustainability (S) is distinct from that of archive-style preservation (P). I won't go into the details of the distinction here but in essence I see P as concerning the persistence of a state, and S as the persistence of a process or activity. Recent work by Chris Rusbridge and others has been blurring the boundary ever more, although in a useful way: by questioning the purpose of preservation and weighing up what are the important aspects ("significant properties") of resources, they have been starting to argue for an approach to preservation that looks a lot more like what I was previously describing as sustaining. I still sort of believe that it is useful to distinnguish between the two concepts, but there's a lot of overlap.
The aspect that I think is especially pertinent to sustaining is "purpose". I don't think this is the same as the "experience" that Brian cites Kevin Ashley on (although experience and information may feed into purpose). It's focused on the objectives of the resource, which may be attainable through radically different experiences; for example (in the case of the environment in which KA operates), the learning objectives that an educational resource was created to serve. For a museum, perhaps a resource was prepared for use in a temporary exhibition, with the objective of enriching the experience visitors to that physical space by illustrating relationships betweeen objects, and providing media resources to bring them to life. When that exhibition closes, the original objective is partially voided - there is no physical visit to enrich - but aspects of it may still be viable - the objects probably still exist and the tales about them are still worth telling, perhaps more so than ever since we've stuck them back in the store-room out of easy access. Brian was talking about web preservation, of course, and I've taken a non-web resource as an example, but my interest in the question of sustainability extends beyond the web and the point applies regardless.
In any given digital resource that we're talking about preserving/sustaining, experience and information at least (perhaps access, too, sometimes) will have contributed to the original purpose to varying degrees - sometimes the experience is the whole purpose, sometimes it's an unimportant side effect of providing access to information. And sometimes it's important to the preserver regardless of its significance to the original purpose.
So if the original purpose is no longer served by a resource, what then for our "preservation" plans? There are still often reasons to preserve (freeze) or sustain (keep alive) an application, or aspects of it - in other words, some sources of value, ranging from historical interest to new uses, which may let a resource adapt and survive. The "significant properties" idea fits in to this. For me, if you are trying to maintain some quality of the original it's more of a preservation activity; whereas if you are more fundamentally interested in continuing to extract value through maintaining utility of whatever sort, we're talking sustaining.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
To Leuven (expenses paid), but who will pay for EDL?
Tomorrow sees EDL's working group 1 meeting at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, not far from Brussels. Quite exciting to be visiting, albeit fleetingly, a place that played host to Matsys, Bouts, Erasmus and Vesalius, amongst others (not to mention, apparently, the infamous AQ Khan). I'm looking forward to attending, though with no expectation of being able to contribute a lot since this group covers different ground to the one I've worked with up till now. I'm not even sure if I'm part of the group or simply in attendance. Anyway, the meeting will look at progress with Europeana so far, and consider the business issues facing it, particularly how to move to phase 2 (i.e. following the prototype, to be launched in November) and how to build a sustainable future. Working my way through 100-odd pages of reading matter in preparation for the meeting, I'm struck by how big a challenge it will be to find the necessary ongoing resources, but also the fact that they are tackling the problem head-on and examining a wide variety of options, from direct subsidy, through subscription by contributors or users, to corporate partnership or sponsorship.
A significant factor in the search for revenue-raising avenues is the fact that Europeana is not going to be a content owner in any significant way, but rather a broker/facilitator for accessing content owned by others. One possibility that I believe it could be worth exploring for two reasons is some form of partnership with a search provider. Yahoo! may be a bit too distracted to talk at the moment, but along with Google could be productive partners. Both sides could benefit by working on an interface and aligning their data structures, and EDL could perhaps offer quite a bit to such a partner in terms of preferential access to the semantically enriched data it will hold. This might be directly to do with searching the resources in EDL, or it might be, say, helping to clean up datasets of people and places. In exchange, maybe either some cash or technological assistance? Perhaps some of the semantic-y startups currently taking wing could also be interesting to work with, but they won't be as well resourced. Cultural heritage organisations have a lot of knowledge and context to offer here so maybe there's a business model to be had.
A significant factor in the search for revenue-raising avenues is the fact that Europeana is not going to be a content owner in any significant way, but rather a broker/facilitator for accessing content owned by others. One possibility that I believe it could be worth exploring for two reasons is some form of partnership with a search provider. Yahoo! may be a bit too distracted to talk at the moment, but along with Google could be productive partners. Both sides could benefit by working on an interface and aligning their data structures, and EDL could perhaps offer quite a bit to such a partner in terms of preferential access to the semantically enriched data it will hold. This might be directly to do with searching the resources in EDL, or it might be, say, helping to clean up datasets of people and places. In exchange, maybe either some cash or technological assistance? Perhaps some of the semantic-y startups currently taking wing could also be interesting to work with, but they won't be as well resourced. Cultural heritage organisations have a lot of knowledge and context to offer here so maybe there's a business model to be had.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
The MCG thread: 21st Century digital curation
Bridget McKenzie has blogged and kicked off a great discussion on the MCG list following a seminar last week with Carole Souter of HLF and Roy Clare of MLA. I've written a reply but as usual I do go on a bit so I'm sending a brief version there and putting more depth here.
There are so many strands to this exchange that I want to jabber about so I’m going back to the start – Bridget’s post. Bridget, if I get your drift, yes, I agree: there is a balance to be struck between the effort put into basic “digitisation” (though I think there are various ideas circulating about what that term implies) and interpreting our digitised collections, and I’m not sure we’re being helped to strike the right balance at present. Raves and gripes about past projects aside, it’s how we spend the scant funds now available that bothers me. Going from a time of relative plenty to a time where most budgets are Spartan rather than Olympian, how do we plan clearly how we spend them?
I’m torn. On the one hand, I get the sentiment which says, we need to be making things that people will enjoy, with some sort of mediation and aimed at well-defined audiences, just like any exhibition or public event we host. I accept that HLF amongst others want their funds to be used on things that we don’t automatically do, things that aren’t our “core activities”. And I take Dylan’s point that, when resources are scarce (which is always), demonstrating (actually, having) impact is really important. But….
On the other, I would suggest that digitisation being referred to as a core activity betrays the fact that it is indeed now something we have to do. The trouble is, it may be a part of our core work, but it has never been core funded (at least not in terms of funds additional to the pre-digitisation days). So it’s a cop-out to say “it’s really important, and therefore we won’t pay for it”. Who will, then? Until our core funders, whoever they might be, come up with the cash to do this newly core activity on an ongoing rather than project basis, we’ll have to act as though it’s not “core” and go begging precisely because it’s so important. But apparently HLF think it’s important enough to not fund it too, so we’re stuffed. I’m glad to hear that in Birmingham at least there digitisation is seen as something to drive with internal funds, I guess HLF are hoping more places will go that way.
The important thing that NOF Digi did (along with other HLF and DCMS funded projects) was get a load of collections records in some sort of order and snap some nice shots of the objects (which seems to be commonly accepted as equating to the “digitisation” of a typical museum/gallery item – making a good record and a decent photo). All the other stuff isn’t flim-flam – for those many users that had a great experience of Port Cities and other such projects, that experience was in no small part due to the contextualisation and linking built on top of the vital digitisation effort. I’m sure that BMAG’s Pre-Raphaelite website will be great, but as Rachel says, the payoff is much more than whatever users it attracts. Like an exhibition, the mediated experience will be more transient than the collections (physical or surrogate) on which it is built. We can’t equate web-ready records and surrogates with physical collections, but nevertheless they are the bricks and mortar from which our public-facing offering is built, and they will last longer than the wallpaper, lighting, video games and Persian rugs with which we make it “engaging”. Besides, sometimes all that stuff ends up seeming really forced just so we could secure the funding. Kind of like the way I’m now listening to Paul’s Boutique and hoping to find a clever excuse to quote some lyrics in support of my argument!
Unsurprisingly, then, I come out on the side of those like Bridget, Mike (E, not D) who argue that investing in the fundamentals in such a way that they can be built upon in future is the way to go. To me this means, basically, getting those records and surrogates done irrespective of anticipated clicks: if the object is worth accessioning, it’s worth recording properly. Getting that content into some public-facing form is, frankly, less vital, and we need to be considering intelligent ways of doing it. Building stuff in such a way that others can do good things with it is a step in that direction, which is why I’ve been pinning my hopes on EDL doing the Right Thing with an API. If this works the right way, any size of museum could contribute content and use Europeana’s centralised brain-power to do all the hard work. Then the basics are done, the mediating content can be tied in to it. But “digitisation” is the essential part. Like Mike, I’ve told both EDL and NCO (via Bridget) that they could reasonably drop a user interface altogether if they provide for other people to programme against an aggregated collection, but conversely a public UI without and API is pointless. I say “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair” [see side 2 for details]. And Nick, the way you describe the vision for IA is very encouraging for this precise reason. Wish we’d had the chance to talk about it t’other night!
Stephen Lowy also raised the term sustainability. What he described is better termed preservation to my mind (although successful preservation needs sustaining…), but sustainability is at the core of this, and for this we need to make a clear distinction both conceptually and architecturally between the layers of the “digitisation” – the records and surrogates ([collections] data layer), access to them (the layer of functionality), contextualisation (a mediating layer of more content), showing them (a UI layer), perhaps including engagement with the resource in Web 2-ish ways (an additional set of social layers?). We shouldn’t be required to provide all of these parts; it’s ridiculous, even with multi-institution projects. Of course we often want to anyway, but for major funders to say, “we are only interested in helping you with the basics if you’ll build all the other layers too” is dumb.
I should add that I do actually believe that interpreting and being creative with our collections (and in fact going beyond them) is also a core activity of museums, and this obviously carries into the digital realm. To take a current famous example, Launchball, which I had a riot playing with my 5 and 7 year old yesterday: this is exactly what museums are for, but it could have been (relatively) rubbish if it had been compromised in the way Mike describes, perhaps tacked onto a digitisation initiative for the sake of funds and shorn of its purity. It has all it needs: food, sickles and girls
Mike again: “cash for sustainability is either not considered or frowned upon by funders who simply don't recognise that this is an absolute requirement in any successful (web) project.”, and Tehmina also wonders what measures are in place to avoid a repeat of situations where there is no planning for maintenance and continued content development. They’re right. At the start of each project we must be stating (a) what’s important about it (b) how long we want the important aspects to last (c) what strategies will be built in to assist this (d) what other potential sources of value the resource offers. This way we can build it appropriately (funds permitting) to ensure that we can indeed continue to realise value from the thing for the proposed lifespan. And once that period is over, we should also be in a better position to re-examine the resource, decide what’s still got potential to advance the organisation’s purpose, and maybe squeeze more value from it. And if we take the right approach to architecture, with conceptual and technical divisions between the layers, then if we’ve decided that one part is for a couple of years and another is “forever” we’ll be able to put out efforts where it matters.
Bridget asked: “what such lead bodies [HLF and MLA] should be doing to invest in 21st century digital curation?” Basically, I’d say, they should put their funds in three areas and realise that they need to be seen as separate endeavours
There are so many strands to this exchange that I want to jabber about so I’m going back to the start – Bridget’s post. Bridget, if I get your drift, yes, I agree: there is a balance to be struck between the effort put into basic “digitisation” (though I think there are various ideas circulating about what that term implies) and interpreting our digitised collections, and I’m not sure we’re being helped to strike the right balance at present. Raves and gripes about past projects aside, it’s how we spend the scant funds now available that bothers me. Going from a time of relative plenty to a time where most budgets are Spartan rather than Olympian, how do we plan clearly how we spend them?
I’m torn. On the one hand, I get the sentiment which says, we need to be making things that people will enjoy, with some sort of mediation and aimed at well-defined audiences, just like any exhibition or public event we host. I accept that HLF amongst others want their funds to be used on things that we don’t automatically do, things that aren’t our “core activities”. And I take Dylan’s point that, when resources are scarce (which is always), demonstrating (actually, having) impact is really important. But….
On the other, I would suggest that digitisation being referred to as a core activity betrays the fact that it is indeed now something we have to do. The trouble is, it may be a part of our core work, but it has never been core funded (at least not in terms of funds additional to the pre-digitisation days). So it’s a cop-out to say “it’s really important, and therefore we won’t pay for it”. Who will, then? Until our core funders, whoever they might be, come up with the cash to do this newly core activity on an ongoing rather than project basis, we’ll have to act as though it’s not “core” and go begging precisely because it’s so important. But apparently HLF think it’s important enough to not fund it too, so we’re stuffed. I’m glad to hear that in Birmingham at least there digitisation is seen as something to drive with internal funds, I guess HLF are hoping more places will go that way.
The important thing that NOF Digi did (along with other HLF and DCMS funded projects) was get a load of collections records in some sort of order and snap some nice shots of the objects (which seems to be commonly accepted as equating to the “digitisation” of a typical museum/gallery item – making a good record and a decent photo). All the other stuff isn’t flim-flam – for those many users that had a great experience of Port Cities and other such projects, that experience was in no small part due to the contextualisation and linking built on top of the vital digitisation effort. I’m sure that BMAG’s Pre-Raphaelite website will be great, but as Rachel says, the payoff is much more than whatever users it attracts. Like an exhibition, the mediated experience will be more transient than the collections (physical or surrogate) on which it is built. We can’t equate web-ready records and surrogates with physical collections, but nevertheless they are the bricks and mortar from which our public-facing offering is built, and they will last longer than the wallpaper, lighting, video games and Persian rugs with which we make it “engaging”. Besides, sometimes all that stuff ends up seeming really forced just so we could secure the funding. Kind of like the way I’m now listening to Paul’s Boutique and hoping to find a clever excuse to quote some lyrics in support of my argument!
Unsurprisingly, then, I come out on the side of those like Bridget, Mike (E, not D) who argue that investing in the fundamentals in such a way that they can be built upon in future is the way to go. To me this means, basically, getting those records and surrogates done irrespective of anticipated clicks: if the object is worth accessioning, it’s worth recording properly. Getting that content into some public-facing form is, frankly, less vital, and we need to be considering intelligent ways of doing it. Building stuff in such a way that others can do good things with it is a step in that direction, which is why I’ve been pinning my hopes on EDL doing the Right Thing with an API. If this works the right way, any size of museum could contribute content and use Europeana’s centralised brain-power to do all the hard work. Then the basics are done, the mediating content can be tied in to it. But “digitisation” is the essential part. Like Mike, I’ve told both EDL and NCO (via Bridget) that they could reasonably drop a user interface altogether if they provide for other people to programme against an aggregated collection, but conversely a public UI without and API is pointless. I say “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair” [see side 2 for details]. And Nick, the way you describe the vision for IA is very encouraging for this precise reason. Wish we’d had the chance to talk about it t’other night!
Stephen Lowy also raised the term sustainability. What he described is better termed preservation to my mind (although successful preservation needs sustaining…), but sustainability is at the core of this, and for this we need to make a clear distinction both conceptually and architecturally between the layers of the “digitisation” – the records and surrogates ([collections] data layer), access to them (the layer of functionality), contextualisation (a mediating layer of more content), showing them (a UI layer), perhaps including engagement with the resource in Web 2-ish ways (an additional set of social layers?). We shouldn’t be required to provide all of these parts; it’s ridiculous, even with multi-institution projects. Of course we often want to anyway, but for major funders to say, “we are only interested in helping you with the basics if you’ll build all the other layers too” is dumb.
I should add that I do actually believe that interpreting and being creative with our collections (and in fact going beyond them) is also a core activity of museums, and this obviously carries into the digital realm. To take a current famous example, Launchball, which I had a riot playing with my 5 and 7 year old yesterday: this is exactly what museums are for, but it could have been (relatively) rubbish if it had been compromised in the way Mike describes, perhaps tacked onto a digitisation initiative for the sake of funds and shorn of its purity. It has all it needs: food, sickles and girls
Mike again: “cash for sustainability is either not considered or frowned upon by funders who simply don't recognise that this is an absolute requirement in any successful (web) project.”, and Tehmina also wonders what measures are in place to avoid a repeat of situations where there is no planning for maintenance and continued content development. They’re right. At the start of each project we must be stating (a) what’s important about it (b) how long we want the important aspects to last (c) what strategies will be built in to assist this (d) what other potential sources of value the resource offers. This way we can build it appropriately (funds permitting) to ensure that we can indeed continue to realise value from the thing for the proposed lifespan. And once that period is over, we should also be in a better position to re-examine the resource, decide what’s still got potential to advance the organisation’s purpose, and maybe squeeze more value from it. And if we take the right approach to architecture, with conceptual and technical divisions between the layers, then if we’ve decided that one part is for a couple of years and another is “forever” we’ll be able to put out efforts where it matters.
Bridget asked: “what such lead bodies [HLF and MLA] should be doing to invest in 21st century digital curation?” Basically, I’d say, they should put their funds in three areas and realise that they need to be seen as separate endeavours
- invest properly in strategic, sector-wide initiatives like the Information Architecture, that one would hope will do the plumbing job we need, and feed into EDL (and beyond?). Fingers crossed for this one.
- support simple digitisation to create the straight-ahead content to go into EDL and/or IA. It’s still got to be done. If it’s not support with funds then MLA must ensure that digitisation is recognised by those providing the core funding as a core activity, and is adequately provided for on an ongoing basis. Not too optimistic.
- yes, still fund us to build some imaginative and innovative, born-to-die experimental exciting digital stuff aimed directly at the public. Who knows? Maybe.
- and funds need to have the right strings attached. Maybe this is sometimes related to “impact”; it should also be about identifying the “sources of value” in a resource, budgeting realistically for supporting them for a specific period, and planning for the end of its life.
Can you tell it’s a holiday weekend and I’m the only one at home?
PS. About those sickles: sorry, the Mummies also made it onto the turntable.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Chris Rusbridge on significant properties
I've been a fan of Chris Rusbridge for a while now, increasingly so as I delved into the work he's been involved in previously, not least (as he mentions in his latest post) CEDARS. I was thinking along the same lines in terms of the need to identify what's important about a digital resource before you settle on a strategy for "sustaining" it (ideally before you build it, actually), and then I came across the work they did on "significant properties". Clearly the properties for the sorts of data and file-based assets that digital curators typically deal with (not to mention the context and purpose of their work) will often be different from the properties that a museum cherishes in their digital investments, but the framework that CEDARS developed is a great starting point for me.
CR has just blogged about this topic again, in the run-up to a JISC workshop that I'll unfortunately miss next week.
CR has just blogged about this topic again, in the run-up to a JISC workshop that I'll unfortunately miss next week.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Shock discovery: poor communication wastes resources
Yesterday I found out about some work that's being done on our behalf by the company that advertises our jobs. At the request of our HR people, they've almost finished building some custom pages to mimic the look of our group portal pages. Trouble is, the web techs (in this case, me) were never part of the discussions and I can't help but feel that we'd probably have got things done very differently if we had been. Certainly I have some concerns about what we'll get and I would have liked to explore other options. What are my concerns? They can mostly be expressed adequately with the word "sustainability":
- Content maintenance. It mimics the look of our CMS pages, but the content isn't integrated with our CMS. Changes to site structure won't be reflected in the menus, nor would updated content.
- Visual maintenance. The look of this site will change (we dearly hope) and I can't change their pages
- Google. I don't know how they look upon sites that look like copies of existing sites and point at their pages. I suspect it might look like spamming and I wouldn't want to be blacklisted.
- Site stats. We can't (readily) integrate the job site's stats with ours (if we get them at all). Not a huge deal to me but a factor.
- Cost. I don't know what this will have cost, but five minutes after getting hold of an RSS feed from their site I had integrated it into our own, replicating the most important part of what they'd done. I suspect we could have done it cheaper, in short!
Friday, February 22, 2008
What have I been doing?
Well, more than I realised perhaps. It's felt both hectic and sometimes unproductive lately but I have moved forwards on quite a few things, though a couple of thorns remain firmly embedded in my side. This has been a week of payoffs for the previous few, as things come to fruition. In no particular order, in fact in random chaos because I'm in a rush, here's some stuff I've been busy with.
The discussion I kicked off on the MCG list about APIs and the EDL was really stimulating, though I never managed to find the time to respond to several of the interesting responses I had. There was interesting feedback on the idea of the EDL itself, or any effort at centralising content. There were also plenty of thoughts about what make good characteristics of APIs and what their uses may be, plus suggestions of examples. I now need to use these in preparing a talk for the EDL WP3 meeting in Paris on the 3-4 March. I've been working on this quite hard, well, sort of, in between the rest, and my own ideas about APIs and indeed the Semantic Web have been evolving a little. Preparation of my survey questionnaire is another area of (out of hours) activity.
What else? I spent 3 days on preparing an out of print guide to pottery fabrics for the web. I started with a PDF of the 200 page Quark document from 10 years ago, exported XML, did some cleaning by hand, passed it through three sets of transformations to structure data and then on to TEILite, and adapted another transformation to display this as HTML. It's not perfect yet and we need to hook all the images in to it, as well as proof read etc., but it was a good proof of how one can take this content and semi-automate the creation of a nicely structured version. The plan had been to database it, and I was just going to get structured data on each fabric out but we seemed to close to what I ended up doing that I went ahead. It felt good.
I did more preparation for moving the events database out of Oracle and into SQL Server; refined some ideas with the help of the microformats list (in short, sod that, it's going to be eRDF for me or something like); met Mike Ellis to talk about the ways that Eduserve can work with museums, gab about microformats and all the rest; talked with a consultant we have working on the Port of London Archives, held at Museum in Docklands, about IT requirements, OAI-PMH and so on (followed up today with a grand assembly of all his interviewees, very interesting); worked on the London's Burning site for key stage 1 kids (more fancy pants XSLT for me, but the good bit will be a great interactive by ON 101); also work on integrating a new game, Family Favourites, soon to be launched at MiD; I got RSS feeds (and other XML sources) drawn into our site server-side (not in a public place yet, but working) and along the way rediscovered a baby REST interface I'd built in the autumn. At present this just lets you search the MoLAS publications, but events and collections are but a short way off if I get a few minutes. I advised on the procurement of a new map application for the London Sugar and Slavery gallery, although we only just made one. Still, there's money to pour away and it must be poured before the end of the financial year. Damn that financial year, it's the bane of my life right now! And I've been trying to get this blasted generic timeline project back on track. Happily today I had a meeting where we got ourselves a plan of action, and just a moment ago spoke to the designer about the next steps so now I hope there's time to get it done before, you guessed it, the end of the financial year...
Quick note: Waibel and Godby reporting on the MCN 2007 (just published in Ariadne) made some interesting observations, including: "During the public CDWA Lite Advisory Committee meeting, Inge Stein (Konrad-Zuse Zentrum für Informationstechnik, Berlin) presented on Museumdat [4], a harmonisation of CDWA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art) Lite with the CIDOC (Committee on Documentation of the International Council of Museums) Conceptual Reference Model). One of the motivations for this effort: with a small amount of changes, CDWA Lite could be used for all objects across the cultural heritage spectrum, whereas currently it is optimised exclusively for fine art. All delegates agreed that the changes proposed by the German museum community should form the basis for the next version of CDWA Lite. Monika Hagedorn-Saupe (Institute for Museums Studies, Germany), Inge Stein and the Advisory Committee agreed that a single international version of the standard would be desirable."
"The Town Hall Meeting on Intellectual Property: Museum Image Licensing – The Next Generation provoked a lively debate, with many points of view represented by both presenters and delegates, and little evidence of an emerging consensus around the business model for sustaining digital image provision: the room seemed divided between those who feel that the museum community can make the most impact in our information economy by providing open access whenever legally possible, and those who favour business models of cost recovery or even revenue generation. "
The discussion I kicked off on the MCG list about APIs and the EDL was really stimulating, though I never managed to find the time to respond to several of the interesting responses I had. There was interesting feedback on the idea of the EDL itself, or any effort at centralising content. There were also plenty of thoughts about what make good characteristics of APIs and what their uses may be, plus suggestions of examples. I now need to use these in preparing a talk for the EDL WP3 meeting in Paris on the 3-4 March. I've been working on this quite hard, well, sort of, in between the rest, and my own ideas about APIs and indeed the Semantic Web have been evolving a little. Preparation of my survey questionnaire is another area of (out of hours) activity.
What else? I spent 3 days on preparing an out of print guide to pottery fabrics for the web. I started with a PDF of the 200 page Quark document from 10 years ago, exported XML, did some cleaning by hand, passed it through three sets of transformations to structure data and then on to TEILite, and adapted another transformation to display this as HTML. It's not perfect yet and we need to hook all the images in to it, as well as proof read etc., but it was a good proof of how one can take this content and semi-automate the creation of a nicely structured version. The plan had been to database it, and I was just going to get structured data on each fabric out but we seemed to close to what I ended up doing that I went ahead. It felt good.
I did more preparation for moving the events database out of Oracle and into SQL Server; refined some ideas with the help of the microformats list (in short, sod that, it's going to be eRDF for me or something like); met Mike Ellis to talk about the ways that Eduserve can work with museums, gab about microformats and all the rest; talked with a consultant we have working on the Port of London Archives, held at Museum in Docklands, about IT requirements, OAI-PMH and so on (followed up today with a grand assembly of all his interviewees, very interesting); worked on the London's Burning site for key stage 1 kids (more fancy pants XSLT for me, but the good bit will be a great interactive by ON 101); also work on integrating a new game, Family Favourites, soon to be launched at MiD; I got RSS feeds (and other XML sources) drawn into our site server-side (not in a public place yet, but working) and along the way rediscovered a baby REST interface I'd built in the autumn. At present this just lets you search the MoLAS publications, but events and collections are but a short way off if I get a few minutes. I advised on the procurement of a new map application for the London Sugar and Slavery gallery, although we only just made one. Still, there's money to pour away and it must be poured before the end of the financial year. Damn that financial year, it's the bane of my life right now! And I've been trying to get this blasted generic timeline project back on track. Happily today I had a meeting where we got ourselves a plan of action, and just a moment ago spoke to the designer about the next steps so now I hope there's time to get it done before, you guessed it, the end of the financial year...
Quick note: Waibel and Godby reporting on the MCN 2007 (just published in Ariadne) made some interesting observations, including: "During the public CDWA Lite Advisory Committee meeting, Inge Stein (Konrad-Zuse Zentrum für Informationstechnik, Berlin) presented on Museumdat [4], a harmonisation of CDWA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art) Lite with the CIDOC (Committee on Documentation of the International Council of Museums) Conceptual Reference Model). One of the motivations for this effort: with a small amount of changes, CDWA Lite could be used for all objects across the cultural heritage spectrum, whereas currently it is optimised exclusively for fine art. All delegates agreed that the changes proposed by the German museum community should form the basis for the next version of CDWA Lite. Monika Hagedorn-Saupe (Institute for Museums Studies, Germany), Inge Stein and the Advisory Committee agreed that a single international version of the standard would be desirable."
"The Town Hall Meeting on Intellectual Property: Museum Image Licensing – The Next Generation provoked a lively debate, with many points of view represented by both presenters and delegates, and little evidence of an emerging consensus around the business model for sustaining digital image provision: the room seemed divided between those who feel that the museum community can make the most impact in our information economy by providing open access whenever legally possible, and those who favour business models of cost recovery or even revenue generation. "
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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.
Friday, January 18, 2008
More distributed services. Databases this time.
LongJump looks pretty cool for hosting databases, both for the non-developer and the techy type. I don't think an ODBC-like connection is possible but a REST or SOAP interface is available. This might be a useful tool for institutions (including museums, of course) that don't have the tech skills or perhaps the desire to develop or host DBs themselves. Sustainability implications? good and bad, as ever, I suppose.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Alex Iskold on "The Danger of Free"
The Danger of Free - ReadWriteWeb
The question we've perhaps ignored rather. It's true, we're all perhaps a bit too keen on getting stuff for free. We see stuff delivered through the screen as intangible, but that doesn't always equate to us thinking it has no value or should be free, so why is this so with web-delivered services and content? Is it just a habit, and one we can back out of if we see that it's going to mean poorer quality goods, or is it just in our nature to go for the free or to feel suspicious of the value we'll get from stuff on the web? If we have confidence that it will be trustworthy and value for money are we more likely to pay?
The question we've perhaps ignored rather. It's true, we're all perhaps a bit too keen on getting stuff for free. We see stuff delivered through the screen as intangible, but that doesn't always equate to us thinking it has no value or should be free, so why is this so with web-delivered services and content? Is it just a habit, and one we can back out of if we see that it's going to mean poorer quality goods, or is it just in our nature to go for the free or to feel suspicious of the value we'll get from stuff on the web? If we have confidence that it will be trustworthy and value for money are we more likely to pay?
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Somewhat relevant: Task force on economic sustainability of digital data
From OCLC via Lorcan Dempsey, hopefully this will deliver half of what it promises:
Panel to address economic sustainability of digital preservation
Panel to address economic sustainability of digital preservation
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