A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

UKOLN is supported by:

From Audience to Avatar? Transformational Technologies for the Cultural Sector

Dr Liz Lyon

Director, UKOLN

MLA NE ICT Conference November 2007

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons LicenceAttribution-ShareAlike 2.0

1. The Web is “sector-agnostic”2. Cultural assets scope is learning and scholarly research3. Digital Strategy development goes beyond “digitisation”4. User-driven Culture2.0 is here now5. The Google Generation are tomorrow’s “curators” 6. “Always beta” & agile development cycles impact

service delivery7. Visitors move in, between and through, physical and

virtual worlds 8. We can learn from business and media…..

Working assumptions, position statements and supporting 2007 statistics from OCLC

Overview

1. Digital memories and digital lives

2. Ensuring long-term access

3. Transforming the experience

                                                             

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

Digital memories and digital lives

“today’s events are tomorrow’s memories for museums, libraries and archives….”

New personal memory devices?

How do we create and manage our personal digital collections? Hybrid collections?

Collecting community memories

http://mapmylondon.com/

Geo-tagged memories

YouTube : hosting, broadcasting, sharing community content

Top social media site : OCLC

Flickr : the People’s Archive?

Assisting recall?

EPSRC Computing Grand Challenge

JISC CREW project Recording presence,

time-based events and human discourse

Recording discussion, disagreement, decisions

Gordon Bell, aged 72, Microsoft Research: MyLifeBits Project

Microsoft Research

SenseCam

2007 Articles in Scientific American and The New Yorker

When everything is digitally recorded, what are the implications for museums & archives?

Life-logging

                                                             

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

Ensuring long-term access

“the life of the average Web site is estimated at 44days = lifespan of a housefly….

Massive digitisation projects

Personal archives

Linking collectionsCommunity content

Reference data: sensor-nets, environmental, geospatial, demographic, genomic

2012

We need sustainable preservation modelsInstitutional: legacy

digital surrogates, born digital media,

Curation / Preservation choices?1. Local (authority) repository / content management system2. Regional archive 3. British Library or National Archive (TNA)4. Disciplinary data centre: UK Data Archive5. “Public” data repository or service6. Web archiving services7. Outsource to commercial data service 8. Ecosystem of hosted lifebits services (Jon Udell) 9. None of these?10.All of these?

“Institutional” Repositories?

Massive JISC investment in IRsSupporting UK Higher Education institutions

Who provides “institutional” support for cultural content?

Museum or archive?

Renaissance Hub?

Local authority?

Florida Digital Archive: archiving state materials for learning & teaching

UK leadership role: BL, TNA

Digital Preservation Coalition

Tools: e.g. Pronom

UK Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk/

• £3M Project• JISC + EPSRC• Community Development lead• Curation manual• Briefing papers• Advocacy, training• Workshops

Disciplinary data centre : social sciences & humanities

?

Blogs: are they preserved? Web archiving issues: scale, currency, coverage

Outsourcing solution?

Commercial data store? Amazon S3

Future hosted lifebits service?

Significant preservation challenges : awareness, co-ordination, strategy, policy, advocacy, trust, responsibility, technical infrastructure, costs …

                                                             

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

Transforming the experience

“for the Google Generation, the audience metaphor is too passive…”

Shipping now for $400

10.3 oz e-Book reader from Amazon

Books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, bookmarks, notation….

Any book that’s ever been in print in < 1 minute?

“a large number of visitors will only ever view the museum’s content on Flickr”

“this very blog is one of the most popular parts of the Museum’s website”

= No 1 social networking site

Germany 54%

Canada 60%

France 70%

UK 72%

US 75%

Mixi in Japan 91%

“General public respondents are more likely to have used a social networking or social media site (28%) than to have searched for or borrowed items from a Library site (20%)”

Facebook: Organisations

can now join

Facebook: professional groups

UK museums & archives on Facebook, but no UK public libraries?

Some more statistics….

23 October 2007, >350 social networking sites

16 about “Books”

“13% of the total general public and 9% of the US general public respondents feel that it is the role of the library to create a social networking site for their communities”

“book clubs was the top social networking service that libraries should consider if they were to build social networking sites”

“On 28 September 2007, MySpace had 197 groups with ‘book club’ in the title”.

Enhancing access?Powerhouse Museum OPAC 2.0? Location-based browse, search…where objects were made, what else was used at that location…

Geospatial…..

Add :

Chronological?

Environmental?

Demographic?

Genomic?

• Tagging, annotation & (micro) comments

• Reviews, ratings, authority & recommendations

• Identifiers, links

• Mash-ups, mixes & cut ‘n paste culture

• Mining

Enriching the cultural record

Wikipedia model: community curation?

Linking the old physical/real with the new digital/virtual….

Open June 2007,10K visitors in Second Life virtual gallery

Imagine:

If you could adopt an historical / new identity and relive those experiences

Touch, hold, use, interact with rare and precious artefacts

Learn in this medium within the educational curriculum

University of Sheffield Centre for Information Literacy SL office

Avon Gallery

Cultural second lives

SL challenges citizen concepts of “identity”

Enables “what if?” learning

Collaborate with education & media?

From Audience to Avatar? …..Take home messages

• Engage with your “audiences”, who are themselves enthusiastic collectors and curators, creators and consumers, who pro-actively participate.

• Data underpins creative culture and intellectual ideas: we must co-ordinate and curate for the future.

• Be bold, experimental, innovative: today you are only limited by your imagination….

Transform the experience

                                                             

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

Questions?

Slides will be available at :

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/presentations.html