SCA Blog

Sarah Porter, Kevin Guthrie and Pat Manson started the discussion with an overview of what they each consider to be the “big issues” in e-content.

Sarah Porter: The 10 content commandments

Content
Do we try to be selective or go for mass digitisation ? something JISC comes up with all the time ? do we digitise backfiles but we do we continue small scale selective efforts - what about duplication as there’s a cost involved in trying not to duplicate

Capacity
Do we go for in-house or contracted-out models ? issue of globalisation and using global organisations for content capture and the ethics involved in that

Competencies
What professional development standards may we need to have in place?

Curation
Digital preservation ? models have come out in the States which are looking at some of those things eg Portico ? looking at non-textual resources such as video and sound

Capital
Often use capital funding to create content but what about sustainability - how do we sustain content?

Commerce
Public/private partnerships ? what models do we need to protect public investment?

Convergence and Collaboration
Some of the new publishing models ? user generated content, social networking YouTube etc ? different models which have different issues and challenges

Formal and informal networks ? there is a cost attached to collaboration ? the cost of time and effort and shifting away from strategy ? can add benefit but how to balance cost

Copyright

Context
What are we doing? Is it fit for purpose? Are users being consulted? What about the role of quality assurance ? do users always want QA or do they want more things which are ‘good enough’?

Pat Manson

There are a number of problems which need political or strategic action:

• There are still issues around fragmentation, uneven progress, why so little of the content is proportionally digitised ? costs of mass digitisation ? competence ? policy-wise, is there still a need for a political case to be made on the benefits and not just seen as luxury goods so showcases like the European Digital Library help to keep the political interest alive and shows benefits of joining up content from different sources across different countries

• Copyright - we risk not being able to digitise the stuff of the 20th century ? action at European level would help organisations digitise ? cooperation is needed with orphan works ? need mutual recognition between member states that if one work is recognised as orphans then other members will too - with out of print works we need co-operation around frameworks for clearance

• Public/private partnerships ? covers the spectrum of content ? need the business models and as new players come on board there will be questions asked about who takes the benefits ? need to make sure people don’t sign away inappropriate rights

• Digital preservation ? what do we do to keep it accessible in the future
• Curation ? need policies and strategies which will take funding beyond the collecting organisations

• Interoperability ? need stable technical frameworks ? cannot be solved in the short term but need to create ref model or framework

Kevin Guthrie

My perspective is at the organisational level ? the organism as opposed to the eco-system. Issues include:

• Strategy for what or whom? There are different sets of objectives at different levels

• How to get organisations to innovate ? I don’t think antique dealers are the ones who would have started eBay even thought they benefit from it now

• How to create new models that create the motivation for change

I have a bias - a tendency to think that you need to create enterprises that do new things and are motivated to creating that new thing - they can organise around accomplishing that thing.

The centralised/decentralised question is not such a binary choice - YouTube is decentralised but would not work without the centre of the site ? the question is, how is heavy is the centre?

New modes of creating content on the web achieve unprecendented scales

Sustainability is part revenue generation and part cost reduction, being able to do more with less

Discussion

Mike Keller (MK) ? what is expensive now will be cheap in five years ? what is on the edges now will be commonplace in 10 years ? there is a snowballing effect of these projects ? the more we report about them the more we will be able to see different projects from before ? there will be new methods of research and teaching and preservation which suggest new methods and findings not just for industrialised world but also for 3rd world

Incentivising innovation is crucial ? we need to permit and encourage headroom - not to take too much of a systems or financial view but the view that there are thing that are unimaginable that will be commonplace in a dozen years

Anne-Marie Millner (AMM): the government of Canada is grappling with the idea of the social web ? everything the government produces online is checked and rechecked and verified

Ralph Goebel (RG): we need to look at the level that things are done, the issue of destination

MK: We need to know more about what the commercial sector has done in achieving scale ? may be doing stuff that other sectors could do better ? if we knew more about what the commercial sector is doing we may not need to spend so much on it

Example: AP and Reuters ? in a short period have done a better job than libraries in preserving and managing news content ? some national governments spent a lot of money in recent years digitising news when, if we knew more about what BBC, Reuters etc doing then may have spent it differently

Dan Jones (DJ): it’s also about influencing their agenda ? what has been successful is working with private sector partners to expand their offerings ? working with them on what the offering is it is possible to get them to segment the market and serve other stakeholders on the back of their main market.
Could spend a lot of public money on projects which the commercial sector will ultimate pick up and do better

Joyce Ray (JR): there is the concern that the private sector will cherry pick just the things that have commercial value

MK: the role of the public sector is to influence their behaviour and for that you have to know more about what they are doing. AP built an enormous digital repository of news and still images and their metadata serves their market -instead of trying to recreate it in the public sector the way forward is to figure out what metadata we need in the long term to serve historians etc and then it may be cheaper just to influence them to make that change and those adjustments ? they have so many markets for what they produce that they have the incentives to keep it and maintain it and manage it. In a lot of ways they are doing a better job but wouldn’t say leave it to them as then you risk homogeneity

Jean Kempf (JK): you also risk that they control the access?To pick up on Mike’s remark ? the important place where communication should take place and hasn’t is the interface between the researchers and the product. At academic presses we want to serve user needs and the libraries have been doing a great job of trying to define user needs but uni presses are probably a good place where this has gone on and the debate can go on about what we want as researchers and scholars, to dream and work on it. We need to look at strategic places? define a field for planning

Rick Prelinger (RP): I’m struck when I come to Europe of the condition with a/v media that the access door gets stickier as media gets richer ? have many more limitations in Europe than in the US but have done so much more than in US with rich media, putting newsfilm online etc. The limitations have allowed you to flourish in ways we have not managed to do so

RG: information is the oil of the future so if you own an info market it?s a good market ? we need to share that info not hand it over to the private sector ? we need to share it - 5 or 10 years in the future we will have a huge mass of digitised objects and the question is how to handle that

Chris Batt (CB): before we get too deep into how we do it we need to think about why we do it or why it should be done ? what are we trying to achieve? In some areas private investment is good eg ancestry is a good example but of all the museums we have, only a very few have objects for mass digitisation, the rest have only a handful?

Andy Tyerman (AT): we’ve got a lot of stuff out there already but are we exploiting it effectively?

MK: I’m very concerned about the emphasis on metadata ? we should be thinking entirely differently about metadata ? the least handcrafting possible ? more and better and different modes of indexing and searching linking and taking advantage of the various ways in which a digital object gets delivered and published. We’ve been in the metadata industry for centuries but in the face of these massive indexing instruments we should be thinking about investing less in metadata and more in curating ? less in handcrafting and more in machines

Bernard Reilly (BR): Another sector where a lot of content is being digitised and worth looking at is scholars who are generating a lot of digital content and are funded by the public policy world ? there is a lot of investment we could probably leverage better in terms of getting digital content to users