SCA Blog

Possible themes:

• Business models/partnerships/roles
• Governance, licencing
• Tools and infrastructure
• Communities of practice
• Advocacy and tools for this

Read on for the discussion of future plans…

PK: might be fun to launch little experiments that involve digitisation and partners from public sector, private sector and foundations and see if they can create in the doing some active best principles for partnerships

MR: so would be nice in that case to find some set of resources that have international value and impact - something that makes sense because it is international

PK: Brian Lapping, documentary maker has been commissioned to make a series on the American war of independence and was looking at models for that…

SD: he needs to talk to Southampton

AD: had a discussion 3 or 4 months ago about joint digitisation projects set up and at pilot stage where NEH would fund US university and JISC a UK one and the universities would work to create collections which would work when brought together

RE: would urge that we think about digitisation projects that have already been completed to jumpstart testing of business models

LD: Islamic element - global interest there if we’re looking at a specific subject area

SP: we’re diving into areas but haven’t answered the question of whether we target an area or looking at models where we don’t do that - or have a mixture - would like to see community content

JR: let’s look at what we’re funding and you’re funding and see if there’s a reason why those teams should get together and then give them extra money to go on longer and explore partnerships that way

BR: sustained digital collections - would this be a useful thing for JISC and US partners to make more info available about successful business if not sustainable models - there has been some work on how successful repositories have been set up and survived - there has also been work on scientific repositories that have survived for decades - lots of work in identification of assets but not just monetary values - that kind of info could be very useful to have available to JISC and other funding organisations but also people applying for funding - it’s building business sense in the community

RE: interesting approach in area of business models would be to have a publication or event on things that didn’t work…we’re all happy to talk about our successes but the failures? wouldn’t that be interesting to talk about for once - we could forgive all the contributors by saying that we would learn from it…

BR: I would argue that those are commonplace but the problem is with people not disclosing the real reasons why they fail

PK: if interested in launching small experiments with social media component could look at experiments that have the possibility of being popular… history of chocolate - tells us stuff about history, empire…

RP: I’m fascinated with notion of allowing openess to flourish in lifelong learning sector with eye to having resources going public. Would be interested in trans-national comparisons about how this can happen. Is it always about money? Or licencing, IPR, accidents? What factors assist this happening that don’t just involve licencing and money?

SP: there are different approaches being taken on a national level - why do some work? as a centralised but not trotskyite organisation we do interfere to some extent and where does that help and where doesn’t it? where does personal interventions help more, different models taken by different funding bodies?

SD: SCA represents a consortia of quite large groups - difficulty I face day-to-day is data-mining - what exactly is going on, whether it is IPR, licencing etc. Social networking tools are cheap and quite easy so should be relatively easy to share info about respective work through these tools rather than having to go to all the individual websites. Is there a relatively low cost easy thing eg populate a wiki, that funders could do to get the info shared

SP: huge amount to gain by doing that

SD: relatively easy to identify the key players… worth thinking about

DB: would be good to continue the dialogue after this event

SP: requires a change of mindset - it needs commitment, coordination and a driver to make it happen when we get back from the office

BR: any scenario building done by JISC? would be good to run through a couple of quite radical scenarios as we seem to have been caught behind the wave and if we draw on the expertise of people here and get some radical scenarios of what might be happening in, say, 5 years time. The oil companies do this well and look where they are…

JK: suggest everyone reads Wealth Networks by Benkler

MR: political difference - US universities produce the kind of students that start things like Sun and Google, let bright entrepreneurs take their ideas and start companies - difference in the UK, environment less supportive

SP: tools and infrastructure…with the amount of content available we could be tackling some of those issues - that’s the challenge Chris Batt gave us this morning - people want invisible technology and we don’t have it at the moment…Mike?

MK: seems like we have some good opportunities in the arena of informing one another and the world what we’ve done on a title or collection or institution basis - superstructure is there and ready to be used - with respect to doomsday scenario where everything is free, we should be asking what we can do that might make a difference? we haven’t carved out that role yet for when that day comes. Selection counts but now we have to give guides to finding the way through the thicket

JK: this is where university press is publishing the secondary knowledge about how researchers could and should produce

SP: is there any existing collaboration between libraries?

MK: rather a lot but it’s not explicit and it’s not public and there’s a lot of control mechanisms put in place by Google to protect its commercial interests which are beyond belief in some way. We have contracts that limit what we do in some ways and permit vast things in others, we have laws, we have limiters on what we do. Prickly legal environment

DJ: when talk about business models easy to get sucked into how content gets to the user but need guidance for deals that allows development n the future so that assets can be used in creative ways

KG: alternative is that it doesn’t get digitised at all? in defence, if you want control you pay for it. If Google puts up hundreds of millions of dollars then there’s a deal there

MK: Google is not acquiring new intellectual property

DJ: what about the indexes they make?

MR: in worst possible case the material could always be re-digitised

RP: this isn’t even three years old and it’s really important not to internalise the present - we should be guided by the world we would like to live in - think about the picture of the world that would be useful for us to pursue our goals properly and in an adventurous way and then try to get there - we don’t know what Google will be doing in five years

MK: the pressure you think is being put on the Stanford project is trivial. How can we exploit what’s going to be a whole new environment with the context changing as it is changing?

DJ: there’s a huge barrier to that quantity of content being digitised again so crucial that there is transparency over who owns it

MK: what can we do to make the lives of our students and faculty, who don’t give a rip who owns the content, better and more effective - what can we do together that makes a real difference. comes to selection and responsivenes and anticipating need? Using subject expertise to build some guides and keep them lively, deliver information. JISC could also do real case studies and real assessments of the power and value of these projects and what they deliver. Understanding what works and why takes us to the next stage

MR: when we’ve found that take up has been disappointing it’s often because we haven’t put enough money into the marketing

JR: our experience has been that special collections material has found new audiences beyond the normal people, the scholars who would make their way to the special collection areas. We give grants of up to a million dollars and over 250,000 they have to come up with matching funds. Could some of the private partners essentially double their money by putting it up against public funds and so there would be a requirement that the material is in the public domain?

RP: it’s already happening

AT: getting into primary and secondary audiences we need to sort out the presentation - got to have some commonality when going out into mass market and non-specialists

KG: when looking at how to get people to work together we have been looking at demand side approach but it’s usually supplyside so trying to figure out a way to develop the presentation side is so much 19th century literature produced right now because of lack of copyright, I don’t know if some way to define a project around that - bang against Google things but also other projects dealing with issues with that content that might be able to define a super project - need some kind of a demand side this is what we’re going to deliver

MR: why so difficult to persuade a scholarly publisher to make resources available to the general public? they are not going to make any money from it anyway. so we could go to Proquest and see if they could put the right kind of interface on it and say here’s a certain amount of medieval literature…

RP: intuitively, the number of independent scholars that produces work is a large number but has that ever been quantified?

KG: JSTORE put the full text out to be indexed by Google but the big criticism is from non-affiliates who find Jstore’s results in Google

AD: how about getting a group of stakeholders together to do an intelligent digitisation of Islamic studies?

General approval of this idea

SP: could look at different things over different phases and explore different things

RP: how to make different media work together - haven’t gone far in integrating them so they work well

SP: need to come up with a list of those subject areas - can do that through discussion on the blog - will put notes on the blog which can be commented on. Can do some work on business models through the SCA