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By Paul Miller, David Dawson and John Perkins - October 2001
Paul Miller, David Dawson and John Perkins report on a recent meeting at which representatives of national and international cultural content creation programmes from around the world were invited to consider scope for greater collaboration.
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"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders
of giants"
Sir Isaac Newton, cited in The Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations
The wealth of nations is becoming increasingly visible online. Indeed, many perceive dissemination of their cultural identity via the Web as a means of maintaining their individuality against the homogenising tendencies of the English–speaking world. Other reasons for this movement online are many and varied, as are the sources of money utilised in content creation.
However, the largely piecemeal nature of digital content creation, and the varied approaches taken by different projects raise the spectre of what Terry Kuny [1] and others have referred to as an encroaching Digital Dark Ages. Now, with some evidence of a political will behind us, with a raft of new programmes in their infancy, and with clear lessons to be learned from innovators, it is the time to act, and not to continue avoiding the decisions that will help to mould the next generation of truly user–focussed, interoperable, services.
For two days in July, a small group of decision makers and policy developers from Europe, Canada, the USA and New Zealand met in London, exploring the extent to which each could learn from the lessons of the others, and identifying areas in which collaborative work might be of mutual benefit [2]. This article explores some of the background to the meeting, and reports on a number of significant outcomes that have led to ongoing activity of potentially great benefit to the digital cultural content creation community in our memory institutions [3] and beyond.
 |
| The view of St Paul's Cathedral, the
Thames, and central London from our meeting venue. Photograph taken by Gilles Saint–Laurent, National Library of Canada. |
In countries around the world, significant amounts of money are being spent in making a range of cultural heritage resources available online. In the United Kingdom, some £50,000,000 (€79,000,000) was allocated earlier this summer as successful applicants to the New Opportunities Fund's (NOF) Digitisation Programme [4] were announced [5], and there are high hopes of Culture Online [6] building on this exciting beginning. In Canada, the Federal Government's Canadian Digital Cultural Content Initiative [7] is spending $CAN75,000,000 (€53,500,000) on content digitisation programmes in libraries, museums, and archives, and over $CAN100,000,000 (€71,500,000) has been allocated [8] under the $CAN500,000,000 (€357,300,000) Tomorrow Starts Today banner [9]. The sums involved are impressive, but these programmes are not unusual, and most countries can now point to similar developments.
In the United States, without established Federal programmes in this area, the picture is less clear. Individual institutions, and consortia such as the Research Libraries Group (RLG) [10] and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) [11] are certainly active in creating content, and in considering issues related to digitisation. However, a national framework is yet to emerge. The formation of the Government–funded Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) [12], and the work it has begun to do in partnership with others, suggests that there may be potential for a more joined up approach across the United States in the future.
All of these programmes have several aspects that are clearly common, not least their remit to bring cultural heritage resources to a wider audience by means of online dissemination.
Outside of the United States, much of the support for the current wave of content creation is emanating from the public sector in one form or another. It is difficult to identify cases in which such money is being allocated to the digitisation of cultural materials purely for their sake. Rather, much of the money rides on the back of other agendas such as high–profile Government commitments to electronic service delivery [13], Learning [14], and the like. Whilst the money undeniably remains welcome, the multitude of initiatives under which it can be made available for projects to spend raises issues as priorities often differ from initiative to initiative, and may well even conflict. At the inaugural meeting of the United Kingdom's Forum for Network Coordination [15] late in 2000, for example, the need for greater harmonisation of funding (timescales, application processes, constraints, etc.) emerged as a key concern for members.
Principal drivers for funding of content creation differ around the world, but clear patterns may often be seen. In several southern European countries, for example, much of the large–scale content creation is closely aligned to the needs of Tourism, whereas further north there is more of an association with broadly learning–related themes such as lifelong learning and social inclusion. One driver is not necessarily 'better' than the other, and nor are they mutually exclusive, but they certainly carry different implications for the project and, possibly, for the longer term viability of the resources it directly produces.
Whatever the source of funding, there are usually constraints attached to the way in which funds can be spent, with many of these constraints having an effect upon what may be digitised and how. Given a large collection of physical artefacts, some of which are well known or exemplary, but many of which are simply further examples of a type, very different strategies would most likely be adopted if the funding were tourism related than if there were a more formal educational mandate from the funder. In the former case, it is perhaps probable that the appealing, famous, artefacts would be digitised; whilst in the latter there might either be a more even sampling of the collection or greater effort expended to digitise everything. In multilingual countries, linguistic constraints often apply. Canada's Digital Cultural Content Initiative [7], for example, requires 50% of the content to be available in French. Preservation of the digital resource adds a further dimension, with some sources of funding more likely to accept the cost of capturing and holding extremely high resolution imagery than others, in which there might be more emphasis simply upon capturing images suitable for the display medium to be used in the short term.
In examining the work being done in many of the current digital content creation programmes, a number of areas emerge in which consideration of common practices might prove beneficial. The most often identified of these is the development of shared technical standards and guidelines, which are addressed more fully below. As with broader considerations of interoperability [16], though, the common ground between these programmes is certainly not restricted to the purely technical.
Other areas in which there is scope for collaboration include preservation, training and awareness raising (of both end users and staff), consideration of the changing roles of memory institutions, dissemination of best practice, development of (physical or virtual) centres of expertise, exploration of IPR issues, engagement with funders and others in developing coherent programmes, and leveraging of collaborative pressure in facilitating change. Some of these are addressed further below, with others merely identified by the group as important for future work.
In a number of fora, groups are increasingly coming together and attempting to draw maximum benefit from the synergies which exist between projects under their purview; synergies which, in the past, have often not been exploited. In the United Kingdom, for example, the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) explicitly sought to gain interoperability, financial and practical economies of scale, and a greater sense of inter–project community by grouping separate bids for funding together in Consortia, and by providing a common set of technical guidelines across all of the projects within their digitisation programme [4]. Also of relevance to the European audience of Cultivate Interactive is the Commission–sponsored work on coordination mechanisms for the digitisation programmes already underway within European Member States [17]. This activity falls under the e-Europe banner [18], and was initiated at a meeting in Lund, Sweden, in April of this year. The Lund meeting resulted in a set of wide–ranging Principles around the e–Europe Action Plan's Objective 3(d) [19], part of which calls for Member States and the Commission to work together to
"Create a coordination mechanism for digitisation programmes across Member States."
The Lund Principles are available from the meeting Web site in all official languages [14], and parts of the associated Action Plan are already being taken forward under the leadership of various Member States.
Elsewhere, too, there are moves towards adoption of common approaches, although most of the sustained efforts are often restricted mainly to technical considerations such as those discussed, below.
The incentive for the meeting held in London was a recognition that, although an increasing amount of work was being done, it tended to take place on a national (c.f. Canada's Standards and Guidelines for Digitization Projects [20], produced by their Interdepartmental Interoperability Forum for the Canadian Digital Cultural Content Initiative [7]); regional (c.f. Lund [17] and other work by the European Commission's Cultural Heritage Unit [21]); or project/ consortium (c.f. NINCH's best practice working group [22], or the guidelines under development by RLG for their Cultural Materials Initiative [23]) basis.
Although all of these were — and continue to be — important in advancing the situation, none appeared to have the breadth, scope, and mandate to tackle a range of problems internationally. A meeting was therefore called at which the attendees explored the scope for joining up much of the existing work and producing outputs explicitly aimed beyond the relatively narrow constituencies of the existing efforts.
Although some funders are noticeably reticent in their desire to recommend or require a common technical basis to the projects they fund, there is a growing trend towards the creation of programme–wide guidelines, and even the emergence of technical compliance as a condition of grant in some cases. With several of the meeting's participants already implementing such documents, and others engaged in creating them, there was a clear interest in exploring the feasibility of moving towards a common view of appropriate requirements.
Shared sets of technical standards and guidelines are often seen as the logical first step in ensuring a degree of conformity across work being done within an individual programme. There therefore appears to also be merit in seeking a similar degree of harmonisation between programmes.
Existing approaches vary, covering everything from the optional support of a Guide to Good Practice [24], through to mandatory conformance to a set of specified standards [25] as a condition of grant. Even in the latter case, as demonstrated in the Guidelines prepared for the nof–digi Programme for example [25], the documents tend to contain significant quantities of guidance rather than prescription, and even the notionally prescribed elements of the document are open to a degree of interpretation and modification where stated requirements are clearly contrary to the interests of a given project. The NOF document and others, for example, make liberal use of IETF terminology throughout;
"The words 'must, should and may' when printed in bold text have precise meanings in the context of this document.
It is important to stress, though, that documents such as these are in no way intended as a straitjacket on innovation, ensuring a bland and vanilla set of projects conforming to some overly prescriptive standardised world view. Rather, the documents tend to leverage well–established best practice, and lay a set of stable, interoperable, sustainable, foundations upon which truly innovative and worthwhile projects will be built and maintained.
Already, there is evidence of movement towards harmonisation of documents in this area. The recent Standards and Guidelines for Digitization Projects [20] for Canada's Digital Cultural Content Initiative [7] and Working with the DNER: Standards and Guidelines to Build a National Resource [26] from the UK Distributed National Electronic Resource [27], for example, are both closely based upon the NOF Guidelines [25], and there is further interest in the USA and elsewhere to similarly build upon this foundation.
Rather than each project or initiative cannibalising documents from previous programmes and adding new requirements of their own, there certainly appears to be scope for a single overarching document, free of the parochial requirements of individual programmes, and structured in such a way as to allow the easy addition of local requirements as appropriate. Such a document might be badged by a wide range of organisations internationally, and would describe those common requirements that seem to appear in almost every technical specification currently in use. Work is underway to examine as many existing technical standards and guidelines documents from memory institutions as possible, and those in possession of such documents are invited to contact the authors.
Over the two days of meeting in London, attendees covered a wide range of topics. There was clear consensus on the need to improve the current situation, and on areas in which work should most urgently be taken forward. The group aims to meet again in the first quarter of 2002, probably in North America, and is already approaching significant stakeholders who were not invited to the first meeting, in order to gain the benefit of their expertise. Although participants at the first meeting were predominantly from Europe and North America, electronic communications with colleagues world–wide suggest great interest in future participation.
Between now and the next meeting, a number of actions are to be completed, including the publication of this paper.
The principal remaining actions include:
The group will draft a number of focussed position statements, seeking to identify key issues and to provide a strong policy support across these. The group will begin by drafting the following statements:-
The group has identified a number of common issues where early information sharing will inform the development of further position statements, or indicate the urgent need for a co-ordinated approach to research. The following areas were identified at this initial stage:-
Additionally, the group identified the following as an initial key action:-
Technical standards
Finally, members of the group will work to enable discussion of these issues more generally, and seek specifically to engage with those grant giving bodies who do not currently offer centralised guidance on the issues laid out, above.
Notice of public deliverables from this group will be given
via e–mail to various community mailing lists. Those who are
interested in receiving notification of all such deliverables are
invited to join the public mailing list,
interoperability [29], hosted
by the UK JISCmail service.
To join this list, send a message to
with the body of the message reading
join interoperability Your_Firstname
Your_Lastname
--
e.g.
join interoperability Paul Miller
--
The authors wish to thank all of those who travelled to London
— at very short notice — to participate in this
meeting. Without their attendance and ongoing participation, this
initiative would be much diminished. Thanks are also due to
Resource for the support that made it possible to meet in the
first place, and to the COMPASS team at the British Museum (http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/compass/
),
who hosted us for an evening reception during the meeting.
Finally, thanks to Gilles Saint-Laurent from the National Library
of Canada, who supplied a photograph of the fine view from our
meeting room to illustrate this paper!
Participants at the meeting were: Chris Anderson (New Opportunities Fund, UK), Mandy Barrie (Department of Culture, Media and Sport, UK), Chris Batt (Resource, UK), Rosa Botterill (European Museums' Information Institute), René Bouchard (Canadian Heritage, Canada), David Dawson (Resource, UK), Louise Edwards (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), Kati Geber (Canadian Heritage Information Network, Canada), David Green (National Initiative for Networked Cultural Heritage, USA), Tony Gill (Research Libraries Group, USA), Susan Haigh (National Library of Canada, Canada), Cliff Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information, USA), Liz Lyon (UKOLN, UK), Paul Miller (UKOLN, UK), Sarah Mitchell (New Opportunities Fund, UK), John Perkins (Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information, Canada), Nick Poole (Resource, UK), Joyce Ray (Institute of Museum and Library Services, USA), Bernard Smith (European Commission), Ian Witten (New Zealand Digital Library Project, New Zealand).
The meeting was conceived and realised as a partnership between UKOLN, Resource and CIMI.
interoperability mailing list.
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Paul
Miller
Interoperability Focus
UKOLN
United Kingdom
p.miller@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/>
Phone: +44 1482 466890
Paul holds the post of Interoperability Focus at UKOLN. This
post is jointly funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee
(JISC — www.jisc.ac.uk/
) of the United
Kingdom's Further and Higher Education Funding Councils, and by
Resource, the Government agency responsible for libraries,
museums and archives (www.resource.gov.uk/).
Paul's background is in archaeology, where his PhD research examined the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in mapping deposits buried beneath modern cities, concentrating specifically upon the archaeologically rich and varied city of York.
In his current work, Paul is responsible for encouraging and
facilitating the development of interoperable solutions across a
range of domains, principally museums, libraries, archives, and
government. Paul sits on a wide range of committees and working
groups related to this area, both internationally (for example,
the executive committees of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
(DCMI — www.dublincore.org/
) and the CIMI
Consortium (CIMI — www.cimi.org/) and within the
UK.
Previously, Paul worked for the Archaeology Data Service (ADS
— ads.ahds.ac.uk/
), a
service provider of the UK Arts & Humanities Data Service.
Here, he was responsible for designing and establishing the
catalogue, which now contains content from local and national
archaeological agencies across the UK.
David Dawson
Senior ICT Adviser
Resource: the Council for Museums Archives & Libraries
United Kingdom
david.dawson@resource.gov.uk
<http://www.resource.gov.uk/>
Phone: +44 20 72731415
David Dawson is one of the Senior Network Advisers within the Learning and Information Society Team (LIST) of Resource.
David studied Archaeology at Durham University, and completed
the Museum Studies Course at Leicester in 1985, before becoming
an Associate of the Museums Association in 1988. He worked in a
range of museums before joining the Museum Documentation
Association (www.mda.org.uk/
) in 1992, as
Business Manager of mda Services, before becoming Outreach
Manager (ICT), giving advice and training to museums in
documenting their collections, with a focus on helping small
museums as well as working with a number of museums in the UK and
abroad. Whilst at mda, he was closely involved in the development
of the Aquarelle Project (aquarelle.inria.fr/aquarelle/welcome.html
).
In 1998 David joined the Museums & Galleries Commission
(www.museums.gov.uk/
) as
New Technology Adviser, before becoming Senior ICT Adviser for
Resource. He works particularly on ICT in museums, managing the
DCMS/Resource IT Challenge Fund, acting as an expert adviser to
the New Opportunities Fund, and working on a range of other
projects and strategic developments, such as Culture Online (www.cultureonline.gov.uk/
). David is
currently a member of the Office of the e–Envoy Broadband
Research group and is the nominated UK Representative on the EU
activity to Coordinate National Digitisation Policies.
John
Perkins
Executive Director
CIMI Consortium
Canada
jperkins@fox.nstn.ca
<http://www.cimi.org/>
Phone: +1 902 4295392
John Perkins is Executive Director of the Consortium for the
Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI — www.cimi.org/
).
CIMI is a group of the world's most prestigious museums,
technology companies, and libraries working to advance museum
digital intelligence through standards, research, testbeds,
advocacy, training and international collaboration. Current
interests are in the area of digital information object
management and interchange for museums, metadata harvesting, and
distributed searching, mobile computing, and content architecture
for Semantic Web applications.
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For citation purposes:
Miller, P., Dawson, D. & Perkins, J. "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/giants/>
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