MLA NE ICT Conference

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From Audience to Avatar? Transformational
Technologies for the Cultural Sector Dr Liz
Lyon Director, UKOLN MLA NE ICT Conference
November 2007
UKOLN is supported by
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
LicenceAttribution-ShareAlike 2.0
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Working assumptions, position statements and
supporting 2007 statistics from OCLC

1. The Web is sector-agnostic
2. Cultural assets scope is learning and scholarly
   research
3. Digital Strategy development goes beyond
   digitisation
4. User-driven Culture2.0 is here now
5. The Google Generation are tomorrows curators
6. Always beta agile development cycles impact
   service delivery
7. Visitors move in, between and through, physical
   and virtual worlds
8. We can learn from business and media..

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Overview

• Digital memories and digital lives
• Ensuring long-term access
• Transforming the experience

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Digital memories and digital livestodays
events are tomorrows memories for museums,
libraries and archives.
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New personal memory devices? How do we create and
manage our personal digital collections?
Hybrid collections?
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Collecting community memories
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http//mapmylondon.com/
Geo-tagged memories
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YouTube hosting, broadcasting, sharing
community content
Top social media site OCLC
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Flickr the Peoples Archive?
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EPSRC Computing Grand Challenge
Assisting recall?
JISC CREW project
Recording presence, time-based events and human
discourse Recording discussion, disagreement,
decisions
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Microsoft Research SenseCam
When everything is digitally recorded, what are
the implications for museums archives?
Gordon Bell, aged 72, Microsoft Research
MyLifeBits Project
Life-logging
2007 Articles in Scientific American and The New
Yorker
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Ensuring long-term access the life of the
average Web site is estimated at 44days
lifespan of a housefly.
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We need sustainable preservation models
Massive digitisation projects
Institutional legacy digital surrogates, born
digital media,
Reference data sensor-nets, environmental,
geospatial, demographic, genomic
Personal archives
Linking collections
Community content
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Curation / Preservation choices?

1. Local (authority) repository / content management
   system
2. Regional archive
3. British Library or National Archive (TNA)
4. Disciplinary data centre UK Data Archive
5. Public data repository or service
6. Web archiving services
7. Outsource to commercial data service
8. Ecosystem of hosted lifebits services (Jon Udell)
   
9. None of these?
10. All of these?

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Institutional Repositories?

• Massive JISC investment in IRs
• Supporting UK Higher Education institutions

Who provides institutional support for cultural
content? Museum or archive? Renaissance
Hub? Local authority?
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Florida Digital Archive archiving state
materials for learning teaching
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UK leadership role BL, TNA Digital Preservation
Coalition Tools e.g. Pronom
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UK Digital Curation Centre http//www.dcc.ac.uk/

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

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Disciplinary data centre social sciences
humanities
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Blogs are they preserved? Web archiving
issues scale, currency, coverage
?
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Outsourcing solution? Commercial data store?
Amazon S3
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Future hosted lifebits service?
Significant preservation challenges awareness,
co-ordination, strategy, policy, advocacy, trust,
responsibility, technical infrastructure, costs
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Transforming the experiencefor the Google
Generation, the audience metaphor is too passive
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Any book thats ever been in print in lt 1 minute?
Shipping now for 400 10.3 oz e-Book reader from
Amazon Books, newspapers, magazines, blogs,
bookmarks, notation.
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this very blog is one of the most popular parts
of the Museums website
a large number of visitors will only ever view
the museums content on Flickr
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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)
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Facebook professional groups
Facebook Organisations can now join
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UK museums archives on Facebook, but no UK
public libraries?
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Some more statistics. 23 October 2007, gt350
social networking sites 16 about Books
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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.
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Enhancing access? Powerhouse Museum OPAC 2.0?
Location-based browse, searchwhere objects were
made, what else was used at that
location Geospatial.. Add Chronological? Envir
onmental? Demographic? Genomic?
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Enriching the cultural record

• Tagging, annotation (micro) comments
• Reviews, ratings, authority recommendations
• Identifiers, links
• Mash-ups, mixes cut n paste culture
• Mining

Wikipedia model community curation?
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Open June 2007,10K visitors in Second Life
virtual gallery
Linking the old physical/real with the new
digital/virtual.
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Cultural second lives
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
Avon Gallery
University of Sheffield Centre for Information
Literacy SL office
SL challenges citizen concepts of
identity Enables what if? learning Collaborate
with education media?
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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
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Questions?Slides will be available at
http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/pre
sentations.html