hangingtogether.org

Earlier this week, I heard Dr Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, speak as part of the Long Now’s Seminars About Long Term Thinking (SALT) series. In his talk, he focused primarily on a part of the Smithsonian I confess I know a lot less about than its plethora of libraries, archives and museums: the Smithsonian’s science centers and the scientific work throughout the institution. Did you know that apart from all of those buildings on the mall, the Smithsonian maintains numerous research centers with activities in 88 countries, or that every 6th Smithsonian employee is working in astronomy? Or that the Smithsonian tends the longest scientifically observed plot of earth (a slice of rain forest in Panama, which it has researched for the last 100 years)? I didn’t, and I walked away newly impressed with the breadth and scope of Smithsonian engagement in science, and in particular its contributions to our knowledge about global warming.

In the q&a, some of the question focused on what you might call more traditional “museum” concerns. A question about deaccessioning of materials triggered an interesting exchange between Clough and Steward Brand, the host of the lecture series. When Clough stated that the Smithsonian won’t duplicate collections at other museums, Brand followed up: “You have some network knowledge of what’s in all the museums of the world?” When Clough affirmed, Brand wanted to know: “Can we have access to that?”

Of course, when Clough affirmed, the network he was talking about was the professional network among curators, as well as the published literature, which allowed the Smithsonian to know what other institutions collect. What Brand got intrigued by, however, was the idea that there might be a database system representing museum collections across the globe which the public might gain access to. Of course, such a database does not yet exist. It’s difficult to refrain from speculating how much inefficiency is built into museum practice because we lack such a resource.
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The Smithonian just announced the release of its Web and New Media Strategy v 1.0 [pdf], which has come together swiftly in a process of marvelous openness and inclusion. As a campus-like institution with 19 museums and galleries, 9 research centers, 18 archives, 1 library with 20 branches, and a zoo, the Smithsonian web-presence to date is as fragmented as its administrative parts (also see this presentation), and the chief goal of the web strategy is to offer the Smithsonian Commons as a unifying platform to SI units.

The initial Smithsonian Commons will be a Web site […] featuring collections of digital assets contributed voluntarily by the units and presented through a platform that provides best-of-class search and navigation; social tools such as commenting, recommending, tagging, collecting, and sharing; and intellectual property permissions that clearly give users the right to use, re-use, share, and innovate with our content without unnecessary restrictions.

Starting to skim through the report, this line in particular caught my attention:

We are like a retail chain that has desirable and unique merchandise but requires its customers to adapt to dramatically different or outdated idioms of signage, product availability, pricing, and check-out in every aisle of each store.

I think this is an apt metaphor for how the Smithsonian currently undermines its own potential, and should serve as a memorable rallying cry for the changes the web strategy advocates.

As coincidence would have it, this metaphor also handsomely dovetails with another intriguing piece of news, gleaned from the UK Museum Computer Group list (posted by Simon Cronshaw, Director of CultureLabel):

If you haven’t come across CultureLabel yet, our aim is to facilitate a united alliance of museum e-stores to forge a new mainstream consumer shopping category of ‘cultural shopping’ – in a similar way to how ethical shopping or alternative gifts have crystallised as buying categories in the public consciousness. We see this as a great new opportunity for both income generation and innovative audience development for all our culture partners.

While the Smithsonian aims to integrate its digital collection into a more cohesive webpresence, CultureLabel aims to integrate museum e-stores (for starters, those in the UK – more here) into one massive one-stop shop. What’s true for digital collections is equally true for products from the museum store: bringing together assets from a wide variety of players creates a webpresence with more gravity, which in turn will attract a wider audience. The Smithsonian Commons and CultureLabel both take advantage of a fundamental network effect: the more assets, the more users (customers / site visitors); the more users, the more participation (purchasing / tagging, commenting, etc.). The brand, a term featuring prominently both in the SI Web Strategy and on the CultureLabel website, ultimately is the biggest winner.

The Smithsonian web strategy acknowledges that the fragmented offering severely limits the impact pan-institutional assets currently have. Taking a step back, of course this logic also applies to the larger community: fragmenting our offerings into thousands of institutional websites severely limits the impact and potential of the collective museum collection.

With 60 participating museums and galleries, CultureLabel breaks down those institutional barriers, and stands as one of the most extensive data sharing exercise museums have engaged in to date. It’s a little sobering, if not surprising, that the gift shop is ahead of the collection in this instance. Can we do for museum collections what CultureLabel has done for museum commerce? Can we scale the model and the values of the Smithsonian Commons to a Commons for all museums? If it works for products, let’s make it work for digital collections.

I have just been reading a recent article by Kathy Enger* published in Library & Information Science Research that examines the potential value of citation analysis as a selection tool in academic library acquisitions. Enger proposes that citation analysis of the journal literature might be used to identify potentially high-impact books for inclusion in a college or university library collection. The reasoning here is quite interesting: based on the observation that humanities and social science scholars rely more heavily on monographs than journals as a vehicle of scholarly communication, a sampling method is used to identify high impact journals in the social sciences and then cull from these the top cited authors. If these authors have also published books not already represented in the local collection, the titles are acquired on the premise that the content is likely to represent ‘high value’ scholarship. Library circulation figures are later examined to determine if these titles are used (borrowed) more frequently than titles selected through traditional means.

This seems like a proposition worth testing. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of the process for arriving at the Smithsonian’s Web and New Media strategic plan, Michael Edson created a Wiki on which Smithsonian staff discuss their points of view in plain site of anybody who is interested in listening in. This experiment in radical transparency is in and of itself noteworthy, and so is the content which surfaces on the Wiki. Encouraged by @mpedson’s tweet, I particularly took note of two short talks arguing in favor of open access to museum content. The first paper (titled “Publish Everything!”) is by Betsy Broun (Director, Smithsonian American Art Museum); the second paper (titled “Make Content Freely Available”) is by Lauryn Guttenplan (Associate General Counsel at the Smithsonian). Both papers were presented as part of the Smithsonian 2.0 Forum on April 21, 2009. One reason why I found these notes remarkable is because those who are speaking represent the class of professional who oftentimes is perceived to be scuttling plans for making data more openly available – not in this instance!

Here are the outtakes I would have marked yellow if I had actually printed the pieces instead of saving a tree and reading online.
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About a million years ago (okay, in 2002) RLG held a forum called “Sharing the Wealth.” We used the event to poke and prod — why don’t special collections lend materials? Of course, some institutions do lend from special collections, but most do not. Could we use those that do lend as exemplars and learn from their experience? Could we use the SHARES partnership to pilot some good practice in this area? Could we use digitization on demand to share (“too expensive!” said most participants). We raised more than a few hackles, and started some good conversations, but the idea didn’t exactly catch fire.

In a Shifting Gears world, with a greater emphasis on giving broader access to collections in the care of special collections, we’re raising this scary issue again. My colleagues Jennifer Schaffner and Dennis Massie are putting on a Webinar along with practitioners from the RLG Partnership: Emory University will speak from the perspective of an institution that’s been doing this successfully for years; University of Miami is new to the discussion and just starting to consider the issues involved before coming to any decision to make their treasures more widely available.

If you are a member of the RLG Partnership, I hope you will join us for this discussion (May 28th, 8 am Pacific / 11 am Eastern, etc.).

Contact Dennis, Jennifer, or me for more information. Also, consider signing up for one of our many Partner lists to receive information of this type more directly.

In a previous post, I’ve shared some background about the data analysis phase of our Museum Data Exchange Mellon grant, and posted some of the questions our museum participants wanted to have answered. In the meantime, we have created a spreadsheet [pdf] which captures our ideas to date of what questions we may want to ask of the 850K CDWA Lite XML records from 9 museums. Note that the methodology captured by this spreadsheet lays out a landscape of possibilities – it is not a definitive checklist of all the questions we will answer as part of this project. Only as we get deeper into the analysis will we know which questions are actually tractable with the tools we have at hand. I’d appreciate any thoughts on additional lines of inquiry we could pursue with our analysis, or other observations!

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Susan Hamson (Columbia) came out with this zinger. We were talking about public services and delivery for archives, special collections and rare books. I think the topic that day was ILL of special collections, a real hot potato.

How can we get more people’s fingers on the pages and in the boxes? Not just in reading rooms, but on the web? Over the past three months, the RLG Steering Committee for Special Collections Delivery tackled questions at the public services end of the lifecycle of unique material. Dennis and I listened in as Cristina Favretto (Miami), Mattie Taormina (Stanford) and Susan sifted through creative ambitions to “do it better.” The committee asked, “What is the collective mind? What to stop doing? Who has the most innovative practices?”

Mattie, Cristina and Susan each asked their administration what changes management could support. They settled on four projects for starters: sharing (really sharing) special collections, balancing copyright management and risk, tapping the expertise of users, and best practices for scan-on-demand and photography. If you want to participate in one of these projects, put your hand up.

I felt a bit as if I was watching Wall-E sorting through the detritus of past cultures, considering each piece thoughtfully and then picking up projects that could change the world, system-wide, for real. In every case, at least one or two of the trio had good reasons not to tackle the topic at their own institution, but agreed the project would have an impact. In a Friday afternoon email volley, Susan wrote:

“Are we representing the interests of our institutions or do we move forward representing the interests of the profession and the patron?  ILL is tricky, permission fees are too–but what are we doing if not pushing the boundaries to engage a debate and discussion?  We’re not establishing policy for our institutions, but we are professionals engaged in the work of exploration and, maybe, change.  If not where we sit but some place else.  We’re not proposing that our institutions throw caution to the wind and abandon all that it good and holy–we’re just pausing to think about something new.  Putting it out there doesn’t make it so (well…).

“Now I’m not comfy with the ILL thing, but I still want to put it out there.  We’re archivists, dammit!   We have super powers (my bone folder is the source of all my super powers).”

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A little over a year ago, I inherited a project that didn’t have much more than a name: “Explore and understand the place of large digital text aggregations in scholarship and research.”

I had several discussions with my colleagues about what this project might turn out to be. We had several ideas:

­– Create a shared understanding of the expectations that researchers and students bring to their interactions with large-scale text aggregations on the web and the requirements for making these collections fit for scholarly use.

­– Convene an invitational meeting of those already engaged in large-scale digitization efforts to establish a common understanding of scholarly use-cases and the core requirements for library-sourced research services.

­– Identify service capabilities (bookmarking, annotation, citation management, etc) that are required to support scholarly use of text aggregations.

­– Assemble a text archive for prototyping and analysis.

­– Investigate needs of scholars (via focus groups?)

­– Experiment with the metadata we get from OCLC’s e-Content Synchronization service to see how we can characterize the contents of book aggregations

­– Experiment with full text functionality we might be able to offer a) on a specific aggregation b) across aggregations

What we were exploring went beyond finding and using a single document. It was about identifying works from many silos to incorporate into a local environment. And it was about performing actions against an index (or multiple indexes) of aggregated digitized works. We could investigate how scholars would work with the range of book text archives, starting with use case scenarios of the types of queries (e.g., in areas such as linguistic analysis, lexical frequency, translation studies, edition comparisons, things like occurrence of geographic place names in fiction, and coincidence of events – like being able to explore how a race riot affected neighborhood population dynamics).
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After nearly eight months at OCLC Research, I’m finally doing my first blog post. Why am I so intimidated at the prospect? Finally, Merrilee can stop pestering me to get off the dime.

Some of you may be aware that OCLC established a WorldCat Local Special Collections Task Force last summer. This happened quickly after Matt Goldner, Executive Director of End-User Services, became aware from the special collections community that Local is missing lots of information that we need for both display and indexing. The group of experts that got together for this task worked industriously throughout the fall and submitted a detailed report to OCLC in December.OCLC has now sent its response back to the Task Force Both reports are linked from the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee website. 

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The logistical details of publishing the tools we have produced as part of the Museum Data Exchange Mellon grant continue to unfold in a slower fashion than I had hoped, but I am now fairly confident that you will find applications for download announced at some point next week – more when it actually happens!

In the meantime, the focus of our activity with the museum partners has moved from creating tools to analyzing the data they’ve shared while using them. We now have data from six institutions who have allowed us to harvest CDWA Lite XML records created with and shared through a combination of COBOAT and OAICatMuseum 1.0 (again, more as we release the tools), plus records from three additional museums who had other means of creating and sharing CDWA Lite XML at their disposal. A total of about 850K records are now sitting behind a firewall on an OCLC Research server, awaiting data analysis.

Our next big question is: how can we evaluate the data the museums have shared? While it uses the same data structure (CDWA Lite XML), all participants are aware that rules to populate that data structure with data content may vary considerably from institution to institution. Cataloging Cultural Objects is becoming a household name, but a good bit of the data shared probably predates the emergence of this data content standard, let alone its local implementation. What are the right questions to ask which would give the participating museums a sense of how well their records play with each other, both in terms of the institutional dataset as well as the aggregate resource?

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