Magic Studio

We were at UK Museums and the Web 2008 last week. Mia Ridge has done a great job of writing up the event on her blog so there’s no need to duplicate that here! Also, there are some great pictures on Flickr tagged UKMW08.

What was most interesting for us was the exploration of themes at the event, entitled “Integrate, Federate, Aggregate … making collections connect online”.

And probably the most pervasive of all was the issue of ‘access’ and ‘creative re-use’ of digitised collections. Whilst digitisation strategies have long been focused on the preservation benefits of collections in digital form, there is real momentum building behind the improved ‘access’ opportunities that these digitised collections present.

These issues were explored in a number of sessions throughout the day. Jeremy Ottevanger talked about his experience of the European Digital Library which is an EU initiative to bring collections together. He did, however, express that the most important aspect of such a project – an API that would really open up access to the collections – didn’t seem to be an important priority for the project.

And that rather parochial approach – allowing access but not re-use – still needs to be addressed on a more widespread basis.

We saw that Flickr is extending its ‘The Commons’ which in itself presents an interesting new model for public/private partnerships in the sector – though restricted to photographic collections only.

More heartening was the ‘Quick and Light’ section and the results of the previous day’s ‘Mashed Museum’ activity. Lots of examples of how to syndicate, share and mash collections together in interesting ways … using the hoard.it prototype of 45000+ museum objects available via a unified API.

In a Web2.0 world, we understand better than ever the art of the possible when it comes to opening up access and encouraging creative re-use of collections. So, there should be no barriers, should there?