Migrated to malbooth.com

I've migrated this blog to malbooth.com on WordPress. I'll be posting on it there from now on.
I hope to catch up with you over there. Mal

FromMelbin Wordle

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An old but still relevant rant from Bruce Sterling

Recently, I found the text for an internally circulated article that I sent to some colleagues in the museum I was working in. It dates from March 2007, but some of the statements are still relevant today, so with a small amount of updating, I'm re-posting it here as maybe some of those new to this environment missed what Bruce had to say.

I remember being impressed by the amount of live web coverage coming from SXSW 2007 including a website full of content, papers online, podcasts, blogs, flickr sites and online videos.

Furthermore, I thought about what this means for us down here in Oz where we are soooo far away from all these hip conferences about new stuff. The web is finally making these far-away conferences and even some courses more accessible to us and it seems to still be mostly free. Those who truly understand what it is about also understand that to get the message out there, you don’t lock it away on pay-per-view sites or member only networks. You share it for free and maybe include some ads that hardly anyone ever clicks or views. At least that’s the way I see it and the whole new web culture of sharing, i.e. sharing valuable, new knowledge and even some wisdom, still amazes me.

So, later that day, in need of some inspiration, I listened to a keynote rant from a guy called Bruce Sterling who was then a Visionary in Residence at wired.com. The podcast was already available on the SXSW website and while not all of it is directly relevant to the work of a cultural institution, some of it was and still is in a conceptual sense if we are to understand the world we are now part of (particularly given the large investment already in most museum websites). I knew that not many of my then colleagues would ever listen to the whole podcast (an hour long), so I jotted down these notes from it as I listened:

Bruce mentions RFID in the SXSW participant wrist bands, but doesn’t ever allude to what they really used RFID for apart from the obvious. (RFID tagging of items like conference delegates, triathletes and baggage at airports has moved on a lot since then, but that is a whole other story, so lets not go there now.) He then refers to “2007 – the year of video”. Sterling calls it a stoopid medium, especially in TV which really is a wasteland. And the vested interests from TV-land are trying to step on the net, but he says it isn’t going to happen.

New trend drivers are emerging.

Three in particular are worth discussing (Prof) Henry Jenkins and convergence culture; Yochai Benkler who wrote The Wealth of Networks; and Lev Manovich and his Soft Cinema – hybrid media. These blokes have cultural, legal and media studies backgrounds, but they talk the same language. They talk in an analytical policy vocabulary – about a new method or approach to increase peoples’ wealth.

On the web information is free and it wants to be free. You are charged nothing and don’t have to click the ads. It is available to anybody and it is incredibly powerful and growing right there in front of you. The first world is the global market – capitalism and the market world as we know it. The second world is all forms of government. The new third world is common-space peer production – not communism, not the state and not the market. It is really growing fast and having profound effects. We use ‘Google’ as a verb now. It is also about ‘Not-For-Profit’ stuff. The fourth world is disorder and where they don’t have any of this.

The new third world is more powerful than we give it credit for, but not necessarily a good thing yet. It is a new thing. Benkler’s and Jenkin’s arguments are fearsome, but the new networks may not be as fragile as they think – they are pretty resilient. Take for example Craigslist – he isn’t a business mogul, he is mild and low key guy from San Francisco and not really interested in business. He just wanted 200 million friends. But he has gutted the revenue streams of major newspapers (i.e. classifieds)! He has no business. (My comment: Some of these networks and start-ups are now being acquired by bigger predators though and will someone like Murdoch or Yahoo eventually acquire craigslist?)

‘Peer2Peer networks are turned on and they out-shift anything else ever built without a dime changing hands.’ This world is still vulnerable to charlatans and rip-off merchants. And there are down-sides to too much ‘fan involvement’ in art.

Mashups – of video & sound.

Are they really a tremendous source of creativity? They won’t last 10 years. They are novel (now) and have no staying power as music. They are not tremendously creative works. It is new and has an audience, but it isn’t a cultural advance.

Lev Manovich talks about soft cinema – digital tools are melting all media down into a kind of slum. It is all merging and distinctions go with powerful compositing tools. Effects are becoming the means of production. All pieces are sent to a compositor, like in Hollywood films. Different flavours come out of the same mixing machine. There are different windows to the same media. Does everything need to go through this ‘media blender’? It is a new capacity, but isn’t necessarily any better. Electronic art stinks. It is interesting, not great. Ease of production? E.g. deviantART. Sure it is folk culture, but it is for hicks! We need a new form of media criticism. Film media, literature, music are all just going away and there are new realities, but they are not that good.

Now there are some 55 million blogs and some are good? Well, no actually. He would be quite surprised if any exist in 10 years. (And if it is true that blogs are that ephemeral, some cultural institutions like libraries and archives better start archiving those relevant to their collecting guidelines sometime soon!) They may be best as platforms for the development of something. ‘They are like watching yourself get beaten to death with croutons’ – and they’re not that potent a media. They’re also not fine art. The usual discourse is like three paras, an embedded video, some hyperlinks, flickr sets, Digg and social book-marking links, etc. Is it done well or badly? Is there any web design critique that could be applied to it to say whether it is done well or not? Sterling (a blogger himself) says it is an unstable media not aspiring to greatness. A word-of-mouth kind of culture.

Is it good to turn on the ‘information factory’ and leave the room? It is machine expression and needs to be understood as that. ‘Semiotic pollution’. The worst is spam. Gibberish. Imagine if that happened on TV or in a movie theatre!

Reed Hundt – a US intellectual and lawyer, who is very weary looking. Disenchanted by Federal Government, he is now in private practice. He was involved in auctioning spectrum (just like we are doing here in Oz). And he has a mad scheme to steal broadband and sell it (as gifts) to police, public safety authorities, etc. He wants to take it from broadband TV. Broadband TV is for shut-ins. Broadcast TV is a lower end evil medium. It was bad before American Idol, but now there is no budget to put on decent stuff. It is junk. He wants to put the net over TV as b-band Internet. It would reduce distinctions between the different media forms. There is no technical reason to not do it. It would change major stuff. It needed a ground swell of support and Hundt was trying to do it with public-safety and security services – cops, firemen, etc. The US would then leapfrog to the top of the national broadband rankings. He has a rather dull website and he used to run a blog.

Yochai Benkler – social networking and what it takes to build a third kind of production system that harnesses productivity, creativity. They need thoughtful engineering and some care. He puts forward a method for socially motivated common-space peer production:

• divide up the work – there is a lot to do, suck helpers in


• the work must be granular, modular (projects) and ‘integrate-able’ (all adds up to turn into one thing that really achieves something) – not seen much in other lines of work, not business, even government


• be self-selective – people chose to join in (people come out of the wood-work)


• have an in or out mechanism (like a two-way membrane)


• have a communication platform to talk to each other, fast & efficient


• humanisation??? (not further discussed)


• include trust construction – has to be built, confidence building (very important)


• someone has to think about what is normal, acceptable behaviour and create that


• transparency – so motives are not questioned


• monitoring (a police force of sorts to prevent someone attacking the system – hackers, thieves, etc. because the Internet is a savage world)


• peer review (who is good at stuff?) – a motivator


• discipline (an Achilles heel of all Internet efforts)


• fairness (will ‘the intelligentsia exploit the helpless proletariat?’!) – Wikipedia and Digg don’t pay people! Things that were formerly professions are now falling apart on the net and are no longer business, they are melting like the Arctic


• institutional sustainability – who knows how long it will last (e.g. Slashdot) – what is the legacy plan, what is needed? The hardware is radically unstable!

Benkler doesn’t talk about some unpleasant extremist forms which might appear to have all of this licked! We can all think of extremist organisations who might be doing much of the above, but perhaps without the transparency and with a different take on humanisation and fairness? Maybe they are proof of the potency of this form of organisation?

In order to make this work, Benkler says that we need to understand that computers are platforms for self-expression rather than well-behaved appliances. Computers really stink as appliances. They are painful to use, always in beta, etc. Well-behaved appliances kill self-expression and common space peer production. Something that barely works can become a common space peer production factory!

Benkler distributed his book (all 500+ pp!) in pdf format and then he opened a wiki for everyone to help him explore this issue, but there was nobody there. It isn’t easy to be as smart as he is! It was just a vast echo chamber. You can open stuff like that, but it doesn’t mean they come in and if they do it doesn’t mean they’ll be useful. Sterling says he could not help him. It is an interesting issue.

Sterling closed his rant with a poem about serenity and a sense of fulfilment. Perhaps it was about life not on the web? It was a bit of a stretch for me . . .

Google Wave

Over the weekend I was reminded by a Tweet from a colleague of the importance of Google's demo late last week of Wave: quite possibly the future of communications on the web. It has been developed right here in Sydney too.

A reliable report comes from Tim O'Reilly and you can read that here. I know that sometimes it is hard to stay up to date with information management technology as new web developments are happening so fast, but it is important and for those of us in libraries I believe it is part of our professional obligation.

Wave seems like a pretty interesting, maybe even exciting development but perhaps the thing I found most interesting in reading Tim's post was a not-so-related comment a long way down that came about because Tim made reference to a book (Practical Internet Groupware) that he had published online. Someone has a go at Tim for making the book available online behind a "paywall" (i.e. not for free). Tim elegantly and gently reminds us that not everything on the Web can and should be for free. He makes two very wise statements:

It's urgent for the future of publishing for there to be economic models for digital publishing, or you will find yourself poorer, not richer, as a result.

And:

I'm all for free content when people can make it work, and all for paid content when that's the only way to make good things happen. You pick the hat to fit the head.

Our goal should be the creation of maximum value to society. Sometimes free creates more value, and sometimes paid creates more value. The smart person, and the smart company, knows how to use both.

Sometimes with blog posts the most interesting and sometimes even the most intellectual debate happens in the comments field and that is part of the real beauty of the social web. That kind of thing doesn't happen in traditional academic publications.

Digital content & social media

A while back I was in Melbourne again to deliver a couple of talks. The prime reason was a keynote for the 2008 SPERA (rural education) conference and I also talked to members of VALA one night on much the same subject matter.
I've uploaded the presentation (using Apple's Keynote for the first time) to SlideShare, but as they are still sorting out a new way to bring hyperlinks with uploaded presentations, I thought I'd shove a quick post in my blog along with all of the URLs and some explanatory notes, so here it is (I've even corrected most of the typos!).

Digitisation, Digital Preservation & Web2.0 at the Australian War Memorial

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social_media awm)

Notes and hyperlinks for some of the slides

Slide 4:
http://www.awm.gov.au/diaries/ww1/ This is our current major project and the diaries of all of the Australian units that served in the First World War are being uploaded progressively as we complete the scanning and checking.
http://www.awm.gov.au/database/collection.asp This is our online collection access system and users can search it for almost 300,000 digital images and catalogue records for art works, photographs, relics, and personal manuscripts in our museum collection.

Slide 13:
This slide highlights a few examples of the ways we’ve started using Web2.0 features to "tour the web" and put our content out well beyond our home website, reaching bigger social networks and engaging new audiences at the curatorial level.
http://www.awm.gov.au/podcast/index.asp RSS underpins much of Web2.0, by allowing the public to select their subscriptions and then have them delivered to them on a regular basis. The links takes you to our podcasts page. Podcasts were our first foray with Web2.0 and RSS.
http://apps.new.facebook.com/artshare/ We have just gone live with ArtShare - a program developed by Brooklyn Museum to allow for selected art works to be featured on Facebook profile pages.
http://blog.awm.gov.au/awm/2008/03/19/hmas-sydney/ The blogs have been the simplest, easiest to use model that has allowed our curators their own voice on the web about our collections and their work. Previously all content was much more formal, using institutional voice. WordPress is used by the Memorial and some of our staff use Blogger (externally, eg. this blog).
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Canberra-Australia/Australian-War-Memorial/7244252524
Facebook plunges us into growing social networks with more reach than we have and allows us to communicate with those who are more comfortable in that space. People seem more comfortable and relaxed in their feedback.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/awm/ & http://www.flickr.com/photos/australianwarmemorial/
Flickr is also a two-way process allowing us to share images with everyone and to learn from the public’s visual pointers to their interests in us.
http://www.youtube.com/user/AustWarMemorial YouTube is another vital way to engage a large audience interested in the moving image. We think it is important to re-use our content and provide interpretation of it on that large network.
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/ We’ve long been a major contributor to Picture Australia, a fantastic portal to cultural images from NLA. It is a great model for further collaborative projects along the same lines.
http://www.ning.com/ We use Ning internally as a social network platform to share ideas, learn about social media, discuss proposals and to help move projects forward.
http://www.awm.gov.au/research/browse.asp And we’ve started using del.icio.us social bookmarking to leave "muddy footprint trails" across our large website for content that isn’t well exposed or that easy to find. We are still learning what del.icio.us can do for us.

Slide 14:
http://www.flickr.com/commons We have been in touch with Flickr Commons and images from our collection are likely to be added on 11/11/08.
http://creativecommons.org/international/au/ We are seriously looking at CreativeCommons attributions to cover content that we’ve developed for our presence on the web, so as to enable its appropriate re-use.
http://buddypress.org/ As we use WordPress as our blogging platform, we will probably take a good look at BuddyPress when it goes live later in 2008. It may extend our blogs to become more of a hosted social network.
http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=Home_page Your Archives (from TNA in the UK) might offer us a good model to facilitate public contributions and a bit of personalisation relating to our archival collections.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code QR codes might be used by us in several ways to facilitate the provision of packets of information to mobile devices with cameras in and the required software. We are looking at this now.
http://www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/index.asp Currently we maintain our own military history encyclopedia and it is a pretty big drain on our own resources to keep adding new content, so maybe migrating the content to Wikipedia.org (and helping to manage it) or hosting a wiki where the community could contribute will work for us.
http://go.footnote.com/thewall/ We really like this mash-up that is related to the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial and we are trying to trial much the same thing with our Roll of Honour. Our trial will probably focus on the Korean War panels.

Encouraging exploration in social media @ work

A friend asked me via Facebook what social media tools we've been encouraging staff to play with at work. (I used to say Web2.0 tools, but have now ceased using that term after reading something on Peta Hopkins Innovate blog .)
We could have gone with anyone of a dozen existing programs ranging from 16-43 "things" but decided to quickly tailor a program to our needs and our endorsed strategic directions for our website. Liz (our Web Manager) and I put it all together in super quick time by collaborating on the one Google Doc. It seems to have attracted enough keen participants and we are happy with the result so far.
So, here are our "ten things" (actually there are nine because thing #1 is an internal thing - applying for extended network access to Firefox browser, Facebook, YouTube, etc.):

1. iGoogle and a Gmail account (I know Yahoo is another alternative, but to keep it simple we selected Google);
2. Blogs & blogging (duh);
3. RSS and feed readers;
4. social bookmarks (we picked del.icio.us);
5. sharing presentations (eg. SlideShare);
6. social networks (Facebook & ArtShare, LinkedIn);
7. social media "things" (including: Flickr, YouTube & Podcasts);
8. wikis and Wikipedia.org; &
9. "other" tools and applications we invited participants to find and explore themselves (Zoho, Google Docs, Open/NeoOffice, CutePDF, Rollyo, LibraryThing, Last.fm).

We've used several CommonCraft videos (which I think are GREAT!) and Wikipedia definitions where available and useful to introduce each "thing" so as not to overload them with too many motherhood statements from us.
To facilitate all of this we are using Ning. It is another social network and we think it has been very helpful in facilitating: forum discussions, user profiles, blog posts, the formation of groups for projects and the hosting of videos. It isn't perfect (yet), but it is almost free (we pay a monthly subscription to get the adverts removed). Hopefully they'll eventually introduce a spell checker and some easy way to export useful discussions. It hasn't been made compulsory, but so far we've managed to get 52 staff involved - almost a fifth of our total staff. The groups we've set up focus on progressing small sub-projects such as Flickr Commons, ArtShare on Facebook, Copyright, our Digitisation Steering Group and Marketing. Just participating in our internal Ning network is itself a learning experience for some people.

Preservation, Web 2.0 and chamber orchestras (2) - following the lead of the Australian Chamber Orchestra with our cultural digitisation programs

This is most of the text for my recent "provocative paper" at the 2008 Museums Australia Futures Forum in Canberra. The rest of the text was made up as I talked to the slides I used, so if you wanted to hear them you should have come the the forum. My slides are now up on Slideshare (see the post above).

The Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) brings old music to life with their live performances. Sometimes they challenge the audience with new interpretations or even "mash-ups" of old and new music. Museums succeed in giving their own well-interpreted performance when they go beyond just shovelling huge amounts of scanned material on the web. I think it is a bit like the ACO breathing new life into old music.

Parallels (does anyone know a neater way to include a table in Blogger?):

Orchestras	Museums
Instruments, music	Collections
Performances	Exhibitions & curatorial interpretation
Tours & media broadcasts	Touring exhibitions and content on new online networks
Recorded music	Digitised collections

I think there is a further parallel in what the public expects from both orchestras and museums: a professional, engaging and enthusiastic performance. I think the ACO is a better example than a full scale symphony orchestra as it is easier for curators to identify with the artistic leadership given by Richard Tognetti, who usually leads the ACO from his violin, than the more formal orchestra conductor waving a baton from a podium.

Museum curators need to manage and care for the collections resulting from our digitisation programs just as we manage our physical collections and museum curators need to be interpreting our online content by playing "our own instruments". That interpretation needs to be delivered in many different ways. I don't think we can just assume the public will find and use it on our rather static websites. Blogs, Flickr groups, social networks and applications like Art Share on Facebook, You Tube videos, podcasts or downloadable audio guides are just a few examples of the relatively new means curators should be using to draw attention to our digitisation programs and collections. They're a little like touring exhibitions or broadcast performances, on the internet.

We need to recognise that digitisation of cultural material for preservation is also good for access. Digital assets created and acquired by digitisation initiatives must be managed and preserved. I believe that the provision of free and open access to the digitised collections of public cultural institutions is also an essential part of the process.

Using new online technologies, we can now facilitate the addition of public descriptions to these files. We can even collaborate with the public in the development of online exhibitions. But, I would not go as far as to say that simply allowing our users (or the audience to use the orchestra analogy again) to generate most of the supposed content of our websites is going to please anyone. If we use the new technologies and social networks primarily to allow users to make comments all over our online catalogues then that is the same as the ACO (or any orchestra) inviting those who have paid to attend a concert to get up on stage and have a go themselves. I believe the public want and deserve more from us than just engagement and conversation. We are being paid for our professional skills in museums, libraries and archives and have an obligation to digitise our collections and provide well-interpreted access to them online as well as other rich content for our websites, just as the ACO performs its music on stage.

I am certainly a keen advocate for social networking and going beyond “metadata” and traditional forms of museology, but there is something more fundamental to do before that kind of "window-dressing" becomes the top priority. We still need to be developing and interpreting fundamental digital collection content.

Some of my colleagues attended the first national Summit on Digital Collections in Adelaide in 2006, but despite a draft National Framework being circulated, not much has since changed. So what we have are some words on a page, but no music yet and certainly no instruments to play it with.

What do we need now? I believe we need some kind of national centre of excellence that is capable of encouraging us in the digitisation of cultural materials. But it should also provide research, advice, and facilitate collaboration, cooperation and training. Perhaps it could also coordinate a shared digital repository service (like CAN) for the poorer institutions who cannot afford their own digital storage.

Much of the advice and research is also available online from UK, US and European sites but the situation overseas is vastly different from our own environment and culture. We have different funding models, differing public expectations, different uptake and spread of broadband and mobile coverage and in many cases our national cultural institutions are well ahead of our overseas counterparts. There is nothing in Australia that meets our specific needs or is close enough geographically for us to have shared conferences, seminars and workshops without paying far too much money on overseas travel.

There are many examples of individual Australian digital initiatives that would be the envy of many overseas institutions. A quick list includes the National Library’s Pandora web archive, the Stable Tasmanian Open Repository Service, the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy, Picture Australia, and massive digitisation programs from the Australian War Memorial and the National Archives of Australia. Currently, something like a large shared digital repository and research service is really only being progressed in the Australian university sector for academic material in projects such as ARROW (led by Monash University) and Demetrius (at ANU). There is nothing like this in the Australian cultural sector.

Maybe we just need to set up an Australian partner centre under one of the international organisations, but we also need some local presence or we will all just keep moving forward in an uncoordinated manner and using vastly different file formats, standards, and even different preservation metadata. Sadly, I think too few institutions are planning for their digital future by setting up trusted digital repositories for their growing collection of digital assets. In the end, if the world decides that the only real digital repository is a certified “Trusted Digital Repository”, that is audited to standards being developed in the US (by OCLC/RLG and NARA) and Germany, will anyone in an Australian cultural institution have had a say in developing that audit checklist? That will make everything more difficult than it needs to be in the future. The “music” might be lost and even if it isn’t, we might not be able to play it.

Interview on the use of blogs from a curator's perspective

I did an interview with Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum over the last week. The interview covers our use of blogs at the Australian War Memorial, to share information about our exhibitions and collections. You can read it on his fresh + new(er). He has generously published all of it, so you may need some refreshments to help you get through it all!

Draft abstract for SPERA Conference Keynote paper

Here's a thing - a draft abstract that was due yesterday. I wonder whether putting it up as a blog post works? Comments are most welcome. (If it doesn't work, I may end up taking this post down in sheer embarrassment!)

SPERA Conference 2008 Keynote Paper (draft abstract)
Creative use of new and emerging technologies at the Australian War Memorial

The Australian War Memorial is busy preparing itself, both via its website and within the museum itself for the Mobile Generation. Digital content consumed on our website and available on new wireless networks within the museum (coming soon, not there yet!) will increasingly become platform independent and much richer, moving beyond simple text and images to include sound and video files. We are also changing our own approach and attitude to be less institutional or didactic and more engaging and collaborative with our community.

Our role as one of Australia's oldest national cultural institutions and the experience we have gained in our recent history with new and emerging online technologies is certainly relevant to the education sector, families and the personal development of both teachers and students. Compared to some other institutions, we have a small amount of didactic content specifically related to certain curricula, and have plans to increase this. Generally, our content and information is designed to be accessible to all and we are now making it easier to find, use and re-use, which will also be of benefit to teachers, students and parents. So, it becomes valuable content from the social history, literacy and cultural perspectives and, we may also be seen as a useful model to teachers and students with some imagination and initiative.

I will discuss and demonstrate some of our most recent and somewhat brave initiatives to expose our content and to engage with new and much larger social networks such as blog readers, Flickr, You Tube and Facebook. I will also cover our initiative to migrate our in-house Australian military history encyclopedia's content to Wikipedia.org, in an attempt to engage with an audience of “produsers”. We believe that many of our younger audience are now more reliant on some or all of these more social platforms and networks for much of their information and knowledge that older generations used to gain from traditional media such as TV, radio, newspapers and printed magazines.

Some of these initiatives may be seen as simple on the surface, but for a large and somewhat conservative national institution with a trusted reputation to protect, they can be seen as risky. Many of our colleagues in like institutions are watching us with some fascination as some have not yet been able to take the same steps. We believe that it is becoming increasingly important for us to learn more about these new “many-to-many” conversations and developing “viral” networks. Our experience has been that we can only learn through involvement, experimentation and innovation. All of that obviously involves some real risk management, as distinct from risk aversion. So far, the returns have been overwhelmingly beneficial and sometimes surprising.

The challenge for us in all of this is to maintain our advantage. We are seen as and need to maintain our position as a trusted provider or credible and authentic, high quality content.

Being miscellaneous or externalising meaning at our museum

I am reading about a May 2007 interview with David Weinberger's (author of Everything Is Miscellaneous, May 2007, Times Books) in which he referred to the fundamental change that is taking place (online) as being the "externalisation of meaning". I read about this on Seb Schmoller's blog Fortnightly Mailing. When he referred to there being no one right way to order the world, particularly digital stuff, I immediately thought the same thing about our vast digitised collections (both images and documents) that are now online and not always that comprehensively described.

So here is my take on Seb's summary of David's talk and what it means in the museum world:

• it is now simpler for people to organise or search digital things (content or collections) as they decide, rather than for them to be classified for them (eg. museum taxonomies which are not always that easy to understand);


• the links between digital things, and the tags (or folksonomies) and other attributes that people give them create a rich layer of meaning that can be drawn upon by others - and they may be better understood by others than the taxonomies we use in museums to describe our digitised stuff;


• the difference between data and meta-data is disappearing (I've not thought this one through fully, but will add some more when I do); and


• through Wikipedia and blogs and similar there is an increasingly public negotiation of knowledge, via a conversation, in which experts (curators, historians and the creators of digital collections) are decreasingly the arbiters of authority, solely through the addition of our own context.

So, if what this infers is a step along the path towards facilitating and building a better, open online community that is relevant to museums like the one I work in, perhaps this quote from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (in an interview with David Weinberger) is also something we could well heed:

Somehow we've worked with people in the community to build an online community. We're not certain how it happened, except that we really do listen to people. We try to treat people like we want to be treated, and somehow we built a culture of trust.

In the same interview Craig compares the similarity between Craigslist and Wikipedia and again, I think there is relevance for us:

The big similarity is that both sites are built by the people who use them. Both have a culture of trust, and both are part of an historic trend where power is flowing from small groups of powerful people to much larger, but still small, groups of people.

The two go on from there to stress the critical importance and benefits (from unintended consequences) of doing good by paying attention to real customer service, listening to people (those engaged in the conversation) and following through (not just lip service).

The Memorial now has a Facebook page, a YouTube page and a presence on Flickr. And we now have a page on our website with links to them all: find it at http://www.awm.gov.au/aboutus/community.htm In doing this we've followed the fantastic example set by Brooklyn Museum and their Community page. We may not be as funky as Brooklyn have managed to be, but we are a war museum and our community will be different from theirs. All of this is an attempt to expose our digital content (or collections) to much larger networks. We are now also looking at the facilitation of tags (or folksonomies) and even deeper descriptions of some of our digitised content by this new community. That will probably have to wait until we've implemented our massive new Enterprise Content Management system as it will lay the foundations for many programs including digitisation, web publishing and improved federated search on our site across all collection management systemn and other databases containing digitised documents.

We also continue to use the AWM Blog to draw attention to our collections and the work we do on them as well as to engage the community on topis of particular interest. Some recent examples include posts from conservators, curators and historians on: Aircraft Conservation, our catalogue programs in the Research Centre and also the recent discovery of HMAS Sydney, which has attracted a great deal of interest and many comments from the community.

New rules for media or online museum communications?

I read these new rules for media first on Tony Walker's fantastic blog ABC Digital Futures and then went straight to the original source - Mark Glaser at Mediashift.

Mark's rules might at first seem only relevant to journalists and such, but the mere fact that museums are now engaged in online communications using their websites means that the rules also apply to us in a general sense. So, what I'll do is take Mark's rules and offer a museum perspective on what they mean for us more specifically. (Apologies to both original sources for a tad of borrowing.)

1. The Audience Knows More Than the Journalist: Rather than being a one-to-many broadcast, museums now must understand that they are just part of a much larger conversation that is networked and constantly evolving. So, replace "Journalist" with "Curator" (or historian, etc.) and you get the message. Our audience probably also has something valuable to contribute. A great topical example is the post we put up regarding HMAS Sydney’s recent discovery and the community’s contribution to that story. It has proved very popular and offered a perspective that we simply could not provide alone.

2. People Are in Control of Their Media Experience: The people are taking control and watching, and listening to what they want when they want. Making sure that we, in museums, provide content that is suitable for multiple platforms and entry points is critical. Increasingly, we will need to provide an option for content suitable for consumption on mobile devices.

3. Anyone Can Be a Media Creator or Remixer: But it still takes skills to use those tools and stand out from the millions of others who are doing the same thing. In a way, museums already do stand out as trusted sources of high quality content, but we need to balance what we do with regard to Rule #1 to ensure our position is not compromised here. As I've said here before, the big advantage we have is the content we can generate and provide online, particularly through our digitisation programs. Just facilitating conversations using fancy new technologies probably isn't going to be enough for us to sustain an audience.

4. Traditional Media Must Evolve or Die: The evolution that traditional museums must make online is not just in adding new features; we must change our mindset, ideas and methods to new ways. Many of our old processes are now completely irrelevant or redundant in this environment and hanging onto them has seen others bypassing us and finding new ways to search our content and collections, describe it, promote it, provide access to it, etc. Many traditional research journals are now either dead or dying and in Australian we’ve seen the death of the formerly popular Bulletin magazine. Maybe we need to look at some of our more traditional publications and move them online too. We also need to think up and use different methods for commerce in the online environment if we need to charge for services provided.

5. Despite Censorship, The Story Will Get Out: This isn’t just about censoring news stories; it also applies to new technologies like peer-to-peer file-sharing. Maybe we need to see these new technologies more as potential friends, than enemies. A good example is LOCKSS which uses peer-to-peer technology (as I understand) to safely share and store digital assets.

6. Amateur and Professional Journalists Should Work Together: The reality now is that professional curators/historians and amateur collectors, enthusiasts and historians can learn from each other and the new social media platforms not only allow this to happen, they facilitate the conversations much more readily.

7. Journalists Need to Be Multi-Platform: Museum professionals need to learn how to make best use of a host of skills to reach different audiences. I think most of us need to be familiar with digital cameras, scanners, digital recording equipment, and online technologies such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarks, RSS, tagging, mashups, social networks & collaborative technologies. We can’t just expect to engage with physical visitors nor those who come directly to our web front page.

I reserve the right to add more examples and thoughts to this post as they arise.

Digitisation, Web 2.0 and chamber orchestras

I subscribe to the concert series the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) gives in Canberra (& many other cities) each year. I have done so for many years and each year one or two concerts inspire the most amazing creative thoughts in my tiny brain while I am sitting listening and watching them perform. Some of the concepts and design features that I used in our current Lawrence of Arabia & the Light Horse exhibition came to me at their concerts.
Last Friday I saw and heard "Sublime", a concert that featured music that was written very recently and that which was written as much as 500 years ago. Some of the vocal pieces by Holst, Nick Drake, Sting, Radiohead and Britten were performed and interpreted anew by Katie Noonan. Unlike the online review, I don't think the combination of music was at all awkward, but that is another issue.
So how is all this relevant? Well, currently a lot of IT-based and web-based museum staff are talking about Web 2.0 and museums. Some curators are also talking about it, but mostly the debate is led by the more geekish and web-aware people who are not that attached to or involved in more traditional museum or gallery practices, like curating exhibitions or developing collections. Perhaps I'm generalising unfairly, but in my experience, that is mostly the case. With regard to the digitisation of museum or library or archival collections, those endeavours are also being led by either technologists or imaging experts or others from conservation or preservation backgrounds. Again, the interpretation of such efforts seems removed from the more traditional curatorial processes. So that is where the musical performance comes in. Sorry for the long and uncertain root to this point.
What dawned on me is that for those of us in museums who are responsible (like I am) for large digitisation programs, just scanning the material and then shovelling huge amounts of it up on the web one way or another is a bit like writing music and leaving it somewhere without performing it. Last Friday, the ACO brought a lot of music to life giving it fantastic new interpretations, like that of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah which Katie sang beautifully and completely unlike other recent interpretations by K.D. Lang or Jeff Buckley. So, what I think this means for us is that all of our efforts on the web re "Web 2.0" and digitisation need to be accompanied by some appropriate curatorial interpretation. It may not need to be that extensive as that certainly wouldn't be possible with mass programs, but we can't simply rely on links to hard-to-find catalogue entries, exposure Google search or public tagging.
As I said above, I have an exhibition running here at our museum for a few more months and we know that visitors don't read much of the carefully written wall text (or storyline) and object or image captions. They will, however, happily come along and listen to me drone on and on about both Lawrence and the Light Horse, perhaps in much the same way that I go along to live music performances in preference to or perhaps in advance of buying a CD or downloading some music from iTunes. (I'm sure some of my "performances" are better than others.)
Museum curators need to be out there interpreting our online content by playing "our own instruments". And that interpretation needs to be delivered in many different ways. Online means such as blogs, You Tube videos, podcasts or downloadable audio guides are just a few examples. Maybe there are more parallels between our institutions and orchestras and it might be instructive for some senior curators, for instance, to look at the role of orchestra principals and leaders?
More to follow as I think this through completely, but to me the way museums use Web 2.0, social networking applications and services and the provision of online access digitised collections goes well beyond the intersection of web strategy, IT strategy, marketing and a social media strategy. That only tells a very shallow layer of the story or the game, there is more to it than that: the museum or institution itself and its collection.
(A recent relevant newspaper article from the NYT touches on some of the points above. You can read it here.)

Unlocking Access: In support of a hands-on Internet Policy

(Keynote)
Michael Geist
Professor Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.
He blogs on the net and IP. See also the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook Group.
[No paper on CD or the web just yet, so for now you'll need to rely on my rough notes. It was a good keynote!]

History. Initially there was a push for governments to be hands-off, but they were never there. They always wanted to have a hand in regulating the net on at least a domestic level and in some international agreements. Canadians used the Australian anti-spam legislation as their model. (I didn't know we had such a law – it certainly isn't effective.) There always was a role for public policy and government.

Internet 2008. The blogosphere (>100 million, but incl. some subject matter experts in some fields); power of social networks – Facebook/Myspace (eg. his group on Canada Fair Copyright had many thousands of members within a week or so indicating opposition to new legislation – now 40,000 members); podcasts' role (he usually uses his iPhone to record talks and then podcasts the MP3 file – people don't want to read, but will listen or even re-listen; wider audience); postsecret – posts secrets to the world in an artistic/creative way (within a veil of anonymity) – many sad, but now >250k and many in galleries and museums in US; online video sharing (eg. YouTube, Star Wreck – free download, incl English subtitles – people could download and still they bought DVD and were licensed for broadcast; elephants dream – open movie using free tools; public broadcasting (like our ABC); flickr & other photo sharing sites like Facebook (many using CC licenses); rise of creative commons (some rights reserved); free online publications (that can also be purchased, eg. In the Public Interest); collaborative internet growth (eg. Wikipedia.org – it doesn't have a monopoly on making mistakes, but has a remarkable panel of expertise; EOL – encyclopedia of life); citizen journalism's rise (eg. OhmyNews – written by everyone); Project Gutenberg (public domain digitised books, like SPW); LibriVox (audio versions of books); educational content online like MIT OpenCourseWare (decade long time-frame finished within four years or four years early assisted by advances in technology and the rise of support for such initiatives); move towards Open Access, eg. PloS, the Public Library of Science – some people have gone on to win Nobel Prize from that online journal; see also Open Medicine); Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) – public domain material hosted for free, forever; digitisation projects like Google Books (whole and snippets), bringing books to life & Canada has a National Digitisation Strategy including photos freely available; Open Source software – browsers, web services, etc.
BoingBoing (originally a zine) has larger readership than any newspaper in Canada. Lots of concern re copyright in Canada, all starting from that Facebook group. Many others being used to voice opposition to public policies.

Internet 2018. (Not a prediction, but public policies and potential.)

1. Connectivity. Broadband for all (or you cannot participate - so there is a public sector policy role there); muni wifi; net neutrality (a notion of a two tiered internet – fast for the rich and slower for the rest – treating all content in an equal fashion); spam; spyware.
2. Enhancing participation. Intermediary liability issues (eg. things posted on your blog by others & not taken down fast enough); domain names; privacy (still struggling with issues, eg. Facebook issues & their privacy settings – many don't use, 70-80%); trust; transparency.
3. Copyright. Anti-circumvention legislation; fair use (Canada has no exceptions like time shifting, three-step test, loss of gift if not used, etc.); term extension (70 years+?); orphaned works; WIPO (an agenda that has moved much further than anyone expected).
   
4. Content. Open Access; digitisation; Crown copyright (could affect us – people asking for permission to copy the Copyright Act!; military denying screenshots of equipment if it thought it critical!); public broadcasting.
   

He finished by saying: “It isn't about a hands-off approach, the future of the net is in our hands.”

I liked this good round-up of issues relevant to public policy and the net. It wasn't too heavy and highlighted many possibly obscure and not obvious connections.
Responses to questions:
The interests of public institutions sometimes undermined by meeting the lowest common denominator and strategies limited to such baby steps that are so conservative and aimed mostly at not offending! Too many stakeholders in the room making decisions. They need to take a stronger line with what they are doing and use restrictions. Too much time spent telling people what to do, not what you can do.
Social networks may be skewed towards the younger demographics.
Expectations of privacy on things like Facebook – people are not expecting that everyone can see it. See Danah Boyd's work regarding the reaction of youth to parents looking at their profiles. Some governments ban the use of Facebook by employees, but all of their potential hires are on Facebook. It needs a re-think about the content posted on Facebook.
He was against the introduction of filtering systems as they are highly problematic and of unknown length/application.