metaphors

My colleague Thorny Staples often uses the metaphor that digital humanities projects are, at their most basic level, online exhibitions. Curated content is presented with key descriptive information not unlike exhibition tombstone labels and contextualized through categorization and by scholarly essays of varying lengths as well as site information architecture (not unlike rooms of an exhibition with wall texts). The end results include the identification and explication of relationships and the presentation of deep readings of objects. That metaphor always resonated with me.

In a recent discussion a small group was trying to work out some generalized models to for the processes we follow from the receipt/creation of digital files through to providing access. We were having a particularly lengthy discussion about description and contextualization -- at what point in a digital file's life cycle is it related to other files and identified as a digital object, and at what point is some sort of intellectual meaning overlaid onto that digital object?

My new colleague Terry Harrison -- a big fan of using metaphors -- commented that when museums acquire objects they cannot know every context in which the object will be exhibited or published in the future, but they acquire it and put effort into description and conservation to prepare for future display/publication when the object will be contextualized many times over.

This sent me down the road to a metaphor that's still developing in my head which may not yet translate to something that anyone beside me thinks is sensible. Or it may not be sensible at all.

First, I'm starting with an assumption that there are four very broad categories of activities that we need to describe (leaving out "preservation" for now). On the museum side, it's these:

Acquisition: Items are proposed, selected, and acquired
Accessioning: Items have accession numbers assigned, are assigned storage locations, relationships between parts are identified (a tea set is made up of individual components), and basic descriptive information is recorded in a registration system
Preparation: Items are cleaned, repaired, mounted, framed, or otherwise stabilized and made ready for research use and public viewing
Exhibition: Items are further described and presented in the context identified by a collection or exhibition curator; an object will be exhibited many times and assigned to multiple contexts

This roughly translates to this in the digital realm:

Creation/Transfer: Selection and digitization or transfer of digital (master?) files to an institution
Inventory: Files are assigned identifiers/names, placed into some sort of meaningful (or not) storage location in a server environment
Processing: QA, manipulation, derivative creation
Access: Making content discoverable and usable, which can include a curator providing context and intellectual overlays for objects (not files)

I'm having one real issue in making this metaphor work for me and for others, and that's around the creation of metadata and recording of file relationships. At what point is the relationship of files to each other recorded? Is the creation of metadata identifying/describing an intellectual object part of inventory, processing, or access? When is the relationship of files to that intellectual object recorded?

I think that inventorying should include a step whereby the relationships between files are recorded so it is recognizable that some set of 300 files go together. There wasn't a lot of push back on this in our discussion. When descriptive metadata for an intellectual object is created and when the relationship of files to an intellectual object are recorded engendered a lot of discussion. I personally think that descriptive metadata for intellectual objects represented by those files is also created during the inventory stage, and that files in hand at that stage should in some way be associated with the intellectual objects at that time.

This is complicated because the recording of all the relationship of files to intellectual objects is not fully possible until objects are prepared and added to an access application. That's where the contextualization happens, so one can argue that that is where intellectual objects are truly defined and the process of associating files to objects takes place. Preparation is driven by access. If access applications are siloed at all, each might use different derivative files, and there has to be some association of those derivatives to the master and to the intellectual objects.

So, we have master files, derivative files (possibly multiple sets over time per access point), intellectual object metadata, relationships of all files to each other and to that intellectual object, and the need to inventory and manage all of the above. Which may be separate from an access application or multiple access points. Where is this recorded, in what order, where, and how do we describe these activities? I'm struggling with that part of the metaphor/model.

How did this conversation arise? Well, we're trying to scope out some future directions and activities, and a shared understanding of the model for the activities we support is vital. Mine is not the only model proposed and it just may not be right. I'm sharing this as much for my own process as anything else.

museum data exchange software

OCLC, funded by the Mellon Foundation and working with the software company Cognitive Applications, Inc, has released COBOAT and OAICat Museum to support data interchange between museums. This work is happening under the auspices of their Museum Data Exchange Project.

So what, many people will say? It should already be easy to share museums data, right?

Not so much.

The museum collection management system arena has some major vendors (Gallery Systems, Willoughby, Minisis, Cuadra, etc) and some smaller vendors (Re:discovery, PastPerfect, etc.), and countless (and I really mean countless) home-grown systems running on FileMaker, Access, and MS-SQL. I know, because I spent many years working for museums and I was on the board of the Museum Computer Network, a group that dilligently worked on many interchange initiatives. I worked with software from 3 vendors and managed a FileMaker-based system. Getting data in was easy. Getting data out was often hard. Participation in data aggregation projects took a lot of effort. And most small- or medium-sized museums (and there are many, many more of them than large museums) have little or no technology staff to enable data sharing. And there is no common data schema in the community.

The museum community itself has sometimes slowed progress. When discussion of relevant library community standards were mentioned, some said "We're nothing like libaries! Our collections are unique! Their standards are not for us!" That attitude seems to have adapted in the last 10 years.

I am glad to see something like this going forward. A fee-free tool that can help museums extract data from black-box vendor systems and enable sharing? Bring it on.

wikipedia loves art

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has announced its participation is a really interesting initiative -- help illustrate Wikipedia articles with your images of art from their collection. Photograph items from the collection, following some guidelines, upload your images to flickr, and your images will likely be used to illustrate a Wikipedia article.

Over the next month we are participating in Wikipedia Loves Art, a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among 15 museums and cultural institutions worldwide. The project, in conjunction with Flickr, is aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009.

We're inviting you to come into the museum and shoot photos of our artworks based on various themes. You can shoot on your own or form a small team (10 people, tops). The photogs or teams with the most points will win prizes.

The details about participation are available at Wikipedia.

This is part of the larger Wikipedia Loves Art project where a number of museums are participating in a scavenger hunt. The only thing that is not clear to me is what the Wikipedia articles that these images will illustrate are about. Scholarly topics? Topics related to art and art history? Articles about the museums or the specific works of art? I am curious.

obstacles to universal access

I've just read an interesting paper from a presentation at the recent CIDOC meeting: Nicholas Crofts, “Digital Assets and Digital Burdens: Obstacles to the Dream of Universal Access,” 2008 Annual Conference of CIDOC (Athens, September 15-18, 2008).

The premise is that technology is not the issue keeping our institutions from reaching a goal of universal access -- it's a number of post-technical issues, including varied intellectual property barriers, institutions' desires to protect their digital assets, and collection documentation that is not well-suited to sharing.

From the section on "Suitability of Documentation":

... but while this technical revolution has taken place, there has not been a corresponding revolution in documentation practice. The way that documentation is prepared and maintained and the sort of documentation that is produced are still heavily influenced by pre-Internet assumptions. The documentation found in museums – the raw material for diffusion – is often ill-suited for publication.

From the conclusion:

While making cultural material freely available is part of their mission, and therefore a goal that they are obliged to support, it may still come into conflict with other factors, notably commercial interests: the need to maintain a high-profile and to protect an effective brand image. If museums are to cooperate successfully and make digital resources widely available on collaborative platforms, they will either need to find ways of avoiding institutional anonymity, or agree to put aside their institutional identity to one side.

It's a frank and interesting paper. I think there has been progress in documentation practice -- look at the CCO and the Aquifer Shareable Metadata efforts, and the earlier Categories for the Description of Works of Art -- but it's true that this hasn't yet taken hold in a widespread way.

Gettysburg Cyclorama

A cyclorama was the cutting-edge multimedia installation of its time in the 1870-90s. A massive 360 degree painting in the round, it was often accompanied by narration, music, and a light show to heighten the illusion. Today I went to see the conserved, restored, and reinstalled Gettysburg Cyclorama at the new visitors' center. The center opened in April, but the Cyclorama only reopened 10 days ago.

I'm glad I went. True, you only get to spend 15 minutes in the Cyclorama gallery and you have to sit through a short movie about the battle first because the museum, movie, and cyclorama are on one ticket. The new museum is very nicely designed and installed (and extensive), the movie is not too long and very well-done, and the tickets are reasonably priced.

The painting (by Paul Philippoteaux, 1884) was installed in the new facility with its diorama foreground illusions recreated. They run a 15-minute narrated sound and light show to recreate Pickett's Charge (dawn over the battlefield is amazing), then they bring up the lights for a few minutes so you can see the entire painting clearly. In some spots the diorama leads seamlessly into the painting. It's still an amazing illusion and it takes your breath away.

The Cyclorama painting was previously housed in a Richard Neutra-designed building at Getttysburg. The Neutra building is scheduled for demolition in December 2008, but there is litigation to attempt to stop it. That will be a difficult case -- battlefield restoration versus Modern architecture preservation.

smithsonian digitization initiative

There's an announcement on CNN that the Smitshonian plans to put its 137 million object collection online. The new Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough said in an interview that they do not yet know how long it will take or how much it will cost to digitize the full 137 million-object collection and will do it as money becomes available. A team will prioritize which artifacts are digitized first. They plan to focus on making the collections usable for the K-12 audience.

When I was at the Smithsonian yesterday for David Weinberger's talk, this seemed to be a buzzing topic of discussion among audience members; one Smithsonian employee even mentioned it in a question to Weinberger, expressing a certain level of surprise.

small pieces loosely joined by metadata

Today I had the extreme pleasure of attending a talk by David Weinberger (The Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Everything is Miscellaneous) at the Smithsonian, entitled "Knowledge, Noise and the End of Information." It was webcast, and I strongly suggest viewing it if you can.

There was lots of interesting discussion about the definition of information, the innately social nature of the human race and how social interaction is a vital aspect of information discovery, and how the loosely joined and messy nature of the internet just reflects human nature and is not a bad thing. He also stressed that one can never know what digital information might be of importance in the future, so we should, as cultural institutions, be striving to keep as much as possible. He also touched on the importance of brand and authoritativeness, but not to equate that with control.

A word I did not expect to hear today, let alone about a hundred times, was "metadata." The cellphone image above is a shot of one of his concluding statements. He talked a lot about the importance of metadata, whether it be authoritative cataloging, community tagging, or contextual relationships through linking. Since we cannot ever imagine all the uses for our digital content we cannot possibly expend the costly effort to provide all the descriptive metadata that every community might want or need, so all three are complementary and of equal value.

One of my take-aways was that this again shows the importance of just getting digital content out there. Let the content express itself through its authoritative metadata, but also provide open access and support multiple mechanisms through which it can be incorporated into new contexts and uses and gain new descriptions.

open access to museum collections

Last Friday there was a post on Open Access News that Wake Forest University's Anthropology Museum had issued a press release about the launch of its online collections, supported by an IMLS grant.

I welcomed this news on many fronts -- there aren't enough ethnographic or archaeological collections online; the museum is using Re:discovery, a great product geared toward small museums; and I have a number of friends with ties to Wake Forest and I've visited Winston-Salem many times and have a fondness for the area.

What made me sit down to think about this for a few days was the passing description of this an an Open Access project.

I worked for many years in the museum community, and every museum that I ever worked for or consulted for wanted to make its collections available in one digital form or another. The Museum Computer Network was founded in 1967 to enable museums to automate their processes and convert collections records to digital form. Museums were among the earliest institutions to share their collections online in the mid 1990s. The University of California Museum of Paleontology had a web site in 1994. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco brought their Thinker "imagebase" online in 1996 -- and they had volunteers assist with an early form of experimental user supplied subject metadata. e.g., proto-tagging. By 1997 the National Gallery of Art provided access to over 100,000 objects in its collection, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art experimented with converting print museum catalogs into freely available online publications.

Sure, there have been lengthy discourses about levels of access to the digital media surrogates and questions of rights and control of those new media assets, and there is some information about the acquisition of objects that's subject to privacy restrictions, but no museum wants to limit discovery of their collections -- they want to facilitate their collections' use in research and teaching.

I've just not heard it described as "open access" before.

I'm not saying that it isn't a sort of open access initiative -- it most obviously is -- but I just think of it as such a normal museum activity I don't categorize it in my mind as anything other than business as usual. Then it hit me -- for the past 15 years museums have been major players in the open access movement without necessarily always knowing it.

Labeling this an open access initiative re-contextualizes this core museum activity into a different realm -- one that I hope will make museum collections information more visible and reinforce the importance of all categories of open access content.

vintage museum photos

Via BoingBoing, check out these fabulous vintage photos from the American Museum of Natural History. I love dioramas, and the exhibit installation images are just great. Taxidermy mounting, diorama background painting, articulating dinosaur bones, casting animal models ... And the vintage exhibitions! I love the images of earnest children being led around ... and doing so-called Indian dances in their construction paper bonnets. State-of-the-art, 1900s-1970s.

OpenCollection

Via Digital Koans, I came across an open-source collection management systems called OpenCollection. from their site:

OpenCollection is a full-featured collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections. It is designed to handle large, heterogeneous collections that have complex cataloguing requirements and require support for a variety of metadata standards and media formats. Unlike most other collections management applications, OpenCollection is completely web-based. All cataloging, search and administrative functions are accessed using common web-browser software, untying users from specific operating systems and making cataloguing by distributed teams and online access to collections information simple, efficient and inexpensive.

...

OpenCollection is intended as an alternative to expensive proprietary software solutions that have traditionally been used for collections cataloguing and publishing by museums, archives, libraries and other organizations.

Having worked for many years in the museum community and had responsibility for the design, care and feeding of a number of collection management systems, this is pretty stripped down. It has very strong support for the linking of media files. At first I thought it was lacking elements to manage those fiddly details that were so ubiquitous in managing physical collections -- storage location, exhibition history, publication history, valuation, insurance, condition -- but once I created a test object through the basic entry screen the other screens became visible to me. The only thing I didn't find (but may have missed) are elements having to do with packing and shipping, which requires very detailed record keeping. I would have also expected to see more on condition, such as the ability to track a treatment history and document treatment, since there are professional record keeping requirements for conservators.

One annoyance -- the OpenCollection product site has this ribbon of images that kept crossing on top of the text and blocking it. I'm not even using Firefox 3.0, so who knows what caused this.

digital art and museums

WireTap Magazine has a great interview with Richard Rinehart from the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive that considers a number of topics, including why museums should care about and collect digital art, and why museums should make digital art available for remix. Richard has done some amazing work in promoting the curation and preservation of digital art, and makes amazing art himself. I've known Richard about 15 years.

I also want to make a plug for Berkeley Big Bang 08 (one of Richard's projects) on June 1-3, and for 01SJ on June 4-8 in San Jose (Steve Dietz, another museum colleague who is well-known for his ground-breaking commissioning and curation of digital art at the Walker Art Center, is the Artistic Director for the festival). Anyone in the Bay Area with any interest in digital art and new media should attend one of both of these events next week.