Tom Roper's Weblog

JDCC09: the urge and surge of international collaboration

At a session led by Sarah Porter on international collaborations, three projects presented.

Michael Popham of Oxford spoke about the Shakespeare Quartos project, which has digitised all 75 pre-1641 quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays in a collaboration between Oxford and the Folger Shakespeare library in the USA, giving scholars new ways to study variant editions of these texts. With a lot of cropping and post-processing, 32 copies of Hamlet have also been re-keyed, so are searchable and manipuable. Different partners in an international collaboration like this have different approaches: JISC and the NEH vary, for example in how they prepare bid documents. Sometimes issues of shortfall of effort had to be tacked and an excess of politeness could hold people back form chasing progress. While they used a wiki to document the project, a lot of management was done by conference call, possible since the US partners were all East coast-based. Images are now up on the BL site. Some work was held up by the need to recruit a software developer,

Susan Whitfield of the British Library presented on the International Dunhuang Project, digitising the contents of the library room at a Buddhist temple at Dunhuang on the Silk Road, preserved by the desert air. The library was sealed in around 1,000 AD, and rediscovered by Western archaeologists in 1900. 40,000 manuscripts, in 20 languages and a variety of scripts, both Sino-Tibetan and Altaic, were dispersed among the imperial powers. The project could not have started without international collaboration, the archaeologists of a hundred years ago being considered thieves in China and there are demands for the restitution of the materials. The collaboration DP: co-operation on conservation, cataloguing, digitisation, research and education. With eight full-time partners, Susan thought that the chief lessons of the project were that there should be something for all sides, like marriages. The project worked on collaboration, rather than colonialism. The website was localised for each partner, with responsibility for content shared; everyone keeps copyright and hosts their own images. The project had spent a great deal of time in training.

Saskia de Vries who, at the the conference dinner the night before, had borrowed my tie to demonstrate sailing knots spoke on the OAPEN a European initiative to offer open access monographs, peer reviewed books in the humanities and social sciences. They have signed up a number of publishers and work on a hybrid model: online content is free to view, while print-on-demand and e-reader content is charged for.

In questions and answers someone asked if the Quartos project software could be reused? Yes, was the answer, it's on sourceforge and can be picked up by anyone. Asked what one thing they would change if they could, one asked for cheaper air fares, another for better communication and outreach. Language differences were felt to be a big problem,

See also the official blog at http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/category/jdcc09/ and the twitter stream.

JDCC09: Nick Poole on Digital Britain or Digital Landfill: free puppies and ten problems

I'm fighting my way through the backlog of notes to write some more posts on the JISC Digital Content Conference. The unreliable wifi at the conference means that while I managed live tweeting for some sessions, others exist as notes on the PowerBook. I may summarise the tweeted sessions too, in time.

The third plenary session, on Wednesday morning, began with David Baker trying to sum up the previous day's parallel sessions, from a series of slides that I hope will be on the conference blog. He drew out some points from each: the hidden costs of digitisation, the need to improve the 'big deals' and to work with publishers without ideological arguments, that in order to engage teachers with existing resources, they have to offer value and be a good fit, and, finally, that innovation breaks rules and that users are collaborators. I'm not sure I understand the point about avoiding ideological arguments with publishers: do the ideological positions come from publishers, from librarians or from academics? If he meant we should stop trying to understand the economic imperatives that drive publishers' behaviour, I'm not sure I agree.

Nick Poole, the CEO of the Collections Trust, who blogs at http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/, gave us a very up-to-the-minute and enjoyable presentation, and contributed to the conference the memorable and resonant phrases, 'free as in puppy, not free as in beer', and 'less innovation and more doing' . Starting from the government document published only the day before, Building Britain's Future, he took us through the political and economic situation and how it might affect us. A new European Commission might have money for digitisation, but In the context of a weak pound against the Euro, the effects of the slump and 5-10% cuts in public expenditure, will the digital economy bail us out?

Digital Britain has five priorities: modernising the infrastructure, creating a climate for investment, securing high quality content, building skills, and giving universal access to broadband. But the Treasury look for public value, public sector efficiency and savings of more than £30bn on top of the Gershon savings of £26.5bn. There is a contradiction between cutting on this massive scale and at the same time requiring public services to increase their social impact. Politicians now think e-services can be harnessed.

Nick thought we had two options: to build on the last ten years' investment, or to witter on about standards and interoperability and consign that ten years' work to digital landfill.

He then gave us ten problems

1. Money: what is a digital economy? We can't buy our own lunch. What is the real economic value underlying transactions?

2. Politicians: we need some core principles which exist irrespective of which politician is at DCMS this week

3. Trust: these are centuries-old industries. How do we crowd source? We can't even build decent websites. We need a contract with users, or we are stuck with command and control

4. Projects: everything is project funded. Nick confessed to being allergic to innovation. In a phrase that struck a chord with the conference, he suggested we should have less innovation and more doing

5. Managers: would you like a business case with that? There is no business case. Free stuff can be 'free as in puppy, not free as in beer'.

6. Copyright: end copyright fear, and take risks. There is so far little case law so we have more freedom to act than we think

7. Users: keep changing. We should reject idealised models of what users might be or need and have a new social contract and collectivism

8. Strategy: new unified field theory.

9. Digital: can mean many different things: delivery of service online, use of computers, digitisation

10. Marketing: the delivery of the project is the outcome. Sustainability is achieved by production of a successful service

The heritage sector is becoming a public service broadcaster sending content into homes and can do things that the commercial sector would find uneconomic. He referred to the RIN work on researchers' needs, Dicovering Physcial Objects, Meeting Researchers' Needs and suggested there should be a researchers' charter.

Therefore, we need a culture grid which can reach an audience who wouldn't come to a museum website. We could do much more: joint procurement, collaborative prioritisation of digitisation, crowd source the interpretation of content, consolidate licensing and, at the political level, sound dissonant.

In questions, Catherine Grout asked about the Strategic Content Alliance. Nick thought there was nothing like it. It was doing things to solve problems, and participant were leaving their guns at the door

Tom Morgan (NPG) asked about the changing marketplace. If there is digital content and a finite pot of money should content be free at point of use or part of the market place? Nick though that the media market place is changing, like the Maryland decision to give away , assumeing some income later.

Is there a consensus as to what is value? No, it's what the user is willing to pay. [No, that's price, value is different, read Marx-TR] We are not clear about our value to users, for example to newcomers to the UK. We have to be clear about different between public and private value.

Session 1: Catherine Grout: JISC vision for digital content

I arrived late for the first session of the JISC Digital Content Conference, and the wifi wouldn't work, at least for me. Others seem to have managed it, so I hope to be able to connect later on. And, at least for the moment, there's no streaming of the Twitter feed. All a bit useless: i shall have to do things the old-fashioned way, making notes and blogging afterwards, when I can get a connection.

I missed Malcolm Read's introduction, but arrived half way though Alison Allden's introduction to Catherine Grout, who gave a tour d'horizon of JISC, from the point twenty years ago when two ISI data-sets were licensed, through the formation of the committee in 1993 and progress in the ten years since 1999, amusingly illustrated with video of some of the technical and socio-political context of the times

She compared the White House website of 1999 with the post-Obama one of 2009 and reminded us of the huge challenges, for example of interoperability. we faced back then.

Some of her slides were very hard to see from the back of the hall, but she covered JISC's role in buying content and in hosting user-generated content, and in integrating content from outside further and higher education, from the BBC, the NHS and schools and museums.

A thread of what Marx called economic shit ran through her talk. She mentioned more than once the economic challenges JISC and the groups it serves face,and the changes that may be brought about by a change of government. How will JISC fare when the public spending axe, Labour or Tory falls?

She ran through the content of JISC collection, mentioning inter alia the JISC FE books deal, though she gave the number of titles as 2,900 rather than the greater than 3,000 figure we've been working with, a site devoted to polar photography I did not know called Freeze Frame, and Archival Sound Recordings which, alas, we have still to get to work with federated access at South Thames. One of her more interesting points was that we do not yet know how the widespread availability of lots of content will change research and teaching and learning. She suggested various ways, the most interesting of which to me was that interdisciplinarity would grow. She also cited a cheese rolling video as an example of the use of content to engage learners. In a curious example of how perceptions change from generation to generation was given when she cited some of the material they have in the East London Theatre archive on the Hackney Empire. It seems the theatre's radical origins, well know to everybody when I lived in the area, are now forgotten.

JISC has fostered the development of new skills and knowledge in digitising and managing digital content; they have responded to government imperatives: industrial activism, value for money, and the green agenda. On the sustainability front they have many partners eg JISC NEH Digitisation, European partners and the Strategic Content Alliance, which aims to develop content for every citizen and respond to Digital Britain. She mentioned Digipedia, an attempt to develop guidebook for digital life cycle

She posed some questions to the audience: how should JISC sustain services? By offering content free to all, free to education, supported by advertising, or on some PFI-type model? (No, no to this last idea).

She showed us a video made by the builders Laing in the 1960s using Pete Seeger's song Little Boxes. Laing. or the advertising agency who made the film, had totally missed the satirical point of Seeger's song.

There are rough seas ahead and times will be economically tough; the momentum for digitising assets is growing, we are better at showing impact and value of work suggestion; but there is a commonplace view that the slump will hit the public sector 18 months after private

There are some advantages: she suggested the growth of Web 2.0 (though she gave Google Video as an example of Web 2.0: I'm not sure I would have chosen that ); there will efficiency and quality gains; the desire for collaboration will grow.

In questions form the floor she was asked where the UK stood internationally; ahead, more or less was her answer. What could JISC do to improve the position of copyright of visual materials? Someone asked about work on information literacy agendas. Catherine said it starts in nursery school, JISC is exploiting digital literacy, with different age groups and at different stages in education in a multi-pronged approach.

Someone else asked about the mass digitisation of photographic collections. While lots of text, audio and video have been digitised, photography lags behind and there are hundreds of thousands of photos. Catherine's answer was to work with subject communities.

Someone from EDINA said that we needed to foster an attitude of critical appraisal, for example to Google suggestions.