Digital Convergence at the AWM

From: malbooth,
13 hours ago

SlideShare Link

This isn’t going to be comprehensive. It is just a few observations that I came away with from Information Online 2009. As I gave a pre-conference workshop and a keynote address, I think it is probably up to others to make more detailed observations. I believe that my keynote address has been recorded and will eventually be podcast somewhere, so I’ll link to that when I read about it. The photos used above (by Neerav Bhatt) are some of the more interesting slides that I used in my presentation.

I was a tad annoyed that many in the audience got hooked up about a minor point that I made. I said that we should not obsess so much about metadata. I think we’ve talked and debated so much about it for so long now (with very little real progress) that we just need to start making other things happen without waiting for it to be “perfected”. It is I believe, with Copyright and “stakeholder consultation”, used as an excuse not to progress things. If Flickr, Google, Amazon or iTunes had waited for us to agree on a schema they’d still not exist. I said a lot of other things, but all the metadata crusaders got hooked up on that wee point and missed all of the others. Typical.

A number of points I made and that were also made by Paul Hagon of NLA and happiness guru Liz Lawley were later re-inforced in other keynotes by Laura Campbell of the Library of Congress and the futurist, Andy Hines. (I’m very glad that we didn’t have to listen to anyone banging on about a new management theory from their recent MBA.)

I took some rough notes at Laura’s keynote address:

Keynote 21 January 2008 – Strategic Directions and Initiatives (on the Library of Congress’ last 20 years)

Strategies
1. Increasing access – American Memory, Thomas (workings of Congress) & their Learning Page – to general public and education audience (this to me was quite similar to our history in opening and broadening public access at the AWM, albeit on a smaller scale). They, like us needed to broaden access to be relevant. They have 110 million online users and 2 million onsite users (we have about 850,000 visitors).
2. Expanded offerings to new channels: embracing new partners & new sectors. Global Gateway – vast foreign collections. eg. the national newspaper program. Can search 1,000s of newspapers. 1 mill online now(?). Flickr Commons pilot – 3,000 images offered (Depression photos) – 10.4 million views in a few months – inviting user annotations and descriptions – all captured. Viewership up. They also arrangement with You Tube.
3. Networks – NDIIPP & WDL – changing work in the future:

• National Preservation Program (NDIIPP) – $100m in 2000. Guided by NDSA Board (all 27 of them). The Preserving Digital Heritage report in 2002 mapped out strategy for distributed network of trusted partners (never to be centralised). Goals – included at-risk content, identification of tools & partners, developing a strategy. 130 partners because even LoC can’t collect everything. Infrastructure addressed to share content. Had eight consortia groups for geospatial, political business/economics, cultural, public & social services data. They have 70 Tb of data. Partners include: universities, broadcasters, commercial enterprises, states, federal agencies, new businesses, tech companies, and other national libraries. Also IIPC – the international internet preservation consortium. 37 member libraries working on this now. they resisted temptation to start with by-laws and got on with accomplishing it. A sensible way to move forward. Now have 248 Tb and they are expecting 650 Tb by 2013. Laura: “Taking early action allows you to learn by doing!”. She also put up a slide about them being catalytic, collaborative, engaging multiple platforms, leveraged networks, shared resources.

• WDL – prototype launched with UNESCO a couple of years ago. No “show-runners” – all their own content. 25 partners now. You can browse by locations, type, time, institution, etc. – for books, manuscripts, maps photos, film and sound (more audiovisual than anything else); heaps of intelligent search (via annotations, curator videos, etc.); multi-lingual (translator services). Memory packages are available. They’ve set up a mirror site at Alexandria. See their online concept video (it is pretty good). (Prototype and Concept videos available here.)

Final comments from Laura: it is not the technology that is the hard part, it is the human element. That will never change. She also mentioned making choices about what work you are in. She said her early work at the LoC was “triage”, then pushing out content, and now building on all of that and embracing networks, and solutions. They did consult some wise gurus about the future to learn about the driving forces of the future. “Creative collaboration is the key to future invention and innovation.” Not a perfect story, but a lot to be said for real collaboration – not easy, but a lot to be said for it when it works.

I didn’t take many other notes that I can pass on right now. I took some notes from Andy Hines’ presentation, but left them at home today on another laptop.

I did like what the State Library of Victoria is doing to connect with students, principally using their Inside a Dog website. Great stuff.

Oh, I almost forgot: Libraries Australia (courtesy of Paul Hagon) have now started their own Ning site, so check it out.

Yes, sorry. I spent much of November away in Iraq and the Northern Arabian Gulf on a curatorial/collecting visit with some elements of our defence forces. It is the first time the Australian War Memorial has ever sent an archivist/librarian to a war zone and only our second curatorial visit since the Second World War. I took about 2,000 photographs for our collection, gathered a lot of donations, recorded (digitally, using Audacity) about 30 oral history interviews, and identified some records and items we were interested in for our collection (post-deployment).
Since that time I’ve not been entirely sure about what details or images I can actually use in my blog. I certainly didn’t want to compromise the security of any of our forces still deployed overseas. It is a bit frustrating because I think their role and the good work they are doing is not well understood, particularly by the Australian public, but there it is.
Then, in December I heard that I’d won a new job at the University of Technology in Sydney. That too wasn’t public knowledge until more recently, so I couldn’t really say much about it until UTS had made a staff announcement.
It has been a really busy time for me as over the Xmas period I really needed to catalogue all of the photos that I am leaving in our collection and I had to prepare a workshop on the management of digitisation projects and a keynote address for Information Online in Sydney.
I hope to get back to posting more on this blog as things settle down, including me, in Sydney, soon.

Images on Flickr from Hawaii. I’m hoping to upload more progressively after the race.

James Nachtwey: Photojournalist

Photojournalist James Nachtwey is considered by many to be the greatest war photographer of recent decades. He has covered conflicts and major social issues in more than 30 countries.
He is the winner of the 2007 TED Prize, awarding him $100,000 and one wish to change the world. This was his wish: “I’m working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age.”
James Nachtwey’s Homepage: www.jamesnachtwey.com

This is great. Brewster Kahle speaks well and from experience. It isn’t an academic theory. I like the way he breaks down the challenge into a manageable, fund-able, do-able program. Some other observations that made me clap and cheer wildly:

• Boston Public Library’s “free to all” statement that is carved in stone & that of the Carnegie Library “Free to the People” (do we really want to be different when we push our content online?);
• producing the best we have to offer;
• not sending stuff you love to India for scanning (we didn’t either);
• aiming at US$0.10 per page, or as he says the same cost as Xeroxing;
• not scanning pages that will end up looking like a fax (or worse still a print-out from microfilm) – scan in colour for the look of the book;
• the convergence of, on one side the library world (starting with out-of-Copyright and out-of-print material) and on the other side the publishers (eg. Amazon) starting with what is currently in print; and
• favouring public (free, universal access) over private (locked up) digitisation programs (me too).

So, watch this for yourself. Even if you are not looking at digitising books, there is a lot in it. TED.com hits the mark yet again.

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!).

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.

Firefox is currently my browser of choice. I use it at home on my Macs and at work (as I managed to get in before the IT crowd started regulating use of it because like many social networks, Firefox might cause chaos, anarchy and the collapse of civilisation as we know it).
Anyway, I have started using the Yoono add-on to see whether it has any benefit in “socialising” my browser to manage feeds to my networks and perhaps to other stuff like news feeds. You too can try it here.
I’ll let you know how it goes for me as I’m a really new user and still haven’t explored it much. It sounds appealing and I agree with this post from ReadWriteWeb that it might enable me to keep track of a few things that have started to clutter up my Google Reader.

There have been a lot of posts about Google’s Chrome browser, but I liked these early reflections best, from the wonderful JOHN TANgerine.

Image above: Matthew Mitcham, from his Facebook page. His win was the moment of the Games for me, marginally ahead of Sally McLellan, Jared Tallent and Steve Hooker.

Image above: Italy’s Giovanna Trillini (L) competes against Cuba’s Misleydis Company during the Women’s individual Foil elimination round of 32 match on August 11, 2008 at the Fencing Hall of National Convention center, as part of the 2008 Beijing Olympic games. Trillini won 15-7. (ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/Getty Images).

This post will by dynamic. I will keep adding my observations as they come to mind. Oh, this definitely has an Australian bias. I wasn’t going to get too interested in the Olympics this time, in fact I really didn’t four years ago, but there were so many brilliant surprises and historic moments this time. These events can only be positive for China.

Opening Ceremonies. Zzzzzzz. Who cares? I do not think that we should need armies to run or entertain us at big sporting events, wearing uniforms or not. Hopefully they will not try to do it in the same way in London. I would rather see the money devoted to sport itself.

Inane morning TV programs. Yum Cha, the lowest of the low. Why? They occupy time that could have been used to show delayed telecasts or at least highlights of events that could not be broadcast live the day before. Mostly they are full of stooopid comments from assorted B-grade idiots who do not understand any sports and seem more interested in self-promotion than anything else. Their only saving grace is that (hopefully) they provide canon-fodder for the acerbic SMH journalist and TV-reviewer Ruth Ritchie. Please Ruth, pleeeeeaaaassseee!!!!

Inspiration. Michael Phelps, Stephanie Rice, Drew Ginn & Duncan Free, the Australian hockey teams, the Australian female swimmers, Emma Snowsill, Jared Tallent, both 470 crews, Sally McLellan, Steve Hooker and perhaps above all the others Matt Mitcham . . . (more to be added I hope). They stood out to me from the sports I managed to watch. Phelps is a complete legend, almost too good to be true. Jared Tallent pushed himself so hard that he threw up twice in the finishing straight, then he backed up with 2nd in the 50 km walk. Their results are not just from four years of work. To do what they do usually requires many more years of extreme devotion and more hard work than any of us have ever done. They showcase humanity almost at its peak. We can’t all be Olympians, but their efforts can at least inspire us to overcome inertia, resistance and sheer incompetence in our daily work. How many of them have said that nothing is impossible so far? Did Matt Mitcham and Steve Hooker choke under enormous pressure when the gold was on the line before their final jump? I don’t think so. What fantastic mental strength and belief in their own capability. I was so impressed. Matt’s win was unexpected and certainly against all odds.

Hope. I hope that those we find inspiring are “clean” and that more honest-looking and talented hard workers like all those Jamaican sprinters continue to beat the heck out of all of those big-headed, loud-mouthed, steroid-fed show-offs from you-know-where. And I hope we continue to see more inspirational efforts in the last week. I also hope we never have to see Happy Daddo and his stooopid side kicks associated with serious sport ever again. I hope Jo Griggs continues to be associated with sports broadcasting. She knows what it means and doesn’t try to steal the limelight from the real stars, nor does she feel the need to remind us of her own sporting glory.

Entertainment. The Australian womens’ water polo team coach; all of the gymnasts and divers; Phil Liggett (the doyen of cycling commentators, who could make paint-drying sound exciting); the laconic Mike Turtur (84 Olympic cycling gold medallist and commentator); and Steve Moneghetti whom I will always remember for his impartial, objective and highly technical call of the final moments of the 5,000m event won by Andrew Lloyd at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland: “LLOYDIE, LLOYDIE!!!!!!”. And the brilliant association of fantastic sporting images and drama with Massive Attack’s Teardrop during the final night’s coverage on Seven. It worked for me!

The Olympics and Social Media. For me this was one huge distinction between this and previous Olympics. You didn’t need to donate to Telstra to send a personal message to athletes who had the brains to set up social media profiles. As soon as Sally McLellan won her silver and spread joy to athletics fans all over Australia, I was straight onto her Facebook profile and sent her congratulations. She even mentioned receiving the messages in her post-race media interviews. With Matthew Mitcham I could go even further as someone had set up a fan page for him on Facebook. Within about 36 hours of him making the 10 m platform diving final the total number of his global fans had increased (from memory) by about 4-5,000. This indicates a few very powerful aspects of Social Networks: their viral power, world-wide reach and spread; community (in this case probably strongly GLBT or GLBT-friendly); and the need people have now to express themselves or engage when they feel strongly about something. Whilst those of us in cultural institutions might not always be able to compete with such popular figures and events such as the Olympics, there is nevertheless a lot for us to learn from this.

In conclusion, I would like to add here that I think Matthew’s final gold medal was very important for Australians. His attitude, emotion and his open, honest and very articulate responses to the media left all of us in a very positive frame of mind post-Olympics. I take nothing away from the efforts of previous medal winners, but I feel and I have heard it said elsewhere, that some of the swimmers’ interviews were just too well-drilled and unconvincing. Perhaps Ian Hanson does too good a job with them and now their responses just don’t have half the credibility and spontaneity that Matthew and Sally did. The media just lapped them both up.

These notes come from a talk I attended earlier today at the National Library of Australia on building online communities. The speaker was Chrystie Hill, Director of Community Services at WebJunction.org, from Seattle, WA.

It was interesting to hear about her journey as she spoke using stories, and didn’t just regurgitate facts.

She spoke of the shift in services for things like reference – both physical and in the virtual world. She experienced this when being educated. She has worked in the Seattle Central Library and says that the space is now much better to work in. Then she introduced her four seminal realisations (my term, not hers):

See The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg is about connections between people: pubs build communities.

She also spoke of John Seely Brown and The Social Life of Documents (on FirstMonday): documents build communities.

And Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam and the decline of civic engagement & social capital in US: capital and networks build communities.

Is your library relevant to you (& your needs)? She said hers wasn’t (at the time) and her most important need was to know what her friends were doing: individuals build communities.

Libraries were not accepting their role as community builders (maybe they still don’t understand that role at all?). But US public libraries became carriers for public Internet access in the 1990s. Eventually home and work use of the Internet also grew. People soon began to find themselves on the web – publishing, subscribing & sharing. It became a story of communities and collaboration on a scale never seen before. Now libraries (& librarians) have to be involved to stay relevant. It is about conversations. It is about people who are saying “here is what I am doing”. People sit behind all the tools and experience. It is also about what your friends are doing. So many tools are now available that it can seem overwhelming, so step back and look at what is behind it all.

So, where is the library?

People are finding their own answers easily on the web themselves. Library use is going down while use of email, online bookstores and search engines is going up!

Can libraries cope where the stuff isn’t completely organised or controlled? Probably not. Many public libraries are closing in the US because they lost their relevance and then they lost their funding. See Content, not Containers (an Information Format Trends report from OCLC, 2003).

Do libraries just = books? Do our users think of us for other information needs? Do we just stop making it feel like church?

She then went back to the new Seattle City Library (image appears above in this post) and said it is what a library should look like (if only!). Real visitation went up 300% in its first year. Public access computer use quadrupled. Its spaces are very inviting and its services are very innovative: multi-lingual programs; online assistance; teen services (via MySpace) – with 50% boys participating!. They are building communities daily and get 1,000s of teens involved.

She said we must do better jobs in all libraries. Online tools help us to see our roles as connectors, facilitators, and community builders.

Currently, Chrystie is writing a book and blogging (one of several). She spoke for a while about the work of Webjunction.org – helping to build relevant vibrant, sustainable libraries in every community. Most content comes from members and partners. All of it is wrapped around social engagement. Public access computing and personalisation services were key to this and to building real communities.

What do they do?

They connect, create and learn:

Connect: using wikis, del.icio.us (others follow this without it being promoted, they just find it – they just use one tag to share stuff for all, eg. we could use AWMWSG or AWMRC), micro-blogging (they use Twitter), phone, Flickr groups, Facebook groups and events, and alternate spaces (eg. LinkedIN, engaging widely!)

Create: blogs and wikis, blip.tv (I suspect schools might find this easier to find than our content on www.awm.gov.au or our blocked content on YouTube), and staff are encouraged to contribute elsewhere (blogs, publications, etc.)

Learn: active learning is encouraged, staff/members are surveyed – What was your greatest achievement last year? (part of bi-annual member survey on webjunction.org – results were visually presented in a tag-cloud), speaking engagements, blogging internally and externally encouraged for all staff.

So what does this mean for us at the Memorial? I think we are heading in the right direction. We are not there yet, but we’ve made a good start and even though we might complain about some restrictions placed on us by out IT staff, they have already facilitated much more freedom and innovation in our organisation than many, may others (judging by the tone of questions asked of Chrystie). Our management too have been both supportive and visionary. How many national cultural institutions can boast that they now have these words as their first listed corporate priority for the 2008-2011 period: “Enhance online access through use of emerging web technologies and improved web content”?