Shaping a Common Language for Culture

Shaping a Common Language for Culture : 

Shaping a Common Language for Culture Nick Poole, Chief Executive, Collections Trust

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Introduction About Collections Trust A look to the past The state of Documentation today Convergence and integration The change in emphasis Some conclusions

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About Collections Trust The UK organisation for Collections Management Formerly known as MDA Responsible for raising standards & best practice Now responsible for the Digital Agenda An holistic view

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A look to the past...

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Thanks to: Museum of Jewish Studies, Prague

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MDA Simple Object Card

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Adlib Information Systems

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About the past... The impulse to Document is fundamentally the same A taxonomic approach to object collections An appeal to the empirical and objective truth A completist agenda – Document Everything An impulse towards standardisation

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But... Some big things have happened in the last 100 years Museums are now publishers People expect, and want to participate in services The line between management informationand narrative information has blurred Documentation became metadata

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Documentation today ‘Documentation’ as a technical definition relating to museum information has, at best, 5 years left to live Documentation, cataloguing, information management – all are becoming one Documentation will become KnowledgeManagement & Business Intelligence

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Documentation today The great challenge to Documentation lies in articulating a clear and compelling case for the role of information in service delivery – ask not what your museum can do for you, but what you can do for your museum!

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Convergence and Integration Internal driver – there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ museum collection External driver – the consumer expects seamless access to rich, well-described content

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The diversity of collections A museum is likely to manage artefacts, books, records, born-digital material, multimedia etc At a level of abstraction, there is no difference Insisting on the uniqueness of museum information forces redundancy Standards, systems, processes and skillsare already converging

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The change in emphasis In the past, systems were dumb, so we had to make information more clever This placed the burden of responsibility on us to standardise words and meanings This process is fundamentally counter-intuitiveto human beings – we don’t work that way

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The change in emphasis Now, systems are getting clever, which means we can allow the information to be dumb(er) Semantics gets us out of the hole of having to standardise meaning, up to a point Instead of a reductionist approach – reduce everything down to 1 dataset, we can glory in the diversity of information and context We can let the network effect do its thing

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Some conclusions Document Everything doesn’t work There are too many standards for standards to matter The basic requirement to manage assets does work We can crowdsource the layering of meaning We can let systems take the strain We can unlock the silos

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Some conclusions We don’t really need a common language for culture We need a common commitment to openness Progress will do the rest

Nick Poole+44 (0)1223 316 028nick@collectionstrust.org.uk : 

Nick Poole+44 (0)1223 316 028nick@collectionstrust.org.uk