NDF stands for National Digital Forum - a coalition of museums, archives, art galleries, libraries and government departments working together to enhance electronic access to New Zealand’s culture and heritage.
The National Digital Forum runs an annual conference, bringing together people working with digital collections. The conference attendees primarily come from the GLAM sector (GLAM stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). This year’s NDF conference was held in
I came away from the conference thinking about three key concepts: finding content; connecting content; and how technology could have a personality.
Finding Content
How we can make our digital content (like the photographs in Heritage Images Online) more easily found? One of the most important factors in finding information is content metadata. Content metadata is information like titles, creators, subjects and locations which in an ideal world would be attached to every digital object. Unfortunately there are plenty of objects out there with insufficient content metadata. One way to improve the metadata is to allow members of the wider community to add information about objects (a process similar to tagging). This is known as user-contributed metadata. Digital NZ presented a session about tools they are developing to allow user-contributed metadata to be added to their records. At the moment they are working on location data – providing a map where users can pinpoint locations associated with the object (and leave comments explaining why). If users add information to Digital NZ’s ACL-sourced records, we would have the option of importing that information back into our own databases.
Connecting Content
Another way to make our digital content more easily found is to improve the connections between our separate objects. This means finding ways to reduce the divisions and differences between all the databases, tools and portals we are producing. This concept generated a lot of discussion but no answers.
One suggestion was to improve the consistency of our policies and the way they are explained, especially around the ability to reuse content. At present most institutions lock their content down and publish a variety of statements restricting re-use – even though a lot of the content is actually in the public domain. Lewis Brown from Digital NZ called very passionately for a global change to all our policies on reuse, but other attendees disagreed (also passionately). There was however general agreement that we could all at least provide more plain English information about what exactly is permissable and what is not – and we could develop a consistent lexicon and iconography, so that users receive this information in a standard format.
Reflecting personality in technology
Daniel Incandela from the Indianapolis Museum of Art opened the conference with a call for us to allow our technology to “reflect a personality”. The museum’s website has a range of content produced by many of the museum staff – by engaging staff they give ‘personality’ to the site. They also aren’t afraid to try different ways of showing information about the museum and their collections – here’s one example. Daniel argued that institutions can be far too conservative and unwilling to take even small risks. He showed us some videos he made for the museum which at the time of filming seemed hugely risky, but now just seem like interesting videos!
Nina Simon from Museum 2.0 expanded on this theme, talking about the importance of creating a conversation with your audience – by all means ask questions, but it’s even more important to actually care about the answers! And we heard about the National Library of New Zealand’s experiments with Twitter. NLNZ use Twitter to send out ‘teaser’ tweets which link back to items in their digital collections. Another example of how taking a risk can engage audiences in new ways.
NDF 2009 was challenging but rewarding. Thanks ACL for sending me.
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