Conference 2007: David Baker: Feedback from the Symposium
David Baker, Principal, College of St Mark and St John, with Sarah Porter and Stuart Dempster
More, live, notes from the meeting can be found on the Strategic Content Alliance Blog
Themes:
- Towards alignment of international content inititives
- Business models/partnerships/roles
- Governance (licencing, IP)
- Tools and infrastructure
- Communities of practice
- Advocacy and tools for this, vocabulary
Approach:
- informal collaboration
- looking at small experiments
- series of events that would make sense internationally
- Emphasis on a range of projects of strategic value
- Begin with a mapping exercise (already undertaking some of that with the Strategic Content Alliance
- Identify areas where additional funding would bring closer collaboration
- Stress marketing
Investigations:
- Look at how funders co-operate to best effect - social networking tools, get comms depts to collaborate
- Work on existing digital collections and look at complementary business models
- Real case studies and assessments
- Build scenarios - including some radical ones (what if something had not happened?)
- Look at non-specialist models (eg buying holidays or books online)
Sustainability:
- How have traditional repositories been sustained?
- Information sharing on what didn’t work (honesty required!)
- Also focus on what did work (special collections revolutionised by digitisation)
- Metrics - taking decisions about funding or bidding for funding
- Matching funding models - public/private - requirement that results be made publicly available
- Longevity strategies (eg Lexus/Nexus)
- Look at supply versus demand-led approaches - what’s the end product?
- Identify the social media component
Tools:
- What will our role be after mass digitisation?
- hat might we do that makes a difference?
- Seamless, invisible, intelligent technology (the ‘Chris Batt challenge?
- Emphasis on specialists - selectors and bibliographers brought together to facilitiate transnational developments of guides and knowledge environments
- Develop alerting tools including forecasting tools
- Emphasis on personalisation
IPR:
- Content owner versus digitiser - who owns what
- Material could always be re-digitised
- Don’t eternalise the present
- Look at Google-type arrangements creatively
- How do we exploit what is clearly going to be a new environment
- End users don’t care who owns what!
SP: skills gap with business models and a lack of understanding of what is appropriate and SCA will try to disseminate and share good practice and could also be done internationally
Areas of focus for development
- Funding for imaginative exploitation of material - basis for advocacy through satisfied customers
- Strategic subjects - improve access for the general public
- Analyse gaps and fill them
- Bring together existing resources + non-print materials (topics with a critical mass of literary materials and context and content eg maps)
- Bring relevant stakeholders together in intelligent digitisation programmes, generating international interest and activity: American War of Independence, History of Chocolate, Islamic Studies + 20-30 more
We need to maintain the momentum - possibility of another symposium in a year’s time - in the mean time develop scenarios, bring teams together such as communication teams and projects where there is a synergy
SP: always focused on concrete outcomes and we will be talking to come partners about extending some of the work and it won’t just be UK or US focused by much broader - a tangible outcome - we need to carry on the conversation on the blog and through email - want to keep it informal and light and make it happen - we want to come up with the list of 20-30 projects - in Islamic Studies want to start something quite soon
Discussion
Ricky Erway: urge focus on institutions continuing to select and digitise individual projects while also working on building a higher, collaborative level
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