Sarah Porter (Chair)
with feedback from session moderators:
Stuart Dempster
Philip Pothen
Alastair Dunning
Paola Marchioni
Emma Beer
PM: project management of digitisation projects
Three key issues:
1. Striking the right balance between the role of project managerand the role of the champion of the project and making use of users through panels and testing;
2. Quality assurance within mass digitisation – Histpop had a policy of zero tolerance and checked images one by one. Others advocated a “good enough” approach; need for collaborative tools to help institutions manage the QA process;
3. Flexibility of approach – tools are just tools, and to manage communication
EB: access and identity management
- one thing to digitise but what do you want your users to have at the end of it if so need to think about access management from the outset.
- being mindful of identity: web 2.0 brings new challenges, new area with things like Facebooks
- trusted and authentic resources can be as invisible as running water
- importance of getting organisations on board as identity providers. they need to either manage them or ignore them
- scare-mongering may be one way to get organisations on board
- need to have licences that allow authorised people to access resources any place any time
SD: business models and sustainability
- convergence of media and new cultures of access and requirement of model licence
- evidence of the cost of digitisation and even fully automated systems involve some kind of human interaction
- need a leap of imagination with value and monetisation
- risk of human vertigo with plethora of online content
AD: e-content and repositories
- JISC repositories programme: one example is the Ethos project to digitise theses
- Lessons learned and case studies – need to have trusted and preservable copies – can be a long process
- Survey of how academics share content and email very popular with three quarters using it – repositories is low – this is a proble
- comparison made between institutional repositories (not fun) and web 2.0 (fun)
- web 2.0 is innovative and moves quickly so there are many good reasons why we should be thinking of integrating web 2.0 tools with institutional repositories or is it overhyped? It’s a global not a local phenomenon, often does not provide metadata or IPR clearance, problems of authenticity
- tension between trustedness of repositories and the fun of web 2.0
- should we be working with the Googles, FLickrs etc? no final answer as very different viwpoints came out – we need some quick research and thinking on how we work with the private sector so we provide what our usurs want
PP: e-content collection, selection and management
- Question not so much how to select but how to naviaget – it’s not selection criteria but tools
- In Germany, competing demands for digi are resolved through peer review
- Users not interested in mechanisms but are interested in effective techniques, for integration of collections with the way they search then, for value added functionality
- Need to look at not just user demand but rareness, and a collection approach to get critical mass
- Google question – do they go for the low hanging fruit, the out of copyright etc and so the difficulty becomes the higher hanging fruit
- Opening up digital resources to the whole population, not just education
- Google may be the hot topic right now but need to think long term