Cultural Heritage

Last week Liz Lyon (Director of UKOLN) and I spent some time working on UKOLN’s response to the DCMS report Empower, Inform, Enrich.

We welcomed the fact that many of the think pieces and case studies acknowledged the importance of the digital environment within public library services. However, the brevity of each individual contribution meant that there was an over-simplification of both impact and issues and there were gaps. The People’s Network is rightly praised for its success but now needs new goals, strategic direction and technical infrastructure. References to successful reading initiatives did not include Stories from the Web which combines library-based meetings and access to a virtual environment. What about the gaps? No mention of digital citizens nor of an increasing use of the mobile Web. No mention of community participation in building local resources and services nor of innovative ideas such as Citizen Science Hubs. [See Serving Digital Citizens, Liz Lyon's presentation to the LGA/MLA Conference, London, Dec. 2009.] Finally, we drew attention to the need to learn lessons from the past. A national, publicly searchable database is a worthwhile ambition but there are technical and logistical issues that will need to be resolved. Moving RevealWeb from an institutional server to UnityUK without a public-view licence removed visually impaired people’s option to find resources themselves. EnrichUK, the NOF-digi Web site, has disappeared – what happened to all those digitised resources? Work is underway to find out but the lesson is to think about long-term preservation and curation at the start of digitisation projects.

It’s not unusual for UKOLN to be responding to consultation documents from either the academic and cultural heritage sectors and writing collaboratively with a wider group of people requires a particular functionality. What about Web 2.0? Google Docs is a free service that allows you to create and store documents – this might be a good choice if it’s a one-off collaboration. Using Google Docs also means you have a public space to ‘publish’ the finished document if you want to. Alternatively you might try using a wiki (institutional or a free service) – this might be useful if there is other supporting or background material you want to store as well. [See UKOLN Briefing Paper An Introduction to Wikis.] The wiki approach is also useful if the document is going to have lots of sections as the text can be split up to be worked on. This is useful if you want to assign different people to write different sections of the text. Whatever your approach, it’s good practice to have one person in charge.