All Change: Adapt and Thrive in a Digital Age

Exploiting Digital Datasets

Dr George MallenSystem Simulation Ltd

www.ssl.co.ukgeorge@ssl.co.uk

‘the transformation wrought by ICT extends to the very heart of the museum, challenging its fundamental nature’

Renaissance in the Regions

SSL - the simple facts

Emerging from research work on learning and decision making, founded in 1970 to do contract research on applications of interactive computing

Early projects on system modelling, decision support and educational gaming

Then visualisation and animation Then IR, museums, ePublishing, image

libraries and higher education

Current business

20 people based in Covent Garden, London~£1M revenues, market sectors:Cultural heritageHigher educationImage librariesPublishing & information servicesCollaborative R&D

Selection of clients and partners

The British Museum, the V&A, the Royal Academy, London’s Transport Museum, the Courtauld Institute, JISC, the 24 Hour Museum, SCRAN, Getty Images, Haymarket Medical, IFIS, MA, BFI, BBC, RTE, EC, Wellcome Trust …

EU Framework projects – FPs 4, 5 and 6 on cultural heritage projects

Systems for

Collection management

Public AccessInterpretation

ExploitationPortals

MUSIMS Cataloguing

Conforms to standards • Objects (SPECTRUM/CIDOC)

• Books (MARC)

• Archives (ISAD(G))

• Images (NISO, VRA)

Supports museum proceduresAdapts to different uses

The Catalogue is the key

Individual museums

S taf f wo rks tatio ns

M us e um re p o s ito ry

W e b b ro ws e rs

F ire wall

L o c al p ub licac c e s ss e rvic e s W e b s e rvic e s

V is ito r te rm inals

Delivery Channels

Web sitesKiosks & interactivesPublications PDAsMobile phones

The Royal Academy

The British Museum COMPASS

SCRAN

Sense of Place South East

Memoria

24 Hour Museum

Museums Association

Public access to the catalogue

Thematic interpretation

Contextual information

Commissioned content

Journalism

Participation

Visitor kiosk

Exploiting Digital Assets

• The digital value chain

• Business models

• Future developments

The Digital Value Chain

• Digitising

• Content management (DAM)

• Content aggregation

• Production

• Delivery

Business models

• Ownership – objects, multimedia representations, metadata

• Licensing

• Public private partnerships

Future developments

• Communities of interest and practice

• Social tagging

• Automatic metadata and the semantic web

• Increasing system intelligence

• New displays and interfaces

Finally, an Evolutionary Perspective

Around 70,000 years ago there was a near extinction of homo sapiens. After the eruption of Mt Toba and the ensuing ice age perhaps only a few tens of thousands humans survived. From them has come a truly astonishing rate of cultural evolution. Why, and where’s it going?

Culture as Externalised Knowledge

Survival after near extinction probably largely based on ability to pass on skill and knowledge - “show and tell”

Transition from hunter gatherer to settled communities demanded agreed or imposed rules and conventions. Set down as laws, ie externalised

Religions as accepted beliefs with externalised texts and iconographies

Scientific method as means of building external knowledge base

Electronic information systems now main repositories for scientific knowledge and cultural history

MLAs as guardians and teachers of cultural history

Broadly we can see universities becoming the creators of new knowledge (high end knowledge markets), and industry/commerce becoming the creators of new technologies

Will MLAs then become the guardians of history with a key educating/mediation role advising governance, policy formation and decision?

The big question – how to develop the role of cultural history in tempering the application of knowledge and technology?

Further reading

The Digicult project at www.digicult.info

“Digital Knowledge Exploitation: ICT, memory institutions and innovation from cultural assets” by Carla de Laurentis, Jnl of Technology Transfer Vol31, No 1 Jan 06, Springer

Some SSL driven websites

http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/compass/ http://images.vam.ac.uk/

 http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/http://www.sopse.org.uk/http://medphoto.wellcome.ac.uk/http://photos.ltmcollection.org/ http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/postcodes/ http://www.untoldlondon.org.uk/ http://www.museumofcroydon.com/