Transcript Introducing MDA - Amazon Web Services

What Audience?
The death of Mass-Digitisation and the Rise of the
Market Economy
Nick Poole
Chief Executive
MDA
We used to say that an infinite number of monkeys,
given an infinite amount of time, would re-create the
works of Shakespeare.
Now, thanks to the Internet, we know that isn’t true.
Anonymous
A lesson from history…
Print
Woodblock (220BC)
The Internet
Movable type (1040AD)
Lithography (1796AD)
Harry Potter (2001AD)
The Mass Digitisation equation…
nge=€
Where:
n = number of poorly-documented pieces of pot in storage
g = how guilty we feel about the bits of pot
e = the amount of time until the next election
The principle…
The philosophy of mass-digitisation is based on the principle of
the right to access
The right to access is based on a socialist view of public
ownership of culture
The public own it, therefore, the public should have an automatic
right to access it freely
Which is true, except…
Some unfortunate truths…
It will never be possible to document every object in every
collection
There is never going to be enough public investment to pay for
every object to be digitised
A very small number of digitised objects are economically
sustainable in their own right
There is not enough value in the high-value items to pay for the
total-cost-of-ownership of all the low-value ones
Not all objects are created equal…
Value chain
Digitisation
Creates…
Resources
Used in…
Projects
Leading to…
Products
Delivered as…
Services
Which create…
Value
Overhead & staff costs
Cost of equipment/service
Cost of acquiring skills
Software costs
Rights clearance (time + license fees)
Adding value (metadata/content creation)
=
Total cost of ownership
+
+
+
+
+
General public
Family historians
Specialist researchers
?
Richly-described objects
Inventory-level records
Uncatalogued material
The NOF Digitise Example
£70m Government-funded digitisation programme
2,000 projects to digitise cultural assets
Hundreds of thousands of resources digitised
Intended to demonstrate sustainability for 3 years
The majority of projects were inaccessible after 2 years
The sector could not afford the infrastructure to sustain the
services
The Google Print Model
Google enters into partnership with large library
Google pays for mass-digitisation of books
Library users have access to millions of digitised books
Google has access to content for its Google Print initiative
Google recoups its costs by building its brand and increasing
market share
Everybody wins…
Except…
The incidental costs of book digitisation are lower than for
objects
The model depends on a small number of large organisations – it
doesn’t work for the large number of small ones
The library has to pay for the long-term implications of digital
preservation
Because it involves a separate partner, the model doesn’t allow
for future acquisitions
Implications
The economics of mass-digitisation are inherently unsustainable
for cultural organisations
The culture sector doesn’t have the capacity to create the
services necessary to make sense of large datasets
Artefacts, books and manuscripts are different things – and
different types of collection have different requirements
A large amount of money and effort is being expended to meet
the needs of a small part of the market (the academic
researcher)
The solution?
Reduce the cost of supply
by aggregating services
De-risk digitisation by
moving to digitisation
on demand
De-regulate the market
and enable market forces
to apply
Accept that not all content is
equal, or equally valuable
The advantages of the Digitisation on Demand model
Scalable – grows and shrinks with the market
Accessible to large and small organisations
Enables the museum to balance cost, value and price
Flexible enough to recognise the difference between collections
Enables us to build our fund of publicly-accessible digital
material over time, instead of trying to do it all at once
Still allows Governments to ‘commission’ and subsidise
digitisation
Making the supply chain work for us
Aggregating demand into simple services – reducing the number
of ‘points of entry’
Reducing costs of participation
Reducing costs of digital preservation by aggregating demand
for preservation services
Migrating towards eCommerce/microtransactions
Using licensing to control permitted usage
Using transactions to develop market intelligence
Moving from ‘access’ to ‘value’
Access is passive and unrealistic
Access de-emphasises the role of the curator
Access is not sufficient to grow audiences
Our ability to add value to cultural content by selection and
interpretation is what makes us unique in the marketplace
The future sustainability of our online services depends on
making the transition from universal access to sustainable and
valuable service.
Conclusions
Mass-digitisation may not be ‘dead’, but it is only applicable in
certain situations, for certain types of collection
Creating, maintaining and storing a digital asset is expensive and
it is irresponsible to ignore the long-term cost implications
Selective digitisation, based on known market need is the only
way of sustaining digitisation for the culture sector in the longterm
Access does not automatically lead to value
Nick Poole
Chief Executive
MDA
http://www.mda.org.uk
http://www.collectionslink.org.uk
http://ww.culturalpropertyadvice.gov.uk
[email protected]
01223 415 760