Building Digital Museums, Libraries and Archives David Dawson Senior Policy Adviser (Digital Futures)

Netful of Jewels The new network will be a personal cultural medium for the age of personal learning. People want museums to provide collection related information and they want interactive, participative services, too. Both are essential to the digital museum. Museum resources of all kinds must be linked to those from libraries, archives, universities and other arts, humanities and science institutions worldwide.

Personalised content theme Aims to: design learning around the learner help learners build their individual capacity Through: resolution of IPR, licensing and copyright issues to support fair use policies tools and support for practitioners to create, adapt, re-use and share quality digital resources improved access to and discovery of digital resources

What do teachers want easy access to stuff high quality, rights cleared exemplars of how it can be used … easy access to expertise not to have to understand the landscape

What is MLA doing?

24 Hour Museum new funding from DfES, through MLA to develop as a ‘cultural sector broker’ –search service to enable teachers and schools to more easily find out about educational opportunities offered to them by cultural sector organisations –enable teachers to find out the education resources that are available to them from the cultural sector, such as online content, educational workshops and visits to exhibitions

Cultural Sector Broker what does this mean? how could we create it? we have many components already … –24 Hour Museum –Cornucopia –MICHAEL –People’s Network Discover Service –A2A, Archives Hub etc –plus ???

Cornucopia online database of museum collections system for collection descriptions – different interfaces for different user communities –Cecilia – music libraries –Inspire – cross-sectoral library collections –Subject Specialist Networks Egyptology

MICHAEL Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage –now 14 countries across EU –European portal in development digital collections –websites, online learning resources –databases, CD / DVDs will link to education search infrastructures –Curriculum Online, EU Schoolnet, JISC services etc etc

People’s Network Discover Service harvests other databases (OAI, web services) –PAS, BL Collect Britain, Fitzwilliam –more to come - a condition of Renaissance / Designation Funding being used as basis for other projects –20 th Century London –NE ‘Single Point of Access’ access to object / item level content

European Digital Library initiated by France i2010 Strategy for the Information Society –flagship initiative – Quality of Life Conclusions in final draft – adoption by Ministers Council 13 th November

What is a digital library? different definitions … –Google print –Open Content Alliance –EU Digital Library lots of stuff from different places brought together value added by the aggregation

What are the challenges? organisational –how can this scale of service be managed? –how can it be sustained –public / private relationships technical –finding the gems amongst the junk –relevance in the eye of the users –making sense of metadata –just how many languages …