what will the museum of the future be like?

Collections Data goes CC at the Powerhouse Museum

I just read at Creative Commons Australia that the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has gone all CC. In part to introduce this sort of practice to Museum 3.0, I am happy to applaud the Powerhouse's move. Museum documentation is a deep recess that is often used as the last bastion of museum authority, rather than a situated, though accruate, description. To open-up our catalogues to use, and perhaps expansion, is an important first step to open up this last bastion of a single identity for objects.

The Powerhouse Museum has also put a large number of its images into the public domain under Flickr Commons which is a very bold move indeed. However, the post went further to say that "In an Australian (and possibly world) first, they’ve released all of their collection documentation under CC."

Now, as anyone who knows me knows, I fully support such a move, but it most certainly is not a world first. The Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, at the University of Cambridge, has been offering all of its collections documentation on-line since 1996, and have been offering it explicitly under Attribution, Non-commercial CC license since 2007. Not to complain, mind you, as I applaud the move by the Powerhouse. Just to set the record straight.

Tags: commons, creative, documentation

Next Post >

Comment by Angelina Russo on April 4, 2009 at 9:49pm: Hello Robin
Thanks for the post. I believe it is very important for the sector to recognise how the early adopters have shaped the contemporary environment. I would like to ask the same question of you as I asked of Seb at the Powerhouse: what are your thoughts on the communities which develop around this content? I'm interested in the shift from cultural networks such as CHIN to the development of value networks such as Flickr Commons where communities are able to self organise both in terms of cultural knowledge and their contribution to collection records. As someone who has been working in this non-commercial CC world for a significant time, have you found that unexpected communities have formed around your content?

Comment by Robin Boast on April 5, 2009 at 3:54am: Hi Angelina,
Sorry for the delay, but I have been offline all afternoon. That is a very good, and important, question. The short answer to your question is, no. However, the reasons for this are very interesting. The problem with making catalogue records available is not just that it is hard for people to take them away and reuse them (due to data structures and copyright), but far more because the language of description and classification used in museum documentation is so inaccessible.
We are just about to publish a study that we did with colleagues in Nunavut (Canada) and at UCLA. It was called Blobgects, where we put our catalogue of Canadian arctic material into a Wordpress blog. This was to allow people to comment, tag and generally access the catalogue data within a media that was more friendly. We intentionally did not add images to test how people would engage directly with the catalogue data. The results were interesting. People hated it. Not because of the blog format, but because they couldn't understand, or find anything useful in, the very specialized descriptive language.
Sorry to ramble on here, but I think that documentation generally is one of the most under-theorized, and under examined, aspects of museum practice. We have a very poor idea of what it is when we document our collections, what effects such levels of standardization have, how to make these, or any other, descriptive accounts useful, meaningful or distributable. To answer your direct question, finally, I think that the only way to start getting value networks, such as Flickr Commons, is for museums to find ways of getting their digital information and resources out there, outside of the museum and into the communities of interest themselves. As long as documentation is an institutionally proscribed trope, broadcast to our publics, it will be of little use to them.
You might be interested in some of the stuff we have been publishing recently:
Srinivasan, R., R. Boast, K. M. Becvar and J. Furner (2009) Blobgects: Digital Museum Catalogs and Diverse User Communities. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 60(4): 666-678.
Srinivasan, Ramesh, Robin Boast, Katherine Becvar and Jim Enote (2009) Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 34(3): .
Srinivasan, Ramesh, Jim Enote, Katherine M. Becvar, and Robin Boast (2009) Critical and Reflective Uses of New Media Technologies in Tribal Museums. Museum Management and Curatorship, 24(2): 169_189.
Boast, R., M. Bravo and R. Srinivasan (2007) Return to Babel: Emergent diversity, digital resources, and local knowledge. The Information Society. 23(5):395-403.