What Audience?

Nick Poole

Chief Executive

MDA

The death of Mass-Digitisation and the Rise of the Market Economy

Anonymous

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.

A lesson from history…

Woodblock (220BC) Movable type (1040AD) Lithography (1796AD) Harry Potter (2001AD)

Print

The Internet

The Mass Digitisation equation…

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

n g e = €

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…

Digitisation

Projects

Products

Services

Value

Value chain

Resources

Creates…

Used in…

Leading to…

Delivered as…

Which create…

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

Uncatalogued material

Inventory-level records

Richly-described objects

?

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 supplyby aggregating services

De-risk digitisation bymoving to digitisationon 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 long-term

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

nick@mda.org.uk

01223 415 760