Q: What are the business models – how do we make this sustainable?
A: (Mike Ellis) Some of this activity can reduce costs – so not revenue stream, but cheaper to do stuff. Requires creative thinking – need to talk to marketeers and communications specialists. E.g. National Gallery – partnered with commercial company to produce iphone app – which was sold
A: (Dan Greenstein) We are going to have to take money away from existing activities – e.g. University of California is now boycotting Nature due to price increases. Need to make sure those things that don’t work go away.
A: (Jo Pugh) Some of this stuff just ‘has to be done’ – freeing our data might be like preservation – doesn’t make us money, but we do it.
A: (Andy Neale) Some of this can be done as part of ‘business as usual’ – tacks on to existing activity
A: (Mike Ellis) Income from protecting some of this stuff (e.g. picture libraries selling use of pictures) is not that great – and there are costs with things like chasing copyright etc.
A: (Jo Pugh) V&A changed rules over what they could do – became more permissive and revenue went up, and they were able to reduce staff
A: (Dan Greenstein) Some publishers protecting backlists in anticipation of a revenue stream that isn’t available, and yet they could realise revenue streams
A: (Stuart Dempster) Look at Ithaca model case studies – real world financials about how much it costs to operate types of digital services – and will be updated this year so will be able to see impact of downturn. Also recommend looking at government technology policy – will be source for innovative practice. Now seeing funders requiring exit strategies for project from day 1.
Q: (Sally Rumsden) Interested in metadata. What is ‘good enough’ metadata. What should we be doing to make sure people can find stuff reliably
A: (Andy Neale) DigitalNZ took any metadata – some items only have title, and even some of those title are ‘title unknown’ – but even this is a hook. When you start pushing this into resource discovery systems with faceting etc. start to expose the quality of the metadata – can highlight to contributors problems they didn’t appreciate, and result in improvements over time. Even if you only have a title – this can still be useful…
A: (Tom Heath) Good enough is in the eye of the beholder. We can’t anticipate. However, you could flag stuff you aren’t happy with so it is clear to users
A: (Dan Greenstein) Metadata enhancement adds to cost. And specialist materials have a particularly high cost, and delivers value to a small number of people. We aren’t good at saying ‘no’ to stuff. We have to be clear what we can afford – have to model costs of project more effectively.
A: (Liz Lyon) Trove project (in Australia) using crowdsourcing to improve metadata
A: (Balviar Notay) Some projects already looking at how text mining tools can enhance metadata for digital repositories – although perhaps unlikely to solve all problems so likely to see mixed manual and automatic approaches
A: (David Kay) If you put stuff out, evidence from Internet Archive and others, authors become motivated to improve and add more. But have to get it out there first
A: (Mike Ellis) Look at Powerhouse Museum collection – using OpenCalais to generate tags. Picasa starting to add object recognition – some automated tools improving, but still some issues. Also look at Google tagging game, V&A also doing user engagement to generate content from humans
A: (Peter Burnhill) Think about what metadata already existed and reuse or leverage that data