Victoria & Albert Museum - Insights from Gail Durbin - Part 1

I met Gail Durbin, at the Museums & the Web Conference last year in Montreal.   Gail directs the online activities of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. 

Recently we had a conversation about the kinds of web programs the Museum is exploring.

Opening Up All Our Content on-line

The V & A wishes to establish its brand as a global source of information about art and design and the website is a very important part of that strategy. 

“What we need to think about very seriously is opening up all our content to other people who want to take it away and use it for their purposes.  We have a management group – The Digital Futureplan - that is enthusiastic about an API so I hope this is something we can pull off and watch how the experiment works.”

Aren’t there a lot of obstacles to do this?

Copyright

Durbin notes that while there are plenty of copyright issues with artists whose works they hold, their Director, Mark Jones feels that it is essential to make the collections as accessible as possible.  Everything that furthers that he sees as an entirely good thing.

Commercial Models – Letting go in one area to open up other possibilities

Last year, the museum set up a system to allow people to download hi-res images for non-commercial purposes.  This also extends to publishers that want to do print runs of under 4,000 copies. 

Says Durbin, 

“ We need to be prepared to take risks. I think he [Jones] thinks that the commercial model has changed these days.  The cost of supplying hi-res images to people individually is actually quite high and we can supply this at no charge or at no considerable cost to ourselves on the web.   There will be other benefits that would come out of this - more people coming to the website and the online shop will do better.” 

Durbin goes on to say that while there are certainly concerns on the part of the commercial arm, and their concerns need to be taken into account, museums need to look at new models.  Maybe they will lose money in an area where they  previously made money, but they could open up new potentials in other areas.

Online Collection Information System  (CIS)

Another project the V&A has in its plans is to put the collection information system (CIS) online. 

The V&A holds over a million objects in its collection, and currently about 30,000 of them appear in the online search.  The plan is to make the entire content of the CIS system available. 

I imagine that this is no easy task, and I’m right....   Gail Durbin says:

“We’ll start with the 100,000 that have a complete set of basic information within the records. Our records are very variable, but if we wait for them all to be perfected we could wait many decades. We need to tell the public that this is a work in progress, that improving our records is a continuous task and it is better to have access to what is currently available than to wait for a definitive version.”

What is the CIS system exactly?

It is catalog of information about every object.  In a complete record there are over potential 200 fields and the V&A can now link the digital image system with the CIS system.  Not every object has a digital photographic record to go with it.  So if we open the whole lot to the public, some records may only have the name of the object, its museum number and its location. 

Challenges: 

User Interfaces, Categorization of Objects

A critical part of the design will be to determine who the users are, and how to arrange the objects in ways that they can easily find.  In addition since many records are incomplete, how does one communicate to the public about the variations? 

A Place for Crowd Curation?

Naturally the question arises in my mind, how about asking people to help with the V&A records.  Is that something that is even possible?

Durbin raises a good point: 

“How do we find ways to distinguish between information from expert curators, and information supplied by visitors?  How do we welcome them in to help? Doing this has risks.  So we need to start with a small project and demonstrate the value. We are currently planning to submit a collection of theatrical photographs to Flickr Commons as an experiment.”

Examples of crowd curation:

Gail and I talked a bit about the various online projects that have engaged the general public to assist in various ways:

Galaxyzoo:   Helping astronomers classify photos of objects in space
Each photo is analyzed by many amateurs helping to speed up the process of scientific research.

 

They Work For You:
Gail mentioned that in Britain people were asked to help match up and index the transcripts and the videos of debates in Parliament.  Says Gail

“Many people find this quite riveting and spend a lot of time doing it.”

Mechanical Turk -
When Steve Focett went missing several years ago, Amazon opened up Mechanical Turk to the public to help analysis satellite photos of Nevada to help find his missing plane.   While this search didn’t find him, they did find a number of other missing planes.

Steve Tag Project: 
I’ve already written about this previously. Nice examples at Powerhouse Museum, Steve.com,  Indianapolis Museum of Art, etc.

Brooklyn Museum:  I can't say too much about these folks.  They Rock!

Question!

I'm really curious about how museums and others can sort out this question of curatorial expertise vs the general visitor. Do you think it's important to distinguish?  How would you go about it? How are you going about it?  What other questions are important to ask?