Not Fading Away

To Grasmere last week, to the Innovative Interpretation of Manuscripts conference, organised by the indefatigable Jeff Cowton from the Wordsworth Trust.

As we edged along Ambleside in glorious sunshine, I mentioned to my taxi driver where I was going. She never learnt Wordsworth at school, she said, and had never been to Dove Cottage. He was just a name, and his work was irrelevant.

I spoke with Dr Luca Crispi from University College Dublin (formerly from the National Library of Ireland), showing some work we did with Joyce and Yeats manuscripts. Eighty people jammed in to the Jerwood Centre with others sitting in the lobby outside, and a further fourteen on the waiting list. It was a great event, the numbers proving that there's a real demand for information on this subject. Too often librarians can just do what they've always done. The charismatic Nat Edwards spoke about the Burns Birthplace Museum, and I was struck by the attention he'd paid to environment, and the erudite David McKitterick from Trinity College Cambridge illuminated us on the revolutions in writing.

I blogged not long ago about the centrality of special collections, and the importance of the user experience and interpretation. The conference gave me a new understanding of the need for leadership, knowledge sharing and collaboration in these areas.

Unless we can get user experience and interpretation right, it won't just be the taxi driver who doesn't know who Wordsworth is. Visitor numbers are declining at the homes of many smaller collections. I think we know how to fix this, but we will need to learn from those who already have.

Luttrell Psalter - the Movie - For Free!

Following on from a post I made a little while ago, the lovely people at WAG Screen have now put the film they made of the Luttrell Psalter online for free!

I'm a fan of this kind of thinking. You can hang on to rights in the hope of some tiny future gain, or you can give stuff away, enrich the community, enhance your reputation and call it marketing if you need to convince your boss.

If you're a fan of medieval manuscripts or just enjoyed The Beauty of Books on BBC4 the other night, you should take a look.

Lessons from Latte

Lots of noise recently about the future of libraries. I liked the marches to protest against library closures, and the BBC carried quite a lengthy piece on it's website rather fatuously entitled "Libraries vs the Internet". The very fact that the BBC chose to give the article this title tells us that libraries aren't doing a good enough job of both utilising the internet and telling the world about the great work they're doing regarding digitisation, online catalogues, aggregation and online exhibitions.

One of the problems was highlighted to me again last week in a meeting with a big library. They'd scanned a large number of 19th century books and converted them into eBooks. But, as the OCR'd text was much the same as that to be found in Project Gutenberg, or even Google Books, they had no real option but to give them away for free.

This is the commoditisation of knowledge. Why should I go to this library rather than another?

I've just moved office, and next door is a nice non-chain coffee shop run by a Turkish guy who this morning tried to convince me to go to his Turkish barber (I tried that once, and they set fire to my ears). His coffee is about as good as anyone else's, but he does a few things well. He know who I am, he offers a nice environment, and he gives me a discount. User experience and personalisation.

Maybe I need to persuade my new friend to start selling Turkish coffee though - that's something Starbucks would never do.

And libraries are just the same really. They may offer much ubiquitous content, but their unique offer is their special collections - stuff no-one else has. Baklava are optional.

Making Meaning

I noticed a piece by Alain de Botton the other day on the failings of museums. His opening statement is "Museums should help us to live better lives". Alain de Botton is very keen on us living better lives. He's written books on philosophy, travel, architecture and status in order to try and help us. I've read them, and I enjoy his well structured, precise prose and thoughtful arguments.

But should that be the purpose of cultural institutions?

Well I believe it's possible for these institutions to help us live better lives in all sorts of respects. From the simple but profound appreciation of beauty (take a trip to the V&A) to the unravelling of the past that illuminates our present (past performance normally being an indicator of future behaviour), these places can enrich us in ways that our work and home lives cannot.

But so often I see museum and gallery visitors straining to find meaning in their experiences. Hunched over tiny labels, taking a close look at the brushwork of a painting, then stepping back to take in the whole canvas. Or sleep-walking through the endless galleries of the British Museum, dazed by the riches.

And here's the problem. We can show off artefacts (well those that aren't in storage), and we can can give some interpretation, but we don't seem to be able to give meaning to these objects. They are just not relevant to the visitor. The quasi-religious presentation of the objects declares their importance, but the visitor's response doesn't correlate to this declared value.

So Alain de Botton frames it like this "curators should co-opt works of art to the direct task of helping us to live".

Surely it's possible for us to contextualise objects for visitors, make meaning and therefore value? As with some of the humanities, museum professionals seem to take for granted that everyone will understand the value of what they do, and they are poor at articulating this value. But politicians and the public clearly need persuading.

David Cameron is championing a number of initiatives such as Big Society and the new measure of national well-being.

Surely now is a great time for the cultural sector to cry out "We can help with this!" But we need to add meaning, not just information.

Future History

For Christmas this year I got a great book called Lost London, published by English Heritage. It documents in photographs London in the years 1870 to 1940. The London that the combined might of planners, developers and the Luftwaffe swept away.

I have also spent quite a lot of time, for one reason or another in Streetview, looking around various locations. I even invented a game at home for my kids. I dump them somewhere in Streetview and they have to work out where they are (the best was the Isle of Mull - "Balamory!", the easiest "Grandma's house!")

So what technology has brought us is perfect recall. The tantalising and fragmentary glimpses we see of London 100 years ago or more give us an elliptical glance at the way life was, but the record is incomplete. Streetview allows us to stroll around towns cities and the countryside at will, observing every detail of architecture, town planning, fashion, advertising, automotive design, agriculture and even economic activity.

Which presents posterity with an amazing opportunity. If Google's slightly creepy Streetview vans take a snapshot of our country every 5 years, the legacy for future historians will be immense.

And it doesn't stop there. Mix in the petabytes of social media data generated around people and places that has all ben time-stamped, and future historians will have a field day. Imagine the young Charles Darwin was on Facebook while at Cambridge, or tweeting away his early cogitations. What insight we would have into his world and the way he came to think the way he did, and who might have influenced him. Stepping back into Streeview, Cambridge 1829, we'd be able to walk the streets as he saw them.

Which means, I guess, be careful what you write, wherever you write it. You never know how you might get entangled in future history.

Lowering The Price of Failure

Back in the 60s my mum was a secretary. She spoke a few languages and worked in some cool places, and she used a typewriter. When my sister was born, she gave up work and spent the 70s doing a fair imitation of the Good Life mixed with Abigails Party (think black forest gateau served with home-made wine…).

When we'd all decamped to college she wanted to go back to work, and picked up her typing again. Initially bamboozled by word processing, she was amazed with spellchecking and backspace. Make a typo - no problem: just lean on that left arrow button and hit "Del". No more tippex or white ribbons fed into clackety typewriters.

When Henri Cartier Bresson took photographs in the 30s, he would compose a shot, check the exposure, choose the moment, and press the shutter. Then he'd walk away - the shot done, the moment captured. I read on a blog yesterday about a guy who has an ambition to get 10,000 photos on his Flickr account by Christmas. And he's not even a photographer.

So the thing that has changed is that the price of failure has just dropped.

We're starting out on building a pretty ambitious bit of software. I've been agonising over features and what to include, but the great news is that we don't have one shot. For example, Flickr and Wordpress put out multiple versions of their sites every day. Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress) blogs about this here. If a new feature, or some "optimised" code doesn't work, they just revert back. The price of failure is low.

The price of building software and not iterating it can be very high.

Back to the Future

At our local park fair the other week I picked up Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. Written in 1995, I sort of never got round to reading it.

It deals with the "careers" of a bunch of Microsoft developers who go to Silicon Valley to make it big in a multimedia startup. Back in those days I had just started Armadillo, a multimedia startup in London, so the memories it brought back were acute. If any of these terms means anything to you, you need to find a copy:

- multimedia

- 3DO

- CDi

- BBS

- 9.6k dialup

- Broderbund

- Voyager

- Powerbook

- NeXT

- SGI Reality Engine

Throw in some Apple-envy and some evocative prose about the Microsoft Redmond campus and I spent a happy and nostalgic couple of hours with this book. At the same time I was clearing out our office and found some awards from 1994 for Best Interactive Multimedia (from the long-gone XYZ magazine), and a BIMA, as well as the Photoshop 1.0 installation disc (one 720K floppy). Then I started boring the guys in the office with old multimedia tales until they surreptitiously plugged their ipods back in...

What was fascinating though was the frustration in the book - trying to build complex experiences within the limitations of the technology (CDROM, slow as treacle dialup) and the money required to build anything. Fifteen years on, both these barriers have gone.

As well as capturing the zeitgeist, the book also presages the arrival of social media and blogging and many of the casual predictions have turned out to be eerily prescient. But then I saw the list of advisors, and with the likes of Kevin Kelley and John Battelle on board he had some good futurologists.

So then I started thinking about 15 years from now. There's a sort of feeling that we're "there"; that we have ubiquitous fast broadband, great developer platforms and loads of free content; that all we will now do is tweak what we have.

So will 2025 be as different to today as Coupland's story is?