Things That Matter

When I was young my dad wanted me to be a lawyer. I went to see one of the big five law firms in the city and had a long and dull conversation with someone in a grey suit. I couldn't see the point. What did being a lawyer do to contribute to society, or even my own well being? Sure I'd be well paid, but it clearly wasn't for me.

Guy Kawasaki (former Apple evangelist turned VC) says every business needs a mantra - something to measure your actions by. When people ask me about Armadillo I say that we like to do the things that matter - work that, if we looked at it from the outside, we'd say "I'm glad someone did that - it was worth doing".

So a few weeks ago I was pleased to see Tim O'Reilly blog about "Work on Stuff that Matters".

There are a lot of people who just took a job for the money. The money and the job are now gone, and I guess that there are a lot of under-employed bankers wondering what to do next. Hopefully it might be something that matters.

Most people in the cultural sector aren't in it for the money - they're in it because they like it and what they do stimulates them, and it might just matter. Now's a good time to give yourself a little credit and count those blessings if that's you.

Co-operate ORE else...

Excuse the nerdy pun, but interoperability has been in my thoughts a lot recently.

A big project, unifying the collections of 9 different establishments just failed to get funding after a year of work. We asked the funders why and it came down to the politics. It was just felt to be too hard to get everyone to play nicely together. Sure, when we looked into it, individual data repositories were wildly different and metadata standards had been lovingly honed in isolation over the last 30 years. Melding them into a coherent whole was going to be, umm, challenging, but we knew that all along.

As standards like OAI-ORE emerge, and start to demonstrate how we can move not only data, but objects around the web, we should be entering a period where virtual loans, digital repatriation and unified collections are commonplace.

But we're not there yet.

Because all this is ultimately about people. If we let politics stymie endeavours such as these, scholarship suffers.

Building for Eternity

When I was working on Turning the Pages with the British Library and Microsoft there was, as you might expect, a degree of cultural confusion. Our friends in London found it difficult that Redmond had quarterly targets and ways of hitting them. Our friends in Redmond found it extraordinary that the BL didn't think in such short timeframes.

So I used a story told to me about the architect of the BL, Colin Wilson. It was along the lines of the fact that when he designed the library, the specification of the materials was based on the need for the library to last for 400 years. Those are the horizons that major national collections have to have. The story helped bridge the cultural divide a little.

Now we see that Google has settled it's dispute with the AAP and Authors Guild and proposes a repository of out of print books that it will administer and charge libraries to use on special terminals. Harvard, one of the first to sign up with Google has bailed, stating it's unhappy about the restrictions.

Whatever the pragmatic sense in taking Google's money to digitise your collection, I believe you have to take a very long view when it comes to access.

I wonder if those who sign up to this new deal will have the foresight of Colin Wilson? The Open Content Alliance are already figuring out a response.

For more on (very) long term thinking I always find the thinking of the Long Now Foundation useful: http://www.longnow.org/

Ideology and accepted wisdom

Just this last week or so I've been having ridiculous conversations about operating systems and RIA technologies.

I've had a concerted Linux attack, whereby I get a number of identical emails from Linux devotees decrying the lack of support for their chosen OS in a project we did.

I've had people saying how bad Vista is, and when I asked why, all they could do was quote other people. And I've seen some rabid Apple fanbois (love that word) talking up anything Apple they could think of, irrespective of their level of knowledge.

Then it struck me. This isn't informed opinion. It's a firmly-held ideological position based on a shared cultural/religious mindset (not technical). Linux geeks like being in a minority of more technically competetent people. Mac fanbois love it that they think they are cooler and more West Coast than sad Microsofties.

Ideology has a place in many areas - I just don't see it in technology. I am idealogically committed to access to cultural collections. But this blog is written on a Mac that dual-boots into Vista, and if I lean over here.....I can touch an Ubuntu machine.

No big deal. My cultural/religious sense of significance doesn't come from my choice of PC.

The need for magic

A while ago I was demonstrating Turning the Pages to Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England (he looked a bit chirpier then).

I showed off some of the features and, impressed, he asked "How do you do that?". I didn't want to go into specularity mapping, polygon vertices, web services and the like, so in an unguarded moment I said "Well Governor, it's mainly done using magic". Luckily he and his entourage laughed.

He then came back with "We in central banking generally don't hold with magic".

My company have built some software that creates such a convincing illusion that people are confident the book is real. If the governor could summon the same confidence now, that would be magic...

Not as cold as all that

A while ago I was visiting a convent populated with only a few elderly Polish nuns. They had established the convent after the war, and their numbers had inevitably dwindled.

It was a freezing morning with a thick ground frost, and, in passing, I mentioned to one of the nuns how cold it was.

She paused before her reply, and looked me in the eye, eventually saying in a quiet, level voice "Not as cold as in the concentration camp".

I think of her nowadays when I watch the news.

It's the experience stupid...

Which end of the tunnel do you start digging from? Do you start off with digitising your collection, or designing a user experience first?

Two of our clients are taking very different approaches to this problem. In an ideal world of course, you'd do both at the same time and the tunnelers would meet up and shake hands. But most institutions aren't blessed with the budget, staff or energy to do that.

I asked the question from the floor at a conference a while ago, and addressed it to a body who were digitising 3,000 books a day. "What are you working on around user experience, or surfacing all this content?" The answer was "We haven't really got there yet". I see this a lot. The imperative is to scan, users often come a distant second.

Last week G. Wayne Smith, Secretary of the Smithsonian said:

"I worry about museums becoming less relevant to society... I think we need to take a major step. Can we work with outside entities to create a place, for example, where we might demonstrate cutting-edge technologies to use to reach out to school systems all over the country? I think we can do that."

This echoes the BL/JISC report earlier this year on the researcher of the future:

"The library profession desperately needs leadership to develop a new vision for the 21st century and reverse its declining profile and influence. This should start with effecting that shift from a content-orientation to a user-facing perspective."

I love Apple products - I have done since using an Apple Mac 256K in maybe 1985. Are Apple successful because they're cool, or are they cool because they are one of the only computer vendors to successfully integrate great content (eg music/movies) and great software and hardware (iTunes/iPod)? Put these together and you get a great user experience.

So who's going to be the Apple of the library or museum world. Could be the Smithsonian...