Finally the Penny Drops

I couldn't make it myself, but Nicholas Serota and Neil McGregor (head honchos at the Tate and British Museum respectively) spoke at the LSE last week about the Museum of the 21st Century.

Amazingly enough, their conclusion seemed to be that it lay on the internet. "Well hello..." you might say.

But they also seem to have identified the fact that museums need to act as broadcasters and publishers, which starts to address a fundamental problem: access isn't enough.

Years ago there was a massive drive towards digitisation, with libraries leading the way. We all know about Google Print.

Looking at the petabytes of scans made the institutions happy that they now had a valuable asset. Like having money in the bank. That you're not allowed to touch.

Most have yet to realise how to surface that content in an engaging way, or provide shared experiences around it. Nick Poole from the Collections Trust commented on the talk "We really do need a new product to excite these people - which might still focus on interacting with Collections in a browser, but in much more imaginative and mediated ways." (You would be right at this point to think this is where Armadillo comes in).

But then we also need museums to take up the challenge of interpretation, and herein lies their role as broadcasters and publishers. A layer of mediation, interpretation and facilitation between the object and the public preserves the role of the museum curator. How many European teenagers do you see wandering the galleries of our museums, with looks of blank incomprehension on their faces. "I know this is important stuff" you can hear them say to themselves (maybe in German...) "but I don't know why".

We can do something about this.

Unravelling strings

I just got back from a beach holiday where my son's kite string got tangled up. So instead of a relaxing afternoon peering into rockpools, I spent hours unravelling knotted string, trying to get a simple straight line from his hand to the kite. Before that I was in Atlanta, where much the same was going on at the Open Repositories conference. Database guys and other assorted geeks trying to unravel a nightmare of databases and repositories to make a simple connection between the user and the data he needs.

But the good news seems to be that they're winning. Some of the work done facilitating cross-repository search makes it look (whisper it...) easy.

This is in no small part due to the emergent standards that I've talked about before, OAI-ORE and SWORD, which make real data migration possible.

Also interesting was the merger of DSpace and Fedora into one organisation; DuraSpace. The message was that they can benefit from working together as well as not chasing the same funding opportunities.

Instead of competing with each other they now have another company to worry about - Microsoft. The engaging Tony Hey was on hand to launch Zentity, a repository built on the Microsoft stack. The pitch was that the institutions already owned and had paid for Windows Server, IIS, SQL Server etc, so Zentity was leveraging that investment. For free.

The Scholarly Communications team have been making big efforts in the last couple of years to convince people that there is a "new Microsoft", which I've found to be true. There is also an "old Microsoft" however and this dissonance will make life hard for the team.

Whatever the case the entry of Microsoft into this space means the pace is about to pick up.

Continuous Partial Attention

I like that phrase. Everyone I run it past gets it straight away. "Oh yeah, it's when you're watching TV and sending a text at the same time!" Yup. Or on your mobile when you're with a group of people, or using an interactive or website while you're chatting with a friend.

It's bubbled up to the surface again this week due to a couple of things. I was listening to an interview with the MD of Odeon cinemas. Strangely one of his biggest problems isn't bittorrents or DVDs - it's mobile phones. He stated that under 16s just don't get the fact that they shouldn't have full-volume conversations on their mobiles in a cinema, and typically 2 or 3 are going on at any one time during a film with this audience. Under 16's are cool with this. Older people are not.

Then I was at a do at Microsoft. They called it an un-conference, which has come to mean many things. This one meant that they live streamed a keynote address from the Mix09 conference in Vegas on a big screen, but at the same time you could play with demos, chat to friendly softies or get a beer. It was fun, but the level of information going in was compromised for me.

The really interesting thing is that I think I'm a dying breed. Clearly younger audiences have acclimated to absorbing information in this way to some extent. But the challenge facing user interface and user experience professionals will be how we manage to feed this growing audience in a way that both suits their "grazing" approach and provides quality information.

Small and Perfectly Formed

Smaller is the new bigger. Not only for banks, but also for computers. Two stats jumped out at me this week.

One from Net Applications. It shows that, in the last quarter, 68% of all mobile internet traffic was generated by one device. The iPhone. In second place was Windows Mobile. With 7%. Nokia and Blackberry even further behind.


This tells us a few things. First, the iPhone is very popular (which we sort of knew). Second, people are using it for mobile internet access. Thirdly, I believe all that has happened is that that device has opened the floodgates. There had been a huge pent up demand for mobile web use, but people just weren't surfing from their handhelds because the experience was so bad (hold your hand up Windows Mobile 5, and you 6...). Come up with a device that made it a pleasure....WHOOSH, the floodgates open. What that means is that when other device manufacturers catch up, they will exploit that demand.

Just to reinforce the fact that mobiles are the new computers, according to the same source, iPhones accounted for 0.48% of all internet traffic in the last quarter. Linux was only 0.86%.

Next stat. As we might expect, desktop, and even laptop sales are expected to tank this year. Gartner are predicting an 11.9% overall decline, with desktops plumetting by 31%. Yet the sales of those small form factor netbooks are on a crazy upwards curve. Acer sold 500,000 Aspire One netbooks in 2008. It's forecasting sales of 12,000,000 in 2009. For one model. Many of these devices are internet-connected with 3G cards, giving us the same scenario as with the iPhone - instant access anywhere.

One thing is clear - we will have to come up with offerings that pay attention to users location, allow for smaller screens and respond to very short usage sessions. We're cooking something up here at Armadillo Towers, so stay tuned.

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/