keskiviikko 14. syyskuuta 2011

Museums, images and non-institutional digital heritage

What do people want from museums? Better metada, better search algorithms? Nope. They want to download images, videos and sounds. Don't believe me? Well, have a look at the Europeana survey 2011: Over 90% of respondents agree that ability to download materials would be "useful" or "very useful".
I gave a little provocative presentation in CIDOC 2011 about museums, images, Google and people outside heritage institutions. My main point was that people want to participate in creating of digital heritage in their own terms, not museums. There is already a very active digital heritage field outside of heritage organisations which often overrules official digital heritage in search engine visibility, usability and coverage. And since search engines (Google) are the main entry points to the internet, official digital heritage is struggling with its visibility. Non-institutional digital heritage is here to stay and museums must decide if they want to be part of that or not.
You can find my slides and full paper from here: http://opendimension.org/ida/papers.php