JISC Digital Content Conference

Posted by Stephen Gray on Monday 13 July 2009 at 2:47pm
Tags: digital collections | event | news |

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The conference was a large affair with multiple themed strands expertly choreographed over two days. JISC Digital Media presented a vision of digital media in a pedagogical context under the umbrella of the 'Content in Education' strand. Other strands included 'Content Development' and 'Managing Content'. These themes seemed a little diverse at first, but it soon became apparent that we had been covering an overlapping and increasingly important issue: user engagement.

In the plenary sessions too, high profile speakers (for instance Robert Miller of the Internet Archive and Nick Poole of the Collection's Trust) asked the same kind of question: who is the user of all this digital stuff and just what are they doing with it?

Conferences generate buzz words and this conference was no different: 'crowd sourcing; was discussed in every session. The idea is that the user is not longer a passive receptacle but an active partner and contributor to a digital collection.

The Galaxy Zoo project is built upon the statistical analysis of galaxies, contributed by millions of dedicated users. The First World War Archive presents informal family stories relating to the Great War. Both projects are highly successful examples of crowd sourcing.

The idea of the productive user is fairly straightforward but the implementation can be fraught. The team from the Old Bailey Proceedings digitisation project warned of the confusion that can result from taking an open approach to user contributions. Without strong guidance the user can and does upload anything or nothing. The conference also looked at possible relationships between digital content collections both nationally and internationally.

In a rapidly evolving environment (technologically, financially, legally and politically) it was the nature of the changing relationship that seemed to dominate proceedings, while matters such as collection building or digitisation took a back seat. The tentative verdict seemed to be that building or sustaining a valuable digital collection using young Web 2.0 technologies was both positive and inevitable, but some casualties would be unavoidable. Learning valuable lessons from others by the sharing of direct personal experience underlined both the need for cautious crowd souring and the value of the conference itself.

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