Talk for the Festival of Maintenance in Liverpool https://festivalofmaintenance.org.uk/ My talk notes http://www.openobjects.org.uk/2019/09/festival-of-maintenance-talk-apps-microsites-and-collections-online-innovation-and-maintenance-in-digital-cultural-heritage/
Festival of Maintenance talk: Apps, microsites and collections online: innovation and maintenance in digital cultural heritage
1. Apps, microsites and collections online:
innovation and maintenance in digital cultural
heritage
Mia Ridge @mia_out
2. What does a cultural heritage technologist do?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasacommons/9467783474https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryqueensland/8808https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryqueensland/8808717962
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4. What do GLAMs have to maintain?
Exhibition apps and audio guides. Research
software. Microsites by departments:
marketing, education, fundraising. Catalogues.
More catalogues. Secret spreadsheets. Digital
asset management systems. Collections online
pulled from the catalogue. Collections online
from a random database. Student projects.
Glueware. Ticketing. Ecommerce. APIs.
Content on social media sites, other 3rd party
sites and aggregators. CMS. CRM. VR, AR, MR.
5. Stories considered harmful
• It’s fine for social media to be ephemeral
• ‘Digital’ is just marketing, no-one expects it to be kept
• We have limited resources, and if we spend them all
maintaining things then how will we build the new cool
things the Director wants?
• We're a museum / gallery / library / archive, not a
software development company, what do you mean we
have to maintain things?
• What do you mean, software decays over time?
• ‘Digital’ is just like an exhibition; once it’s launched
you’re done
• That person left, it doesn’t matter anymore
6. If you don’t make conscious
choices about what to
maintain, you’re leaving it
to fate
8. Better stories for the future
• You can’t save everything. Make conscious
decisions about what to maintain and how you’ll
close the things you can’t maintain
• Plan for a graceful exit – for all stakeholders
• Refresh little and often, where possible
• Build on standards, work with communities
• Also:
• Check whether your websites are archiveready.com
• Support GLAMs with the legislative, rights and
technical challenges of collecting digital ephemera
Worked as a cultural heritage technologist for a long time; currently leading a large data science project at the British Library
I’ve worked in a lot of cultural organisations, and generally my job has involved making digitised items available both as individual items, and as computationally-ready data.
