A Second International Meeting on National Digital Cultural Content Creation Strategies

Some of you were with us at the first meeting of this informal grouping, back in July of last year. For those of you that weren't — and for any who were, but would like a refresher — I recommend that you take a look at one of the short and hopefully accessible synopses recently published in Cultivate Interactive and D-Lib Magazine.

The rest of this document is intended to pick out some of the high level issues for this activity generally, and for the Washington meeting in particular. It should help to clarify what the meeting is for, what it's not for, and maybe help you to begin thinking about the ways in which you would be most comfortable contributing whilst in Washington.

Based upon your reading of the contents of this document and the rest of the agenda, we would especially welcome input from all of you during Monday morning's "Introductions" session. It would be useful if you could provide a little background about the work being done by your organisation in this area, especially drawing out any key contributions you might make to international effort here, and raising any particular issues you would like to see addressed during or after the meeting. Remember that there are forty of us to speak before lunch, though.

If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

A Rationale

It is clear that in a number of countries around the world, large public programmes are being initiated to create digital surrogates of existing cultural heritage material. The reasoning behind these is not always consistent, including such diverse drivers as Tourism or Education/ Life Long Learning, but the resulting body of digital content remains broadly comparable.

Alongside this essentially Government-driven content creation, we can similarly point to significant bodies of material being funded by Charitable Trusts, educational institutions, the Private Sector, etc.

Accepting — and even celebrating some of — the inevitable differences of purpose, approach, mandate, sustainability and the like, there would nevertheless appear to be value in looking to see where commonalities already exist, enabling a degree of cross-fertilization, and the avoidance of duplicated effort. Beyond that, even, there are possibilities to be seized if participants wish to look beyond current synergies in order to identify areas in which they might actively work towards greater cooperation and commonality.

It was with this in mind that the organisers called the first meeting of this informal group in London, during July of 2001. Although called at short notice, the meeting was successful, and all present agreed to the value of a further meeting in order to further advance common areas of interest.

Some beginnings in London

The meeting in London last year, reported in Cultivate Interactive, began to explore areas in which it might be useful for the assembled organisations to consider comparable approaches.

As a first step towards this, a number of Policy Research activities were initiated, and these are to be discussed as part of the Washington agenda. It was hoped that by researching current preconceptions and activities, we might be in a better position to make decisions, both singly and together. As will be reported, the effort involved in compiling even the documents before you for discussion at this meeting was greater than anticipated, which has implications for extending this work.

Along with the Policy Research, we commissioned Position Statements on a number of topics felt by those in London to be key to the activities of the Cultural Heritage community in the online environment. These, too, are on the agenda for discussion in Washington, and there may be scope for organisations beginning to consider ratifying versions of these documents in some manner.

An action plan for Washington

The meeting in Washington is intended to achieve four principal goals:

• to foster a sense of community amongst those, internationally, responsible for funding, shaping, or mandating the development of programmes resulting in the public delivery of digital cultural content
• to review previously commissioned Policy Research activity, and to gauge the value of expending further effort on these activities
• to review previously drafted Position Statements, to gauge their value to the community, and to explore the benefits of recognising the current Statements in some form, and/or actioning the drafting of further Statements
• to explore the value of a group such as this
  • examining its role with respect to other organisations already in existence
  • considering the implications (financial, for example) of this group progressing a programme of work
  • specifying, if relevant, a programme of work for the future.

Additionally, it will continue the work begun in London, exploring commonalities of approach and areas of shared interest amongst those present; acquaintances made by participants at the first meeting, for example, have already resulted in a number of collaborative activities beyond the scope of the whole group.

Conclusion

In the end, though, the two days of this meeting are about all of you, your organisations, and the goals you wish to achieve. In organising this meeting and its predecessor in London, the organisers are attempting to move towards solutions to a set of problems that we perceive, and that we believe others also recognise. How far we can go, together, towards addressing any or all of those is in a large part dependent upon the extent to which our understanding of the problems is common, and the extent to which finding solutions to them is aligned with the broader goals of our institutions and our countries.

It may well be that national or organisational differences are so great in some areas that we can do little more than agree on the problem; trans-national solutions may be harder to agree. Agreeing on the problem is, in itself, a significant step forward.

How much further than that we can go, together, remains to be seen.

Facilities

We are meeting at the Brookings Institution, in central Washington DC. The room we are using will have internet access, as well as a laptop hooked up to a data projector for anyone who needs to use it.

Organizational details should be addressed in the first instance to Paul Miller of UKOLN.

Information