Google Cultural Institute (GCI) is based in Paris, and is a team largely made up of designers and software engineers (how does this feed into my study? As a form of institutional critique or as a study of the management of heritage resources?)
GCI ran the pilot Google Art Project two years ago. At this stage there were 17 art museums and galleries involved. The pilot threw up several questions, the foremost among them being, what can distinguish the digital object from the authentic object in a positive way? The project explored different lighting options in the museums (see Turning the Pages & 'Valery Proust Museum') and used street view technology to emulate the experience of walking around the building. A lot was learned from the project, although the GCI has subsequently gone in a different direction.
Moving away from the trend for taking very high quality images (the Louvre has a satellite imaging camera), Crossan suggested that the future of digitisation will be smartphone-based, where the sophistication lies in the software rather than the hardware.
GCI has now launched an exhibition facility, which represents the material of partner institutions in online exhibitions. This allows for the display and exploration of archive material. GCI operates the service on a hosting model, it doesn't make curatorial decisions and the rights to works remain with the partners (in cases where rights to contemporary artworks belong to artists it can still be problematic). The Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory site is an example of this format. In reference to a mosaic thumbnail image style page, Crossan suggested that the layout can be difficult to access unless you know exactly what you're looking for (see Europeana's online exhibitions). There is a further question about how to engage audiences who won't necessarily seek out culture. The search engine model entails that content can only be provided if you know what you're looking for.
Crossan focused on the case study of the Yad Vashem Centre to explain how the digitisation of images and their accompanying text shed new light on unknown photographs and provided context for the histories of individuals that were victims of the Holocaust.
He then gave details of the progress of GCI since Google Art Project. It partners with 250 museums and galleries from 42 countries (encompassing both art and historical content). Beyond the online exhibitions of partner institutions, there is now a user gallery feature that can be taken up by anyone (prosumer?) There are currently 300,000 user galleries and counting. Although not intentionally designed for that purpose, the feature has been utilised by a number of secondary school teachers.
A lot of GCI's current investment is going into solving the metadata problem. They have developed a system for tagging items with Freebase elements, and are also investigating image-based search solutions (beyond metadata). Long-term plans include linking projects on different platforms by making content available through APIs. All this work (and the priorities of GCI generally) are oriented more towards digitisation than digital preservation.
The rationale for GCI? Crossan called it part of Google's Corporate Social Responsibility Programme (although they wouldn't describe it as such) - see http://www.google.org/, e.g. Public Health initiative. However the production of high quality content (which is not primarily English-language material) is good for the longevity of the web and thus, long-term, for Google. Incidentally, this is also why GCI isn't based in an English-language speaking country.
Steve Crossan will shortly be leaving his post as head of GCI. His email address is: stevie@google.com
N.B. See Versailles 3D for an example of GCI's 3D scanning effort.
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