Viviane Reding, EC Commissioner for the Information Society and Media (2004-2009)
In 2005 a speech, unveiling the EC's strategy to make Europe's written and audiovisual heritage available on the Internet, Reding explained, 'without a collective memory, we are nothing, and can achieve nothing. It defines our identity and we use it continuously for education, work and leisure. The Internet is the most powerful new tool we have had for storing and sharing information since the Gutenberg press, so let's use it to make the material in Europe's libraries and archives accessible to all.' In March 2006, a press release also quoted Reding as saying, 'information technologies can enable you to tap into Europe’s collective memory with a click of your mouse' (see Communication of Memory and Heritage post for further discussion).
There is an interesting counterpoint here with a 2010 speech, called 'Privacy Matters', that Reding made in her current role as Vice-President of the European Commission (responsible for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship), in support of the so-called 'right to be forgotten'. While there is a clear distinction between cultural heritage and personal data, the introduction of such rights possibly indicates increased wariness and a shift away from positivist thinking around the Internet more generally. More about the 'right to be forgotten' vs. the 'right to be remembered' can be found in this British Library post from the web archiving blog.
Elisabeth Niggemann (Director General of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, DNB- German National Library and former Chair of the Europeana Foundation Board)
In Europeana's 2011-2015 strategic plan, Niggemann wrote:
'Europeana will become the trusted source of Europe’s collective memory, celebrating our cultural diversity and providing a space in which we can reflect on our European identity.'
And further on:
'[Europeana] has facilitated innovative collaboration and knowledge transfer throughout the memory institutions of Europe. The result is a new spirit of collaborative enterprise that is creating a sustainable European information space.'
Furthermore, prior to this in 2010, Niggemann had been one of the members (along with Maurice Lévy and Jacques de Decker) of the Comité des Sages (high level reflection group) on Digitisation to deliver the report 'The New Renaissance' to Neelie Kroes (European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda) and Androulla Vassiliou (Commissioner responsible for Education and Culture). The report urged EU Member States to step up their efforts to put online the collections held in all their libraries, archives and museums. It also stressed the benefits of making Europe's culture and knowledge more easily accessible. A couple of quotes from the report are as follows:
'A poet said: “Europe, thy name is memory.” Europe was constructed with the notion of evolution,thought, creation, research and ingenuity. No one will disagree: each phase of this process is worthy of conservation and study. It presupposes today a gigantic translation of this collective heritage to ensure that it will not become as impenetrable for future generations as have been the hieroglyphics throughout the centuries! It is above all the duty of the public sector to ensure that this heritage is available to everyone' (p. 42).
'For centuries, libraries, archives and museums from across Europe have been the custodians of our rich and diverse cultural heritage. They have preserved and provided access to the testimonies of knowledge, beauty and imagination, such as sculptures, paintings, music and literature. The new information technologies have created unbelievable opportunities to make this common heritage more accessible for all. Culture is following the digital path and "memory institutions" are adapting the way in which they communicate with their public' (p. 4).
Bruno Racine (Current Chair of the Europeana Foundation Board)
Less an explicit promoter of memory, since Racine took up the Chair of the Europeana Foundation Board, allusions to memory institutions (i.e. museums, libraries and archives) have nevertheless persisted in the annual reports, accounts and business plans from 2012-14.
Bernard Smith (former head of the 'Cultural Heritage' unit in EU R&D programme in the Information Society)
The EC-funded DigiCULT report of 2002, 'Technological Landscapes for Tomorrow's Cultural Economy', contained a foreword by Smith, in which he stated:
Europe's cultural and memory institutions are facing very rapid and dramatic transformations. These transformations are not only due to the use of increasingly sophisticated technologies, which become obsolete more and more rapidly, but also due to are-examination of the role of modern public institutions in today's society and the related fast changing user demands. These trends affect all the functions of the modern cultural institution, from collection management and scholarly study through restoration and preservation to providing new forms of universal and dynamic access to their holdings.Technological innovation plays a major role in the way our cultural institutions develop strategies for valorising their collections. It equally impacts directly on all those industries that provide products and services to, or with, the cultural sectors. Traditional demarcation lines between different types of institutions, between different skill and competence profiles and between different stages in the creation and management of collections are fading away.
Furthermore, he authored a European Council resolution prepared and accepted by EU ministers of culture, called 'Preserving Tomorrow's Memory: Preserving Digital Content for Future Generations' in 2002, which was about the challenge of preserving cultural heritage digitally long-term.
Another publication from 2003, 'Digital Heritage and Cultural Content in Europe' stated, 'Europe's Cultural and Scientific resources are a public asset forming the collective and evolving memory of our diverse societies and providing a knowledge basis for the development of our content industries in a sustainable knowledge society' - this is a quote from what has come to be known as the Lund principles.
The EC-funded DigiCULT report of 2002, 'Technological Landscapes for Tomorrow's Cultural Economy', contained a foreword by Smith, in which he stated:
Europe's cultural and memory institutions are facing very rapid and dramatic transformations. These transformations are not only due to the use of increasingly sophisticated technologies, which become obsolete more and more rapidly, but also due to are-examination of the role of modern public institutions in today's society and the related fast changing user demands. These trends affect all the functions of the modern cultural institution, from collection management and scholarly study through restoration and preservation to providing new forms of universal and dynamic access to their holdings.Technological innovation plays a major role in the way our cultural institutions develop strategies for valorising their collections. It equally impacts directly on all those industries that provide products and services to, or with, the cultural sectors. Traditional demarcation lines between different types of institutions, between different skill and competence profiles and between different stages in the creation and management of collections are fading away.
Furthermore, he authored a European Council resolution prepared and accepted by EU ministers of culture, called 'Preserving Tomorrow's Memory: Preserving Digital Content for Future Generations' in 2002, which was about the challenge of preserving cultural heritage digitally long-term.
Another publication from 2003, 'Digital Heritage and Cultural Content in Europe' stated, 'Europe's Cultural and Scientific resources are a public asset forming the collective and evolving memory of our diverse societies and providing a knowledge basis for the development of our content industries in a sustainable knowledge society' - this is a quote from what has come to be known as the Lund principles.
Nick Poole (Chief Executive of the Collections Trust and Chair of the Europeana Network)
Describing Europeana as 'both a celebration and a consolidation of European cultural identity on the web' in a 2010 report, I interviewed Nick Poole this year and had the opportunity to ask him about the rhetoric of collective memory around the Europeana project (see above, Niggemann). He had this to say:
'In my role as Chair of the Europeana Network, I have come to regard Europeana chiefly as a process rather than a destination. The process is one both of asserting a European cultural identity (which arguably has deeper roots than its political and economic identity) and of identifying where it is located so that people can discover and experience it. Europeana itself is not a source, to me at least, but a collection of sources. It is not in itself trusted, except to the extent that it signposts resources from trusted cultural heritage institutions.Nor is it a space, in the traditional or virtual sense - it isn't an agora in which one can experience European culture, but a channel through which people can arrive at cultural experiences.
It is my view that, up to this point, the process of putting collections online has militated against the idea of collective memory. Our focus when digitising collections and making them accessible via websites and apps has been on the representation of the thing, and the administrative information about the thing. This is an index, but it is not memory anymore than a menu is the food it describes. Memory, to me, is complex,layered, situated and incremental. It has to do with customs and experiences and personal reflections on these. The skill of the curator is to lead you through these experiences and to draw the connections and stories out of them so that they become accessible as a collective memory. In putting things online, we have written this curatorship out of the process and in trying to automate storytelling, we have lost contact with the stories that accrete around the objects.
From my experience working with digital projects, we are in the process of making an important transition. It was summed up to me by a colleague from Google as 'the next challenge is not mass-digitisation or mass-preservation, but mass-curation of the sheer volume of cultural content'. Most of the next generation of digital cultural channels are focussing much less on aggregating large bodies of undifferentiated content and much more on creating highly targeted niche experiences structured around cultural themes. Hence the Google Open Gallery is focusing emphatically on citizen curation and providing people with the tools to assemble content from multiple sources to represent collective memory.
My office is at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, and today nearly 55,000 people walked through the doors of this building. They do so partly because they anticipate a particular kind of experience, partly because visiting the Natural History Museum is part of a collective memory and partly because they want to be a part of that memory for future generations. It is therefore both a reflective experience (looking back) and a participatory experience (being a part of a collective cultural experience). We are really only at the very earliest stages of understanding two things:
1. How technology can unlock that collective experience so that it is richer for people when they are participating in it, and;
2. The ways in which both physical and digital experiences form anequal part of that collective memory.
So, to cut a (very) long answer short, I think people want experiences that give them access to a sense of collective cultural memory. I think that they also want experiences that enable them to contribute to that collective cultural memory as an ongoing process. I think we are only at the earliest stages of understanding how to use technologies such as the Internet and mobile platforms to support that experience. I hope that in future the physical and digital experience of collective memory will be seamlessly integrated, so that they augment each other, but for the time being, putting collections online is a very blunt way of providing access to one part of that experience.
Describing Europeana as 'both a celebration and a consolidation of European cultural identity on the web' in a 2010 report, I interviewed Nick Poole this year and had the opportunity to ask him about the rhetoric of collective memory around the Europeana project (see above, Niggemann). He had this to say:
'In my role as Chair of the Europeana Network, I have come to regard Europeana chiefly as a process rather than a destination. The process is one both of asserting a European cultural identity (which arguably has deeper roots than its political and economic identity) and of identifying where it is located so that people can discover and experience it. Europeana itself is not a source, to me at least, but a collection of sources. It is not in itself trusted, except to the extent that it signposts resources from trusted cultural heritage institutions.Nor is it a space, in the traditional or virtual sense - it isn't an agora in which one can experience European culture, but a channel through which people can arrive at cultural experiences.
It is my view that, up to this point, the process of putting collections online has militated against the idea of collective memory. Our focus when digitising collections and making them accessible via websites and apps has been on the representation of the thing, and the administrative information about the thing. This is an index, but it is not memory anymore than a menu is the food it describes. Memory, to me, is complex,layered, situated and incremental. It has to do with customs and experiences and personal reflections on these. The skill of the curator is to lead you through these experiences and to draw the connections and stories out of them so that they become accessible as a collective memory. In putting things online, we have written this curatorship out of the process and in trying to automate storytelling, we have lost contact with the stories that accrete around the objects.
From my experience working with digital projects, we are in the process of making an important transition. It was summed up to me by a colleague from Google as 'the next challenge is not mass-digitisation or mass-preservation, but mass-curation of the sheer volume of cultural content'. Most of the next generation of digital cultural channels are focussing much less on aggregating large bodies of undifferentiated content and much more on creating highly targeted niche experiences structured around cultural themes. Hence the Google Open Gallery is focusing emphatically on citizen curation and providing people with the tools to assemble content from multiple sources to represent collective memory.
My office is at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, and today nearly 55,000 people walked through the doors of this building. They do so partly because they anticipate a particular kind of experience, partly because visiting the Natural History Museum is part of a collective memory and partly because they want to be a part of that memory for future generations. It is therefore both a reflective experience (looking back) and a participatory experience (being a part of a collective cultural experience). We are really only at the very earliest stages of understanding two things:
1. How technology can unlock that collective experience so that it is richer for people when they are participating in it, and;
2. The ways in which both physical and digital experiences form anequal part of that collective memory.
So, to cut a (very) long answer short, I think people want experiences that give them access to a sense of collective cultural memory. I think that they also want experiences that enable them to contribute to that collective cultural memory as an ongoing process. I think we are only at the earliest stages of understanding how to use technologies such as the Internet and mobile platforms to support that experience. I hope that in future the physical and digital experience of collective memory will be seamlessly integrated, so that they augment each other, but for the time being, putting collections online is a very blunt way of providing access to one part of that experience.
Michael Heaney (International Advisory Committee: UNESCO Memory of the World programme)
I asked Heaney the following: how do you understand the concept of memory encoded by UNESCO's 'Memory of the World' programme? He wrote:
'I understand it in three ways:
a. Some documents record important human experience when those who experienced it are no longer with us to tell us directly - for example the Registry of the Slaves of the British Caribbean 1817-1834
b. Some documents are important because the document itself has had a major effect on humanity. Three very different examples of this would be Magna Carta; the patent for the internal combustion engine; and the first Landsat photographs.
c. Some are important because although they did not in themselves influence human thought or progress, they illuminate important facets the state of humanity at a point in time - for example the Nebra sky disc sheds an enormous amount of light on human capacity for abstract thought in the Bronze Age.'
Federico Mayor (Former director general of UNESCO)
Mayor was responsible for the early promotion of memory in the UNESCO context, which may have its legacy in the 'Memory of the World' programme. He published Memory of the Future, UNESCO Publishing, in 1995. Below are some quotes from the book:
'[In answer to a question concerning the need for solidarity] Yes, if we move off the well-trodden track with imagination and daring, if the vision of the future wins over the vision of the past. It is never too late to think about tomorrow, no matter how distressing today may be. This is why I have written Memory of the Future' (p. 11).
'[Of universities] Interdisciplinarity - posing a structural challenge to institutions traditionally organized, in the words of Sir Eric Ashby as 'constellations of anarchies' - conjures up images of a universe in expansion, in which processes of continuous creation intersect and strengthen one another' (p. 31).
'UNESCO has (therefore) recently launched a wide-ranging programme of action, called 'Memory of the World', with the aim of ensuring that documents in jeopardy are preserved for evermore, in the first place by reproducing them by means of advanced techniques such as digital recording on media that are more reliable and longer lasting than conventional photocopies and microfilms' (p. 80).
'How could we not be encoraged to pursue our task (the promotion of mutual understanding and solidarity) with renewed energy and hope when we take a look at the impressive World Heritage List, containing as it does so many sites that are a priceless testimony to the wealth and diversity of our common heritage? (p. 101).
James H. Billington (U.S. Librarian of Congress)
Billington championed the Library of Congress’s National Digital Library program, American Memory, which makes millions of American historical and cultural documents from the collections of the Library and other research institutions on the Library's website available online.
Furthermore, he proposed the establishment of the World Digital Library in a speech to the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO in June 2005, indicating a commitment to large-scale digitisation projects comparable with Europeana (although allied with UNESCO).
I asked Heaney the following: how do you understand the concept of memory encoded by UNESCO's 'Memory of the World' programme? He wrote:
'I understand it in three ways:
a. Some documents record important human experience when those who experienced it are no longer with us to tell us directly - for example the Registry of the Slaves of the British Caribbean 1817-1834
b. Some documents are important because the document itself has had a major effect on humanity. Three very different examples of this would be Magna Carta; the patent for the internal combustion engine; and the first Landsat photographs.
c. Some are important because although they did not in themselves influence human thought or progress, they illuminate important facets the state of humanity at a point in time - for example the Nebra sky disc sheds an enormous amount of light on human capacity for abstract thought in the Bronze Age.'
Federico Mayor (Former director general of UNESCO)
Mayor was responsible for the early promotion of memory in the UNESCO context, which may have its legacy in the 'Memory of the World' programme. He published Memory of the Future, UNESCO Publishing, in 1995. Below are some quotes from the book:
'[In answer to a question concerning the need for solidarity] Yes, if we move off the well-trodden track with imagination and daring, if the vision of the future wins over the vision of the past. It is never too late to think about tomorrow, no matter how distressing today may be. This is why I have written Memory of the Future' (p. 11).
'[Of universities] Interdisciplinarity - posing a structural challenge to institutions traditionally organized, in the words of Sir Eric Ashby as 'constellations of anarchies' - conjures up images of a universe in expansion, in which processes of continuous creation intersect and strengthen one another' (p. 31).
'UNESCO has (therefore) recently launched a wide-ranging programme of action, called 'Memory of the World', with the aim of ensuring that documents in jeopardy are preserved for evermore, in the first place by reproducing them by means of advanced techniques such as digital recording on media that are more reliable and longer lasting than conventional photocopies and microfilms' (p. 80).
'How could we not be encoraged to pursue our task (the promotion of mutual understanding and solidarity) with renewed energy and hope when we take a look at the impressive World Heritage List, containing as it does so many sites that are a priceless testimony to the wealth and diversity of our common heritage? (p. 101).
James H. Billington (U.S. Librarian of Congress)
Billington championed the Library of Congress’s National Digital Library program, American Memory, which makes millions of American historical and cultural documents from the collections of the Library and other research institutions on the Library's website available online.
Furthermore, he proposed the establishment of the World Digital Library in a speech to the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO in June 2005, indicating a commitment to large-scale digitisation projects comparable with Europeana (although allied with UNESCO).
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