Culture Grid Consultation

Collections Trust have launched a consultation about the future development of the Culture Grid (www.culturegrid.org.uk), the aggregator which currently provides access to 3m+ records from UK museums, archives and libraries. Here's a blog post about why with some useful thoughts on what aggregation means for cultural heritage:

http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/blog/culturegrid

Nick Poole (Head of Collections Trust) commented on the Culture Grid issue as follows:

My vision for the Culture Grid has always been as a service not a destination. It's a cornerstone of the COPE ('Create Once, Publish Everywhere') strategy that there needs to be middleware that extracts the collections data, stores it and makes it available to 3rd party platforms like Europeana, Google Cultural Institute, Digital Public Space (potentially) and anything else that might come along.

So the 'why' is that a museum would decide to promote themselves to online audiences by putting their data into these platforms, but instead of doing it several times for each separate destination, they put it into the Culture Grid and then tell us who we can share it with. In the process, we wanted to take some of the cost and some of the risk out of collections data-sharing so that it is an easier decision for a museum to make.

I always assumed that once everyone had an API, the need for this kind of middleware service would evaporate. In practice, one of the key outcomes of this consultation so far is that this is far from being the case - people want the Culture Grid to build out the use case, demonstrate value and actively broker cultural data into things like hacks and new platforms. Which brings me to one of the big challenges with the Culture Grid. The Culture Grid is a free-to-use service, but to get funding for it, we had to build a search front-end (the website at http://www.culturegrid.org.uk). Because this was a secondary aim for us, it's never been promoted as a public-facing destination. However, as soon as you put up a front-end, everyone wants you to make it something the public would really want to use. This is one of the challenges that's faced Europeana all along, and one of the reasons why they're now focusing on improving the end-user experience of their main website.

It's a critical question in terms of our future strategy - do we:

a) Stick to the vision that the Culture Grid is an enabling service, not a destination in its own right (which makes it hard to pay for),
b) Focus on developing it as an end-user destination (which would involve us getting a lot more involved in quality, standards, rights and metadata enrichment),
c) Both,
d) Neither.