>> Presenations Museum Computer Network Conference, 1997 October 16, 1997 "Communication and Integration: the Challenge for the Cultural Community"   Introduction Within the official theme of this conference of "Communication," I notice that the most common theme for presentations is integration--especially "integrated access." The two go together perfectly. If you think about it, integrated access is about communication. You can't have meaningful access without communication. Simple, physical access to naked or raw data is as compelling as access to the rich and powerful who will not listen or speak with you. Any rich access demands effective two-way communication between the visitor/researcher ("What is this material? Where did it come from? How do you know? Why should I be interested? What is its story? What do others think? Where do I go from here?") and the host ("Who are you? Have you been here before? What do you want to know about this? What do you know already? What might be useful to you? Do you need any guides?"). Indeed the wider the access, the broader the communication bandwidth needs to be.   The Levels of Integrated Access As we are increasingly aware, "integrated access" occurs at many levels: First, at the intranet level of inside access to the multiple databases and other forms of information and communication systems within an institution. James Blackaby reminds us in his essay, "Integrated Information Systems," 1. how disparate that information usually is and how it is mostly not in a computerized form but rather "the file cabinets, the curator's desk, the document boxes, the naturalist's logbook, the educator's cart, and maybe even the curator and the collections manager themselves." At the next level of integration, we have museums' "professional" access to each other's information; the sharing and exchanging of information. This is the arena in which the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) operates and Diane Zorich has usefully cataloged the potential benefits for exhibition organizers and designers, catalogers, museum researchers, conservators, educators, and curators wanting access to worldwide collections: cumulatively leveraging museum staff and financial resources. At the level of single-point access for a broad range of the public, from scholarly researcher to curious layperson, to a wide array of distributed and disparate resources in museums we are now darkly glimpsing the possibilities through a few projects: CHIN's National Inventory (in its Guide to Canadian Museums and Galleries); the MESL project and its descendants: AMICO and MDLC. In other sectors of our communities: university research libraries are showing early progress as, for example, The Making of America projects at Cornell and Michigan are planning to link their currently separate collections and to expand to other Digital Library Federation members; and archives, for example, in testing the EAD, are also coming up fast with the American Heritage Virtual Archive testbed project). The final phase will be the current dream of public, single-point integrated access across all sectors for a sizable number of museums, private collections, libraries, archives and other sources using multimedia material and searches. For all of this, not only communication but deep-seated active collaboration is essential--and that too is one of the related themes of the conference NINCH This is the cue for me to say something about NINCH, as it was founded very much on this need for a greater integrative principle to be working in the digital networking arena across the components of the cultural community. NINCH is a membership coalition mostly of organizations and associations representing museums, libraries, archives, higher education, scholarly societies, and the contemporary arts. Its mission is to promote and advocate for the digital networking of cultural heritage materials but, more importantly doing so in as coordinated and integrated a way as possible. Formed in March 1996, the coalition is engaged in: educating each other about technical and policy developments in the field; developing a common advocacy strategy for winning recognition from government and institutions of our needs and contributions to the creation of a worthwhile information infrastructure; and acting as a catalyst in whatever ways it can towards the goal of building the united, federated, distributed digital libraries, archives and museums of the U.S. (well, of the world, really). So clearly from my perspective the emphasis that I detect on integrated access is something I'm excited by and supportive of. Beyond Access However, of course, this is not enough. Systems and technologies can only go so far: they are dependent on the human factor. Much of our progress here, as with much other human endeavor, will depend upon the degrees of human stubbornness and human vision in play, on institutional politics, on the power of the past to dictate the future versus the power of the persuasive few to turn the heads and those elusive switches in people's heads that will help them understand the dimensional magnitude of what we are about. While you, as museum staff, are working hard to improve the way you tell the stories of the objects under your care, we, as a broader community, have to find good ways of telling our story. We're back to Communication. I would venture that we (or some of us) need to be engaged increasingly in two things: in explaining and demonstrating what digital networking is doing to our work, and can do to the structures in which we work (both the intellectual, discipline-based structures and the organizational, institutional structures); and in boldly building a more theoretical base for what we are doing and to chart the ground that we see before us: in a combination of theory and "Imagineering" So what do we want to explain and demonstrate? Principally that digital networking (and the integrated access to worldwide cultural material and its metadata and the contact and communication that come with it) is not additive. It's on a different plane than figuring improved accounting systems. To invoke Thomas Kuhn's famous model on the development of science, digital networking is not "normal science"--slowly accretive, additive--like improved accounting systems--but involves a paradigm shift. Of course there is and will be resistance. Institutions are famously slow to change. Anthropologist Mary Douglas' book "How Institutions Think" is helpful here in our being aware of how ways of thinking are locked into existing social structures. 2. And Berkeley librarian Peter Lyman, one of my favorite digital seers, also reminds us of how successful new technologies must reinforce the core values of any social group: "all cultures, ancient and modern, know how to "break" tools that compromise their sense of order and authority." I'm sure we all know institutions and associations who see this work as "technology," just another thing on the list of things that might make our life easier and our work a little more effective (like accounting software and in-house multi-media presentations of existing work, existing thought). The Internet is "a good thing," we hear, as long as it's kept in its place and doesn't get too intrusive. Well, digital networking is a tool in a museum's toolbox; but it is also a strategy and a force that's difficult to keep in any box. It is dependent on technology but it is really not about technology. Our belief, or at least my belief, is that this will alter the internal structure of museums, how museums play in the culture as a whole, and how museums work with each other and with other institutions in the cultural or knowledge industry (both locally and worldwide). [And so I'm pleased to see sessions on the new exploding registrar and on how the new information professionals will be created, nurtured and integrated into museum structures (though I wonder if there'll be any discussion of actual change to those structures) and on how Web Teams from across divisions of a museum are an essential recipe for building a museums web presence.) One other tack I might try here is to suggest, slightly tongue-in-cheek, that networking might even bring art and cultural artifacts back as a reason to visit art museums. How many of you saw and were intrigued by the October 5 lead story in the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times about the success of art museums over the last 25 years? The number has increased by 50% since 1970; over 100 million visits are made each year and museums, once only quiet, dark contemplative caverns are now "classroom, meeting place, restaurant, playground, park bench, party palace, cinema, singles bar, conversation provocateur, travel agent, lecture hall, wine bar, and...the place to see and be seen socially." As New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art's own paradigmatic advertisement puts it: the Great Hall has replaced Grand Central--and the shopping mall is close at hand. Over the last five years 120 large museums increased gallery space by 3% and store space by 30%. With a general increased dependence on gate fees rather than subsidies, museums now know the quandary of theaters: do popular potboilers/blockbusters that have something to do with Impressionism or Picasso and represent certitude, or produce investigative work that will not pay the rent. Interestingly, no mention was made of museums' web presence or what it could do to help in the bringing the museums' collections back to stage center. This is partly where NINCH should come in again--in gathering practical examples from all of our sectors--of how the work that has been done to date is already changing the ground. But I believe it's something we should all be aware of. One of the most useful and generative projects I've come across has been MESL-- the Museum Educational Site Licensing project. With a tough schedule and all manner of unforeseen difficulties erupting throughout its brief two-year life-span it has produced much good thinking on economic models, crossed many difficult technical hurdles in getting a library of over 9,000 images and data operating, has sketched the basis for practical steps in bringing a critical mass of museum images before a particular audience and as it passes away is seeing two real-world offspring being born. The MESL final report together with a collection of essays by participants addressing how their institutions were changed by the MESL experience will be immensely useful both in very practical terms and in giving us fuel for our fire about the transformative nature of what we're about here. Some of the elements I find most exciting about this project: the notion of a collective, building a single point of access, multi-institutional digital library of high-quality images with full documentation, cataloging and contextualizing materials; [rich integrated access] the fact that it was wildly collaborative [our undercover theme at this conference]. Not only did it bring together groups of different kinds of institutions (7 universities and 7 museums) with shared values as equals, but on another level each institution brought a team of players together that in many cases had not worked together before. Museums brought together staff from the registrar's office; IT, photo services, the library, and educational and curatorial offices; and universities: faculty, designers, and staff from the library, visual resources, computing, Information Services. the potential for the discovery of new uses for visual material by engaging libraries and faculty into the equation. With regard to the last of these, one of the participants wrote that one of the most dramatic results of this experience was to begin to actually reconfigure the context of its main collection. The George Eastman House collection of photography had been assembled as part of the campaign in the 1920s to raise photography to a fine art. Thus its supportive cataloging consisted of the "leanest art historical data" rather than the result of a demanding analysis of content, subject or meaning. The museum is now engaged in a retrospective "associated texts" project to build up the metadata of its collection: slowly aware that this collection as it is being digitized may have a far wider appeal than ever previously imagined. As Education Director, Roger Bruce puts it; "Omnivorous postmodern scholarship goes wherever it wants. In the near future our collections may as frequently support labor history, for example, as the history of artistic photography." And it really is the quality of the metadata that will support this. Alfred North Whitehead in his classic "The Aims of Education" decried the presentation of inert information: raw data sitting naked and cold in an alien context. And today it's tragic to witness the immensity of so much inert information, 'stuff,' on the Web. And this includes material on museum, library and archival web sites: flat pictures of object x with virtually no platform to perform. Actually, museums, as we know, got away for years with this in the glass-box syndrome: you were an expert and you knew, or you just gazed in aesthetic daze at something that literally just sat there behind its protective layers. Now this behavior won't wash on the Web. Our information has to be rich and connected. And deep, well-researched metadata can give material back its dynamic potential, its legs, some ground, some wings--and some good hyperlinks. Two theorists, "Imagineers" if you like, both working for the Smithsonian, whom I'd like to mention and for whom metadata is key for the future of museums and archives, are Steven Lubar and Elizabeth Broun. Steven Lubar is chair of the History of Technology division at the National Museum of American History. At this year's Society of American Archivists conference he gave the most spirited defense of metadata and its place in a more activist understanding of how archives, aided by their digital networking, can operate in society. Defining them traditionally as the site of institutional and cultural memory and thus of power (who controls the access to and the use of archives can control social, institutional or national memory and the story that is told), archives, Lubar argued, should be treated as more active producers of culture than we might normally give them credit for. Now, with the aid of metadata and an archival attitude that will allow documents to be connected, historical documents will have much greater range. Elizabeth Broun, director of the National Museum of American Art, continues to define the work museums should be doing in the future with their new networking tools. (See for example her "Museums 2000" paper).3. Not only should they tell the stories of objects more efficiently, but they should be able "to surface the complexity of the stories we tell about objects" (far more complex than the stories a Disney theme park is keen to tell) by paying great attention to metadata, to the coding of material, ensuring that it include multi-level interpretive points of view. Broun is good at imagining the new "Museum Without Walls" of the future--the meta-museum where a museum delivers its richly contextualized pieces up to collaborative digital exhibitions (or allows visitors putting together their own exhibits, or searching for the answers to research questions, to come in to the museum. In this work, she says, the signature, character or hallmark of a particular museum lies not in the mass of the collection or the volumes of stories to be told but in those few stories that are unique to the museum, those you can tell better than anyone else. Networking enables visitors to investigate and discover the stories of objects before the visit by exploring the web of relationships that complex, multilevel coding can deliver. This facility is nicely described in Max Anderson's introduction to The Wired Museum. But how are curators and scholars going to transform scholarly expertise into a point of view useful to multiple audiences? Searchable data (on today's tiny, limited databases) often misses the informed point of view. This is another argument not only for metadata but for the action of coding digital objects as a serious intellectual enterprise. Intellectual Property As this conference started with a special session on data standards initiatives (by which collaborative integrated access is made possible) it ends on Saturday with a similar open session on Intellectual Property issues--perhaps the greatest collaborative challenge we face and probably the single most important issue for all of us. As we travel further into the digital era, the intellectual property and intellectual value issues continue to become more complex than we have known in the past--and they will continue in this way, I surmise, for quite a while. Once we have integrated access and are over our delight at being able to discover and navigate complex bodies of material on the web we quickly come up against a knot of issues regarding the relationships between that material, its owners and users, In other words: who can do what to material that is available on the Web? How can material be protected on the Web as it is made increasingly accessible? Should there be open and free access to digital museums, should there be any kind of charge for access; if so should there be different charges for different uses, different users? Should it be easy to verify and authenticate material online; should material be digitally watermarked or otherwise protected from mis-use and mis-appropriation; should it be possible to download and print out all digital material? How do the basic economics of providing digital access to archival material collide with our belief systems in making research material available for free? The forces that intersect in this vortex of new concerns are those of legislation (should law follow or direct practice) in protecting the rights of copyright owners and the received practices of the users of material; new technology (especially encryption technology enabling the locking up of digital material only to be unlocked for a small payment or a password); and new licensing arrangements reflecting new economic relationships. These themes and issues will be demonstrated on Saturday with a particular emphasis on the site licensing models. Meanwhile, current copyright legislation and the battles around fair use I believe demand our keenest and utmost attention. Balanced copyright law that guarantees fair use and other educational exemptions is a vital first platform for us all. NINCH is an active member of the Digital Future Coalition that is working extremely effectively in presenting balanced digital copyright legislation before Congress and we do a thorough job in informing members and our listserv subscribers about current developments in as clear a manner as we can muster. Barry Szceszny from AAM is here to answer any specific copyright-related legislative issues--and I think the position of museums both with copyright legislation and in CONFU is critical for the rest of the community.   Conclusion My final words are that in intellectual property as with everything else, we need the parallel work of what Elizabeth Broun calls "implementeering"--the development and implementation of carefully crafted protocols, standards, agreements, language, legislation, etc., alongside essential risk-taking, envisioning, and pioneering. Eleanor Fink in her keynote speech at the first (1997) Museum and the Web conference, envisioning the culture of the year 2005, closed with a vision of a cultural network that would form a "new domain of the human spirit, a territory of cultural discovery and innovation." However, Eleanor said, the main obstacle to the realization of this vision is not technology or economics but our reluctance to take risks and to "identify strategic partners and developing collaborations that can move us forward toward our mutual goals." "Working alone, we can produce a lot of impoverished weed patches that, given the competition from business and entertainment sectors, no one will want to visit. Working together, we can create a magnificent garden with something for everyone." Footnotes 1. The Wired Museum: Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms, Katherine Jones-Garmil, ed. American Association of Museums, 1997. 2. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think. Syracuse University Press, 1986. 3. Museums for the New Millennium: Proceedings: "New tools to help museums perform their work." Smithsonian Institution, 1996.