Evidence of the Impact of Early Digitisation?
Posted: June 4, 2008 Filed under: evidence | Tags: nof-digitise evidence strategy digitisation 1 Comment »Representatives from the UK funding bodies Museums, Libraries and Archives (MLA) and the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) which spoke at an event in spring 2008 which suggested there was not much enthusiasm from them for digitisation.
Two bloggers, Bridget MacKenzie and Jeremy Ottevanger produced some really interesting responses.
One of the rationales for the lack of appetite for digitisation is the supposed failure of the NOF-digitisation programme, which ran from 1999 to 2004.
But is there actually any formal evidence of this? And if there is, what mistakes could be learnt from it? Could there be a way that we could be running improved programmes for the cultural heritage sector, quite possibly for much lesser costs?
Hi Alastair, thanks for the shout. I noticed a spike in visits and this is why. I’ve not got anything to add to what I wrote but if I could precis it I’d say, funders should be supporting us in partitioning the work of digitisation from interpretation and dissemination. All are vital, but if each little project tries to do all steps as they currently wish, we waste our efforts. We need chunk the work into horizontal rather than vertical slices.
As you say, some evidence in this argument would be very useful! But an attitude from funders that each project has to have a direct user-facing impact *on its own* is short-sighted, old fashioned and dumb. IMHO