paper brainstorming - typology of digital collections - more thoughts

So I've had a chance to do some brainstorming about this 'digital collections typology' -- thinking about the variables that we can use to compare the different projects that use digital technologies to share their collections with stakeholder communities.

The first one that emerged was How is source community knowledge regarded?

On one end of the spectrum there are projects that use the language of sharing: knowledge is given, collected, enhances collections information. The majority of the projects I've seen fall in this camp, I think.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are projects that recognize that knowledge is not monolithic: there is dialogue and sometimes disagreement, there are multiple perspectives about objects -- the incommensurability that we keep talking about in some of our earlier papers.

Another variable that we might use is How are users regarded?
Are they active agents in producing information? or passive consumers of information?

-- a related issue to this one is how easy is it for a user to contribute to the catalog? Is it as easy as filling in a field and pressing 'submit'? or are there more steps involved in becoming someone the museum thinks worthy of contributing to the collection information?

There were several other issues that I thought of, but they did not seem to fall on a spectrum or axis:

-- local use of information -- how is the information used locally? do the projects acknowledge that collections information can be used in unexpected ways within source communities? do they facilitate this local 'life' of information?
-- identification of individual contributors -- whether the 'community knowledge' comes from named individuals, or if it's added in without identifying who it came from.

I'm sure other issues will emerge, and I will refine (and possibly combine) some of these variables, but that's what I have for now.

paper brainstorming - typology of digital collections

Ramesh and I had a conversation last week where we talked about digital museums/collections -- an area of research that I've been working on recently (and posting about on this blog: here, here, and here). Eventually this will be developed into a paper, and I wanted to put some of our ideas up here on the blog for everyone's discussion and consideration.

• Once I've looked through a bunch of examples, Ramesh wants me to build a typology of sorts, based around how these digital collections work with new media and allow other ways of interaction with communities.
• Creating it so that it's not just a list, but a landscape of what's out there in terms of these digital collections (not digital museums, because we're not talking about online exhibits, but rather online catalogs).
• Articulating their relationship with one another and with our project
• Based around certain variables : ie. use of blogging, semantic tagging, other sociotechnical issues
• thinking about different axes - mapping those examples, then presenting in context, and comparing/contrasting with where our project stands
• also addressing a larger set of questions about how information institutions open up and represent other voices, and the sociotechnical issues that come up

By 'sociotechnical', I mean the problems/issues that arise at the intersection between people and technology. For example, systems that aren't designed to accommodate controls around sensitive information, or allow communities to set permissions for access based on their own cultural protocols of access.

The important thing is to situate our project relative to other digital institutional collections-based projects that are working with communities. Looking at the institutions, and the systems. Not necessarily all indigenous communities, but it wouldn't be a bad thing if all our examples had that in common.

Eventually this will be developed into a paper that is a justification for our project relative to what's out there. With a title that's something like "Enabling Voice in Digital Collections" (have to define what we mean by voice, and how different systems enable voice). The key would be to extract that model/ those variables and placing different projects along an axis/axes. Possibly we can include some evaluative data from our project, but maybe not (depending on whether it ends up being relevant).