Long term implications of the social web for

cultural heritage metadata

Seth van HoolandUC3M (Madrid) - ULB (Brussels)

31th May 2010Powerhouse museum, Sydney

Sydney May 2010

Overview

• Evolution of documentation practices over time

• Negative and positive long-term outcomes of the social web for LAMs

• Commodification : social tagging

• Sense-making : user comments

• Questions - debate ...

Sydney May 2010

Context

• Digital Information Chair ULB (2009 - )

• Visiting scholar UC3M (2009-2010)

• Partner in the CollectiveAccess project

• Co-chair DC Tools community

• Account manager for digitization company

Sydney May 2010

“Stratified time”

Sydney May 2010

Social web

• User-generated metadata : conceptually not innovative, just the scale is different

• Exploring two potential long-term effects :

• Commodification of cultural heritage - case of social tagging

• Faciliting the functional memory - case of user comments

Sydney May 2010

Commodification of cultural heritage

• « Fitness for purpose » ISO quality definition of information systems and services

• Idea of self-regulating markets, where the demand has a direct impact on the offer :

• 19th century archives in Belgium

• Benjamin Barber : importance of safeguarding heritage for future generations

Sydney May 2010

Social tagging

• Access and use enable the classification => conform to the “fitness of use” principle

• But : fair representation of the users ?

• As much a child of its time as DCC, etc

• Use : tighten the relationship with the online user community

• “A way of acting on the present rather then recalling the past” Geoff Bowker

Sydney May 2010

Sydney May 2010

Overview

• Evolution of documentation practices over time

• Negative and positive long-term outcomes of the social web for LAMs

• Commodification : social tagging

• Sense making : user comments

• Debate ...

Sydney May 2010

Catalyzing the sense making process

• User comments : more semantics than tags

• No actual previous analysis (that I know off) of the content of user comments

• Case-study : Beeldbank Nationaal Archief

• Typology

Sydney May 2010

Shatford classification

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Results• S1: 67.61%, S2: 18.87%, S3: 30.70%, S4:

20.56%, G1: 6.29%, G2: 1.71%, G3: 0.57% , G4: 0.29%, A2: 2.86% (A1, A3 and A4 are not represented)

• Interests in specific terms, use few generic terms and hardly any or no abstract notions

• Most prevailing comments relate to individually named persons, groups or objects (S1)

Sydney May 2010

Typology of comments• Correction of the displayed metadata :

45.58%

• Including narrative elements : 31.09%

• Sharing the user’s personal history regarding the image : 8.95%

• Mentioning a false or inadequate display of the image : 3.14%

• Stating an opinion or judgment : 2.86%

• Engaging in a dialogue : 1.15%

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Correction of metadata

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Narrativity

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Personal history

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Layman versus expert

• Aleida Assmann : factual versus functional memory

• Not exclusive, but actually interdependent

• User comments are a crucial component to keep cultural heritage relevant to users

• Database versus narrative (Lev Manovich)

Sydney May 2010

Debate ...

• Democratic character of social tagging ?

• Long term value ?

• Metadata as the second most valuable good of a heritage institution => define quality metrics to be validated within the professional cv