Andy Powell has had a blog-writing explosion over the last few days, and a couple of his posts made me both smile and think a bit. Particularly ‘What Web 2.0 teaches us…‘ where Andy talks about how “Web 2.0 technology democratises production but creative talent and presentation skills remain rare commodities”. This is interesting, particularly as we had a similar conversation in the Digital Library team recently, about ways of avoiding the copyright and licencing hoops that we have to jump through to deliver images to our History of Art Department. We talked about art historians, and the Department, maybe investing in a high-quality digital camera to capture images in situ, of architecture, of original paintings in galleries and so forth … wouldn’t that be great for building a collection of useful images for scholars? Erm, well no, and in saying that I mean no disrespect to members of the Department but our academic staff aren’t professional photographers (in the main) and I doubt that any of them would want to carry all the photographic kit necessary to capture the kind of quality images they want to use. Nor would they have time to wait for the perfect lighting, or probably have the skills to get all of the necessary fine-tunings and balances right. We could get a nice collection of ’snaps’ this way and there could be some real value in this kind of lightweight collection, but for serious use, for presentation, study and analysis, we need images of a high and professional quality. And I’m sure we can apply the same logic to our Music and Theatre, Film and Television Departments. Yes, there might be value in a performance recorded on an inexpensive device – it may be the only recording we have, but for serious research we need a quality that such devices, and amateurs, simply cannot deliver. So, I can only agree with Andy’s post, that “there is always a place for do-it-yourselfness”, but we can’t meet all of our needs without the right equipment, skill and professionalism, and we have to accept that one way or another we’re going to have to pay for that.
I’d also argue the same about metadata, that you can only get so far with user-created tags, but that the real value comes when effort is putting into both the creation and the mechanisms for creating metadata.
