An Open Content Museum of World Culture

Last week while we were giving a technology workshop at the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM) annual conference, the power of the observation that culture is additive, that cultural artifacts gain meaning as well as significance by being seen in the context of other, similar, artifacts from within and outside the culture, and that the digital world offers us the opportunity to bring dispersed cultural objects together, was self-evident. Here were hundreds of generally small museums, in diasporic communities throughout North America, that each held a tiny portion of the story of American Jewry. If only they could aggregate it – each telling their local story, yet each contributing to the larger picture of what Jewish culture means in America; and of course, they could.

This would take us far beyond schemes for national museum collections portals (mostly metadata repositories) that have received funding in some countries but have had little impact on users seeking to better understand other cultures since metadata contributes only a crust of such understanding. Yet Web technology makes integration of full collections knowledge and opening to worldwide commentary relatively simple if we don’t fall into several well known traps. First, we must not succumb to the numbing, dulling and expensive urge to standardize. Individual institutions document their own holdings, in their own terms, and possibly with contributions of knowledge from their immediate community or the wider world. With a minimum of coordination in keywording, they can ensure that web pages containing artifacts of Jewish heritage in museums appear in search engines as an aggregate, even without any agreement on common documentation standards, a shared information system or any on-going technical collaboration. With a bit of semantic web processing, such as we see in the Finnish museum portal, they could aggregate content in semantically meaningful ways and allow smart browsing of categories of objects.

At the CAJM meeting, the conversation soon turned to a second potential pitfall – how we were going to address the profound challenge of preserving digital documentation. Again, without succumbing to the temptation to plan a Trusted Digital Repository (TDR) dedicated to American Jewish heritage, these institutions could simply agree to give the content to the Open Content Alliance (OCA) that, with the Internet Archive as its repository, has agreed to keep it for them and make it available for free to the public forever. If the museums own the content outright, they can make it available under a Creative Commons license; if not, they can still give it to the OCA under more restrictive terms until more open terms can be negotiated.

It seems this idea has not been sufficiently explored by museums – at CAJM and elsewhere it is met with surprise. We think that it deserves a full hearing and discussion, so we’ve invite Brewster Kahle, “Digital Archivist”, founder of the Internet Archive and Open Content Alliance, to give the opening keynote address at Museums and the Web 2007 in San Francisco. We hope that the resulting dialogue throughout the MW meeting will lead us as a community towards a consensus of how we can built an open content museum of world culture in the first decade of the 21st century.