The Smithsonian has decided this whole online contraption may not be a fad after all.
Over the weekend it invited 31 luminaries of the digital age to talk with what the institution hopes are its most energetic thought leaders. The subject: dragging the world's greatest museum complex into the current century.
No small task.
Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, the technorati monthly, tells of one Smithsonista who proudly observed that her operation's curators had already carefully picked 1,300 photos and uploaded them to the social-sharing Web site Flickr.
The problem is that the Smithsonian has 13 million photos.
Well, it's a start. Only 99.99 percent to go.
At this gathering -- "Smithsonian 2.0," it was called -- there was much talk among the institution's handpicked staffers about the difficulties of moving this battleship, ocean liner, glacier . . . pick your metaphor. The invited techies, meanwhile, stressed how deathly soon might come the day the Smithsonian wakes to discover itself General Motors.
The forward-looking Smithsonistas have a formidable ally. That would be G. Wayne Clough, who became the Smithsonian's new secretary in July. His previous gig, fortuitously enough, was being president of Georgia Tech. This initiative is his idea, and a major thrust of his young administration. He claims "Smithsonian 2.0" will not be one of those feel-good events after which hibernation resumes.
"With digitization and with the Web, we can see it all. We can see it all!" he exults. ...
Of the Smithsonian's 137 million artifacts, however, not only is less than 1 percent on display, but most of that is in Washington. You have to come to the Smithsonian. It doesn't much come to you. ...
The question for attendees of the "Smithsonian 2.0" discussion was, how can you get everything -- every thing, every last dung-rolling beetle -- out there where everyone in the world can get equally excited about it?
The core group of outsiders were heavy dudes, as these things go. The principal presenters included Bran Ferren, co-chairman and chief creative officer of the legendary Applied Minds Inc. (Before that he was president of research and development and creative technology for Walt Disney.) Clay Shirky is the author of the acclaimed Here Comes Everybody, the recent book that looks at the seismic changes being brought about by decentralized, bottom-up, peer-to-peer technologies. George Oates is one of the founders of Flickr, the photo-sharing phenomenon. ...
The discovery of the "long tail" principle has implications for museums because it means there is vast room at the bottom for everything. Which means, Anderson said, that curators need to get over themselves. Their influence will never be the same. ...
The problem is, "the best curators of any given artifact do not work here, and you do not know them," Anderson told the Smithsonian thought leaders. ...
It's like Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, Anderson said. Some Wikipedia entries certainly are not as perfectly polished as the Britannica. But "most of the things I'm interested in are not in the Britannica. In exchange for a slight diminution of the credentialed voice for a small number of things, you would get far more for a lot of things. Something is better than nothing." And right now at the Smithsonian, what you get, he said, is "great" or "nothing." ...
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
