Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
its digital content in different ways.
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The BBC Backstage project has
also focused attention on how developers and others can make use of
BBC digital data.
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Within the academic sphere, Concordia, a shared
project between King's College London and New York University,
provides a good example. Under development at the time of the
writing, the project is exploiting lightweight geographical standards,
notably GeoRSS feeds and KML, to integrate different data resources
related to the study of classical Africa, mainly inscriptions carved in
monuments created during the Roman Empire.
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User interactions with digital data
Barring the flow of digital content out to other locations is just one of
the traditional boundaries that digitization projects need to break
down. How users interact with the digital data is another. Nearly all
digitization projects have followed a model in which the holder of
knowledge (whether it be university, museum, archive or other) creates
the digitized resource, adds the necessary contextual information and
presents it to a specific audience for consumption - a model that mimics
the one-way flow of information in the lecture hall.
Successful Web 2.0 sites, most notably YouTube and Flickr, have
built their foundations on ignoring this model, allowing user-generated
content to become the keystone around which their service is delivered.
If they are to achieve greater success, future digitization ventures need
to question the traditional parameters and develop services that respond
to the greater demand for user interaction.
The Great War Archive
Within the UK, perhaps the most successful example of this has been
the Great War Archive, an initiative that was born out of a larger
project based at the University of Oxford to digitize poetry manuscripts
related to World War 1.
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While the poetry manuscripts were held
either by collecting institutions (such as the Imperial War Museum's
Isaac Rosenberg collection) or by private estates (such as the manuscript
of Wilfred Owen's poem 'Strange Meeting'), the Great War Archive
sought to digitize relevant items held by the population at large. Every
item originates from, or relates to, someone's experience of World War
