Fresh & New(er)

The New York Times announced last week that it was stopping charging for archival and subscription content on its website. As its self-report explains, the NYT has realised that selling and managing subscription service to archival content now is not going to be as profitable as selling advertising on this content and making access to it easy and free.

This turnaround has come at the hands of Google and the power of search – search which is now driving less ‘serious’ readers to their content who are unwilling to buy a subscription. For the NYT they expect to get better returns on material previously only available through subscriptions via onsite advertising and the ability for readers to engage in conversations around the content. Conversations mean exposure, exposure means advertising. Blogger Jason Kottke (amongst many others) has already been digging through the archives exposing some of the more interesting material.

There has been an explosion of discussion across the web but the Future of the Book pulls together three commentaries to suggest that

Whatever the media business models of tomorrow may be, they will almost certainly not revolve around owning content.

and drawing on Jeff Jarvis’s 2005 proclamations, explains that the future lies in integrating your content into your audience’s conversations.

But in this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.

So what might this mean for museums?

Whilst those in collecting institutions often see themselves as the sole holders of particular objects, it is becoming more acceptable to acknowledge that as institutions there is still a lot to learn about these objects and that that knowledge may lie elsewhere in the community. Certainly injecting museum content into, and encouraging audience conversations then is not as controversial as it might have been ten years ago. Exclusivity might work with our physical spaces but not online.

At the same time increasing commercial pressures are asking museums to find new revenue streams – image sales, licensing, syndication, partnerships. Already the V&A and the Met have moved to ‘no-fee’ image licensing for small run academic publishing after discovering that the internal cost of charging for these operations outweighed their commercial returns. From the WIPO’s Guide to Managing Intellectual Property for Museums (pt 6.6) –

Recent developments in business models concerning the production and distribution of content on the Internet, coupled with a continued examination by museums of their missions and mandates has led to an awareness that the making available of museum images is merely a means to a commercial end, and not the end, itself. Indeed, in a recent press release, the Victoria and Albert Museum announced that it would no longer charge fees for academic and scholarly reproduction and distribution for its images, claiming that while it earned approximately 250,000 a year from scholarly licensing programs, the overhead costs associated with licensing fees rendered their profits much less. What is not reported, but suspected, is that the Victoria and Albert Museum determined that it was wise business practice to allow its copyright-protected images to be made available for free, thereby increasing their circulation and delivering significant promotional opportunities back to the museum.

As the WIPO Guide suggests, there is some potential for museums in the online space in the brand and promotional opportunities in the short term, and then flowing from these in the medium-long term, the partnerships and commercial content syndication options that are expected to flow from a greater awareness (and discussion) of content.

What the NYT announcement does, along with the increased commercial activity around digitising state-held records, especially those relating to the profitable family history space, is create significant competition for museum content online.

When Bad News Follows You in the New York Times (via Nick Carr) is a fascinating article about what can happen when ‘everything’ is put online.

The article looks at the new array of problems that have come about as a by-product of the NYT optimising their site and archives for Google with SEO techniques. Suddenly stories that were either of minor significance, or were in later editions, corrected, are appearing toward the top of Google searches for names, places and events.

Most people who complain want the articles removed from the archive.

Until recently, The Times’s response has always been the same: There’s nothing we can do. Removing anything from the historical record would be, in the words of Craig Whitney, the assistant managing editor in charge of maintaining Times standards, “like airbrushing Trotsky out of the Kremlin picture.”

Whitney and other editors say they recognize that because the Internet has opened to the world material once available only from microfilm or musty clippings in the newspaper’s library, they have a new obligation to minimize harm.

But what can they do? The choices all seem fraught with pitfalls. You can’t accept someone’s word that an old article was wrong. What if that person who was charged with abusing a child really was guilty? Re-report every story challenged by someone? Impossible, said Jonathan Landman, the deputy managing editor in charge of the newsroom’s online operation: there’d be time for nothing else.

(snip)

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has a different answer to the problem: He thinks newspapers, including The Times, should program their archives to “forget” some information, just as humans do. Through the ages, humans have generally remembered the important stuff and forgotten the trivial, he said. The computer age has turned that upside down. Now, everything lasts forever, whether it is insignificant or important, ancient or recent, complete or overtaken by events.

Following Mayer-Schönberger’s logic, The Times could program some items, like news briefs, which generate a surprising number of the complaints, to expire, at least for wide public access, in a relatively short time. Articles of larger significance could be assigned longer lives, or last forever.

Mayer-Schönberger said his proposal is no different from what The Times used to do when it culled its clipping files of old items that no longer seemed useful. But what if something was thrown away that later turned out to be important? Meyer Berger, a legendary Times reporter, complained in the 1940s that files of Victorian-era murder cases had been tossed.

“That’s a risk you run,” Mayer-Schönberger said. “But we’ve dealt with that risk for eons.”

There are interesting parallels with our experience in making our online collection more usable and accessible. Public enquiries have skyrocketed and now range from the scholarly to the trivial – the greatest increase being in the latter category. Whilst there is a significant amount of extremely valuable piece of object related information sent in by members of the public, there are false leads and material that cannot be adequately verified, and more still that the Museum already knows but has not yet made available online. Managing public expectations and internal workflow is a difficult balancing act and a continuing challenge that many museums that not only put their collections online, but also make them highly accessible, are facing.