When the Data hits the Fan!

Digital Content Monetisation Conference, London Implementing monetisation models to create rapid and sustainable digital growth Last week I attended the DCM conference as moderator for an afternoon session on “Monetising through effective DAM and DRM”. It was a great conference and I’d like to thank the organisers for having me and allowing two of our MA DAM students to attend as conference helpers. The tickets were ~£1,400 each so allowing us to attend at no fee was very generous! This blog provides a summary of thoughts provoked by this event.

When Crowdsourcing was called TeleCrofting Just after the Millennium I had the opportunity to work with the Shetland Isles Museum and Archives . I specified and installed a complete digitisation studio for the scanning of all the black and white glass plate photographs on the island - all 80,000+ of them. You can see these brilliant photo's here  and I highly recommend the puffin pictures ! One of the things you might notice if you surf your way over there is the rather good (considering the basic interface) subject and index based searching of images available. Searching by Parishes, photographers and detailed subject searching is possible. The 80,000+ glass plates had minimal cataloguing information attached to them. So this detailed indexing was achieved by adding indexing search terms and tagging for each and every photograph. There was not the staffing in the museum to achieve this task in any reasonable timeframe. It was done by the local Shetland population, mainly t