[Bp_localcontent] Policies on local content

[Alastair Dunning]

Dear all, 

I've seen the discussion on local content, and thought I would make a perspective from my organisation, The European Library.

I have to admit the concept of 'local content' is quite an unusual one. The research and national libraries that make up The European Library tend to define their collections in a global or national way rather than a local one. 

However, if we can think in terms of local content as being national content (and national digitisation strategies), then the concept becomes easier to talk about.

Many national libraries begun digitisation by have pursuing policies that have allowed them to digitise what they consider their national treasures. This was very popular in the early days of the Internet and produced exhibitions like this - http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/exhibition/

However, this is no longer a feasible approach. Users expect to see a broader spectrum of content available not just the featured, canonical highlights. Some countries have engaged in more systematic digitisation (eg books in Norway) which has been facilitated by collective rights agreements. Other countries have this approach for historic newspapers, working with a moving wall target to 70 or more years, and aiming to digitise all the newspapers before that date.

But books or newspapers are only a few of the media that a nation can digitise. Creating a sense of a national corpus of material is difficult for a host of reasons - the collections are dispersed not just in different public and private institutions in their own country, but in other countries' institutions; different funding structures and lack of coherent policies (on quality of digitisation, degrees of openness etc.)  mean different collections are digitised in different contexts at different standards; various metadata standards means it is difficult to make dispersed content interoperable.

Crowdsourcing / community engagement is another lens to look at this issue. By creating digital content and then, via various means, asking local / national audiences to engage with that content provides a firmer link between a collection and its public(s). The UK funding body, Jisc funded many projects along these lines in the UK and produced a report on the issue. They used the concept of 'community content' rather than 'local content'

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/communitycontent.aspx
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/dcatwefinalreport_final.pdf

The whole tenor of this work was it allowed communities not just to access content but to engage with it in more meaningful ways. This may well be a fruitful way of thinking about 'local content'

Alastair

Alastair Dunning
Programme Manager, The European Library
http://theeuropeanlibrary.org/
(Based in the National Library of the Netherlands)
skype: xcia0069
twitter: alastairdunning