EDITORIAL

Investing in Digital Knowledge

Last month I attended two conferences, "Digital Knowledge" in
Toronto and "Electronic Visual Arts" (EVA) in Florence, which led me
to think more deeply about what kinds of digital objects those of us
concerned with cultural heritage information should be creating. At both
meetings, most people were discussing ways to capture and provide
access to digitized libraries of texts and images which were essentially
the kinds of information products that exist in analog libraries, but at
each there was at least a glimmer of realization that this was not the right
thing to be doing. By the end of the week I was fully convinced that we
have been trying to make the wrong digital knowledge and that we need
to radically redirect our efforts.

At the "Digital Knowledge" conference, the falsifying note was

smack by the founders of the Intemet Public Library who insisted that
what people wanted was services not digitized resources. At EVA, the
death knell to "compile images and texts" or "author multimedia
products" was sounded by those who were engineering solutions rather
than hand crafting them. Perhaps I can explain.

Digital conversion of printed books and photographs produces fast

paper; it has some advantages in terms of storage and delivery over the
original, but it fundamentally fails to use digital multimedia technologies
to advantage. A photograph of a windmill is nice; a photograph that
allows us to peel back the cover, see the mechanisms, run the mill and
watch the way the crank is attached to power distribution systems,
examine the renovation history and the ownership of the mill over time,
etc., uses interactive multimedia to advantage. The first point to make
about digital knowledge then is that it is functional, it should do some-
thing or be a service. If it is not, then it is digitized information from
analog sources, and it won't excite or really do what we need.

9 Archives & Museum Informatics 379

 The second issue is how to deliver objects embodying digital
knowledge. What we have been doing is compiling them or authoring
special '~tles" which present them in a narrative or a web for navigation.
Both authoring and compiling are approaches to using hand-made
objects and don't scale up. What is needed is approaches to engineered
delivery of multimedia objects. Engineered delivery involves
architecture and design in place of compilation and authoring.

At the EVA conference, several authors presented approaches to

algorithmically making links between objects, or driving presentation
from databases and the results of queries to databases. It was clear that
when digital objects were authored, or hand-crafted, they were unique,
but when designed they were parts of a whole with coherence between
each unit. When compiled, objects had standardized content imposed by
librarians, but when architected they had standardized structures to
support specific functions as imposed by engineers. The difference in
the two approaches was re-usability, support for multiple independent
intellectual perspectives, and the ease of reconfiguration. All this added
up to greater value over time.

Cultural heritage institutions, when they construct digital knowledge,

must make objects that are inherently interesting as multimedia, last over
time, and carry value that only the legitimacy and interpretive
scholarship of the repository could have created. Instead much attention
is being paid to making huge libraries of cultural clip art. As David
Wallace argues in his review of museum sites on the World Wide Web
in this issue, those institutions which use the Intemet to show a few
images, or a few thousand, without much documentation are essentially
shouting into a noisy ballroom. In a few years there will be hundreds of
thousands or millions of images on the net; they won't constitute digital
knowledge. Only deep documentation, structured for re-use and made
accessible to engineered search and navigation approaches, will be able
to qualify for the rubric of knowledge.

And even these should be intrinsically interesting objects, with layers

of meaning that require multimedia support to explain themselves.

380 Archives and Museum Informatics Vol 9 9 No 4 9 1995