These are the questions that pile up when I try to think about what a National Collection might mean. I wanted to record the questions somewhere —they are very much in progress. I don’t know what the answers are; I don’t know what I think the answers should or could be… mostly.
Any list of questions reflects the viewpoint and biases of its compiler. These are my questions, in a personal capacity.
Who are the users of a National Collection?
What is a citizen’s experience of the National Collection? What are they doing with it? Where do they go to do that?
Is it a showcase? Is it like a search engine, a portal that shows results but takes you to the “owner” web site to look at a thing? Or does it provide its own interface to show a thing? Is it similar to finding things in a big institution’s collection, but … even bigger?
What’s in it? What does it mean to be “in it”?
Is it things from collections held in Britain, that are in some way about Britain?
Or is it anything in collections held in Britain, regardless of where in the world they came from or how they ended up in that collection?
Does it contain things in other nation’s collections that are about Britain, or originated in Britain?
What does “National” mean, anyway? Things that happen to be geographically located in the Nation? Things of interest and relevance to the citizens of the Nation? Any large collection that meets that last criteria is immediately an international collection, and would need connections to cultural heritage and memory organisations all over the world. Institutional collection boundaries are perhaps meaningful — but are national boundaries? Items relevant to citizens’ family history and experience could be anywhere.
Is it mostly about objects of cultural heritage? From museums, and galleries?
Things from libraries? What about Britain’s national libraries and their digitised collections?
Things from archives? Like The National Archives? What about local authority archives? Community archives? Smaller archives and museums? Local historical societies?
What about community contributions, generally? Who can contribute and how do they do that?
Will contributors have the resources to contribute? Will it favour bigger organisations? If so, is that OK?
Who gets to put stuff in it? Who decides that something shouldn’t be in it?
How could it deal with so many different kinds of contributed content?
How is it organised? What does its descriptive metadata look like?
There’s a lot of knowledge from lots of different domains. How can different sources reconciled to form a coherent organisation of knowledge? Is it desirable to try to do that? Could it work without it?
How do you find things in it?
How do users make sense of a single system that might contain documents in a local history archive and paintings in the National Gallery?
Is it a gigantic connection machine?
Is it about giving organisations the tools and infrastructure to make their own connections? In which case, where and how do all those connections appear? How are they useful to people?
What’s new about it?
What’s needed to make it work? Skills, infrastructure, tools… cash…?
What about design? Who designs the National Collection?
What can it learn from Europeana, or DPLA? Are they similar? Or are they quite different?
