In January, I was invited by the Getty Foundation to participate as a library commentator at a meeting of representatives from its Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI). One of the Getty Foundation’s most visible grant programs, the OSCI has, since its start in 2009, marshaled organizational, technical, and museum experience in the service of publishing rich, interactive museum catalogues. But beyond that stated mission, the program has yielded broad insights into digital publishing.

In the past, print editions of museum catalogues have been of interest primarily to art historians and collectors, serving a niche publishing market for high-end coffee table books. But early in its work, the museums participating in the OSCI realized that they were not only talking about digital editions of traditional art catalogues but were moving toward a digital publishing solution that could empower scholars and a broader lay audience to interact with a museum’s artifacts. As one participant described it, the initial question facing the OSCI was whether it should function like a restaurant or a grocery store. In other words, should it focus on serving complete meals (traditional art catalogues), or on providing ingredients (individual digital artifacts) to those who want to prepare their own?

Over the course of the two-day meeting, the most interesting discussions revolved around the challenges museums face as they seek to produce new online publications, and the opportunities that technology and the Internet present them. Not surprisingly, almost every participating museum reported that it has recently reorganized in some fashion, with most adding or changing the positions of staff responsible for content strategy, user experience, and digital media. Indeed, many OSCI participants acknowledged that digital technology has changed their approaches to being a museum, as new forms of user engagement have begun to yield new insights about how to present their content and collections. To that end, there was great interest in how Web analytics can improve websites. And, it was evident that museums have much to learn about how to optimize metadata to support greater discoverability. Sound familiar?

Collaboration

For me, the OSCI experiment stands out for several reasons, but perhaps the most critical aspect is its collaborative approach, which begins with the Getty Foundation. Instead of specifying an interest in a particular issue and soliciting independent proposals, Getty realized that creating a collaborative program would foster a more robust solution than might have been possible under a traditional grant program. It coordinated an effort among peer institutions, provided funding, and has convened meetings that allowed participants to share insights and discuss mistakes, progress, and strategies. In such a collegial atmosphere, mutual criticism moved everyone forward.

One result is that the Getty Foundation realized that a larger set of museums would benefit from a collaborative, open source authoring and Web publishing effort. To go back to the restaurant/grocery store analogy, OSCI participants decided that a Whole Foods approach is best, and they set out to produce a suite of tools (the OSCI Toolkit) that enables museums to offer both gourmet packaged meals (interactive catalogues) and high quality ingredients (discrete digital content) for users who want to prepare their own feasts.

For more than a century, cultural institutions (including museums, libraries, and publishers) have been organized as hierarchical bureaucracies. But in this era of powerful information technology, that model is showing its age, and much of my presentation at the Getty meeting focused on the need for greater collaboration. In what I thought was a risky premise, I posited that digital publishing has made it imperative for museums and cultural institutions to move toward a more distributed style of decision making that would allow midlevel employees to have greater freedom to make resource commitments and tactical choices. And I argued for making digital publishing a more routinely collaborative process, both within organizations, and, eventually, across peer institutions. I learned that, among the OSCI group, this is already beginning to happen, organically.

What stood out most from my experience at the meeting is the power of collaboration, and the tremendous insights and benefits that can come from sharing experiences. Too often, digital developments at one set of institutions, such as libraries and museums, never reach (and thus never benefit) counterparts in other areas, such as the publishing world. Just imagine what we might do if that changed?