David Newbury discusses the challenges and opportunities in modeling and digitizing museum collections, emphasizing the limitations of current cataloging standards. He highlights the importance of understanding the context and user interaction with digital collections, proposing a collaborative approach to address the evolving expectations of information access. Newbury calls for a reevaluation of how labor in cultural heritage preservation aligns with shared values and community service.

1. CIDOC 2024, November 12, 2024
The Work of Digital Collections
David Newbury
Senior Director, Public Technologies, Getty

2. Thank you, CIDOC & Rijksmuseum.
I lead public technologies at Getty.
I’ve been working on museum data standards
for the past decade.
You are my people.
2
Introduction: The Work of Digital Collections

3. I’d like to show you
three things.
3
Introduction: The Work of Digital Collections
Decorated Text Page, Getty
Epistles, Master of the Getty
Epistles, 1528-1530

4. I’d like to show you
three things.
4
Introduction: The Work of Digital Collections
G. Prat photograph album of
China and Japan, 1874-1900,
Page 109.

5. I’d like to show you
three things.
Introduction: The Work of Digital Collections
The moral of flowers
Rebecca Hey, 1833

6. 6
What do you see: Three Manuscript Pages?

7. 7
What do you see: Three Artworks?

8. 8
What do you see: Three Authored documents?

9. 9
What do you see: Three Collection Items?

10. 10
What do you see: Three Human-Made Objects?

11. 11
What do you see: Three primary sources?

12. 12
What do you see: Three stories about nature?

13. 13
What do you see: Three beautiful images?

14. 14
What do you see: Three JPEGS?

15. I’d like to show you three other things…
15
And now for something completely different

16. 16
What do you see: Disciplinarity!

17. DACS/EAD. MARC21. Linked.Art.
Each of these is a cataloging standard.
Each of these is a model of the world.
17
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

18. Our web pages display our
chosen model back to our users.
18
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

19. Our models of the world are terrible.
19
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

20. ALL models of the world are terrible.
20
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

21. Every model of the world does inconceivable violence
to the underlying reality and humanistic truth of our
lived experience.
21
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

22. 22
How dare we model these?

23. Those models reflect our
understanding of our users
back at our users.
23
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

24. Our understanding of our users
is based in our disciplinary training.
24
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

25. And our disciplines describe
the work we do to enable
the work we believe our users do.
25
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

26. This is a work of art, of paint and gold,
created be a French artist in the
early 16th century.
26
Decorated Text Page: Getty Art Collection

27. Our model documents its materiality,
how it has been exhibited, what we
know about its history and influence.
27
Decorated Text Page: Getty Art Collection

28. Our model emerges from inventory
management, tracking the location,
movement, and insurance value of
expensive, unique objects.
28
Decorated Text Page: Getty Art Collection

29. Our model enables study, inspiration,
and our duty of care for this unique,
physical object.
29
Decorated Text Page: Getty Art Collection

30. This is a primary source,
documenting the travels
and opinions of a French
silk inspector working in
China in the late 19th
century.
30
G. Prat Photographic album of China and Japan: Getty Research Collection

31. Our model documents the context,
history, and processing of this page
within the larger context of the
archive, as well as the physical
location and arrangement of the
material.
31
G. Prat Photographic album of China and Japan: Getty Research Collection

32. Our model emerges from finding aids,
letting scholars request objects—
and decide if it’s worth the trip.
32
G. Prat Photographic album of China and Japan: Getty Research Collection

33. Our model enables understanding of
the original context of the archive’s
creator and the retrieval of the
physical materials for further study.
33
G. Prat Photographic album of China and Japan: Getty Research Collection
Source: The National Archives (UK). (Link)

34. This is a page from a book of poetry,
written by Rebecca Hey and
published by Longman, Rees, Orme,
Brown, Green & Longman in 1833.
It is available in the GRI Special
Collections.
34
The Moral of Flowers: Getty Library

35. Our model documents the authorship,
publication, subject matter, location, and
access criteria for the book.
35
The Moral of Flowers: Getty Library

36. Our model emerges from card
catalogs, allowing for self-service
access to vast materials in consistent
ways.
36
The Moral of Flowers: Getty Library

37. Our model enables discovery of a book,
facilitating identification, confirming
relevance, and enabling access to the
book for research or pleasure.
37
The Moral of Flowers: Getty Library

38. These are all useful models.
38
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world
38

39. They’re all also wrong.
39
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

40. …with all due respect to my museum, library, and archival colleagues.
40
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

41. They’re all books…
41
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

42. …but not really.
They’re all digitized proxies of books,
available on the internet as images.
42
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

43. They’re all web pages describing items,
providing access and enabling research.
43
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

44. And they’re all embedded in a discovery ecosystem.
44
Disciplinarity: Modeling the world

45. And they’re all embedded in a discovery ecosystem.
45
Disciplinarity: Searching the Internet

46. Google is only 26 years old.
46
Disciplinarity: Searching the Internet

47. Our ability to store information has
exploded over the past 26 years.
47
Disciplinarity: Searching the Internet
By User5515 - Own work, CC BY 3.0. (link)

48. And our ability to capture and process
information has expanded alongside that.
48
Disciplinarity: Searching the Internet

49. Over the weekend,
I took a walk in Westerpark.
49
Digression: a walk in the park

50. This sign was hanging on a gate.
I was curious.
50
Digression: a walk in the park

51. I took a photo.
51
Digression: a walk in the park

52. Selected the text.
52
Digression: a walk in the park

53. …and translated the content.
53
Digression: a walk in the park

54. Turns out there’s a garden party coming up.
54
Digression: a walk in the park

55. Turns out there’s a garden party coming up.
55
Digression: a walk in the park
…this is the future of access to information.

56. Turns out there’s a garden party coming up.
56
Digression: a walk in the park
…this is the future present of access to information.

57. These photos capture technical metadata.
They contain geospatial metadata.
They use AI to access horticultural information.
57
Digression: a walk in the park

58. They provide on-device OCR and translation,
provide face detection and entity recognition,
can be keyword-tagged, date-filtered, synced,
and can be instantly shared across the world.
58
Digression: a walk in the park

59. How do we respond to the
expectations of a public trained on
this level of information access?
59
Digression: a walk in the park

60. How shall we respond,
disciplinarily, to
information overload?
60
Digression: a walk in the park

61. This is a beautifully-captured photo.
61
Disciplinarity: our duty of care

62. …a digital composite, with separate
passes for gold leaf and pigment.
62
Disciplinarity: our duty of care

63. We only have five pages
available online.
63
Disciplinarity: our duty of care

64. We do have microfilm…
64
Disciplinarity: our duty of care

65. …what is our responsibility?
65
Disciplinarity: our duty of care

66. This is a unique historical record.
66
Disciplinarity: our duty of care

67. Documented within a finding aid…
67
Disciplinarity: our duty of care

68. …but without direct access to the images.
68
Disciplinarity: our duty of care

69. 69
Disciplinarity: our duty of care

70. 70
Disciplinarity: our duty of care
…how shall we prioritize?

71. 71
Disciplinarity: our duty of care
This is from a book of poetry, art, and botany.

72. 72
Disciplinarity: our duty of care
Fully digitized and available worldwide…

73. 73
Disciplinarity: our duty of care
…but not on our own website.

74. 74
Disciplinarity: our duty of care
…what should we preserve?

75. 75
Crisis: how should we respond?
I tell these tales not to shame, but to
highlight our collective opportunity.

76. 76
Crisis: how should we respond?
Do we retreat into disciplinarity?

77. 77
Crisis: how should we respond?
Do we despair over the scale
and impossibility of our task?

78. 78
Crisis: how should we respond?
Do we focus on standards and processes?

79. 79
Crisis: how should we respond?
Do we try and do it all?

80. 80
Crisis: how should we respond?
Our constraint is not our expertise…

81. 81
Crisis: how should we respond?
Our constraint is not our expertise…
…it is is the value of our time.

82. 82
Crisis: how should we respond?
Our constraint is not our expertise…
…it is is the value of our time.
Our disciplines prioritize our labor...

83. 83
Crisis: how should we respond?
Our constraint is not our expertise…
…it is is the value of our time.
Our disciplines prioritize our labor...
…but misalign our efforts to collaborate.

84. 84
Values: how should we respond?
As we work together on the standards and
practices needed to document cultural
heritage…

85. 85
Values: how should we respond?
…in a world where expectations
around access to knowledge
have forever changed…

86. 86
Values: how should we respond?
…we must consider how our labor must
shift to support the values that we share
and the global communities we serve.

87. 87
Values: how should we respond?
We value the stories and art we use to explain
our world and ourselves to each other.

88. 88
Values: how should we respond?
We value the connections
between diverse cultures
and histories.

89. 89
Values: how should we respond?
And we celebrate human creativity and
the search for meaning and truth.

90. Thank you, my colleagues.
90