(Three people answered this survey: where appropriate their answers are color coded)
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1. Concept of Networking Cultural Heritage How familiar is your organization and its constituents with the terms of this vision and with the current issues that have to be grappled with to make this vision a reality? MCN board members and a majority of its members are very familiar with this vision. The rest of the membership would fall into the "somewhat familiar" category. One reason they are MCN members is to learn. |
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2a Given this definition of advocacy, how does your organization advocate for networking cultural heritage? MCN does not have a formal advocacy program. MCN's focus has been on education within the museum community. Historically, one of our goals has been to reach within the museum to help staff members at all levels understand the strategic value of information and related issues. We have always aimed to provide a platform and generally do not take positions. We did take fairly strong positions when the US telecommunications law was revised several years ago. MCN as an organization signed onto *many* formal letters to congressmen, policy makers and others advocating for nonprofit rates and universal access. Our advocacy over the past few years has been less because the need has diminished at the legislative level, but I would argue the need is still there at the policy level, as is evident by CONFU and other efforts underway to secure rights in the digital arena. True and we could just say that we do in fact participate in advocacy, but usually as a joiner rather than an initiator? IS MCN going to vote on approving/disapproving CONFU? Has it? How is it done, do we poll the members first and have a vote by consensus? or vote of Board Members?
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2b Do you have a different working definition of advocacy than the one we offer here? No. |
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2c Projects? Of the projects that your organization participates in, which are related to digital networking? CIMI, Museum Metadata, loosely, all our projects. |
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2d Partners? If you collaborate with partners in any networking advocacy activity, who are they? We have worked with the Getty and AAM, but not specifically in an advocacy role |
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2e Measure Success? How do you measure the success of your networking advocacy projects? We would like to see all our initiatives have greater impact. |
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2f Target? Besides NINCH members, what groups should NINCH target for advocacy? I'd suggest the present and future presidential administrations, policy makers, educators, and the general public. If we only have NINCH educate its members, what's the point? Our wanting things won't make it so -- we have to convince others that our interests are also their interests. |
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Perhaps an effort to "bring it to the people" would be most helpful to our constituents. Our members know the issues but sometimes we are frustrated in making others understand. Do our members really know the issues? Can they say what CONFU recommends re: digital images? Do they know that "fair use" provisions are at risk of being severely curtailed in a digital environment? I'm not so sure. I think NINCH has to help educate us not with traditional means like "white papers" but also with practical ideas like tools for assessing the issues (for example - worksheets for determining "fair use", checklists for determining IPR criteria for our collections, etc.) |
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2 -intellectual property (copyright law, fair use, licensing) 1 -standards (vocabulary/description/data; cataloging; technical, etc.) 3 -access 6 -economics 5 -internationalism 4 -preservation
>Isn't our primary goal "access" to museum collections through information technology? Standards are important but only insofar as they enable access. Ah, standards :) To a point, I'd agree with you Diane, standards are an enabling tool, not of much interest on their own, however MCN is in part premised around such "enabling" tools (technology) in the service of goals, so many of our core functions are about those tools in the specifc service of larger goals like access. it seems MCN is not about enabling *all* kinds of access via purely education, community events and PR for instance, but mostly about access as it can be enabled by technology, so these enabling tools seem core to us in a functional sense if not a visionary one (ie. technology is what makes MCN unique, but access is what we share with museums, AAM, NINCH, etc). Likewise for standards. Also, standards can be used for a lot more than access; we like to talk about AAT and SGML et al to enable search and retrieval of information by the public via the web, but that's just one aspect; standards also have implications for technology investments, planning, and museum workflow by creating systems based on repurposing and managing data (rather than costly one-offs) as well as provding access to it. I'm of mixed feelings, mostly because the catagories they ask us to compare are apples and oranges, but I would suggest access as #2 and legal as #3 instead. (it seems like technology enables access, and is often impeded by legal issues - the goal should be more important than the obstacle...again apples...) though it's true that the legal stuff is a hot topic right now. |
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