I was reminded of that threat very keenly today, after I saw this article from Read Write Web: Google Adds Semantic Search Results with Google Squared.

According to the company’s blog from one year ago today, when Google Squared first launched, “unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn’t find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet.”

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By clicking “show sources” on the Squared-provided result, a list of sources appears showing you how Google is arriving at this answer.

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Much of this information, however, relies either on Google’s ability to naturally parse information or for web publishers to begin “adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface”, as the company wrote at launch last year.

This is really quite fantastic for information-seekers. We’ve been heading this way for a while, and I’m happy to see this rolled out on this scale. For most users, they won’t even notice it, but for those of us whose business it is to provide content, what does it mean for us?

First, it means is that we’ve really got to get our collective acts together. When I was writing my master’s thesis four years ago, I posited that soon we would have our collections online and we would be able to move on from public access and onto public interpretation. Unfortunately, my timeline was wrong and many institutions are still at square one.

Looking collectively at the field, there are hundreds (or thousands) of collections, large and small, who still do not have collection information management systems, digital asset management systems, content management systems, SEO optimization, metadata standards, embedded metadata, or a combination of all of the above.  Why is this? Well, for the most part, museums, libraries, and archives are notoriously bad at adopting complex technologies unless significant pressure is applied either internally or externally. And when they do recognize the need, the persons responsible for advocating for adoption find themselves stuck trying to explain something intangible to a board of directors who are more interested in on-site programming and foot traffic. It is incredibly difficult at this time to show hard statistics about SEO increasing foot traffic or even online learning.

For example, here’s my institution, the Magnes’, most well-known work:

Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses Mendelssohn (1856) by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim - Magnes Collection

I just performed a search for this piece, using a couple of different search terms. The first result in both image and web search (Google) was the page in Flickr. Second hit was to Wikipedia and then Wikimedia Commons. For the last two, the image had been scanned from a German text Magnes had licensed the image to. There was no link to Magnes, nor anything that suggested that the piece was in our collection. There were zero hits to our website or to our collections online (in my own defense, we’re overhauling our website for precisely this reason, embedding metadata into the images, and I have no control over database SEO right now!).

This isn’t limited to small, underfunded history museums. If you perform a web search for “starry night van gogh”, MoMA is the third hit. Not too bad, actually. But if you perform an image search, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is displayed prominently, but you won’t find MoMA as a source until the bottom of the second page.

Ok. So clearly we all need to do some work with optimizing both our sites and our images. However, those things are really hard for most museums. If I could wave a magic wand, there would be a product that does all of the following (vendors, are you listening? Take notes. DO THIS. We will give you our money!):

• Manages museum, library and archive information in one, federated database, including exhibitions, conservation, provenance, rights, location tracking, etc.
• Exports and imports into a variety of crosswalked metadata standards
• Utilizes controlled vocabularies and standards in order to facilitate pan-institutional linkages
• Serves as a robust digital asset management system, embedding the collection data into EXIF/IPTC/XML fields of the master asset and makes derivatives at will
• Displays collection assets online in a clean, flexible, attractive manner, utilizing sharing and embedding features, optimizing keywords and tagging, and having an available API for online visitors to use

The frustrating thing for me is that I’ve seen a lot of systems that do most of this, but not all of them. Institutions who can do this use a variety of systems, bandaged together with bits of programming. Granted, I’m not a programmer, but I know such a system is possible. I’ve seen bits of it work together, but none all at once. Lacking such a system means that institutions can’t fully prepare their assets for the semantic web.

Archives and libraries are likely a bit better off, as they’ve applied easily-computer-readable XML standards to their already happily formatted data. But I have to wonder if the model for siloing data will be a benefit or a curse in the long run. Will these silos be flexible enough to engage with online users expecting to find information with only one or two search terms, in only one location? This leads me to my next point…

Second, we need to take a hard look at how we’re actively sharing our data and with whom. Search engines are not going to find all of our stuff, from us, if we release the assets online without some methods of bringing the user back to home base. Like the Oppenheim painting above, users finding assets online won’t know where its from, and thus, probably, won’t have the benefit of any additional research about the original works. Our authority is threatened because of this. Our ace in the hole is that we have the authentic object, but what happens if no one knows where the authentic object is?

I’m not at all suggesting that we limit our release of assets, but I am recommending that we slow down a moment and take stock. “Just get them online” isn’t good enough. It’s never really been good enough, only a start. Online assets mean very little if they lose their context. A digital file of a painting may be pretty, but without the information we can provide, its only function is ornamental.

The way we use the web is changing. The way the search engines are using the web is changing. We need to respond more quickly to changing search algorithms and use patterns, and we need to try to figure out some easier solutions for linking our data to the rest of the web. A cohesive, easy-to-use product would be a good start. We’re also siloed within our own institutions and consortiums, making connections with our friends while forgetting that we’re also part of the larger world. I fear for those of us who don’t get a handle on these problems soon; if we fail to do so, our role as respected educational resources becomes diminished, if only from lack of exposure.

Do collecting institutions spend a great deal of money, staffing, space and time caring for collections? Most definitely, yes. Is this a waste of resources, especially in a digital age when they could conceivably scan or make models of artifacts and then store only the copies? I won’t repeat the results of years of research conducted by a great many folks who have studied how access to original artifacts supports learning, research, and emotional connections to places, people, and history. Digital objects degrade in ways physical objects do not, nor can they replicate the meaningful, unquantifiable aura of the original.

Wedding Dress, Turkey, 19th century. gold metallic embroidery on velvet. Gift of Sara Levi Willis. 86.42. The Magnes. Click the image to read more about this piece.

Could this encumbrance upon the institution be caused by the devotion to objects by hiring collection managers, when funds for staffing could be used for additional curators and educators instead? Perhaps so, but there are also costs associated with borrowing artifacts for exhibitions and programs. Not as much as storing them, true, but the costs still exist, even if they’re not borne specifically by the non-collecting institution. Someone has to shoulder the burden of storage and management, if there are to be objects to display and study at all.

Are institutions without collections effective and valuable? Of course! I am very pleased that they are able to take the materials we collecting institutions can provide and use them to develop exciting and unique educational content. But that doesn’t mean that collecting museums can’t develop similar programming. And I’d be surprised if there’s evidence to support the idea that non-collecting institutions develop better programs than collecting ones.

As someone whose mission and purpose in life is to make cultural heritage materials accessible to the world, the thing I think I find most insulting about this choice of words is that it demeans institutions, professionals, donors, and all other stakeholders who take great pride in protecting the world’s treasures. We’ve a duty to our public to safekeep and share these artifacts. I would very much like to applaud those archives, libraries and museums – with a special nods to smaller places – who have made fantastic strides in the past decade to increase access to their collections through innovative programming, digitization and publication on the web, leveraging social media for incubating research and ideas, open storage, remixing, etc. We’ve come a long way in a very short period of time, and I can say quite definitively that far from being “encumbered”, we are empowered by our collections.