The discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo Saxon gold has understandably gotten a lot of coverage today with the news outlets doing a pretty good job (from my positional as a layman) of explaining the significance and importance of the find. But I just discovered something interesting from a social media perspective – their web presence leans heavily towards sharing.
For a start they’ve put 620 photos of the find on Flickr ranging from professional studio photos suitable for print (taken by local photographer David Rowan) to the photographic records used by archivists.
They all have downloading and embedded enabled (like most photos on Flickr) but are also licensed under a pretty liberal Creative Commons license which allows anyone to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work” and to “make derivative works” as long as the creator is credited.
Considering these photos came from a wide variety of sources from academia to local government that’s quite remarkable as it means anyone can do pretty much anything with these photos. You could even take the high-resolution photos and make a book to sell if you wanted to. They’re free for the taking.
I then had a look at the official Staffordshire Hoard website (which is currently a little slow to load due to all the attention) and noticed another Creative Commons license on the sidebar of every page.
This one is an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license which is a little more restrictive but not by much. It simply says that if you use their content it can’t be for commercial gain and what you produce must be released under the same license. Personally I think they should have put the photos under this license but the fact that they’re using Creative Commons and encouraging sharing at all is remarkable.
Or is it?
Archaeology is a niche activity with a lot of amateur enthusiasts. I suspect the academic and amateur worlds blur and cross over a lot, indicated by the chap who found this gold being an unemployed 55 year old man from the Bloxwich Metal Detecting Club who was able to liase with the authorities, presumably through Duncan Slarke at Birmingham Museum, in such a way that everything was kept secret for two months. The authorities understand the community and the community understands the authorities. While I’m sure there are tensions and I have absolutely no personal knowledge, I suspect this sort of interaction between Them and Us is normal.
In short, they’re all a bunch of nerds. Which means Internet rules of sharing and co-operation for the greater good apply.
If I’m right, then this is a lovely example of the sort of culture that fuels Open Source software development and projects like Wikipedia operating in a pretty low-tech environment. And as such when Daniel Pett was building the website in a day (using free software and documenting how he did it) and the photos were being put online I suspect the question of whether they should make everything available in a way that allowed people to share and use it in interesting ways never occurred to them. It’s just what you do.
On the Flickr set they say:
The images contained in this set invite comment. We accept there may be some errors with labelling as this was done in a very short space of time.
The Portable Antiquities Scheme, for whom Duncan Slarke works, states at the top of the front page that it’s…
a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales.
This hasn’t been heralded as an innovative crowdsourcing project like, say, the Guardian’s MP Expenses project because it’s not innovative. This is how this community has always operated both online and off. It’s second nature to them. Everyone else is just playing catch-up.
And if you’re thinking, well, that’s all well and good but my organisation could never get away with something like this, take a look at the logo-itis at the bottom of every page on the Hoard site:
That’s pretty damn establishment, indicating it’s not about what’s possible, it’s about what the culture of your organisation allows to be possible.
What does your culture allow to be possible?
Thanks very much for the analysis of the site that we launched. It was a collaborative effort, which involved the work of many, some people I still don't have the names of. I want to give them all credit for their hard work on the site eventually.
Everything the Portable Antiquities Scheme produces, we want to share as widely as possible. Our database of 410,000 objects found by the public of England and Wales (and overseas visitors) is made available for anyone to search (it is rather slow, but I am rebuilding that!) and for academics to reuse. We give away our data with just a call for attribution back to the source. What we're recording is a legacy of the destructive nature of archaeology – be it professional intervention or amateur metal detecting.
I'm not sure everyone in the archaeological sector will agree with how the website was built, methods used etc. However, I built this at the cost of the domain names in 12 hours after I was informed by the boss that we were showcasing online. Standing on the shoulders of others, you can really produce good quality web sites quickly, and I hope people have enjoyed it. The site will keep developing and be embellished with the full object records in due course.
In terms of IT cost, I have a budget of £4-5k per annum, which I spend on hosting and bandwidth fees – it's shoestring stuff. Our Scheme costs £1.3million a year to employ circa 50 people. It is great value and allows us to appreciate things like the hoard. Sorry, probably gone on a bit there!
Here's to a great day for archaeology.
Dan