A Shared Collection Discovery Portal Case Study: Northwest Digital Heritage

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today’s webinar with Rachael Cristine Woody. My name is Bradley, and I will be your moderator for this webinar entitled A Collection Discovery Portal Case Study Northwest Digital Heritage.

Before we start, I would like to provide some information about our company and introduce today’s presenter. Lucidea is a software developing company specialized in museum and archival collections management solutions, as well as knowledge management and library automation systems. Our brands include ArchivEra, Argus, Presto, and Sydney Digital.

Now I would like to take a moment to introduce today’s presenter, Rachel Christine Woody. Rachel the owner of Relicura and provides services to museums, libraries, archives. She specializes in museum collections management systems, digitization technology, digital project management, and digital usership. During the course of her career, she has successfully launched multiple digital projects that include advanced digitization technology, collaborative portals, and the migration of collection information into collections management systems. She is also a popular guest author for Lucidea’s Think Clearly blog and has provided us with many great webinars that are listed on our website, so please feel free to check those out after today’s session. Take it away, Rachel.

Great. Thank you so much, Bradley. Thank you to Lucidea for hosting us today, and thank you for joining.

We’re continuing our conversation on creative partnerships and specifically with how we can enter creative partnerships and broaden our collections access online.

So with that in mind, we’re going to take a look at one of the many consortium models out there that helps to deliver aggregated collections online and that is Northwest Digital Heritage, one of the home institutions out here, by me over in the Portland, Oregon area.

And we’re going to get it kicked off. There’s a webinar precursor, not that you need to have seen it before this webinar, but may be helpful information for you. I’ll introduce you to Northwest Digital Heritage, some of the like need to know information just to get a sense of the organization.

We’ll talk about briefly what it takes to build a consortium, so you have that in mind as we sort of walk through requirements for both the collection contributors as well as the requirements for having a consortium being up and running and operational.

We’ll talk about contributor criteria especially with consortiums they tend to be broader while having an overarching theme as to how the collections are connected.

The Northwest Digital Heritage specifically has a flexible approach to contributing content which is always interesting to me when consortiums can make it easy and like lower the barrier to entry for any type of institution who wants to broaden their collection access.

We’ll talk about the reality of regional software distribution, especially in the Pacific Northwest area. The types of institutions we have in this area and the types of software that’s used, makes an interesting thing to consider as we enter into a consortium type discussion.

And then with that we’re going to talk about hidden costs of a consortium. You as a contributor don’t necessarily need to know as it doesn’t impact you or your budget line, but it does impact the health of the consortium that you are joining. So it’s always good to understand the funding models of the partnerships we enter into.

We’re then going to talk about the Northwest Digital Heritage Funding Model and especially with what has happened current events wise over the last couple of years, which has taken a relatively stable funding model and made it more complex.

And then we’ll talk briefly about shared, challenges for consortium co leads. In this case there is more than one co lead, so navigating that different structure.

The dividends, of course, of a shared infrastructure, which is part of why there is such an interest in supporting these consortium models. And then how that Northwest Digital Heritage approach and especially that flexibility and that low barrier to entry for their collection contributors, how that model has really been one that I’ve admired, and I think you will too once we get through the webinar together.

So with that let’s get into it.

Okay. The webinar precursor. If you’re interested in general in how to enter into powerful partnerships, especially when it comes to broadening collections access and being able to acquire and use robust collections management system type tools. We’ve covered, this in a previous webinar. You’re welcome to check it out but again not required watching for you to join us here today.

Okay Northwest Digital Heritage or NWDH, website is northwestdigitalheritage dot org and they are a consortium that is currently focused around, the state of Oregon and Washington. So in the lower contiguous states it’s the the top Northwest two.

And they launched in May twenty twenty one. So in scheme of some of the larger, established consortium models like Digital Public Libraries of America, this one is on the newer side. Though, of course, now it’s already five years old.

And because it is that two state model, it has state representation and is co led by a member of the Washington State Library, a member of the State Library of Oregon, and a member of the Oregon Heritage Commission, which is also part of the Oregon State apparatus.

Notable here and is not as common for consortium or certainly not the larger ones is that there are no membership fees. And so for any institution in that two state area they can enter into a partnership as long as they meet criteria to begin contributing their content to the Northwest Digital Heritage online portal, which is huge in terms of the organization types that tend to be out in the Northwest. They tend to be smaller, lower budgets. They have for some of them it’s all volunteer staff. There’s not a lot of extra money to put towards things like putting collections online. So having access to this type of consortium model is revolutionary for most of them.

That has in part led to it being one of the largest participatory consortium in that there are more than two ninety three at this point, more than two ninety three collections contributing to Northwest Digital Heritage, which is amazing. It’s such a large majority of collections in this area contributing in this larger consortium model. And across those collections at the time of checking their records they are up to nearly one point three million records. So a fairly sizable for this area consortium in terms of both the contributing number of institutions as well as the records.

So what does it take to build a consortium? And this is important to understand, especially as a contributor, to understand how the model is built, what the intention is, and how you fit into it.

And this is certainly the case for Northwest Digital Heritage. So a consortium needs a stable institutional home. For Northwest Digital Heritage it is currently straddling, sort of two homes across both the Washington and Oregon state governments and has those three co leads. So, for some consortium it can be based just in one institutional home. In this case it’s a little bit more unique and complex by having additional co leads.

There needs to be sustained financial backing. And of course, in any sort of endeavor, having financial backing that is regular and dependable is critically important. While there may not be immediate direct and monthly costs, depending on what the consortium setup is there is always costs. And so having that in place is crucial for these consortium models and certainly having diversification in funding models will be also very important.

They need enterprise grade software so to develop an apparatus that can go and harvest across in this case two ninety three different collections institutions to get the updated records or even new records from these different institutions and then serving them up into one discovery portal is going to take technology, both hardware and software, of course, that will be situated and honed by those co lead institutions.

They need also scalable technical architecture. So depending on the apparatus that is delivering this discovery portal, it needs to be scalable to start to accommodate millions and then perhaps even billions of collections data as well as any sort of assets that may be included with those depending on the on the setup.

We also need dedicated personnel with expertise.

This, with a consortium given the highly technical nature as well as of course the professional standards required for both museum and archive collections and to have them be cross searchable, it is very important to have staff in place that shepherd the process of having contributors come on board, of vetting the data as it comes in to ensure that it meets requirements, as well as personnel who are technically inclined and have the technical knowledge needed to run and maintain these highly technical systems.

And then we need unified data standards for that cross searchability, especially with the more institutions that you add into a consortium and the more records. In order to ensure that the user is getting the highest accuracy possible, we need to make sure we’re using the same language, the same fields, or that there’s at least some mapping to similar fields to help serve up the appropriate collections to our users without them having to try and navigate and Intuit how two ninety three institutions could differ on their data entry.

And a representative governing body. Depending on the consortium setup, this can look a couple different ways. For example, in other consortiums this may be a volunteer representative committee model, representatives from the different contributing institutions.

In this case with Northwest Digital Heritage and perhaps in response to it being an area where institutions don’t have a lot of staff or capacity to take on these volunteer roles, the co leads of those three state agencies are serving to help facilitate that governing body. So making sure that best practices are updated and distributed, helping to facilitate administration in terms of bringing on new collectors, getting them acclimated to those new best practices, that kind of thing.

So quite a bit to keep in mind and understand when you’re joining a consortium.

For, consortium models, there then is the question of what sort of content and contributors do they work with. Any time a consortium is set up, it is going to have some sort of universal overarching theme or subject matter. In this case for Northwest Digital Heritage it’s going to be the specific northwest of the lower contiguous states, so Oregon and Washington.

And from there Northwest Digital Heritage has kept its contributor criteria pretty inclusive. So very, very broad. They have the usual, public library collections. So if there are archives or special collections included in those public libraries they’re accepting of those. They include museums and historical society collections, which can be more artifact based, sometimes with archives.

Tribal communities, of course, with their cultural heritage, both artifacts and archives, cultural organizations that may not have fallen into the previous three that I mentioned. And especially in the Northwest there tends to be some very unique, on the smaller side but still very unique, cultural heritage organizations.

And they also include colleges and universities. And so in this case in our area that tends to be more archives. Of course that’s not limiting to archives and it can mean that there’s these large research collections as well as data sets that may have been kept separate from this consortium in the past. So it’s actually a little unique that such a broad swath of contributor types are encouraged to contribute to this model, but they are still unified with that overarching collecting theme of it being this Northwest history, culture, and art.

And with Northwest Digital Heritage, they’re further unique and I think one of the the notable aspects for me is that flexible approach to contributing content. So they’re already lowering the barrier to entry by not charging any of their members any sort of fee for participating in the consortium model. And then they’re further supplying a very flexible, multi option for institutions to decide how they want to contribute their content. This is key because for many of the institutions and because there are two ninety three of them, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of different collections management systems in play or digital asset management systems.

And for many, there may not actually be a system in place at all, which can make it difficult if they were trying to contribute to other consortium that relies solely on doing the OAI PMH protocols. So, for spelling out that acronym Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, That’s essentially the consortium going out to the institution where their collection lives online, making the request to get their collection data, and then taking it back and serving it up in that aggregated consortium model.

For many of the consortium this tends to be sort of the only or at least majority supported way because it’s a little it’s easier for everyone but it’s only easier if those institutions have a database that serves their collections online.

Because that is not the case for a good chunk of the two ninety three contributing institutions to the consortium, we need different options. And so in addition to having the concept of the harvesting, which can happen, first depending on the consortium, if it’s robust and fancy, it can be automatic or certainly automated all the time periodically throughout the day.

For other consortium where changes may not be needed quite so automatic or the infrastructure is not quite as robust, it can be a more periodic cadence, like every couple weeks or once a month where they go and refresh and go and gather new records or updates to existing records. So from that, if they do not have their collections online, there’s a third option from Northwest Digital Heritage, and that is the option of providing their collection data via a spreadsheet and essentially via a comma separated value CSV import.

This is so important because with the majority of the smaller institutions out in this area, there is not a CMS in place. There’s no sort of semblance of a database.

The best that is usually the most, achievable for these institutions is going to be a spreadsheet. So having such a flexibility of contribution, options helps to ensure in Northwest Digital’s case that as many organizations as possible are able to contribute to their consortia.

All right. So we sort of touched on it, but to break it down a little bit more specifically and especially in the Pacific Northwest area for Oregon and Washington, there is quite a distribution of software across the region. And so for us the main players or institutional types for this consortium is going to be either museums or archives.

So already right there, if they have a collections management system they’re usually going to be in one of those two camps, an archives CMS or a museum CMS.

While there’s quite a bit of overlap in best practices, which makes a consortium even possible is wonderful, but it does mean we’re working with different types of systems and different ways data may be structured, different way data may have to be extracted from those systems.

So it’s quite a bit to consider.

And then you add on top of that just the distribution. Even if we were only dealing with museums, for example, we could still be looking at how to deal with data from dozens of different museum collections management systems. So it’s quite a bit to consider as a contributing institution. It’s good for us to be aware, and that’s why those unifying data standards that we have to follow in order to contribute our content is so important because there are so many different systems and ways the data could be structured with the way the fields could be labeled across these different institutions that it would be impossible to provide any sort of meaningful discovery through the portal without that unification process.

And what is important to emphasize here in the Oregon Washington area and in the case of Northwest Digital Heritage many of those institutions are going to be very small, very underfunded, and not have a collections management system in place. So as a consortium you and if you participate in one you need to consider all of the different systems that could be in play and how that is tackled both from a unification of data consideration as well as the technical aspect of how you will go and get that data and then include it into the aggregation of that discovery portal. So quite a bit to consider here.

There are of course hidden costs of the consortium and this is not necessarily hidden costs for you as a contributor, but again so critical to understand as you consider the health of a consortium that you might be joining.

And important for us to understand, especially in the case of Northwest Digital Heritage that does not seek membership fees from their contributors, it’s very important for us to know that there’s still cost there and how we might be able to support them if not with our own dollars.

So hidden costs for consortium, the data management aspect that’s going to have both a human cost and of course a hardware software budget.

And for our case with the aggregator that can be quite a bit of technical infrastructure needed, not just the actual database aggregation but also the but the tool and workflow needed for the OAI PMH if that is being included, which at this point is the gold standard for so many of them right now. I don’t think I know one that doesn’t use that.

And then of course the humans it takes to do that. Like of course depending on the tool some of it can be automated. We still need human beings to manage and maintenance systems, make updates, ensure everything is running smoothly.

There’s then infrastructure maintenance. So keeping that up to date especially if the consortium is working off of several different open source type tools, making sure those are all healthy, that they’re all talking to each other. And then of course the non database infrastructure of what are the workflows we’re working with our content contributors. What is the maintenance like in terms of having their data ingest healthily into these systems? If there is new collection contributors coming online that necessitates a change to infrastructure, All of that is just a continual work in process for the maintenance of that infrastructure.

Documentation, certainly quite a bit at the outset when a consortium gets started establishing the best practices and the how to instructions for content contributors. And then the maintenance part of that, of course, as the more collections join, as the software changes, as user expectations or user behavior changes, documentation should be continually changing in order to be relevant and easy to use for everyone. And that takes a human to do it. And then last piece, but important, especially for you as a collection contributor, having that community care and outreach. And as a consortium, their community is the collection contributors. So for a consortium, their community care and outreach is to the individual consortium, institutions or, yes, the collection contributors to those institutions.

Making sure that the ones that are contributing currently, that things are still going well, especially if they’re all volunteer ran, there can be volunteer transitions, loss of institutional knowledge, which can happen frequently. So making sure that they’re still good and have what they need, but also organizations that may not be part of Northwest Digital Heritage, but wish to join. So doing community care and outreach also to potential collection contributors. So quite a bit of work that may have a seasonality to it, but still is very much present, especially for a consortium model and one that is currently supporting two ninety three different collections.

For Northwest Digital Heritage for their funding model and for consortium there can be a variety of ways consortium models are funded. Quite often it is through quite a bit of grant funding even if it is somewhat consistent funding with an asterisk on consistent. So the Northwest funding model isn’t necessarily unique which is important to keep in mind.

The largest funding at least up until very recently has been coming from the Institution of Museum and Library Services, so IMLS, which is a federal grant, and the Library Services and Technologies Act, which is known as LSTA, and it’s federal money distributed down to the state level.

And those who may be following current events, especially here in the States, both of these funds have been threatened slash revoked slash cut in the last two years with some reestablished and some other legal question marks as some of these, grant funds make their way through the court. And with that came quite a bit of disruption, as you can imagine, to many of the museums and archives across the country and of course impacted Northwest Digital Heritage with the immediate loss of funding and the immediate question marks of the impact, like ongoing cascade of impacts to the other funding, including at the state level, which makes up the other part of the funding pot for Northwest Digital Heritage, at least currently, which is funding that comes from the Oregon Heritage Commission, Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, and the Oregon Cultural Trust.

And while a couple of these are state agencies it is not necessarily state money that is annual and dependable money that is being, contributed towards the Northwest Digital Heritage it is often the philanthropic lines of funding.

So you can imagine in this last two years almost it has been very stressful and has impacted this particular consortium as I’m sure it has impacted other consortia across the country.

So this is important to keep in mind because up until twenty twenty five we would have looked at this list and I thought this is pretty solid funding. This is pretty dependable federal and state funding lines, philanthropic funding is pretty solid. And we have learned that that is not something that we can depend on, at least not currently.

Which has led to some challenges for the co leads of the Northwest Digital Heritage Consortium. The grant funding volatility that was not something that they thought was going to take up so much time in terms of funding’s gone. Okay how do we what do we do in the mean like how can we fix it? How can we plug the holes, to maybe then needing to apply for more grant funding not realizing like that was not part of the plan. The abruptness and the all of a sudden needing to apply for more funding was not built into part of the capacity of what the co leads I imagine, thought they had on their plate for the year to run the consortium. So already additional stress on many levels on just three co leads for two ninety three institutions.

Which brings me to my next point, which is these are not dedicated positions. The three representatives from those three different branches of Oregon and Washington government agencies, they have full time jobs doing something else.

They are allowed to use part of their job to do these sort of maintenance now, maintenance mode type things thinking, rightly, at the time that they were in a maintenance mode with this consortium, not like a build up and figure it out mode.

And so that has, I imagine, really created quite a bit of stress on these co leads who already have very full time jobs to now having a piece of their job taking up a considerable more of their time and attention.

Which then leads me to this final point is that the impacts on the sector for museums and archives are times two for these representatives. Because not only are they getting impacted, as we’ve just discussed in the Northwest Digital Heritage category of their jobs, they’re getting impacted in the same way in their actual more full time jobs and focuses in their respective parts of their government agencies.

So with archives and museums being impacted in multiple ways, not just related to the consortium, they’re dealing with a level of crises that is humongous.

So this when things are going well, current events wise, and when funding is dependable and consistent, there’s not these stress points. But because we have now experienced such a crisis kicked off from funding this is now creating some stress fractures in an otherwise very stable and fairly typical consortium type model. So things for us to consider as a community of collection contributors and those of us who are collection stewards where in this case we don’t have a membership fee to contribute to Northwest Digital Heritage and yet our support and advocacy for them is so essential to make sure that they’re going to still be around for us to continue contributing in our collections.

So bringing us back around to some benefits for you as collection contributors is the dividends of a shared infrastructure. And this is especially a bonus to those smaller organizations that don’t have a collections management system at their repository.

So with that, we get turnkey technology stacks. So for those, collection contributors, especially where they’re contributing via spreadsheet, they are now able to provide access online without having to try and figure out how to get their own collections management system which for some may not be an immediately realizable option for them. So such a huge benefit and especially for those without that CMS. But even for those who do, they’re getting such a broader reach with their collections and being able to be served up into a very robust discovery portal among peer collections.

We also get the benefit of distributed knowledge pools. So working and in this case among two ninety three other collecting institutions, we have neighbors and friends essentially that are contributing to the same discovery portal that have gone through the same process that can we can phone a friend and reach out to learn what the workflow is, reach out with any sort of queries we have around best practices.

And it really encourages healthy community communication.

And democratic audience growth. This is perhaps the biggest selling point for collection contributors is they’re able to serve up their collections regardless of what their budget is, regardless of what collections management system they have. They can serve up their collection right alongside a R1 university archives or a large popular museum and have their collections contents be searchable across and with all of those collections. So the the audience and discovery piece is such a rewarding part of that in joining a consortium model.

And navigating hurdles of a distributed network, things to keep in mind as a collection contributor, of course, is the data standards reconciliation piece. That is part of the deal when we want our collections to play nicely with others so that they do participate and can be cross searchable in that larger aggregate.

So something for us to keep in mind and, be aware of and expect as we get into a consortium partnership.

And then the constant technological updates.

This is throttled, of course, depending on what consortium you join or what technology you may already have in play. So maybe not a lot of actual frequent updates, but it is always good to make sure that both hardware and software on your end and with whatever the consortia is using is up to date. Everything is working. The workflow for contributing your content or how it is being harvested, that all of that is up to date. So while the consortium can take care of their piece of it, of course, you as a contributing institution, especially if you are being harvested, making sure that that is working smoothly on your end.

So in summary for Northwest Digital Heritage, it is such a beautiful model because of its very encouraging approach to the no fee memberships and its flexibility in how it is either, going and gathering or receiving your collections content. It means that there’s such an encouragement of any type of institution with any type of budget to contribute. And it helps with the, connecting of partners across the region of all different shapes and sizes that otherwise would not have happened. So it really is a beautiful model.

We just need to make sure that we shore it up. So benefits, of course, no financial burden for the contributing partners. Though I would asterisk that with definitely lend your support with advocacy and making sure that the institution and consortium is getting the funding and support that it needs.

It’s built to ensure participation from a vast array of institutions. So all consortium are inviting of institutions, but Northwest Digital Heritage, while under the theme of Northwest, is one of the most welcoming and encouraging I have found both in in word and in practice.

It brings collections together from all corners of the Northwest and with their their low barrier to entry they are really, I mean two ninety three collecting institutions, like they have really been successful at that.

And serves as an access to technology equalizer. So again providing for those who already have a database, ability to easily contribute content through harvesting. For those who don’t have a database, the ability to contribute their own into a database aggregator and having that collections access piece. So a beautiful model.

So we cover quite a bit.

As a reminder, there is a webinar sort of precursor if you’re interested in the broader concept of partnerships. We focused on one aspect of partnership today with the consortium model, but there are other sort of partnership models you can consider with the collections management system. So if you’re interested check out that webinar. We introduced you to Northwest Digital Heritage, which is a consortium that helps to provide discovery portal type access to two ninety three different institutions across Oregon and Washington. And then we then got into the details of what does it take to build a consortium, which is important to understand even as a collection contributor, for Northwest Digital Heritage, what their inclusive contributor criteria is and sort of the uniqueness to that, as well as the uniqueness of their flexible approach to contributing content, making it really easy for all sorts of shapes and sizes of collections to be contributed.

We talked about the reality of regional software distribution, which is always good for us to understand as collections contributors to sort of know the lay of the land and why things may be the way they are in terms of technical infrastructure and best practice requirements.

We then reviewed the hidden costs of a consortium model and the NWDH funding model, especially since that funding model has come under severe strain in the last couple of years of current events. So really understanding costs and how our partners are funded is important for us as contributors to understand when we’re in this partnership.

We took a look at challenges for consortium co leads, of course, with that current events and stress leading into already their day jobs. Again, for us to understand in order to be good partners with a consortium.

We then talked about the dividends of shared infrastructure. So the benefits of us joining a consortium, whether it’s Northwest Digital Heritage or one in your own backyard, how that really benefits all of us.

And for the NWDA approach, the grand design. So how that one in particular summarizing the benefits and the extreme, perks of their uniqueness and in their approach and their setup. So a very nice model to take a look at and understand and consider as a consortium and as a collection contributor.

All right before I let you guys go, speaking of collections online, my most recent book is out: Weaving a Digital Storytelling with Online Collections. So working with collections management system of course but also some other cool tools that are available and going through, different examples and case studies as well to give you some ideas of how you can use your collections online to tell stories not just in your exhibits, but in your online exhibit halls. So, courtesy of Lucidea Press, please go pick up your free e copy, and I hope you enjoy it.

And with that, I’ll turn it back over to you, Bradley.

Thank you, Rachel, for the wonderful presentation. And to our audience, if you’d like to learn more about our museum collections management system called Argus, please feel free to visit our website or reach out to us at sales at lucidea.com, and we’d be happy to have a chat with you.

If you have any more questions on any of our software or our company, our contact details are listed on the screen, and please stay tuned for more webinars and content related to this series.

On behalf of the Lucidea team, I thank you all for attending today, and until next time. Thank you.