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October 3, 2011
We need a digital public space.This redesigns the internet so that institutions would make publicly owned content available, free, for non-commercial public use. That content could be used elsewhere for commercial projects – but at a cost. It is reclaiming the public domain in the sense of citizens having the right to access and interact with the countries social and cultural assets online. It implies a Digital Australia that is digitally literate, educated and ready to exploit the new technologies
At its minimum it appears to be associated with the BBC and other cultural institutions in the UK, including museums, archives, libraries, galleries and educational bodies, all of whom share a vision of not simply using Internet technology as a distribution channel, but instead being part of that digital environment as it evolves: being part of the Web, rather than just on it.The idea of a Digital Public Space, conceived by the BBC as a place in which public collections of film, video, sound, and other digitised objects can collectively overcome rights and access barriers, is a welcome recognition that this new digital public sphere has first to be organised and established.
Mo Roberts says:
It aims to be an access point for all of the UK's cultural archives, marrying together both the rich information which has been carefully collated, checked and double-checked over the years by experts in their respective fields, with the more immediately-accessible higher level information and audio-visual material, both from the partners and around the Web.
I presume that this would include a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public would be part of the idea of publicly accessible cultural content---movies, music, images, books, documents, texts, magazines etc. There is a real need to open up the Australia’s public resources.
Do we have a concept of Digital Australia? One that actively supports the growth in the creative and digital sectors and the the availability of public service content?
We, as typical education consumers, are changing from someone who was satisfied by text and rote learning perhaps ten years ago into someone who now looks to learn from and produce with the gamut of rich media available in his or her daily life. So the initial push is on educational and cultural institutions – universities, public television, publishers, producers – to release more of their courseware, programming, books, and pedagogic materials as ‘teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.
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