A once leading platform for open heritage data from one of the world’s major museum collections, gone. Over two million “persistent” URIs – relied upon as authoritative by many other projects – dead.This of course affects also pages created by other organizations in the source countries of the material in the British Museum that serve as the only means of access for many citizens of those countries to the material now in a distant foreign collection.
There is a mysterious dramatic reference to "current extraordinary circumstances" on the new Collections page. Is that a collapse of the Museum's web infrastructure due to the dismissal of key personnel championing and overseeing this effort, without any sustainability plan being in place and a lack of interest or support by current leadership. Or has it been hacked by cultural property terrorists protesting about the material shut away in this imperial museum? Is the Portable Antiquities Database going to suffer the same fate with the loss of all those "data"?
A twitter account Is the British Museum’s endpoint working? @bm_lod_status has been following these problems since October 2018 when it seems these problems were already appearing, at first sporadically, but then with increasing frequency (2 385 Tweetów). It might be noted that certain key personnel changes took place in the BM's Digital Humanities department in January/February 2018.
Are you quite sure that the Collection online hasn't simply moved from a subdomain (https://collection.britishmuseum.org/) to a folder (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection)? The latter seems to work fine.
ReplyDeleteAnnoying for those who had old URLs linked or bookmarked but URLs have always been somewhat ephemeral and they just need updating.
But that was the point. If this online record is to function as a research tool, then in research based upon it, the link to the actual data is the only way to reference it. If that link goes dead because they've moved the information elsewhere, the people that have been using it as a research resource (a) have to know what has happened and (b) have to go back to old research to replace the links (and who pays?). AS I said, the BM is "looking after" important bits of the heritage of a lot of other countries and this online resource may be the only contact many of the citizens of those countries have with what the Brits took. This makes it harder for them to use what has been written in the past about it to even get a cursory view of their own history.
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ReplyDelete"But that was the point."
ReplyDeleteYes, but his point that a "once leading platform" is "gone" was ridiculous hyperbole. All the page content is still online, easily accessible and as "authoritative" as ever; the URIs and related old URLs were merely one (now outdated) path to it.
" If this online record is to function as a research tool, then in research based upon it, the link to the actual data is the only way to reference it."
No, not the "only" way. Every item curated by the BM has a unique permanent identifier (museum/accession number) and that is easily used in a keyword search.
Voila! BM museum number
Any worthwhile "old research" should always cite the permanent identifier as the primary reference. Links are optional but, no matter how stable they may seem, they come with a caveat. The internet is inherently dynamic and should never be treated in the same way as hard copy (e.g. printed books, journals, etc.). The internet is convenient but digital and prone to change; hard copy is less convenient but analogue and permanent.