Evidence Summary
Insufficient Understanding of User
Benefits Impedes Open Data Initiatives at Museums
A Review of:
Booth, P., Navarrete, T., & Ogundipe, A. (2022).
Museum open data ecosystems: A comparative study. Journal of Documentation 78(4), 761-779. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2021-0102
Reviewed by:
Jordan Patterson
Associate Librarian
A. P. Mahoney Library
St. Peter’s Seminary
London, Ontario, Canada
Email: jpatte46@uwo.ca
Received: 24 May 2023 Accepted: 28 June 2023
2023 Patterson. This is an Open Access article distributed under
the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0
International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial
purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the
same or similar license to this one.
DOI: 10.18438/eblip30372
Abstract
Objective – Using Nardi and O’Day’s (1999)
definition of ecosystem as “a system of people, practices, values, and
technologies in a particular local environment,” to understand how art museums
form their policy to interact with and respond to the various open data (OD)
ecosystems in which they operate.
Design – Multiple case study consisting of interviews and subsequent qualitative
analysis, as well as document analysis.
Setting – European art museum OD ecosystems.
Methods – The researchers identified 3 museums with OD initiatives and conducted
in-depth interviews with relevant staff members at each institution. The
researchers also interviewed representatives from relevant national OD
policy-related agencies. The researchers coded their data and developed a list
of five key OD “ecosystem components,” which they used to analyze the 3
specific museum ecosystems under consideration.
Main Results – Open data initiatives at cultural
heritage institutions are subject to a number of internal and external
pressures. Museums are typically responsive to their environments, and top-down
policy requirements appear to be an effective means of advancing open data
initiatives. Nevertheless, the value proposition of open data appears to be
insufficiently understood by museum staff and other stakeholders. As a result,
museums participate in OD initiatives even when the benefit remains
undemonstrated and the use of OD—how and by whom—remains unclear.
Conclusion – The needs and wants of OD end-users remain ill-defined and poorly
understood. As a result, museums expend resources and effort to supply OD,
while remaining uncertain about the return on their investment. Attention to
users could result in “more robust information flows between ecosystem
components.”
Commentary
“If you build it, they will come.” It is easy to
invoke this inspirational slogan to supply an impetus for an open data project
before a real use case has been established. But is it true? Despite widespread
adoption of OD practices and policies, it appears that without a proper
understanding of the end-user’s role in the OD ecosystem, the benefits of OD
are often more theoretical than actual, more pie-in-the-sky than a real return
on investment. The experiences—and the challenges—documented in this study will
likely sound familiar to anyone who has invested significant time and energy in
an open data project at a cultural heritage institution. In this paper, the
researchers bring into focus a common problem for museums and libraries.
Assessed with Perryman and Rathbun-Grubb’s “The CAT: A
generic critical appraisal tool” (2014), this research meets a strong standard
of validity. Recognizing that their work is among the first to study museum OD
ecosystems qualitatively, the researchers clearly state a number of limits to
their paper. In particular, they note concerns about the case study method’s
adequacy vis-à-vis the complex ecosystem paradigm, the lack of methodological
rigour in ecosystems analysis, and a certain arbitrariness in the definition of
ecosystem. With these cautions in mind, and still perceiving the academic value
of inquiry into OD ecosystems, the researchers rightly frame the study as
exploratory and suitable for the development of theoretical propositions, if
not hard and quantified conclusions. The researchers also include a word of
caution about the generalizability of the study, given that it only considers
three cases sharing the same general characteristics.
Nevertheless, the exploratory nature of the study
should not dissuade readers from taking its findings seriously. The extensive
literature review demonstrates how the work builds on established concepts, and
the researchers’ discussion ties their analysis back into and confirms findings
from other research. For instance, though the case studies focus on
medium-sized institutions, by relating the present study to previous research,
the authors make informed judgments about OD activity at smaller and larger institutions,
and therefore gesture toward a fuller conception of OD initiatives at museums,
whatever the size. This study probes the world of museum OD ecosystems, and
future researchers will find herein a useful model for further study of this
area.
The emphatic takeaway from this study, however, is a
point the researchers are at pains to repeat throughout: museums lack a clear
knowledge of user OD needs. The directness of this statement is an open
invitation to further research. It is also an invitation to professionals at
cultural heritage institutions to revise and rethink their OD practices. If
museums sense their data has tremendous potential, yet
remain underwhelmed with its use once it is made open (i.e., their return on
investment), they should actively pursue an understanding of the data’s
ultimate users and demonstrate the successful reuse of their data. If museums
do not take this step, they will not see the maturation of OD ecosystems, and
their projects will fail to justify further investment.
References
Booth, P., Navarrete, T., & Ogundipe, A. (2022). Museum open data
ecosystems: A comparative study. Journal
of Documentation 78(4), 761-779. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2021-0102
Nardi, B., & O'Day, V. (1999). Information ecologies: Using technology with
heart. MIT Press.
Perryman, C., & Rathbun-Grubb, S. (2014). The CAT: A generic
critical appraisal tool. http://www.jotform.us/cp1757/TheCat