CoOL logo
I remember the first time I saw the CoOL web page (Conservation Online). It was about 1995 and I was a student working in the Lilly Library’s Book Conservation department when Jim Canary told me to check it out.
I really can’t think of a topic that isn’t covered at CoOL. I can remember spending hours digging around all of the pages when I first saw it. It seemed to answer all of my questions about my interest in the profession and point to ones that I hadn’t thought of. Have a look at all of the “Conservation Topics,” or look at the number of national and international organizations who have their home pages associated with CoOL. Dig around there. It’s amazing.
Perhaps most importantly, though, look at the ConsDistList, an e-mail distribution list that at last count had just under 10,000 subscribers. This dist list has been going strong since 1988 and has been one of the most important ways for conservators to share and find information on a truly international level. It has been the central hub for information sharing within the conservation community.
Yesterday that changed when Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources announced that Stanford is no longer going to support CoOL and that the ConsDistList had produced its last instance. Bang. It’s over.
Stanford University Libraries also announced that they were laying off 32 employees. Clearly, these decisions were difficult for Stanford. As an employee of an institution that has recently experienced lay offs, I know that these are not easy times for anyone.
Also yesterday, the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) and the International Institute for Conservation (IIC) sent out e-mails pledging their determination to help support CoOL and to find a way to support the information contained within the web page. Clearly, this will take a lot of work and effort.
Walter Henry, who had been for the past 22 years the principal organizer and manager of CoOL and the ConsDistList, suggested that CoOL “contains, at a very rough guess, 120,000 documents, possibly quite a few more. I hope they have been useful to you all, and I hope to be of service to you as we move into the future.” That’s a truck load of documents that are now hanging perilously on the edge of invisibility.
The imminent demise of CoOL and the ConsDistList marks the biggest shift in information sharing for conservators since the profession started printing journals.
I don’t think for a minute that AIC and IIC and conservators in general are willing to let this resource and the contained documents fade away.
But I would like to raise some questions around the best ways for this information and data to be shared and stored. I would like to suggest that AIC and IIC work to make themselves platforms for the creation and sharing of this information rather than just static distribution sources. Instead of relying on one person to manage the information (Walter, how did you do it?), I suggest that they rely on **everyone** to manage, create, and update the information.
For the past few years my friend Daniel Cull and I have been involved in creating and editing the Wikipedia article for Art Conservation-Restoration. While clearly, this article currently contains a fraction of the information that is in CoOL, Wikipedia’s potential is limited only be our efforts and imagination. It should contain the sum of conservation knowledge.
Could Wikipedia become a replacement for CoOL? Maybe, just maybe.
But that’s just part of the problem. What about the ConsDistList, and all of the other e-mail dist lists associated within CoOL? I can only throw out suggestions or ideas. But maybe we could build discussion networks within current social media applications such as Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc? What role could a blog or multiple blogs play in sharing this information? Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to use these new and existing technologies?
I don’t really have the answers to these questions, but I think this is an opportunity for conservators to open their collaborative networks and try and use social media applications to handle our information sharing. This is an opportunity for conservators and associated museum professionals to discuss the best ways to share and distribute electronic information.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
I feel similarly distressed about the Getty’s proposed forfeiture of the BHA (Bibliography of the History of Art). Tough times.
June 12th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
How can someone/s be so selfish… bottom line or not… they could have sent request for OTHERS to take their “loss” off their hands BEFORE CUTTING THE CORD!! Can their really be educators in back of this… or only the money men?!!!
June 12th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
AIC is creating a conservation wiki with funding from NCPTT. It should be availble before the end of the year. But the key is the archives distlist.
June 12th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Not sure what the AIC wiki is all about really, but one avenue that I think AIC and IIC should seriously consider as an alternative to the distlist are member forums. These type of forums are extremely valuable to all sorts of people who share common interests. Not to mention membership and access could just be wrapped up in our already existing AIC memberships. Should AIC find a way to host specialty group forums on their site I think they would finally start taking steps towards a new future.
Everything that the DistList was about could be covered in these forums, while introducing a new level of interactivity. While social media sites such as those mentioned in this post are useful to an extent, Im just not so sure they are as universally accessible as theCoOL/DistList medium. In my opinion, an interactive platform would probably find the most success if it were hosted by our own organization. We are already spending quite a bit for AIC memberships, and having quite a bit of experience in this area I think they could quite easily implement these forums without much of a budget increase if any.
Just my two cents..
June 12th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
I like part of your idea, Justin, the forums — which allows you to learn the answers to questions that you might not have encountered YET by reading the “talk”, and, I think that the list should be free or funded in general by ads or support, not by people having to pay to join. If you read the many blogs right now, MANY are losing jobs (hmm, walter?) and the idea of having to pay for what we cannot afford right now is a problem — and then there are students, always struggling — and some of these people have a lot to offer a list in terms of commentary. In our firm we had to choose who could afford to join what org this year — dollars were tight. However, I have no problem sifting through sponsors/ads as appropriate on the side, be they AIC (and some of AIC’s dollars can go toward this) or Amazon or Talas. If I only can afford to join WAAC, I also want to be able to go to the “coOL” list . . . WAAC may or may not be able to contribute, but it is a viable group. SO, I would vote to try to find a way to fund it creatively but without exclusions.
June 14th, 2009 at 11:07 am
I too like the idea of forums, however, I tend to think that they wont work in the conservation world, mainly because they have been tried and totally failed before. The old AIC website for example had forums. E-Conservation magazine set up forums with similar intentions, and they are barely used – which is a shame.
The other problem with forums is that they are not so “searchable” in the same way the distlist archive was easily searchable and the way wikipedia is easily searchable.
I don’t know if wikipedia is the answer to all our needs, but, I do know that everything on CoOL could (in theory) go on wikipedia and be a valuable resource for both conservation as a profession and an idea.
Maybe though its time to try out a variety of things and see what get’s the best “take up”.
Richard thanks for the post, and all the comments thanks for the ideas. Some good stuff.
As a side question: AIC + Wiki = What’s this all about?
Cheers,
Dan
June 14th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
I’m grateful for AIC’s interest in seeing CoOL live on. I am a little concerned, however, that whatever organization plays host to whatever becomes futureCoOL is willing to hold this new resource lightly.
One of the great things about CoOL as it has been is that while Stanford generously hosted it, it didn’t come across as Stanford’s product. It felt like it was by and for the larger conservation community.
While I appreciate what AIC is, I also feel it is important to acknowledge what AIC, or any other conservation organization, is not, and that is the larger conservation community. I feel it is important that no aspect of futureCoOL should be connected to membership to AIC, or any other organization.
So, as Richard McCoy states in his post, I too hope the new host “work to make themselves a platform for the creation and sharing of this information” and “that they rely on **everyone** to manage, create, and update the information.”
June 14th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Richard,
Eloquence and simplicity as always, thank you. I also appreciate that you ask questions – I find that they always encourage dialog more than declarative statements.
“The imminent demise of CoOL and the ConsDistList marks the biggest shift in information sharing for conservators since the profession started printing journals.”
I am overwhelmed by the utter irony that at the brink of Web 3.0 semantic tagging technologies, CoOL and the ConsDistList, both Web 1.0 technologies, were extinguished by Stanford University without so much as a month’s warning to the nearly 10K users around the world. There is a criminal disregard and astonishing lack of reciprocity for the nearly 100K authors who supplied content to the DistList and CoOL archive implied in this action. Were any of the users of CoOL and the ConsDistList given the opportunity to create a succession plan for Stanford University Libraries voluntary hosting services? Sorry, not even a day’s notice. Stanford University Libraries and Stanford University decided to pick-up their preservation toys and “go home”, with no regard to the rest of us in the sandbox.
But, what now, Richard? The desire for the world-wide conservation community to communicate, share, explore, ask for help, undertake collaborative clinical trials and critical analyses have all been demonstrated by Walter Henry and the ConsDistList beyond the shadow of a doubt. The need for such a platform only expands exponentially with every passing day, (sometimes I think, by the hour!). And yet, the fragility of the access and permanence to the information has been tragically underscored by Stanford University’s remarkable inability to responsibly transfer management of the site. When any entity, public or private, wants to pull the plug on an electronic archive or platform, there is no guarantee that anyone new will be asked to sustain the information.
Can and should we, as you say, “rely on **everyone** to manage, create, and update the information”? What are the “best” ways for conservators to share, distribute and SAVE electronic information? I, among others who have long wished to do so, have been too tardy in thanking you and Daniel Cull for authoring the impressive Wikipedia article on Art Conservation/restoration. Fantastic effort! I am awestruck by the thoughtfulness, historical context and reflective tone. You ask in your blog post if this Wikipedia page might take a place in the future of CoOL. I would love it if you could post a link explaining how ongoing content changes and archived information could be posted, organized and linked on a Wikipedia page.
I don’t know enough of how Wikipedia works but I imagine that the page could work as a gateway to other private and public blogs and web pages. Or could Wikipedia actually hold and archive the “acreage” it would take to hold the expanding and increasingly resolved body of professional conservation knowledge? I like that image but, wow, to have it organized within historical context and semantically tagged? I like what fills my imagination!
On a simpler, more practical scale I can imagine that, like current blog pages and Twitter entries, there might be links to topic pages such as “current job listings”, “current questions in deterioration and stabilization of coatings”, and links to blogs on current clinical trials of treatment materials and analytical techniques, such as Nancie Ravenel’s Pemulen page: http://www.pemulentr2.pbworks.com .
What sparks my interest most is your idea that conservators can re-imagine CoOL and the ConsDistList by expanding the use of what has increasingly become one of the most productive platforms for the development of professional knowledge: “collaborative networks” using “social media applications to handle our information sharing.” “Current social media applications such as Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, Twitter,” and collaborative hosted knowledge development Wikis such as PBWorks are creating a new, daily workspace for conservators willing to use the net. These new, networked information development platforms are exciting in that they are both Read and Write interactive. And they renew the remarkably innovative promise first made to preservation professionals by Walter Henry and the ConsDistList: the users control the content.
The range of platforms and their respective time commitments run the full range and have become a part of my scheduled weekly activities. I can read, learn, ask, contribute and evaluate both short-term and long-term juried conservation information now as never before. And the information is no longer simply written. Now there are videos, voice, animated charts, multi-media and real-time videoconference presentations that can show you how something looks, feels, sounds and behaves. Downloads can be considered repeatedly and at my convenience, allowing me to learn without interrupting my daily work flow commitments. I can plan my own windows for professional development, research and worldwide collaboration. And I can do a great deal without expensive travel costs.
Even the potential loss of archived information may, and I emphasize the word may, be better served by a widely distributed network of independent blogs, wikis and social networking sites. Such a decentralized network prevent the massive loss or archived information when a sole-source hosting service quits, merges, sells itself, falls victim to economic bad times or gets hacked.
Still, what worked especially well for the ConsDistList will be sorely lacking with a more distributed network of posts, pages and Wikis: A single, universally accessible format, dependable and regular instances, the easily scanned summary at the beginning of each instance and the structure of new queries, discussions of past queries, announcements and job postings. Even new blog, Wiki and web pages could be announced and indexed on the DistList! That single-source, news-headline, announcement format was hard to beat!
Also missing will be the single archive of searchable keywords, subjects and authors and the go-to site for worldwide links to preservation-related organizations and indexes. Everybody else, including AIC, copied the ideas and formats at CoOL. What a great testament to Walter Henry!
It seems obvious to me, now, that conservators need both: we need both a broad network of independent, museum, grad-program and national conservation lab web, Wiki and social network pages AND a single, international, serial, emailed query and announcement platform. The former takes individual-USER initiative, which appears to be at an all-time high right now and is growing. The latter will probably require international collaboration of professional organizations, which could likely ruin a really good thing.
Conservators, archivists and preservation professionals: let’s insist that our respective preservation professional organizations, national museums and education centers to support and re-establish and archive CoOL and the ConsDistList with haste. Email, call or write your membership organizations, national museums, national archives, research institutions and graduate programs to tangibly support the re-establishment of Conservation On-Line, (CoOL), the conservation distribution list, (ConsDistList) and their archives.
And then, for some instant and more reliable gratification, join-up with a number of your most interesting professional colleagues, pick a problem you’ve all be curious about and start an exhaustive, reader-interactive Wiki to develop a heavily juried, authoritative discussion on the topic! It could be surprisingly simple and rewarding!
June 17th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
I just want to encourage people to give the AIC staff and Board some time to work with Stanford. AIC has a lot invested in CoOL (archives, websites, listservs, etc.) and there is no doubt that any commitment to maintain the assets would not be taken lightly. (Just as I’m sure Stanford did not take these issues lightly).
Once that is secure there will be time to reimagine and reinvent. The DistList as it is now is irreplacable and I agree with much of Dale’s comments.
As for the idea of wikipedia – I personally don’t see it as a replacement for some of the other types of content. I think looking at the history of changes on Richard and Daniel’s excellent entry on Art Conservation-Restoration shows the challenges in keeping an entry appropriately vetted.
The AIC wiki catalogues should be live soon and then I will be excited to hear from colleagues on how people want to use the platform to expand content.
Trackbacks
Leave a Reply