Tony Ageh on 'The Value of Memory'

A recent speech by the BBC's Tony Ageh's to the 'Telling History' conference organised by the Prix Italia has been published in full on the About the BBC Blog and is well worth a read. Its theme is "the way the Internet is turning us all – or at least, WILL turn us all - into memory institutions." Ageh (the BBC's Controller of Archive Development) was talking to a room full of broadcasters, and his comments are particularly relevant to public service broadcasters in particular. But it's clear from the text that the "us all" can be read more widely to refer to other organisations and even individuals.

One passage looks at a recent project using the BBC archive to shed the light of hindsight on the 80s Miners' Strike. Probably the key line is this: "The footage needs to be balanced by personal input – by witness accounts – by the voice of people and the opinions of people who were involved." In other words, organisations like the BBC (and more familiarly museums and galleries) - squarely "memory institutions" - perform the most useful service to society's collective memory by opening their content to public recontextualisation and interpretation by other participants.

But we believe there is also a hint here for a strategic opportunity that could be relevant to a broader range of our clients, particularly in arts, broadcasting and publishing. The form that public recontextualisation of content takes is already getting more interesting. From a world of hosted comments we have moved into social media where users can take more control of curating their own commentary across the web. Services like Storify take a stage further the process of adjusting the power relationship between the traditional tellers of stories and the rest of us. What next? Ageh points to a world where much more content is made available. In order to make sense of this in the aggregate, it would help for content to be better-structured and semantically addressable.

And that might also help with a much more vexed question, addressed only fleetingly here by Ageh - the development of business models to monetise content (the other kind of value). The money question matters for public organisations like the BBC, because the right kind of answers might help to unlock content wrapped up in the rights of creators and contributors (and to justify the investment of public money in the complex technology involved in digitising and classifying content). It matters even more for the private sector. The Press Association's recent publication of its ontology, and the emphasis that the organisation is placing on the value of semantically organised data, represents a bold strategic move based on an understanding of the value that deep thinking about metadata can add to large bodies of content in a commercial context (albeit in this case B2B). This is an unproven area and therefore not without risk, but for the same reason those organisations that can figure out the right model have an opportunity to carve out a strong position for themselves.

As Ageh says, we are at an early stage of making sense of how to remember online. But if we don't move pretty quickly to address these questions with some diverse and creative answers, we might wake up and find that Facebook is basically doing the whole thing for us (more on this in a later, much overdue, post).