Can you start by telling us about the background of this work?
At the museum desk of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek / German Digital Library, we realised that the museums who we were supporting to publish their data on our platform were finding it very difficult to understand our technical metadata requirements. It seemed that we were expressing these requirements in a language that museums did not understand. We wanted to address this while also encouraging museum professionals to consider the FAIR and CARE Principles when preparing their object information for online publication.
Through informal conversations with representatives of the museum associations of the federal states in Germany we learned that they wanted to better coordinate their work around advising museums on how to best document and publish their collections online. We decided to join forces and develop an accessible recommendation that would help museums adhere to relevant documentation standards and make their object metadata fit for publication online.
We did not want to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we set about summarising and ‘translating’ the minimum requirements of relevant metadata standards in a compact and easy-to-read online handout. Since our initial meeting in 2022, more organisations and initiatives involved in the publication of digitised cultural heritage have come on board our working group.
Why did you think about using the Impact Playbook?
From the beginning, we wanted to make sure that our ‘product’ would be as widely received and used as possible. We needed to make sure that we understood who we were developing the recommendation for and what the needs of its future users were. The Impact Playbook is aimed precisely at projects to do with digital cultural heritage that put the stakeholder at the centre and so it seemed like a fitting source of inspiration for how to plan the work of our newly established ‘Minimum Record Recommendation Working Group’. Phase one of the Playbook – which focuses on Impact Design – seemed especially helpful, and we very quickly adopted some of its methods for our own impact design.
How did you use it?
In one of our first regular virtual meetings we did an exercise based on the Change Pathway. Over 15 minutes in a collaborative document, members of our working group were asked to fill out each of the headings: Stakeholders, Resources, Activities, Outputs, Short-Term Outcomes, Long-Term Outcomes and Impact. In one of the subsequent meetings we fine-tuned the results and there we had our blueprint!
The process had the full buy-in of the working group. Yet we wanted to make sure that we would not lose track of the Change Pathway as a ‘compass’ and so we decided to set up two sub-groups. One focused on the ‘analysis’ of existing standards and the development of our own recommendation based on these standards, while the other was dedicated to ‘impact’ and making sure we defined who our stakeholders and their needs were and delivered on those. The act of ‘touching base’ - going back to the Change Pathway - helped us focus our efforts.
How did you identify the needs of your stakeholders? How did the Impact Playbook help you to do this?
In the Change Pathway, we identified several categories of stakeholders: users of the recommendation (museum professionals, museum consultants); disseminators (providers of professional training, academia, museum associations and boards); software providers in charge of implementing the recommendation;and finally, the beneficiaries of high quality cultural heritage data - portal providers, the research community and the general public.
We then used the Empathy Map from the Impact Playbook to try to envisage what stakeholders’ needs might be, but we really wanted to hear from the recommendation’s future users, so we got them involved at several stages of the recommendation’s development.
As soon as we had our first draft of our ‘list of data fields’ , we asked representatives of all four stakeholder categories to tell us what they thought. Their extensive feedback was worked into the beta version of the recommendation, which we published in October 2023. Since we realised that we needed the support of the software providers if museum professionals were going to be able to implement the recommendation, we conducted interviews with a number of the leading providers working in German-speaking countries. The idea to hold these interviews actually came up as part of the Empathy Map exercise and we gleaned a lot of useful feedback.
Moreover, several of the software providers with whom we spoke agreed to adjust their data export function in adherence with the recommendation. Importantly, they agreed for us to list them in our online handout, which means potential users of the recommendation can find out if their software providers already support the recommendation. In May 2024, the working group published the first full version of the Minimum Record Recommendation. It would look very different had we not engaged our stakeholders from the beginning.
What would you recommend to others planning to use the Impact Playbook in their project design?
Dive straight away into the Change Pathway. We found it to be very intuitive. Combined with the definitions in the glossary, it is more or less self-explanatory, so that it can be used even without previous knowledge or experience in this area.
Is there anything else that’s important to tell us?
We believe that the Minimum Record Recommendation can help institutions prepare their data for the common European data space for cultural heritage and to lay the foundations for training Artificial Intelligence applications in a way that respects the wishes of museums. One of our next steps will be looking at how we can make the recommendation available to international museum professionals. No doubt we will consult the Europeana Impact Playbook for this!
Find out more
The Minimum Record Recommendation can be found in German on the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek’s public wiki and Zenodo.
You can access and use the Europeana Impact Playbook for your own work, and join the Europeana Impact Community to become part of a community of impact practitioners - from beginners to the experts!
If you would like to hear more about the work described in this article, join the webinar Impact design in the aggregation experience, taking place on 16 September!
