With apologies to Rod Page, here is my summary of his recent talk "Going Digital" at the Natural History Museum, London on March 17, 2009. Errors and omissions are mine, with the exception of Rod's closing remark which I have quoted verbatim, rather than attempt to paraphrase. For those with the time (and the technology), I would very strongly recomend watching the video of Rod's talk, and viewing his slides. To make things easier, I have put together a page pulling together the various electronic strands of Rods talk in various formats. However, here is my executive summary of his presentation:

Background

• Authority is conferred by what you do, not who you are.
• Embrace the Web. If you don’t, you are irrelevant.
• NHM is a digital outsider.
• We should "Go Digital" to learn things we don’t already know.

How do we "Go Digital"?

• Apply identifiers to data.
• Identifiers facilitate data integration.
• Identifiers prevent "link rot," make data citable and provide the means to deliver credit.
• Identifiers facilitate date reuse and repurposing of data.

What can museums can do?

• Perhaps nothing! This is the safe option because technology is very fast moving.
• Easier to say what museums should not do.
• Museums should NOT build silo's for images, video, bibliographies, social networks, bulk storage/computing.
• Third party groups already do this better and with more money than museums can hope for.
• Museums should make the process of going digital very easy.
• Museums should deliver infrastructure and get out of the way.
• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to science.
• No branding, corporate style, or permission involved in delivering the highest impact science software in evolutionary biology.

Biodiversity Project Partnerships

• The "Dance of the Initiatives"
• Too many initiatives - museums risk spreading themselves too thinly.
• There may be a danger of too much money - everyone wants a piece of the action.
• The science criterion for judging a partnerships value is "Can I do science with it?"
• For the Encyclopedia of Life project the answer to this question is currently "No".

Barriers to going Digital

• Intellectual property is driven by fear, and this fear leads to the creation of data silos.
• Data silos and IP terms and conditions are doomed, because biodiversity data leaks as part of scientific communication.
• Creative Commons provides a means of managing IP.
• Being open is good for science because "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow".
• I.e. data deficiencies can be addressed by being open. 

What to digitize first

• We can compute the value of data through citation (akin to Google's Page Rank).
• Thus digitize what has been cited.

Conclusion
"I think the museum is an amazing place - I really enjoyed working here all those years ago when I was a post doc for a couple of years. If you look at the front of the building or the inside it is absolutely magnificent. If you look at not only the front of house physically, but the front of house in terms of the web page, for visitors to the museum the web experience is great. I think what I am concerned about is that if you go to the back of the museum you see a very different kind of picture, and I guess the point is physically the museum at the back looks like this and and thats fine. Digitally, the back of the museum will look like this as well. It is never going to be pretty, it [is] never going to be as attractive or as scenic as the [front] web pages, but I think it is equally vital. In the same way that the [physical] museum depends on these kinds of back end services and back end staff, I think digitally we are going to have to shoot for the same kind of thing, and I think if the museum wants to be a world class institution it is going to have to devote the same kind of resources it has to the front, and it does to this rather less attractive back part of the museum." Rod Page - March 17th 2009.