The free access to public domain data seems to be more real and live with the Internet advent. However, in practice we lack of tools to find and to access this data. As described by Elings & Waible, the community of libraries, archives and museums have been working hardly over the past decades to create and to implement methods and tools to achieve full integration of the available content. The efforts consist to create metadata (data about the content), descriptive standards, and protocols to share (exchange) content. Based on this work I wonder better opportunities for end-users (us) of these systems.

I admit, my archive is almost a mess. I am still trying to find a good organizing methodology for my digital files. Basically, it is a trial and error method with many interactions until now. Many specialists have expended their lives doing the same thing, and they have the “know-how”. The question is: how can I borrow this expertise from them? I could learn the metadata, protocols, and almost become a professional in this field. It is a very high time consuming. But what if I have a system that encode this expertise and help me to organize my archive? Yes, I don’t want to learn biblioteconomy and documentation; what I want is an end-user friendly system to archive digital files. The system should support a very good way in helping me to find categories and key words to index my files. It should help me to store and to find content in a natural and flexible way. And it should be flexible enough to be customizable and extensible with new functionalities.

Another thing that I would love to have is a truly free access to public domain data. It is like what we can get from Wikipedia, and google scholars, and google books. I want more than what is available now, like a smart system that can find things that I like based on the files that I have. It is a suggestion system based on my personal archive.

In conclusion, the museums, libraries and archives have a mature set of tools and protocols to represent, store, and exchange content. It is still a hot and evolving topic among these societies, but there are enough definitions to create system to expose the content on the web. It is time to start the creation of systems to enable end-users to work on this domain. It is on my todo list. =)