Interview Date: March 4, 2010
Denver, Colorado

Howard Besser

Summary:

Initially, the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESLP) set the standards for what images everyone would contribute (namely, the museums and the Library of Congress). The project looked at every Kodak on the market at the time, taking an image and compressing it. Using the lossless jpeg showed that each image lost something…clarity, color, and so on. We learned right away: consumers beware. For the last thirty years, the question being asked was: if you build it, will they come? The idea was that if the MESLP just puts stuff out there, there will be users. Besser and team didn’t realize that use had to be encouraged. Collaboration was key; faculty members were enticed to share teaching templates and approaches between campuses.

The collaborative push ended up being extremely successful. There was a vast amount of classroom use and lots of individual use. The MESLP thought it would generate all this bad behavior that would need restriction, but there was (almost) no bad behavior. Besser sees that with any large projects being worked on, there is a vision of where the problems are going to be and what kinds of things are going to be learned. It became a huge project: 50 to 80 percent of those issues end up occuring.

For Besser, the MESLP built lifelong professional relationships.  Thorny Staples, one of the representatives on the project from the University of Virginia, is a professional colleague of Besser’s. The two of them used to go to dinner, converse, and work on things. From the MESLP, many people have kept together, because of the intense environment the team worked in for several years. As much as that project was a total drain on Besser’s life (and on everyone else who was involved), Besser doubts that anyone would wish that they hadn’t been involved in the project. From the MESLP, most of Besser’s colleagues went on to higher level management positions, managing teams or whole projects because of their experience there. The attempt and success of implementing a new project and working with others to collaborate and get things done was the greatest accomplishment. Another thing Besser really took away and learned was that trying to do a massive project is near impossible unless there is a steady source of income to pay for things that weren’t envisioned when the project was first laid out.