OpenCulture

In August 2011, for 3 days, London was overtaken by a series of spontaneous riots. As disaffected children and young people took to the streets, looting shops and damaging property, the television news sent pictures of burning buildings and angry mobs around the world.

In the aftermath of the riots, people of all ages and faiths came together in angry condemnation of the senselessness of the riots and with a renewed spirit of unity and community. When things like this happen, society needs to understand them, to learn from them and ultimately learn how to avoid them in the future.

But understanding something like the London riots means addressing a set of layered issues. There are social, economic and political dimensions to be considered. Questions of unemployment, consumerism and the relationship between citizen and state abound.

In the months following the riots, the Museum of London announced that it was considering expanding its collecting policy to include artefacts, placards and other material relating to the events of August 2011. In a series of debates hosted by the Museums Association, museum speakers addressed the complexity of documenting and interpreting an event in which people lost their lives, and which involved overt conflict between the rioters and the police. Many felt that it would be better to let some time elapse between the events and their interpretation, to allow perspectives to mature.

Museums can be places of debate and dialogue – they have a profoundly important role to play in helping people understand and address the causes of events such as this.

The International Council of Museums (ICOM) defines a museum as, “a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.”

While this definition serves as a useful description of what a museum does, it says very little about what a museum means to the society it serves. Whether they focus on art or architecture, science or technology, all museums are united by a common purpose to inform the future development of society by enabling it to reflect on its past.

Museums weave objects, knowledge and experience together to create narratives which help people understand the world around them.  It is sometimes tempting to think of this process as objective and apolitical, focusing on the inherent quality of things themselves. But collecting, documentation, interpretation and digitisation are all highly subjective activities, defined by personal and national perspectives.

In our role as documentarists of both the good and the bad of society, museums must be unafraid. We must challenge orthodoxy, confront prejudice, shine the light of knowledge on propaganda and oppression. In so doing, we are creating an important social contract – the public will entrust their nations treasures to our care, in return for which we must be responsible custodians and storytellers.

At the same time, we must entertain. There is a careful balance to be struck between the didactic, campaigning museum and the provision of rich, aesthetic experiences which improve the quality of life, give people respite from their daily work and help them think about the world from a fresh perspective.

We must guard against passivity – our role is not simply for people to come and enjoy our galleries and exhibitions. We must use every appropriate tool and technique to reach out to audiences, to make ourselves relevant to them and to educate them about the world around them. Not that this exchange is purely one-way – museums around the world are working in partnership with their users to shed new light and bring new perspectives to their collections.

And finally, we have a duty to protect. A nation’s heritage is of vital importance to its self-confidence, its national identity and the pride of its people. It can help unite cultures, faiths and tribes, teaching people about each other and promoting tolerance and understanding. These treasures need to be managed, cared for and kept safe in an environment which balances control and sustainability and minimises the effects of decay.

The most successful museums are those which achieve all of these aims under the same roof, and this is the key to the unique role that museums and collections can play in a healthy, prosperous and confident society.

Yesterday’s announcement about the High Court ruling that the Wedgwood Museum’s collections can be sold as an asset to contribute to the £134m pension shortfall of the Wedgwood company has prompted me to return again to the theme of how fragile a museum’s legal relationship with its Collections can sometimes be. Read the rest of this entry »

What are the essential ingredients of a museum? If you’d asked this question perhaps 10 years ago, the list would have been pretty straightforward - walls, objects, respectful visitors, curators. The mental archetype of the museum in the popular consciousness would have been a place with things in it, cared for by people who knew about the things. Probably wearing tweed, and almost certainly male.

Fast forward a decade, and the picture is nothing like as simple. Walls? Pah. A museum is so much more than walls - it is an attitude, a belief, a set of principles, a pop-up in a shopping centre, a tent on the foreshore of the Thames.

Things? So 90’s. Yes, of course we need some stuff, but only to the extent that they help us tell the human story of the world. Collections are the heart of the museum, but they are (or should be) subordinate to design, interpretation, narrative and experience.

Respectful visitors? Sod that, culture-nazi. Museums are places of joy, celebration, learning, entertainment and egalitarianism. They’ve even got kids in, for god’s sake. Where once the museum had every right to expect its visitors to be quiet, well-behaved and have at least a nodding acquaintance with clerical latin and taxonomy, nowadays it is very much the duty of the mountain to make itself available for Mohammed.

And Curators? Well, thereby hangs a tale.

Every good story needs its heroes and its villains. It needs simple 2-dimensional characters we can boo and cheer at. And in the story of the progress of museums in the past decade, it is very often the curator that has found themselves the villain of the piece.

If the thrust of museum discourse is essentially progressive, the curator has come to represent everything that is retrograde about the ‘old’ museology. Where much of the rhetoric about museums is about openness and equality of participation, the lazy characterisation of curators is as hoarders of knowledge, using their control over ideas to exter control over their colleagues - indeed over the museum itself.

The archetypal curator is essentially an academic - highly specialist, extremely focussed and driven not by the impulse to share knowledge with a non-specialist audience but by the urge to enhance the general fund of scientific understanding. This is a gross characterisation, of course, there are many curators whose greatest gift is communication but there are just as many for whom the public role of museums is an unfortunate inconvenience to be tolerated not celebrated.

The heyday of the ‘old-school’ curator in England really ran between 1890, the great period of expansion and collecting (not just in museums) and the 1950’s. During this period, the supremacy of the curator as the arbiter of knowledge and objective truths was largely axiomatic - nobody really questioned it. Then, of course, society changed, and museums changed - the great expansion of social policy, the invention of social history, the re-coding of the museum’s role in society all happened between 1960 and 1980, and things have never been quite the same since.

Today, in all but the largest National and Regional museums, the idea that every collection (not just every museum) should have a curator is almost an anachronism. The assault on curatorship came from numerous angles all at once:

• There was the argument of simple economics - as museums have had to increase delivery on diminishing budgets, the idea of a specialist curator attached to every collection became simply untenable. Indeed the idea of having a specialist curator in every museum (along with the concept of having in-house access to a professional conservator) is now regarded simply as a financial impossibility by many.
• Then came the Collections Manager - if you look back over the last 10 years of Museums Journal recruitment ads, there is a marked trend. People stopped advertising for specialist roles like ‘curator’ and ‘documentation officer’ and instead started advertising for more broad-spectrum curatorial roles like the slightly suspect ‘keeper’ and, particularly ‘Collections Manager’. The Collections Manager was expected to bridge two worlds - the world of business process/management and the world of curatorship. In the process curatorship came to be seen as a set of repeatable processes, and started to become detached from the idea of scholarship and subject authority.
• Then came a profound shift in the design idiom of museums. We abandoned almost completely that onslaught of skeletons and picture frames and handwritten labels and camphour fumes that characterised the Victorian museum and embraced instead light, space, sparseness - the idiom of the art gallery and the experience. Where once people came to a museum to see as many unusual things as possible, now they come to experience the whole museum.
• Then came the Internet, and with it the appropriation of the word ‘curate’. People today curate their shoe cupboard, they curate online exhibitions by choosing some pictures, they curate social media strands of conferences (apologies for that one). A ‘curator’ meant someone who had deep specific technical and/or scientific knowledge of the subject of their collection, and who used that knowledge to develop the collection, to research it and to enhance the general fund of knowledge. Like an academic forced to perform on a reality TV show, the need for the curator to reduce this knowledge to a form suitable for public exhibition was not always a comfortable fit.

There are all sorts of reasons, practical and political for the devaluation of the currency of curatorship. And yes, there is a case to be made that the control exerted over the museum by its curators had become a limiting factor on its ability to change, and that some degree of positive action was necessary to redress this balance. But we have to guard against the risk of going too far in the opposite direction.

The Collections Trust’s vision of a sustainable museum is inherently about balance. Like the Ancient Greeks believed that health was a question of keeping the humours of air, earth, fire and water in balance, we believe that a healthy museum is one in which four priorities - humans, collections, knowledge and money - are kept in equal and mutually respectful balance.

A balanced museum cannot function without curatorial knowledge. Curatorial knowledge cannot function without the support of learning, access, outreach, gallery and web. Neither can function without money. None has a purpose if they are not used.

The risk of not having access to ‘old school’ curators is that museums will gradually stop moving forward, and will instead begin to feed on the knowledge and collections accumulated in the 40 years either side of the turn of the century. A revolving video in the Natural History Museum tells visitors that ‘90% of the worlds species haven’t been discovered yet’ (how do they know??) and yet many museums have quietly stopped acquiring, stopped carrying out new research.

Two candidates have emerged in recent years to backfill the loss of specific knowledge that comes from having a curator. One is crowdsourcing, the other is joining together what remains of the UK’s ‘network of expertise’ into Subject Specialist Networks. The crowdsourcing vision holds that knowledge of the collection is not the preserve of the museum, and that if we can but unlock the vast untapped reserves of knowledge in the community, we can extend the idea of participatory culture to embrace participatory curatorship. I have always been troubled by this - the flipside of the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ is the ‘immense self-reinforcing stupidity of the crowd’ - the fact that when crowds are right, they can often be more right than experts, but when they are wrong, groupthink can make them forget to question.

Subject Specialist Networks are a vital, indeed thriving way of opening out specialist knowledge, of filling gaps and of helping people support one another - but they are an adjunct to, not a replacement for, the idea of having curators in museums working with their collections.

And so what to do? We cannot go back - a return to the hegemony of the curator would help neither curators not the rest of the essential functions of a museum. But perhaps we could made some different decisions about how we go forward. Instead of regarding curators and ‘other staff’ as being at odds, perhaps we could focus instead on their common aim to preserve heritage and to make it available for education, enjoyment and research. I think too much has changed to re-assert the old role of the curator. Perhaps instead we could think about how we assert a new role that is fundamentally predicated on balance.

On the 5th December, I attended the first of 5 meetings of a new initiative called the ‘Museum Ethics Network’. Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and led by the School of Museum Studies at Leicester the purpose of the network is to examine the current ethical framework governing museums, to test it and to identify potential ways forward.

Now, I freely admit that I approach ethics with a healthy dollop of skepticism. Having studied it first at UCL (as part of an MA in the History & Philosophy of Science) and latterly at Cranfield Business School (as part of a course on ‘Case Based learning’) I know that discussions of ethics can very quickly dissolve into a miasma of semantics and end up sounding more like a 6th-form cider-fuelled theology debate than a reasoned discussion.

However, at the risk of prefacing the next meeting’s discussion - it has never been more important that we revisit, engage with and really test the foundation of our ethical principles. The entire sector is being tested on the forge of relevance, and it is at times like these, when there is no real political or professional pole star to orientate by, that ethics is pretty much all we have. The only way, in other words, is ethics (sorry, but I managed to hold that in throughout the entire meeting).

The network brings together a really interesting group of people - David Fleming from National Museums Liverpool, tireless campaigner for social justice and human rights, Manchester’s Nick Merriman, Leicester’s Jocelyn Dodd and new(ish) recruit Janet Marstine, Eithne Nightingale, the V&A Head of Diversity Strategy, Mark O’Neill from Culture and Sport Glasgow, NHM’s John Jackson and a whole range of others.

The semantic issue was neatly side-stepped by James Dempsey o fthe University of Leeds, who works with many different types of business and organisation to explore the meaning and function of ehtics in their institution. He provided a neat triumverate of ‘ways of expressing ethics’ which I will try to reproduce here:

1. Case studies - which have the advantage of a loose, organic approach to ethics which helps people to think rather than presrcibing answers (but with the corollary that they are relatively unstructured)

2. Codes of Conduct - which are clearly-expressed and have the quality of sets of rules, but which militate against creative and informed decision-making based on sound judgement.

3. Values - tacit or explicit expressions of corporate principles or values which provide a broad frame of reference within which decisions can be made.

James pointed out that none of these is mutually exclusive, and that they all centre on the idea of a rational individual who will bring to them their own personal frame of reference. I think this is a neat exposition - although I think that in reality decisions are more often made on the basis of custom, practice or process and that whether an action is good or bad, right or wrong, is really an emergent property of the process of being a museum. I am not sure, outside a smallish number of highly specific contexts (such as restitution, repatriation or potentially controversial subject matter) whether people think very much about ethics in their daily work.

Next up was Nick Merriman, who had been asked to give a potted history of the development of Codes of Ethics for Museums. Speaking with characteristic erudition, Nick explored the way in which the idea of professional standards for museums emerged from the idea of museums as a ‘profession’. Mark O’Neill observed that this was, itself, partly a response to Thatcher’s concerted attack on the professions in the mid-1980’s, which prompted many sectors to codify themselves as professions. Nick explored the emergence of the MA Code of Ethics as a curatorially-led development, supported by a broad framework of discourse and training. He looked at the broader definition adopted by ICOM  and the way in which both were ultimately assertions of professionalism on behalf of the broad spectrum of people working in museums.

From there, the discussion opened out into a broad exploration of the different dimensions of ethics. I have a visualisation of this discussion, which I will post here when I can next get to a scanner, but to characterise some of the dimensions:

1. The concept and expression of ‘professional ethics’ as a codified set of principles and associated governing rules of behaviour. Both the MA and the ICOM Code of Ethics fall into this category, and there was an interesting discussion of the intellectual model of museums manifest in both documents. There was a feeling around the room that both are too anodyne and lacking in ambition and direction to form a useful direction for the ‘virtuous museum’ (a beautiful content of John Jackson’s and one to which I am sure we will return). In particular, there is nothing in either document which speaks to the moral imperative of engagement, inclusion, representation or diversity.
2. The connection between ethics and social policy - I got nervous here, as I do whenever people speak of a polarity between ‘collections’ and ‘people’. There was a slight tinge of ‘museums have focussed on procedural and structural standards for collections (cover your ears, SPECTRUM) because this is easier, or less challenging than addressing social issues. There was a really interesting discussion about the idea of ethics in relation to the principle of democracy and the right to representation.

   At this point, there was a fascinating discussion which I can’t do full justice to here about the implications of the current change in political and strategic direction for the sector. Some felt that with the Coalition Government, we will see an end to projects and developments focussed on diversity and democracy, that the advances of the previous decade will be set aside as inclusion comes to be seen as an unaffordable luxury and that a new trend towards appointing Trustee’s with strong right-wing views will undermine the hard-won egalitarianism of modern museum practice. Personally, I think this is too apocalyptic, but it is hard to argue with the fact that there is a lot less emphasis on inclusion in the current and forthcoming generation of funding programmes.

3. The connection between ethics and human rights - the fact that Collections Trust takes as our starting point in all collections-related work the principle enshrined in Articla 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (’that everyone shall have the right freely to participate in the cultural life of their community’) and that actually both the MA and ICOM Codes of Ethics are quite sufficient if you incorporate this fundamental assertion of ‘rights’ in front of them.
4. The extent to which the public role of museums, based as it is in the concept of trust, is rooted in our professional ethics. Several people questioned whether the more flexible approach currently taken to ethical decisions (particularly around financially-motivated disposal) would either undermine the public trust in museums or help them to understand the ethical dimension of our work.
5. The extent to which ethics is informed by the financial circumstances of the UK museums sector - including an interesting discussion of how museums can make ethical decisions about the companies with whom they enter into partnership.
6. The ‘philosophical’ idea of ethics as a domain of discourse and where, if at all, museums have open discussions based on the realities of current working practice.
7. The idea of ’systemic’ ethics - that ethical implications arise as a by-product of the simple act of managing a collection and can be an emergent property of the systems we use to do the job. In this context, it is interesting to look at the issue of whether documentation, selection, digitisation - which are often presented as ‘neutral’ processes, can either serve to reinforce prejudice or highlight and guard against it.
8. The idea of environmental ethics - the responsibility to the object, to the public and to the impact on the broader environment. In this context, we discussed the Eden project as well as the new radical wing of conservators who are taking a more aggressively ‘risk-based’ approach to thinking about environmental management.
9. The idea of ethical codes as a defence mechanism - that while the majority of people never read or refer to the MA or ICOM Codes, they frequently invoke them either to defend their practice or to help inform non-museum colleagues about the value and impact of their work.
10. The idea of ethics as a necessary element in addressing the statutory requirement to demonstrate public benefit required of museums as charitable organisations.

There are, I’m sure, many other dimensions - but I found it fascinating to explore the ways in which ethics impact directly both on practice but also, critically, on public value, trust and identity.

And so to the afternoon session, which focussed on ‘Social Engagement and Ethics’. Again, I confess this had me worried initially - there had been an interesting undercurrent to the morning session that the focus of professional practice on collections had somehow been to the detriment of their ’social’ function, or at least that museums had been much more successful in being explicit about the former, but less so the latter. In the event, though, my concerns were more or less unfounded - it turned out to be less about collections-bashing and more about something much more interesting - social justice.

I want to explore Mark O’Neill’s presentation in detail and at greater length elsewhere. It was, frankly, scintillating - a brilliant, clear exposition of why museums are where they are and how they got here. I’ll restrict myself to covering a couple of his core ideas:

There are 3 ‘types’ of museum (actually, there are 3 stages of progression, but it’s simpler to say ‘types’):

• Elite museums - of which there are very few left, but which exist in splendid isolation from ideas of audience or social utility and are able to focus instead on art for arts-sake and the pursuit of truth and beauty in and of themselves.
• ‘Welfare’ museums - which are essentially elite museums onto which the functions of education and inclusion have been grafted. These form the majority of museums, and while they pay homage to and use the language of inclusion and diversity, are still essentially focussed on the idea of transmitting privileged knowledge. As an aside - we talked about what happened to Renaissance, and there was an interesting sense that the Renaissance Hubs had been aborted in the transition from elite to welfare museums, and before they had an opportunity to achieve the kind of root-and-branch long-term change required to change them permanently into category 3, which is….
• ‘Social Justice’ museums - which understand and pursue truth and beauty, but which are fundamentally constructed around the needs of real people and which also recognise the role of inclusion and diversity - that there are many truths and many subjective forms of beauty, that are egalitarian rather than privileged and which work in partnership with their audiences.

I am paraphrasing inadequately, of course, and Mark said much more besides. I suspect that there are very few museums now that do not at least aspire to be museums of social justice, but I was fascinated by the ‘path’ to museum enlightenment (my words not his) which Mark offered. He described a progression through a number of stages:

• Avoidance
• Tokenism
• Projects
• Bolt-on services
• Integrated services
• Full integration

I think this is valuable because I think it helps to think about where on this progression your museum is, and whether Mark and David are right that we risk slipping back a few rungs in the current political climate.

Next up, David Fleming. Instead of giving a presentation, he started with a simple statement ‘Museums serve elites’, then stood up and read the National Museums Liverpool’s Strategic Plan. I’m not sure if this is publicly available anywhere, but if it is, I suggest you track it down. Better still, I suggest you track David down and get him to read it to you. It begins with the words ‘We change lives…’ and continues on to address public stress, the welfare and prosperity of Liverpool, connectedness and - to me the most fundamental word of all - confidence. It could not be a clearer expression of the museum as agents of social change, as needing to deliver real value for a city where deprivation and joblessness are endemic. He finished by sharing some interesting statistics about the socio-economic profiling of the audiences of National Museums, published by the DCMS in their annual review of KPI for the Nationals.

And so where did all this get us? A long way and nowhere at all, really. We rehearsed some familiar ground about the sociological function of museums, we heard some interesting ideas about how to structure thinking about professional ethics, we highlighted the value and limitations of the existing Codes of Ethics. We know about the ‘triple bottom-line’ of museums, about the many ethical dimensions of daily life. We acknowledged the chasm between ethics and practice.

The real question, of course, is not the subject itself, but in the idea of change. There was a suspicion that, if the political tides have turned against instrumentalism and social policy, then ethics could become a more ‘palatable’ vehicle through which to pursue the same principles. It was pointed out that social engagement is a campaign which polarises, whereas appealing on the basis of ethics is a much harder line to deflect. Some people suggested a toolkit, others felt it would be sufficient to explore the issues, others, too, felt that it was time to revisit the MA and ICOM Codes of Ethics and to use them to express a statement of intent on behalf of all museums.

And me? Well, I spent the day in the company of some brilliant brains, and there are three phrases which stood out for me:

• ‘Museums should be unafraid’
• ‘Relevance is the key to survival’
• ‘Ethics is the basis of confidence’

I’ll blog the next few sessions, and I really look forward to seeing how the discussion evolves from here. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on the question of the role of ethics in museums!

OK, let me get this out of the way from the beginning. I am not an Apple fanboy. I own an iPod, but I have never used a Macbook (I don’t trust anything that doesn’t have a DOS prompt). I have tried to avoid writing this post, but for some reason it just won’t go away.

Last month, Steve Jobs died leaving behind him a company whose projects have touched the hearts and changed the lives of millions of people. I never met the guy, and I know nothing about him other than what I have read in the press both before and after his death. And yet, the mythology is of a man who transformed the world of consumer electronics because of at least 4 fundamental qualities:

1. Exceptional leadership
2. Extradordinary design sensibility
3. A singular focus on the user experience
4. Strong business acumen

The reaction to Steve Jobs’ death was one of genuine sense of loss - that something uniquely valuable had gone from the world. It isn’t often that someone who essentially makes a living by making stuff and selling it to people achieves this kind of personal relationship with their customers. And it got me to thinking - museums should always look outwards to other industries to see what we can learn from their success. In previous posts, I have drawn on examples from gaming, from manufacture and from logistics, but never consumer goods. So, I wondered, what if Steve Jobs had made a museum?

Lesson 1. Playing your own tune

On the face of it, in a culture defined by open standards and open content, Apple should not be a success. It uses proprietary formats,is ultra-secretive about new products and polices patent infringements with enthusiastic vigour. Apple products ask their users to subscribe to the Apple way of doing things in a way that must have struck terror into the hearts of the team responsible for marketing the 1st generation iMac.

That they can do so is a result of at least two factors - (1) immense confidence and (2) the knowledge that if you offer people simple, functional and beautiful experiences they are going to be willing to meet you halfway when it comes to acquiring the skills and vocabulary to use them. Apple products demand that their users do things the Apple way, but the payback in terms of attachment and depth of engagement is correspondingly greater.

So if Steve had made a museum, I think these would have been the founding principles. It would be 100% rock-solid in its confident assertion of its place and purpose in the world - without trying to be all things to all people as museums can sometimes do - and unapologetic in asking people to engage with it on its own terms (rather than trying to rewrite the ‘vocabulary’ of the museum to present a more user-friendly face to the world). It would accept that some people are simply not ‘museum’ people, in the same way that some people aren’t now, nor ever will be, ‘Apple’ people, but be ready all the same to welcome them in the event of an epiphany.

At the heart of it, having the confidence to know that you do what you do best, delivering something that solves a genuine problem, and knowing that people want what you are delivering are the most fundamental ingredients of success.

Lesson 2. Inside-out design

Steve Jobs famously once said ’some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. To design something really well, you have to get it’. So, while the beautiful aesthetic of many Apple products is the first thing most users see, what really differentiates them is this holistic, end-to-end approach to design which results not only in beautiful things, but also beautiful interfaces and, ultimately, beautiful experiences.

So Steve’s museum would, of course, adopt the same design philosophy. All of the elements of Steve’s museum, from stores, to galleries, to reception to the loos would have been designed with this integrated view in mind. He would have ‘got’ the fundamentally interconnected roles of museums to collect, preserve, interpret and share, and he would have ensured that all of these elements co-operated seamlessly to deliver a coherent, beautiful and compelling end-user experience.

This, as luck would have it, is exactly the design philosophy which inspired the Collections Trust to create the BSI Code of Practice for Collections Management (PAS197), which has as its very core the principle that the quality, depth and relevance of the end-user experience is directly and implicitly connected both to the strategic mission of the museum and the processes by which it manages its collections. Steve would have approved!

Of course, with his legendary attention to detail, Steve would not have been happy until the design of his museum had been stripped of anything extrinsic, unneccessary or which presented any kind of barrier to the user experience. From the steps up to the front door, to the font on the website, everything about the presentation of and interface with Steve’s museum would welcome the user, draw them in, encourage them to form a lasting personal, emotional and psychological bond with it. Visitors to Steve’s museum would, I am certain, have left with the impression that it was theirs, designed around and with an implicit understanding of their needs and values.

Critically, too, Steve’s museum would leave people feeling empowered with a sense of their own cultural literacy - that they had encountered, learned and acquired the necessary skills to make the museum their own - rather than culturally passive, disempowered or even bored.

Lesson 3. Making money

This morning, Apple Inc. shares are trading at $385.33. The ‘brand value’ of the company is approximately $153.3bn. Apple products are used in affluent nations throughout the Western world. By any measure, it is a massively successful company. Its success is not purely economic - it has also succeeded in carving out a leading position in a highly competitive marketplace through a culture of innovation and quality.

So would you have to pay to get into Steve’s museum? I rather suspect that you would. Not only would you have to pay, but you would almost certainly pay a premium slightly above the price point of other similar leisure attractions in your area. But pay it you would, because nothing else would deliver the depth, engagement and value that Steve’s museum would be offering you. And yes, that price point might well be exclusive, which flies in the face of a decade or more of opening up and diversification but at the same time, the museum would move from being something egalitarian but disposable to something desirable, aspirational and financially sustainable.

But, perhaps most importantly, Steve’s museum would be characterised by movement and momentum, not by stasis. It would explore multiple platforms, multiple points of delivery. It would look for new problems to solve, integrating technological innovations as it goes. Building on a clear core philosophy and aesthetic, it would expand laterally, defining new relationships and articulating new value propositions for its audiences.

The good news is that Steve’s museum exists everywhere, in different forms and with differing emphasis. For many, particularly those battered by spending cuts, it is hard to be confident about the future and about the intrinsic value of what we do for people. There has been too much emphasis on hitching museums onto other people’s value propositions and not enough on the unique core value proposition of museums in their own right.

Sometimes, the integrated design philosophy has been lost in successive waves of change. But at heart, the museum profession’s conception of what constitutes an effective modern museum is dynamic, responsive, user-focussed and streamlined. Museum professionals everywhere are confronting new challenges with innovation and creativity, and using design idiom to have new conversations with the visiting public.

I’d like to think that Steve would approve.

Hi my name is Jason Marceniuk. I had the pleasure of working with Collections Trust during my 8 week placement as part of my MA in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. I enjoyed my time there at thoroughly recommend it for future students considering a placement. My work was with the launch of the 3rd generation of the Collections Link. (www.collectionslink.org.uk). Read the rest of this entry »

I want you to imagine a scenario with me. Picture your museum. Now imagine it with no servers, no in-house IT team, no Collections data onsite at all. Imagine that all of the software you use to manage your Collections is accessible through your browser, with your data held in a secure, stable server farm somewhere far, far away.

How do you feel?

The idea of applying the principles of Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) to Collections Management is not new. Indeed, in some ways it is much older than most people think - harking back as it does to the very early days of using remote terminals to access processing power provided centrally on a mainframe. Back in the early 1980’s, museums all over Europe would ship their hard-copy record cards to the MDA Computing Bureau to be transcibed into electronic records, again, making use of the economies of centralised computing power.

Fast forward 30 years, and the scale, complexity and richness of electronic recording of information about museum artefacts have expanded exponentially. Documentation and cataloguing are a global business, supported by a thriving community of highly specialised software applications and standards such as SPECTRUM.

The prevailing model of computing in museums is (as it is in most other types of enterprise) to have a number of relatively highly-powered machines connected to a Local Area Network which acts both as a conduit to the Internet, a firewall, a communications layer and a shared filestore. Until relatively recently, most Collections Management Systems were engineered to operate in this environment - either installed across the network or on a dedicated internal server. 

This model had its advantages. A LAN could include multiple physical locations, enabling, for example, curators onsite and conservators in offsite stores to interact with a common dataset. It empowered the museum to run its own kit, and to establish policies for things like backup and disaster recovery. In essence, it put the information about the collections inside the same physical context as those collections.

But the networked-application model also has some profound drawbacks. It is inherently inefficient, requiring expensive user support and onsite technicians. It requires physical space appropriate to the operation of high-powered and energy-hungry machines. It places a barrier to the upgrade path for the software, requiring manual intervention, downtime and occasionally bespoke development. The knock-on effect of this is that innovations funded by one user of the software are seldom cascaded automatically across the entire user community (or where they are, the time-delay involved can be considerable).

Collections Management Software as a Service, in which Collections data is held on low-cost, scalable offsite storage and manipulated using browser-based interfaces, appears to hold the solution to many of these issues.

It makes sense from the developers point of view - hugely reducing the complexity and therefore cost of maintaining 2000-3000 separate installations of their software. It provides a relatively painless path through which upgrades and new features can be cascaded out across the entire user-base of a given system. Not only this, but it offers a development path for new features and functionality - perhaps in the form of integration with tools for Digital Asset and Digital Rights Management, Workflow Management, Visualisation or Digital Preservation.

It also makes sense from a managers point of view - onsite IT infrastructure (and the skills to maintain it) can be very expensive. The space required for dedicated onsite kit can be given over to storage, administration or other hard-pressed functions. CMSaaS can be cheaper, offering the flexibility of subscription-based models which scale with the content and its uses, and in the process, offering a means of futureproofing against the evolution of the museum and its information management needs.

It makes sense, too, from a professional point of view. A community of clients using a common Cloud-based Collections Management System forms, almost by definition, a community of practice. It leads to the sharing of knowledge and expertise, to mutual support and other forms of collaboration. Not only this, but it naturally tends towards the principle of openness with museum datasets, encouraging the more proactive use of data through API and 3rd party applications and websites.

For all of these reasons, the majority of the leading Collections Management Systems have either already developed fully-hosted versions of their applications or are in the process of developing them. And business, it seems, is booming - at least partly in response to the strictures imposed on museums by funding cuts. Most vendors are reporting significant increases in the uptake of their Software as a Service offers, with some confidently predicting a full transition to Cloud-based, browser-based Collections Management within the next decade.

And yet there are many for whom the idea of Cloud-based Collections is unpalatable, to say the least. Some point to the inherent instability and insecurity of the Cloud as being too much of an operational risk to entrust their Collections data (which is intended to be the canonical and authoritative record of the Collection) to it. Others point to the fragility of their connection to the web - raising the prospect of downtime, lag or failure. Others point to the creativity and innovation which comes from having technologists, technology, curators and data under one roof. Others, too, suggest that this places them in a position of total dependency on their vendors and software providers, effectively rendering them hostage to the vendors charging model. It is also suggested that each and every installation of a Collections Management System represents a bespoke tool, specific to the needs of that museum and that SaaS would fail to deliver the kind of local configurability that museums and their Collections demand.

It is too early to say whether all of these concerns are equally valid. Certainly many museums run antiquated hardware and suffer from poor Internet connections - although people suffering with a bad PC should in theory benefit from the lighter processor load of using browser-based applications. Many are also governed under a Local Authority IT Policy which stipulates requirements that make CMSaaS all but impossible. It is also fair to say that many Browser-based applications are not quite as responsive as their locally-installed counterparts (although the gap is closing).

As to the risk inherent in Cloud storage, I suspect this may be based on an overestimation of the stability and security of locally-based physical media. After all, the data is still bits encoded on a spinning disk (or solid-state drive) whether it is under your stairs or sitting in racks in a data warehouse somewhere. I also suspect that the inexorable and inevitable rise of mainstream consumer-focussed applications which run in the Cloud will gradually help people to overcome this concern.

As to the creativity and innovation that comes from having museum technologists on the team - this has doubtless led to the flowering of ideas and applications, but it may simply not be sustainable in the face of the economic realities confronting museums in most countries worldwide. This is, of course, a gross simplification, but we may come to see a relatively small number of museums (outside of the larger institutions) that are able to maintain this kind of staffing and capital overhead. Many museum technologists - disaffected in some cases by the inability of the museum to enable them to deliver what they know they are capable of, have themsevles defected to commercial vendors and development houses.

In reality, we are unlikely to see a total transition to Collections Management in the Cloud anytime soon. This is a tremendously diverse sector, with a huge range of different types and scales of institution. There will always be those who need an installer and a locally-based application, for whom this is the simplest and most effective option. What I do think we’ll see, particularly over the next 4-5 year cycle, is two significant trends:

1. A significant swing in the medium-to-larger end of the museum community towards full-service online Collections Management Software and;

2. The emergence of more online tools with a very low barrier to entry (both in terms of cost and complexity) which are suited to the needs (and budgets) of smaller local and community museums.

Is it time for Collections in the Cloud? I’d love to know what you think!

We’re excited to see that our friends over at Culture24 have announced Let’s Get Real 2011, a 2-day conference (20th and 21st September 2011) built around the theme of how best to evaluate success online. Read the rest of this entry »

Collections Link is the Collections Trust’s online service which supports networking, collaboration and professional development for people who work with Collections. The service has been online since 2006, with some 1,800 registered users, more than 500 specialist how-to guides and 40+ networks. Since late 2010, the Collections Trust team have been working on the 3rd generation of Collections Link, and as we approach the launch, I thought it’d be useful to reflect on how we’ve got to where we are. Read the rest of this entry »

The following notes are taken live at the European Commission’s Member States Expert Group meeting. Opinions expressed are the author’s own.

INTRODUCTION

The meeting was introduced by Mr Khalil Rouhana, Director of Directorate E (Digital Library Initiative) at the European Commission. Read the rest of this entry »