OpenCulture

To Birmingham last Friday, where Linda Spurdle had organised ‘Making Connections’, a forum for the UK Hub Museums funded through the Renaissance in the Regions programme.

The aim of ‘Making Connections’ was to provide an opportunity for the Hub museums to share the insights and experiences gained over the past 2-3 years of technical development, to identify areas of common interest and to test the appetite for further collaboration between Regions.

I gave a presentation looking at the tension between the ‘command and control’ method of developing technical programmes and the more fluid but diffuse model adopted in recent years. It was also an opportunity to talk about the need to provide simple, single points of access to the sector’s information for services such as Google and other public/government sites.

Jane gave an excellent presentation looking both at the development of the new Culture24 website, and at the role of C24 in bringing cultural content to a far wider audience. There was an interesting discussion of the need to ‘emancipate’ cultural sites from Local Authority web services, which was also the subject of a paper we published last year.

Finally, we agreed that communication - the simple sharing of knowledge, experience and current work - is perhaps the thing which people valued the most. We agreed to look into ways in which the Collections Trust can help this communication happen over the next 2-3 years.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Events, Nick Poole. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.