OpenCulture

‘The Geek shall inherit the Earth’. As jokes go, it was never really all that great, but about 5-6 years ago, it really seemed to fit. We were entering the Digital Age, which perhaps more than any which preceded it split the cognoscenti from the layman.

Either you could ‘code’, or you couldn’t, and if you couldn’t you were excluded from having a right to an opinion about all sorts of things. Suddenly, the geek was king and your 30 years of experience in sales or marketing didn’t matter at all, grandad.

And so, for much of the past decade, it has been. Funders, dazzled by the glory and promise of the Web, lost their senses and began funding things like mass-digitisation, which a few short years before they would have sent away to write a proper Business Plan. Technology became the industry which earned its keep by promising more than it could really deliver.

But recently, things seem to have changed. We have lived with the new generation of web tools (which don’t require you to do anything more than drag and drop - check out Weebly if you don’t believe me) for long enough that technology just doesn’t hold the same kind of terror for non-geeks anymore.

Suddenly, the old world of common-sense and supply and demand seems to be reasserting itself. I say this because in the past few months I have encountered a new breed of policymaker. The PlayStation Generation is coming into its own and they’re seeing through the glamour of technology. we can’t say to them ‘you don’t get it’ because they do, they just don’t agree that IT is the universal panacaea it was once presented as being.

Evidence? The Semantic Web has gone very quiet. Politicians are suddenly talking about funding infrastructure not websites. Senior, important people are saying things like ‘couldn’t we just build that in Wordpress?’. People have stopped talking about a ‘Digital’ agenda as an end in itself, and have started talking about cross-platform multi-channel marketing in which the Web is just one of many components.

Welcome to the Brave Old World!

This post is based on the text of an email to the Museums Computer Group responding to the announcement of the publication of the BSI PAS197:2009: A Code of Practice for Cultural Collections Management.

The BSI release is the first part of an ongoing series of communications activities around this standard.To clarify what it is - the full title is ‘BSI Publicly Available Specification 197:2009, Code of Practice for Cultural Collections Management’.

It is a  joint Code of Practice with the British Standards Institute which the Collections Trust has sponsored (with the support of the Museums, Libraries and  Archives Council) and which has been developed in broad consultation with the sector over the past 18 months with direct input from a Steering Committee of museum, archive and library practitioners.

The starting proposition for the Code of Practice for Cultural Collections Management is quite simple. After 30 years of Collections Management practice, and 10 years of concerted investment, the museums, libraries and archives sector has reached a stage of considerable knowledge and sophistication about the processes and implications of acquiring stuff, caring for it, interpreting it and making it available to the public (the eternal continuum, in the words of the PAS, between collections development, collections information, collections access and collections care).

We at the Collections Trust believe that our industry is at the intersection of some very profound shifts - in technology, in consumer behaviour, in our understanding of economic and environmental sustainability and in our behaviours and values about collections and collecting. This tipping point represents both an opportunity and a risk.

The opportunity is to define a next generation of professional practice which builds on our collective experience, consolidates it and enables us to move forward with confidence. The risk is that we abandon this knowledge and busily set about reinventing the wheel.

The ‘role’ of the standard, then, in the sector is to act as a catalyst. It is to capture the value of decades of professionalisation in Collections Management, to give it a focus and to use it to set the agenda for the next generation of services.

Underpinning this are some critical developments in the sector. For one thing, there is no longer such a thing as a ‘pure’ museum, archive or library.  Instead there are organisations managing an increasingly complex range of content and material and presenting it to an increasingly sophisticated audience in increasingly multi-faceted ways.

This is why the entire focus of the work on the Code of Practice has been on creating something that is as ‘platform-independent’ or inherently cross-domain as possible. In so doing, the Steering Group has created a ‘lingua franca’ - a common definition of the scope of Collections Management which we believe will work for curators, archivists and librarians (and in the process encourages them to share their knowledge and skills more explicitly). It is, in this sense, a ground-up approach to interoperability as an inherent property of management systems, rather than as a feat of retroactive engineering.

This bit is critical - it attempts to resolve the ‘either/or’ question about how you approach your collections. ‘Do I have to use SPECTRUM to manage my archive? Can I use CALM for my object records?’. The answer is that the PAS 197 Code of Practice provides an overarching framework which lets you ‘assemble’ an approach to managing your collections that is appropriate to your collections and the uses you want to put them to. It means not having to say ‘I am *this* kind of organisation, and this alone’.

The second key development is the reduction in silos between functions and systems across different parts of these institutions. A key aim of this work is to move from a system in which there is a division between front and back-of-house, between education and documentation, towards something much more holistic and better-integrated.

The emphasis here is on resolving the division between collections knowledge and other types of information and working towards integrated information systems which allow knowledge to flow freely between different parts of the organisation.  And before you ask - yes, this is how we see the future of SPECTRUM. Ultimately, we believe that Information Management in museums, archives and libraries will be a utility, happening in the cloud, but for now we have to content ourselves with integration and exchange.

So…to try and reduce all that down to a simple proposition - it is a standard for the next generation of Collections Management practitioners which builds on the knowledge and experience of the current and previous generation. It provides an integrated, holistic and proportionate approach to defining Collections Management practice in your institution.

It is also, absolutely, emphatically, a starting point for discussion. You’ll know that we make a habit of not doing these things unilaterally and we are totally aware that this thing will only fly if you lot want it. Hence the standard was developed with comments from more than 200 of you, and its publication kicks off a 2-year review period. More information about how to contribute to this will be circulated shortly.

As for the other questions you’ll want answers to…

Is it part of Accreditation? No, but we hope it will inform the review of the Accreditation Scheme happening in the next 2 years.

Do I have to buy it? We’ll be circulating some information about what’s in it and who is likely to need a copy as part of our comms about it.

Do I have to do it? Chances are you already are, in some form, but no - it’s not an obligation.

Does it replace SPECTRUM? Nope, it mainstreams SPECTRUM (and other archive/library infomatics standards) within a broader framework of organisation-wide Information Management which serves the interests both of the collections and their users.