OpenCulture

Innovation, it seems, is all the rage. The final Digital Britain report refers to it no less than 76 times (compared to 5 mentions of the word ‘museum’) - although to be fair this compares pretty favourably to the 91 mentions of ‘users’ and 80 of ‘value’.

Reading through the report, it is clear that whatever the unique selling point of UK Plc may be, much of it rests on our ability to innovate - to generate new ideas, techniques, products and business models. The real economics of the Digital Economy are opaque at best, but they certainly seem to depend on monetising both our ability to generate new Intellectual Property and our first-mover advantage (such as it may be) in fields from gaming to infrastructure and possibly even culture.

This is, itself, no bad thing. The UK has a long heritage of boffinry and invention and our contribution to the global advancement both of technology and humanity (give or take some expansionist Colonial behaviour) has consistently outpaced our size and the scale of our public investment.

(more…)

The Collections Trust is currently involved in an AHRC/EPSRC Science and Heritage Programme project called EGOR. ‘EGOR’ stands for Environmental Guidelines: Opportunities and Risks, and the aim of the project is to re-assess the environmental impact of the various standards frameworks used by museums, archives and libraries.

While the recent Museums Association enquiry into sustainability for museums was a bit all over the place, EGOR is defined much more tightly around the technologies and protocols we use to modulate risks to collections and buildings presented by environmental factors such as heat, light, ventilation and pollutants.

(more…)