OpenCulture

I have recently been assessing a number of applications on behalf of a UK funder. The purpose of the funding programme is to support innovative research into different technologies with potential application to Collections Management.

As I work my way through the piles of papers, business cases and ‘aspirational’ timetlines I find myself becoming both increasingly excited and increasngly concerned.

Excited because here is some of the best, most innovative thinking in the sector. Big brains working to bring new interdisciplinary research into the management and delivery of cultural collections and services. Some of the work being proposed is fascinating. People are looking for funding to develop smart objects and buildings, into ‘mote’ sensor arrays for distributed realtime environmental and fire control, even into systems which monitor the impact of users on the internal microclimate of the museum.

I’m concerned, however, for two reasons. In this round, the failure rate is maybe 8:1, if not higher. That’s a tremendous amount of new thinking, good ideas, innovative and creative approaches that aren’t going to go anywhere. That means that all of the value, the intellectual effort, simply dissipates and that a lot of people are simply going to go back to their day-jobs without looking for other ways to bring their ideas to life.

The other concern is to do with that bizarre word ‘dissemination’. Dissemination, in an HE/FE context, means having an event, and possibly putting the research data onto the web. At best, it means writing it up for a peer-reviewed journal. The problem is that while an academic might reasonably expect their peers to see their work in Nature, the average curator (or conservator) in the average museum isn’t going to be able t afford the subscriptions.

So, what we seem to have here is a basic broken value-chain. Funders such as HEFCE and others put money into research at least partly to stoke the flames of the UK economy, to lessen the innovation gap between us and other countries. Because, as any free-market economist will tell you, innovation is the pathway to recovery. That research produces good work, but too often the story ends there - with the sector blissfully ignorant of the new thinking, and the academic content in the knowlege that the research imperative has been satisfied, even if the outcome has not influenced practice.

There are, in my pile of funding bids, at least two research proposals which, if successful, would produce direct applications with clear and immediate benefit for Collections Managers and Curators. If they were research in the pharmeceutical applications of a new compound, or a better way of extracting power from a lithium-ion battery, then there is an entire ecology of startup capital waiting to be spent on business-park offices and Nespresso machines.

Because the cultural heritage market is marginal at best, there isn’t the same kind of economic imperative to take this extremely valuable new thinking and to turn it into new products and applications for the museum market. Given that both the HE sector and cultural heritage are likely to need to make their resources work far harder in future, the case for reconnecting this value chain is becoming increasingly apparent.

Museums, in some ways, present the perfect research environment.  They ae complex but controlled, are likely already to have in place things like climate control and monitoring. Better, they house a staggering array of different types of material, while also providing services to th visting public. They could so easily be a crucible of research and innovation that generates applications which find their way into other industry sectors.

To achieve this, I’d argue we need to think about incubation, treating these fledgling ideas as new startups. Those two great ideas in my pile of assessments, how can we nurture them, put them in contact with finance and technical, manufacturing and marketing support? How can we connect the people involved with practitioners so that they can test the market and adjust their work accordingly?

Because, it seems to me, if we can be proactive about re-connecting academic research with digital and physical collections management, we could then go after the much larger prize of working proactively with HE and FE to plan together and to identify future professional needs as future research projects.

We’re already working on a project called the ‘Digital Heritage Research Training Initiative’, run by the University of Leicester to educate HE/FE institutions and postgraduates in the use of collections as primary resources. Perhaps it’s time we thought about building on this to get rid of the inovation gap between museums and HE, and replace it with a mutually beneficial partnership.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 1:57 am and is filed under General, 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.