Connecting Collections Event with BT
Last Friday, the Collections Trust and BT Archives held a joint event at the BT Auditorium in the heart of the City. The theme was ‘Connecting Collections: Successful Partnership working across the heritage sector’ and the aim of the day was to look at some of the most interesting current examples of partnership working and see what makes them tick.
As we move through what is likely to be a very challenging time for UK Culture, the principle of partnership - and particularly of partnerships which extend beyond the traditional museum/museum collaboration - is becoming increasingly important. But what makes a successful partnership? Can they be created, or do they simply arise by happy coincidence? The answer, it seems, is ‘a bit of both’.
Roy Clare of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) was on top form as our keynote speaker in the morning. He spoke with conviction about the power and potential of partnerships and about the role of collections in communicating heritage with the public. The two standout lines for me were:
“Collections are not about heritage. They’re a way of looking into the future.” and
“We are entering the most challenging funding climate our generation has ever faced.”
These twin pillars represent both the opportunity and the challenge for our current generation - the role of collections as a real, vital part of social development has never been more important. On the other hand, we are going to have less money than ever before with which to achieve this potential.
Jason Webber of the Museum of London spoke about the experience of the Exploring 20th Century London project, and particularly of both the trials and tribulations of building a sucessful partnership across museums of different scales and resources.
I am on the Steering Group for Exploring and have seen at first hand the power of sharing resources in this way, but also the tremendous effort that has gone into keeping the show on the road. Jason also gave a much-appreciated nod to the Culture Grid as the underlying infrastructure for the project.
Sian Wynn-Jones from the BT Archives spoke next. Sian was the driving force behind the whole event, inspired partly by her work on the Connected Earth project. She spoke about the process of developing collaborative approaches to collections development, and of the process of building a consistent framework (matrix) for contemporary collecting across telecommunications.
Connected Earth is interesting in that it looks to a future in which collections development is not a solitary activity, carried out by each organisation individually, but rather something that is shared across a number of organisations, working strategically in partnership to extend their individual capablities.
Next, the irrepressible and inspiring Simon Floyd from Renaissance East spoke about SHARE. SHARE, if you aren’t familiar with it, is an ingenious way of tapping into the expertise latent in cultural organisations around the Eastern region. Essentially a kind of skills exchange, it enables people to access the skills of colleagues in other museums in return for sharing their own expertise.
SHARE shows how small, self-organising communities can socialise their expertise and build their own capacity by avoiding big strategic initiatives and going for simple, practical solutions on a regional and sub-regional basis.
After Simon, Liza Giffen of the University of Leeds Special Collections and Kirsty Shields of the M&S Archive spoke about the really remarkable collaboration between their two organisations, which has resulted in the development of a new joint storage and display facility for their collections.
Perhaps most striking, apart from their highly polished presentation, was a particular project which Kirsty highlighted concerning ‘Shrinkage’. ‘Shrinkage’ at M&S means waste, through loss or damage. When the company was looking for ways to reduce shrinkage, they looked to the archive. There, they found the company’s 1960’s Shrinkage policy. When the re-introduced this to the company in the 00’s, they managed to reduce waste by up to 40% across the M&S empire.
The M&S/Leeds project is a great example of two organisations across the public and private sectors sharing a common need, and managing to work together in a genuinely mutual and collaborative way to achieve a solution that was greater than either of them could have achieved on their own.
Tilly Blyth of the Science Museum gave a fascinating presentation of their work on using new technologies to promote collaboration and partnership through the Locating Communications Heritage project. Locating Communications Heritage uses the best of current mobile interfaces to present augmented reality views of locations, based on data drawn from multiple sources.
The project really underscored the idea that the future is likely to be built around consumer-centric platforms which emphasise the integrity of the user experience over the identity of the sources. It takes a big leap for organisations to forego their own identity like this in the name of better services.
A series of breakout sessions saw participants attend two out of four seminars:
- A session on what the new Collections Link can do for museum, archive and library people (due to launch at the end of this month)
- A session on the BT Telecommunications Wiki Thesaurus - a really nice platform crowdsourcing the development of a telecomms thesaurus
- A session from the University of the Arts, Lonfon on Knowledge Transfer and innovative collaborations
- A session on the Archives for the 21st Century Action Plan from the National Archives
After the breakouts, Anra Kennedy from Culture24 spoke about the utterly brilliant Caboodle project. Caboodle uses contemporary games design to provide an interface which lets kids curate their own collections online (I spent most of Saturday afternoon with my 5 year-old putting together the world’s best shell collection!).
Finally Almut Gruner from the Thackray Museum spoke about her wonderful Medicine at the Movies project, which put video production kit and facilities in the hands of punters and gave them the opportunity to make a series of short films making use of heritage collections.
All in all, a really fascinating day, albeit one scored with an undercurrent of concern at the forthcoming cash crisis and it’s implications for all of these projects. So what did we learn about what makes a successful partnership?
Well, that partnerships come in all shapes and sizes, but across all of the projects that we heard about, there were some features in common:
- A visionary individual or group of people willing to invest the time, energy and enthusiasm to drive the collaboration;
- A powerful will to make things happen, in spite of obstacles of time and money;
- A lack of resources leading to creative, lateral thinking and problem-solving;
- A ‘just do it’ attitude and a belief in the power of on-the-ground action over large-scale strategy
It sounds glib, but the most remarkable thing about the day’s proceedings were the people. All of the speakers had in common a charisma and a commitment to getting things done. I have to say, I can’t think of a more positive message as the cuts continue to hit the sector - that the things that will really move us forward are creative energy and commitment, rather than cash.
I can’t sign the day off without a note of thanks to the Collections Trust team, Eleanor Lovegrove, Laura Whitton, Tammy Lorimer and Magda Howlett, as well as the fantastic David Hay and Sian Wynn-Jones at BT for putting it all together. The event was filmed, so we’ll post the results on YouTube as soon as they are available!
Oh yes, and we launched a new business venture over lunch, but that is definitely another post!
