OpenCulture

I was recently lucky enough to be one of four speakers invited to address the final day of the Leiecester University School of Museum Studies Summer School in New Media.

I was asked to speak on the subject of the ‘Future of Collections’, alongside Stuart Davies, consultant and president of the Museums Association (on the Future of the Profession), Nigel Llwellyn of Tate (on the Future of Research) and the splendid Graham Howard of System Simulation (on the Future of Design).

I can’t distil here everything that was said, but standout moment for me was Graham’s inspired use of the historical view on the history of design across multiple media to extract some golden threads of where the future might be going. I was particularly struck by his assertion that modern web design is about information design - and as we see the web fragment from destinations to applications and channels, this is certainly already coming true.

I started my presentation, as I find I am doing more and more often these days, by revisiting article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s worth repeating here, because I think it is fundamentally important:

Whereas everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of their community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

There’s so much in this little sentence that matters. I like the way it shamelessly elides culture, the arts and sciences. I like the universality of it, which skates over short-termism, tokenism and positive action. I like that it’s not ‘culture’, but ‘cultural life’ - in recognition of the fact that culture and heritage are being made every second of the day, all around us.

I then took a look through the main ‘pillars’ of the Collections Trust’s work with libraries, archives, museums, collectors and others. I was recently accused by someone very senior in the sector (who should know better!) of flitting from one idea to the next, never settling on any. There may be a grain of truth in it, in that we are constantly forging ahead, but I was proud to look across SPECTRUM (soon to become SPECTRUM 4.0), the joint BSI/Collections Trust PAS 197 Code of Practice for Collections Management, the new Collections Link, OpenCulture, the Culture Grid and even the Collections Trust itself and to see how we are putting these theoretical principles at the heart of next-generation practice.

The main element of my lecture, though, took the form of a David Hilbert-style challenge to the students and practitioners at Leicester. I presented 10 questions about the future of museums, which I offer to you here for discussion and comment:

1. What are Museums for? If you had to summarise the role of museums in contemporary society, what would it be? (there was a lovely rejoinder to this later from Stuart Davies, quoting the MA definition of a museum verbatim - good on him)
2. How can we avoid what Chimamanda Adichie calls the ‘danger of the single story’? How do we avoid instantiating and perpetuating our cultural bias through what we collect and what we choose to digitise?
3. Is a museum a business or a public good? The current economic situation is, in the words of the brilliant Steve Little in the South East Renaissance Hub, pushing people either towards greater dependence on subsidy or towards greater economic independence, what are the implications for their role as custodians of culture?
4. Is there a Right to Culture? Not only in the sense of a human right, but should everyone, every subculture have an equal right to share their cultural viewpoint through museums?
5. How do we balance authority and openness? This is rapidly becoming an old chestnut, but the early experiences of user-generated interpretation and citizen curation have been a mixed bag, and we haven’t yet addressed it as a core challenge.
6. Should museums own stuff? There is simply not enough money in the system to collect everything we want to collect - the global art market has skyrocketed and it is no longer feasible or publicly defensible for us to use public funds to support a relatively tiny cultural elite in the competitive acquisition of works of art. What other models are there? How might we use things like tax breaks or collectivism to define a new form of relationship with Collections?
7. How can we get rid of more stuff? Museums should be able, like any other business, to sell or write off unusable stock, and to use this financial freedom to invest in their future. Why should a museum not sell off parts of its collection to create an endowment which will ensure that the good stuff can be enjoyed by future generations?
8. What is the Internet for? The online, Tesco-style browsing experience of cultural heritage is horrible, doesn’t correspond to a known user need outside the needs of a small number of academic researchers, and costs the public a fortune. How can we embrace the idea of culture as an application, or as digital assets to be spread throughout the online universe, used and repurposed in any way people want to?
9. What role should the State play in museums? Our contract with Government is about to change, and with it not just the financial rules, but also the ethical and political ones. Should the State concern itself with the provision of museums, and if so, why?
10. How should we collect the future? The rate of acquisition throughout the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s has left our generation with an undigestible pabulum of collections. We are so preoccupied with the economic and professional realities of curating this immediate past history that we are failing to effectively curate the present one. How can we release museums to collect contemporary culture, rather than act as storehouses for a gradually aging sideshow of Victoriana?

Big questions all, but they matter. as I said to the students, right now is the time when we get to invent a new role for museums in the world. The same is happening in libraries, and will continue to happen for all cultural sectors as society moves through its cycles of development.

For the Collections Trust, we have a vision of a new type of museum, and a new type of museum professional and we want to make a profound contribution to helping realise the tremendous potential of this new generation. I’d welcome any and all comments, either on the challenges above, or how we might more effectively pursue the solutions.

It was a great opportunity to meet with some new and emerging talent in the sector, and I’d really like to thank Dr Ross Parry and Dr Richard Sandell at Leicester for giving me the opportunity!

Tags: Leicester future museums

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Events, 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.