OpenCulture

These are serious times. And it is time to be serious.

The events of recent months, and the cuts that are still to come, are not a temporary aberration. This is not a bump in the road. Museums are entering a new era. We are a country in crisis. A country at war. We have a Coalition that does not fundamentally believe that culture should be funded by the taxpayer. This is not a question of sitting it out, of waiting for the sun to shine again.

We have a choice. We can try and protect the world we have known. Or we can recognise that what is done, is done, and look to a brighter future, a future that we control, a future that we can design and build ourselves.  And in this endeavour, in creating this future for museums, we want for nothing. We have some of the best museums in the world. Some of the richest collections. Some of the brightest people.

But this is not a question of technology. This is a question of museums. The opportunity is now, here, today, to create a new and better vision of how museums can and will function in society. Because this is a society that needs to rebuild. Not just economically. But personally. And we can help.

You and I, we have two jobs to do. I’d argue they are the most important jobs we could do – to us falls the responsibility to help society reconnect with itself, to help people reconnect with each other. To us falls the responsibility to harness the power of the Web, the platform, the application, to secure the survival of our industry.

And in this task, we have to use every tool in our armoury, and use them with the wisdom we have acquired in the past decade.

•    Fund imaginatively
•    Collaborate Creatively
•    Aggregate smartly
•    Build Openly

Imaginitive, creative, smart, open. These are the themes of our conference today. These are the qualities we must bring to designing this new future of ours.

But I want today to be more than a conference. I want this to be the milestone that we look back on, years hence, and think ‘that is when the change began’.

When I survey the past 10 years, I am proud of how far we have come. Of what we, as a community have achieved. But to be proud is not enough. Now we must take everything we have learned, everything we have attempted and turn it to the business of creating real, lasting value, both financial and cultural, for our museums.

The place of technology is no longer at the margins of the museum. Our role as technologists is no longer to explore, to investigate, to discover. Our role, from today, from now is to deliver.

And to deliver, we must abandon our cherished behaviours. It is no longer sufficient to build services we design for ourselves. We must build services which confront, head on, the real needs and behaviours of a Digital nation, a mobile nation, a nation that has chosen its destinations.

The services we deliver from now on must always aspire to greatness, while recognising that greatness is achieved by working in partnership with others. For too long, we have sought to tell the History of the World in 100 million objects. The BM’s initiative has shown us that when you collaborate creatively, 100 will do.

For too long, we have funded technology piecemeal, in fits and starts, and never with the confidence which befits its importance in the modern museum. From now, we must fund imaginatively. We must integrate the business of technology into the very core of our organisations, and demonstrate that Digital can deliver money. Real, sustainable, useful money, a genuine financial return on our investment.

For too long, we have set out our stall and waited patiently for the millions to come. And yes, to some of our national museums, they have. But it is not enough for a few individual brands to thrive. Museums must thrive. And thriving means building openly and aggregating smartly – it means working with the grain of the Web to achieve more than the sum of our parts. It means reaching out and recognising, for once and for all, that for museums, openness is good for business. That open and commercial are not opposites. That in a Digital Economy, they reinforce each other.

On the 15th of December, I will be on a stage with the Minister for Culture at the Institute for Contemporary Art. It is an opportunity not only for him to set out his vision, but for us to inspire him with ours.

So what do you want our vision to be? Because I can tell you mine.

My vision is of museums as a celebration of the strength of our cultural identity, in all its richness and its diversity. I want to see us achieve the transition from public subsidy to strong financial independence. Not because the coalition is forcing us to, but because that is the right thing to do for our future growth.

I want museums to reconnect with the Creative Industries, and to take their place at the vanguard of learning, engagement and sustainability. I want everyone, at every level of society to walk through the doors of our museums and experience real, tangible culture because that is their birthright. I want museums to be everywhere, online, on the High Street, on the radio, on the television.

I am tired of our politicians and our leaders apologising for museums. I want Ed Vaizey, Jeremy Hunt, David Cameron, the Treasury to know that we are an economic and intellectual powerhouse, an international export of which we should all be proud. I no longer want us to be seen as part of the problem. I want us to be seen as part of the solution. Part of the infrastructure that will build a better Britain.

And I want us to achieve all of these things through technology. Not technology that is lumpen and intrusive, incomplete and unfinished, but through technology that is smart, agile, coherent and seamless. Through technologies that compete on equal terms with the best consumer offerings. But to do this means working together. We cannot all be the BM, or the Tate. The reality is that if we are really going to deliver a Digital offer for museums that is globally competitive, we must pool our resources, collaborate creatively, aggregate smartly, build openly. Individually, we will not do what needs to be done. Together, we can achieve anything.

So in the year ahead, I will commit to doing everything I can to making this vision a reality. I will work with funders, with politicians, with broadcast and media, old and new, to inspire them with the vision of what we are capable of. But neither I, nor you, none of us can do this alone. We must raise our voices together. You must go back to your museums, overcome the inertia, battle the doubt, find creative solutions, imagine a better world.

So that is the vision I propose to take to Ed Vaizey on the 15th December – a vision not of technology, but of a new role for museums in a Digital nation, in a Digital economy. A vision of museums not as economic dependents, but as drivers of new, local, responsible economies. I hope that today we will have an opportunity to explore that vision, to test it. But let us be under no illusion. If we fail to bring everything we have learnt in the past decade to bear in building a new future for museums, it will be our failure. And if we succeed, and we must succeed, the success will belong only to us.

Thankyou, and I wish you a good conference.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 10:57 am and is filed under 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.