OpenCulture

I was asked recently to summarise the current UK situation for museums and the digital agenda for some overseas visitors. Here’s what I said:

“UK museums have covered a tremendous distance in a relatively short space of time. They have enthusiastically and creatively embraced the various opportunities both to use technology to open up access to collections and to use social media to engage with their audiences.

A generation of public investment has resulted in a skilled workforce, a large quantity of individual digital assets and some online services. It has enabled us to learn a great deal about brand, trust and authority in the online world. Looking ahead to the next generation, I see two challenges.

The first challenge will be to work with other Creative, Media and Technology industries to build the interaction layer which turns this mass of digital content into rich, meaningful experiences for users, delivered through the consumer platforms and applications which now form the digital mainstream.

The second challenge will be to understand and support the development of a thriving ecology of commercial and non-commercial re-use of our content in the consumer environment, so that we can re-invest in future development in a sustainable way.”

Beneath this view is a philosphical vision which stands at the core of the Collections Trust, and of my own work in museums and digital policy over the past decade. This vision is of a world in which museums have renegotiated the social contract with the public so that people everywhere understand that museums are places where culture is made and celebrated, rather than preserved and hidden from view.

It is of a world in which we have managed to re-code what the average punter thinks when she or he hears the word ‘museum’, in which we have managed to retain the brand association of trust and integrity but have moved on from the core value proposition being ‘looking at stuff’ to ‘collaborating to understand and weave narratives around stuff’.

It is also a world in which we have reconciled the drivers of audience engagement, cultural custodianship and commercialisation into a single, coherent and professionally-managed value chain.

I have written about the prize and the risk before, but to reiterate: the risk is irrelevance and the same ignominious confusion about our core social function as is currently threatening libraries. The prize is a new, vibrant and exciting place in the hearts and minds of the people who pay our wages and enjoy our collections.

For almost the whole of my professional life, however, this has been a sector in ‘transition’ from one mode to another. But the transition is starting to feel endless, and it is starting to feel less like inertia and more like a fundamental conflict at the core of what museums are and do.I am no longer convinced that with enough progress and demonstrators, change will come. It is starting to look like we are going to have to make the decision to change ourselves.

At each end of this transition stand two groups, equal in the strengths of their views.

The first group harks back to the glory days of curatorship at the end of the last century. It seems to seek the apparent comfort of the great Victorian ambitions of expansion and taxonomic classification, of a clear division between ‘true’ and ‘not true’ and of the time and capacity to undertake the scholarship to differentiate the two. It is too simplistic to say that they hark back to a time when the user was a passive consumer - there is very little to distinguish the phenotype of the Wikipedian from that of the gentleman researcher in the 1800’s - but they certainly appear to long for a time when it was generally understood that the museum was where you went to see the objective facts of the natural and modern world.

The second group struck out early into the brave new Digital continent and find themselves waiting impatiently for their colleagues to catch up. As far as they are concerned, it seems, the wells are dry in the old country, the resources spent. The opportunities lie  in the New World, with its abundance and egalitarianism. But they fail to see that in colonising the new Digital environment, they became familiar with a language and customs that are still alien to many of the folks back home.

Looking at this new environment, the concerns of the curatorial protectionists look well-founded. Where once there was the socialist and egalitarian principle of publicly-funded cultural heritage, now there is the grubby and competitive uncertainty of commerce. Where once there were facts, now there is ‘narrative’. Where once there were boundaries, and contexts, now there is ebb and flow between a multiplicity of contexts. Where once there was a well-established social behaviour of visiting the museum, now there is an unseemly competition with a multitude of other forms of culture, both high and low. It is profoundly unfortunate that we didn’t manage to reconcile these two communities before the economic weather channged so abruptly, and that now these uncertainties are redoubled by the very real threat to jobs and objects that characterise the daily concerns of many.

And here, right at the border between these two territories, lies copyright. Copyright is the battlefield across which standards are raised, skirmishes are fought and generals strategise. It is not, of course, the detail of Copyright law that puts it in this central place, but what it stands for. Copyright stands for an uncomfortable elision of the moral and the economic imperative. It stands for the idea that an idea can be owned, and more, that it can be valued in monetary terms and traded as a good. It stands for the tension between the individuals right to creative self-expression and the ability of organisations to control access and use for financial gain.

Of course, the digital evangelists would argue that the battle has been fought and won, and on larger fields than cultural heritage. The exuberant disruptiveness of technology has destroyed forever the idea of control-as-business-model and replaced it instead with strange new ideas like ‘monetising traffic’ and ‘paid search’.  The old-school crowd point to the dotcom crash and the twin business models of ‘be Google’ and ‘be bought by Google’ and ask whether the Digital Economy is really anything more than a political aspiration to distract us from the systematic collapse of our manufacturing and agricultural base.

The battle is being fought over Copyright, but it will not be resolved through Copyright. There is no perfect license, no unifying clause that can reconcile what has become a sectarian dispute in the cultural heritage community. It will only be resolved in one of two ways - either the Government will wholly and comprehensively come down in favour of one camp or the other, and enact primary legislation to enforce this victory (entirely unlikely under a Coalition Government), or we can see if there is a middle way which, even if it doesn’t entirely reconcile the more polemic ends of the spectrum, enables us to work together.

And I profoundly and with the utmost conviction believe that there is such a middle way - a self-governing, self-imposed modus operandi which can bring the values and integrity of the old museology into the brave new technological world, and in the process reinvigorate the public perception of our relevance to their lives. But achieving this middle way, achieving a successful hybrid cultural proposition, depends on both sides abandoning cherished comforts and attitudes in the name of a better future.

So what are the features of this middle way? Well, there are several, and the first concerns the word ‘culture’. Culture, to most people, means ’stuff happening in the world’. Depending on socio-economic status and predeliction, it might be tinged with ‘high culture’ and evoke Swan Lake and Parsifal, or it might be used as a portmanteau (’alternative culture’, ‘black culture’) to refer to the whirls and eddies of modern identity. As museums, our job should not be to freeze-dry culture, but to participate in, revel in and celebrate it, to reflect it back on society in all its multifacted confusion, to use it to challenge, inspire and educate and ultimately to enable people to use it to shape their personal, social and global future.

This is a unique and joyful reponsibility, and even when it is not well-understood (or understood but not supported) by politicians, every man, woman and child knows both that it is important and why it is so. Museums as a political entity have become protective of culture, and in recent years (collectively if not individually) have been apologists for our role in capturing and sharing it precisely when we ought to have been proclaiming it with both joy and confidence to anyone and everyone that will listen.

If the first priority is to re-code our relationship to culture, the second is to re-evaluate our attitudes and beliefs about commerce. I have been fortunate to work in both the private and public sectors, and perhaps because of this I see them not as being at odds with one another but as complementary and mutually-reinforcing sets of priorities. It is a sadness that so many of my colleagues in the museum sector still regard  commerce as otherworldly, alien and distasteful. I am surprised, in 2011, still to be confronted by attitudes that see the pursuit of culture as a public good as pure and noble and the pursuit of money to sustain culture as an impure and ignoble distraction. As Chimamanda Adichie reminds us, the single story of another’s culture is seldom true and childish simplifications on both the public and the private sides of the fence help no-one.

It is entirely possible to be commercially savvy, operate sharply and make sophisticated uses of licensing as an artefact of control all in the name of serving a public cultural purpose. Equally, it is possible to throw open the doors and make content universally accessible in the name of driving commercial value to the bottom-line. The cultural and commercial imperatives are not in opposition, but coexist along a spectrum of activity which runs from non-commercial, through non-transactional (things like brand equity and audience engagement) to strictly financially transactional. If museums could but genuinely embrace the triple social, economic and environmental bottom-line of the social enterprise, and hold all 3 in equal priority and respect, we would have the opportunity to articulate a business-case for museums on our own terms, and in a way which preserves our values.

As the economic crisis deepens, and bites harder into the old model of public subsidy for museums, the financial realities are becoming ever more acute. As a result, many museums are making, or considering making a transition to independent trust status. Where 2 years ago, it was an idle luxury to speculate on how services would be made to be self-sustaining, in today’s operating environment we no longer have the luxury of choice.

If the financial future of museums lies in becoming commercially acute, then a key part of true sustainability will lie in recognising our place in the supply-chain of culture to consumers, and in truly understanding and embracing our core competence and their value.

If the supply-chain for richly integrated on and offline cultural experiences follows the normal stages of extraction, processing, manufacture, distribution and fulfilment, then our core role lies in extracting the material output of culture (historical and contemporary), distilling it to its essence and working with our audiences to weave narrative around it. In short, our role in the chain is to editorialise culture.

As with any other supply-chain, I suggest that the transaction and fulfilment of user demand - in this case the development of the rich, high-quality interaction layers and applications which transform cultural assets into cultural experiences and which collectively represent the digital mainstream - should be handed off to the market players who have both the financial scale and experience to do so on an economically sustainable basis.

Put in simple terms, it makes for better experiences for our users and makes far more economic sense for us to deliver 100,000 objects through one collective iPad application than it is for us to do what we are beginning to do and develop 1000 individual apps featuring a smattering of information.

More, it makes far more sense for us to let a commercial partner wear the risk and cover the real development, delivery and marketing costs of a proper high-quality product (and to keep a proportionately higher share of the resultingly higher revenues) than to run 50 ‘pilot’ projects which deliver an application that is neither internalised to the museum nor achieves a significant audience share.

But why do museums turn up their noses at the possibility of working with commercial partners who very often share the self-same passion for culture and who are able to bring to the relationship highly specialist (and expensively-acquired) skills in product and business development? Why do we instead try and shoulder the whole supply chain ourselves, when the experience of the past 10 years tells us that the difficulty of doing so is disproportionate to the end result? Why does every individual museum seek to replicate technology and infrastructure that works better at aggregated scale, and to develop the required skills in enterprise management itself when there are so many pre-existing pressures on time and capacity?

I know the reason, as do you, if you work in a museum. But nothing about a collaborative future needs to be to the detriment of your individual museum, or its potential for revenue-generation, quite and totally the contrary. But working effectively with the Creative, Media and Technology sectors means presenting an united front and a coherent offer. It means saying ‘yes, we can’ with resounding conviction when asked whether we can deliver, whether we can sign the licenses and negotiate the contracts. Otherwise, we look like a thousand islands making overtures to a continent - it makes our offer, which could be so compelling and so central to peoples digital lives, look chaotic and incoherent.

This isn’t the whole solution, but it is a way forward, and one which I believe holds the key to the future prosperity and success of UK museums. We need to re-appropriate the word culture and turn it into a joyful celebration of what we (uniquely) do. We need to re-evaluate our core cultural product (moving on from ‘truth’, to ‘narrative’ and ultimately to ‘collaboration’).

We need to reconcile the digital evangelists with the collections recidivists so that both camps can benefit from the skills and perspectives of the other (since, let’s face it, they both depend on each other), and in the process reconcile their vocabularies to create a common, hybrid lingua franca for culture which combines the physical and the digital innately.

We need to recognise that culture is a business, and that managing it as a business can advance, rather than undermine, our social and cultural aspirations. In so doing, we need to recognise that focussing on our core competencies and using them to create cultural assets and experiences which we can monetise (and therefore sustain) in partnership with the private sector is a story of success and advantage, not failure or loss.

Ultimately, we have a choice. We can get smart and get excited about culture, reach out and forge a new social contract with the public and a new economic contract with industry to create a new offer that is fit for a new generation of audiences. Far from marginalising our curatorial colleagues, we can empower them anew as the mediators, guides and guardians of a whole new range of interpretive sources. Or we can go to the wall defending  a model that is scarcely 100 years old because it is what we grew up with.

Your move.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2011 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Business Models, Collections Management, Digitisation, General, Grid, Nick Poole, Uncategorized. 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.