We’re excited to see that our friends over at Culture24 have announced Let’s Get Real 2011, a 2-day conference (20th and 21st September 2011) built around the theme of how best to evaluate success online. (more…)
The following notes are taken live at the European Commission’s Member States Expert Group meeting. Opinions expressed are the author’s own.
INTRODUCTION
The meeting was introduced by Mr Khalil Rouhana, Director of Directorate E (Digital Library Initiative) at the European Commission. (more…)
I was invited along to the offices of We Are What We Do the other day for a get-together to discuss the launch of HistoryPin.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with HistoryPin, it is essentially a web-based and mobile application which encourages young people and old people to ‘pin’ their photographs and the stories they tell to a map of the world. The web platform and iPhone app will be ‘launched’ (the web platform’s already been available for a while in a basic form) on the 11th July. (more…)
Guest blog from Ruth Gidley, curator of Moving Here project at Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Gallery (RAMM), Exeter
http://www.rammuseum.org.uk/Moving-Here/
When our museum’s new online collections database goes public, it will already have attracted well over 500 comments. And all of them started off as notes in pencil. (more…)
My theme today is ‘rising to the Digital Challenge in Difficult Times’.
Many of you will know that this is one of my favourite themes - because I think that some aspects of the new Digital environment offer us an unprecedented opportunity to do something new. To become something new. To win a new place in the hearts and minds of a society that is disaffected with the politics and economics of short-termism and instant gratification. To establish a new contract with punters that is based on meaning and validity in a turbulent world. (more…)
It’s a simple question. How much would it cost to Digitise everything in Europe’s museums, archives and libraries? Answering it turned out to be one of the biggest challenges the Collections Trust has ever faced. (more…)
Every once in a while, things shift imperceptibly but fundamentally on their axis. Devout views, long-held, become the laughable fancies of childish innocence. Entrenched positions become blurred as tectonic plates beneath them start to grind into motion. And so it is, it seems, with ‘Digital’.
Digital. The banner under which museums, libraries and archives unite. The ultimate priority of Governments across the Western world. The word has become axiomatic - ‘Digital Britain’, ‘Digital Economy Bill’, ‘Digital Culture’. But like all axioms, it is ultimately meaningless. Or at least, it means so many things that it has lost its way in a semantic miasma.
It is time to think big about future roles for Museums, Archives and Libraries in civic society.
Whatever the impact of the next 18 months on public subsidy for arts & culture, we need to be able to present a strong, confident and forward-looking vision of our role in and value to a society that is experiencing great change.
