Attending today the Europeana Scotland event co-organised by the Collections Trust and Museums Galleries Scotland. The event is an opportunity for Scottish museums and other cultural institutions to find out what Europeana is, how it works and what it can do to help them get their Collections to a wider audience. (more…)
The Collections Trust has announced OpenCulture 2011 - a 2-day Collections Management event for the UK and international community.
The first international event to focus on current and next-generation practice in Collections Management, OpenCulture 2011 features a Great Collections Management Exhibition and Trade Fair and a conference addressing key themes in Collections policy and practice, including:
Delegate fees start from as little at £66 plus VAT and there are attractive earlybird discounts for people registering before December 2010.
Find out more about this exciting event and register online at http://www.openculture2011.org.uk
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). (more…)
In June 2011, the Collections Trust will be holding an international conference to explore and progress the themes of OpenCulture. Our aim is to work with the International Council of Museums to bring together some of the world’s leading thinkers about the arts and culture and to explore the shape of cultural services in the years ahead. (more…)
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’.
Wikipedia describes itself as a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. With over 14 million articles (of which some 3.1m are in English) it is used by people all over the world as a source of reference, a place to share knowledge, and sometimes as a source of amusement.
Anyone responsible for managing a public-facing website in the past 5 years will have watched the proportion of hits originating from Wikipedia gradually creep up alongside the all-encompassing Google clickthroughs. The reason for this is that Wikipedia has achieved that magical online double-whammy of combining breadth with market-share, and it shows no sign of diminishing (recent news stories notwithstanding!).
The Collections Trust has been commissioned to deliver the Community Engagement strand of Stories of the World, one of the 10 major projects of the Cultural Olympiad in the run-up to 2012.
Stories of the World is enabling 14 museum projects to deliver innovative exhibitions which have been co-curated with their audiences, which include children and young people. The aim of our programme (which we are working on with the National Youth Agency) is to work with these delivery partners to ensure that their Community Engagement has the maximum possible impact.
Saturday morning saw me arrive bleary-eyed in Leeds to give a presentation to the Social History Curators Group about ‘Social History and Social Media’ - essentially a look at three key questions confronting the Social Historian in the digital age:
Two events this week have really got me thinking. The first was the excellent JISC Digital Content Conference 2009 (#jdcc09) which brought together 200 HE/FE techies and librarians to talk about how to get more content to more people via the Web.
The second was today’s Museums Copyright Group conference, held in the beautiful (air conditioned!) Sackler Wing at the V&A.
The difference between the two was striking. As the JISC Confernce unfolded, the low steady chant of the first day (’free your data, free your data, free your data’) became a roar by the second. This was a room to which you could say ‘crowdsource’ without 200 people thinking ‘git’.
I attended this morning’s session at NESTA at which Stephen Carter gave the keynote address about the Digital Britain review (really his first public statements since the publication of the interim report a couple of weeks back) - thanks to Bridge Mackenzie at Flow for the heads-up about the event!
A fascinating session, it was yet another tantalising glimpse of how significant Digital Britain could be for museums, archives and libraries.
NESTA have posted full video of the event here.
The session was chaired by Jonathan Kestenbaum of NESTA. He really hit the nail on the head when he said that Digital Britain was really giving voice to a feeling, a sense of convergence which is happening across the Media, Tech, Cultural and Creative industries.
Stephen Carter is an interesting guy - ex of James Walter Thompson and the founding CEO of OfCOM, he is a great speaker and it is well worth listening to his 20-minute unprepared commentary if you can. His three-word mantra ‘poetry, plumbing, proficiency’ pretty much sums up the digital agenda in the culture sector for the past decade or so. It’s all about content, infrastructure and developing the skills and confidence to wield the tools of technology to best effect.
He spoke a lot more ‘about’ the review process than he did about the review itself, but what is clear is that there is a real recognition within Government that the Digital Economy *could* have a profound impact on the stability of the real economy if (and only if) we can work out some viable long-term business models around both content and next-generation Broadband access.
What was probably most interesting for museums, though, was the absolutely unequivocal view that eGovernment and online public service delivery (including access to the creative output of the Creative & Cultural Industries) are two of the most important foci and drivers for this work. Ultimately, as Carter pointed out, all of the great strides in technology in the UK have depended on public money from public markets, and the next phase will be no different.
Peter Bazalgette (media pundit and partially responsible for bringing Big Brother to the UK) gave some excellent insights into the realities of the situation. Again, he highlighted the Cultural and Creative Industries as key agents and drivers of content, which in turn generates demand. He also pointed out the tremendous shift which has taken place in recent years in which prosumers are driving an unprecedented increase in the content flowing across the network.
Absolutely, said Neil Berkett from Virgin Media, but we’re not in the game of giving it all away. All of this future prosperity depends on realising that the old monolithic transactional industries (CD anyone?) are dead, and that the next generation of business, funding and legal models will have to stop shoring up the old industries, and focus instead on fostering the new ones.
In this world, he noted, you and I have two forms of currency - our attention span and our own content. The future depends on establishing non-transactional models which understand that the dividend, the payoff, may be two or three transactions away from the point of consumption.
Heady stuff indeed, but Kestenbaum is right - there is an atmosphere, a commitment, a momentum behind this one which marks it out. Digital Britain may not change the world, certainly for museums, but if it is any indication of the scope and quality of Government thinking on this issue, there are exciting things to come!
