OpenCulture

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that I recently accepted the role of Chair of the Europeana Council of Content Providers and Aggregators.The Council is a cross-industry body which connects content providers and aggregators including museums, archives, libraries, broadcasters and publishers throughout Europe.

I have taken on this role because I believe that there stands before us an opportunity to transform the way that digital cultural content is discovered, used, curated and distributed, and in the process to take culture to an entirely new and much larger audience.

I am really excited about the Council and the opportunity it presents to have these important cross-cutting conversations in an open forum. This is why I would like to extend an invitation to content providers and aggregators throughout the UK to join the Council and to become part of this conversation.

Every type of organisation or project that provides or will provide content to Europeana is welcome to join the Council. To join, all you need to do is register at http://www.version1.europeana.eu/web/guest/councilregistration

There is a full meeting of all Council members annually, and other meetings as needed. The first of these will be a plenary meeting, to be held in Amsterdam on the 13th and 14th October. At this meeting, we will be setting out an ambitious work programme designed to help us overcome some of the key obstacles to the emergence of a Digital Economy based on aggregation and distributed re-use.

Members join the Council in order to:

• Share best practice and common standards between museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections.  Seek common solutions to issues affecting holders of digitised heritage material
• Enable knowledge and technology transfer between different institutions, domains and countries
• Improve users’ experience by integrating all types of content through Europeana
• Enrich their content by displaying it alongside related material from other countries, other domains
• Be part of an award-winning, highly visible portal that is the focus of political attention
• Demonstrate the relevance of cultural and scientific heritage institutions to new generations of users

Members are asked to communicate the value of providing content to Europeana to their own national and domain networks, but apart from participating and sharing information, there are no responsibilities or costs associated with membership of the Council.

More information and a full list of current members of the Council is given at: http://www.version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-foundation/content-council

For further information, please contact feedback@europeana.eu. I am always keen to talk to anyone about Europeana and what it can do for their organisation, so do please leave me a note on this blog, or email me at nick@collectionstrust.org.uk to find out more.

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…)

As I may have mentioned before, the next few years look set to be challenging for museums. We don’t yet know what proportion of the impending public sector spending cuts will fall on museums. But we do know that the cuts will come, and with them a different way of working for museums and museum professionals across the country.

Times like these call for big ideas. No matter how harshly the winds of political favour turn against Culture, the interests of museums and their audiences are best served not by protecting what is, but by reimagining what could be.

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I was lucky enough to be invited to speak yesterday at the West Midlands Museums Federation event on A Sustainable Future? It was interesting, partly because it has coincided with a real rush of Green Museum events and discussions elsewhere this week, and partly because I think that some of the messages coming out of yesterday have a much deeper resonance across the rest of the sector.

The first thing that struck me, as I arrived at the BMAG Collections Center in Duddeston, was Chair Phillipa Tinsley’s badge of office, suspended from a ribbon festooned with the names of past chairs stretching back to the mid-Fifties. Here, in the form of the Federation, is an organisation that is all about the long now. Outlived only by the Museums Association, it has seen strategies, wars, strikes, recessions, changes in practice, the invention of the Internet, and has calmly carried on serving a useful purpose through all of them.

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I have recently been assessing a number of applications on behalf of a UK funder. The purpose of the funding programme is to support innovative research into different technologies with potential application to Collections Management.

As I work my way through the piles of papers, business cases and ‘aspirational’ timetlines I find myself becoming both increasingly excited and increasngly concerned.

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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!).

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I’m delighted to introduce the first in a series of guest blogs from friends and colleagues who work with the sector to explore innovative uses of technology. Please welcome Marieke Guy, who blogs regularly for UKOLN.

Marieke is a research officer in the Community and Outreach Team at UKOLN, a centre of excellence in digital information management, based at the University of Bath. UKOLN provide advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities. Marieke is a regular Twitterer (http://twitter.com/mariekeguy) and can be emailed using m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk.

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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.

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Some of you may be aware that the Collections Trust is mid-way through rolling out the Culture Grid, a new service which brings digital content produced by museums, archives and libraries to a mainstream audience via services like Google, Flickr, Wikipedia and the BBC.

More information about the Culture Grid - what it is and how it works - is online on the Collections Trust’s YouTube channel at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/CollectionsTrust

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I am sorry it’s been a little while since I tweeted offering to write to you about what museums, archives and libraries can do for Digital Inclusion. I’ve been busy, though, talking to people across the sector about our offer and how it might help people who aren’t active users of digital media, whether through choice or circumstance, to get involved and perhaps more importantly to feel that getting involved is something they want to do.

There are approximately 10,000 museums, archives and libraries in the UK. When people talk about our sector, they usually think of the big nationals like the Tate, the British Library or the British Museum. But the reality is that the vast majority of cultural organisations are much more like Post Offices once were - trusted, local institutions embedded in the hearts of local urban and rural communities.

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