OpenCulture

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’.

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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.

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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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With typical journalistic aplomb, the Telegraph article (Nicolas Sarkozy fights Google over classic books - Telegraph, 06.01.10) focuses on the easy story, and in so doing focusses on entirely the wrong thing. The real news is not so much the French Government’s well-documented antipathy to the Google Books settlement, but that embedded within France’s £30bn fiscal stimulus package is an investment of more than £680m in the Digitisation of ‘our museums, our libraries and our cinematographic heritage’. (See also articles in the FT, Lesoir.be and in the French press )

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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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OK, that’s it. Pack up the scanner. Tear those bin-bags down from where you duct-taped them to the windows. Digitisation is done.

If I had a penny for every time someone senior in the sector said to me ‘of course, our main priority is to digitise our collection and get it online’, well, I’d have enough to buy a part-share in a Titian. And when they say it, their eyes wide with expectation and hope and enthusiasm, I find myself filled with inner turmoil.

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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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