OpenCulture

OK, so next year is going to be a nightmare. How much of a nightmare, nobody yet knows, but we are starting to discern the shape of how some arts and culture organisations are going to react. People everywhere are freezing recruitment, asking staff to act up into vacant posts and - most importantly - to accelerate redundancies in order to contract out committed work.

As a tactic, it’s straight from the first page of Management for Beginners, and it works - up to a point. It enables organisations to invest in this current year (in the costs of redundancies) in order to achieve savings next year. It also mitigates some of the risk of what’s coming next year by replacing difficult permanent contracts with ones that are shorter and easier to cancel.

So far so businesslike - but what it means is that in the next 18 months, we’re likely to see a loss of skills from the sector on a scale which few of us have ever experienced. In a world in which we were already bemoaning the loss of curatorial expertise, we’re likely to see a wholesale attrition of museological and Collections Management knowledge, infrastructure and experience as the cuts bite deep.

As I’ve said before, I believe we’re heading towards a ’self-help’ sector. Which sounds ridiculous, of course, when you realise that the sector has always, to an extent, run on a filigree of personal and professional networks and contacts. But whereas this social/professional infrastructure has hitherto coexisted with a well-funded stratum of professional support agencies, it is soon to become the primary channel for professional development in museums, culture and arts organisations. (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’.

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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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Following a brief Twitter discussion this afternoon, @miaridge asked me to put together a use case for an idea which has been rolling around my hind-brain for a good few years now. The idea first, then the use case.

The idea comes from four places:

1. The adage ‘knowledge grows through use’, which I acquired some years ago from a quotes website. The principle being that knowledge is dynamic and emergent, and that it thrives through the process of exchange
2. The fact that there is a physical manifestation of this principle in the way that neural pathways in the brain form, strengthen, detach and re-combine in response to changes in external stimulus
3. The way in which procedural AI in computer games can generate apparently complex, individual and motivated behaviours by combining a few simple starting conditions and essentially linear algorithmic rules
4. A bar in the City of London which shows prices for drinks on a ticker-tape - the prices fluctuating constantly in response to the demand for particular drinks

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For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, NOF-Digi refers to the New Opportunities Fund Digitisation Programme - a £50m Government-backed initiative to digitise the nations cultural heritage, and in the process to generate a new generation of learning resources online.

For many, it was the first large-scale investment in Digitisation, and heralded a new era in terms of skills and understanding. Sadly, however, as is sometimes the case with project funding, many of these online resources have not been actively maintained by their host institution.

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So, the Digital Britain report has been with us for long enough now for people to have started accusing the Government of ignoring it. The popular press is making hay out of the apparent reverse double-switch on ISP lockdown for filesharers following Peter Mandleson’s latest round of international meetings. In the meantime, the publicly-funded world holds its breath waiting for a General Election and, more importantly, *that* Spending Review.

It was interesting, in this context, to have been involved in a series of recent discussions about the role the Department for Culture can play in the evolving world of Digital. As part of these discussions, I was asked to do two things. Firstly, to produce a short ’state of the nation’ piece highlighting the current activity in museum tech. Secondly, to suggest some areas which might benefit from DCMS’ attention.

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The Digital Preservation Coalition was established in January 2001 to ‘foster joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base.’

The sense of urgency was born of the recognition that we stood at the dawn of the digital age, without the strategies, knowledge, tools or practices we needed in order to ensure the long-term preservation and access of what we were about to create.

Fast forward 8 years, almost a decade, and where are we? Are funders placing intelligent obligations on their recipients, requiring good practice and long-term thinking? Do museums, archives and libraries maintain Digital Preservation Policies that are connected to the management and development of their organisations? Are the Digital Assets themselves well described, using appropriate standards?

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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:

• Given that everyone’s experience and creative output is now spread across an extraordinary range of channels and platforms, how can we hope to curate digital Social History?
• Given that two of the central tenets of the new generation of digital services are collectivism and radical trust, what is the redefined role of a curator going to look like and how do we communicate it to the public?
• To what extent can the new technological tools, and the philosophies hich underpin them, be harnessed to the work of capturing and curating social history?

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Innovation, it seems, is all the rage. The final Digital Britain report refers to it no less than 76 times (compared to 5 mentions of the word ‘museum’) - although to be fair this compares pretty favourably to the 91 mentions of ‘users’ and 80 of ‘value’.

Reading through the report, it is clear that whatever the unique selling point of UK Plc may be, much of it rests on our ability to innovate - to generate new ideas, techniques, products and business models. The real economics of the Digital Economy are opaque at best, but they certainly seem to depend on monetising both our ability to generate new Intellectual Property and our first-mover advantage (such as it may be) in fields from gaming to infrastructure and possibly even culture.

This is, itself, no bad thing. The UK has a long heritage of boffinry and invention and our contribution to the global advancement both of technology and humanity (give or take some expansionist Colonial behaviour) has consistently outpaced our size and the scale of our public investment.

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