In the aftermath of the riots, people of all ages and faiths came together in angry condemnation of the senselessness of the riots and with a renewed spirit of unity and community. When things like this happen, society needs to understand them, to learn from them and ultimately learn how to avoid them in the future.

But understanding something like the London riots means addressing a set of layered issues. There are social, economic and political dimensions to be considered. Questions of unemployment, consumerism and the relationship between citizen and state abound.

In the months following the riots, the Museum of London announced that it was considering expanding its collecting policy to include artefacts, placards and other material relating to the events of August 2011. In a series of debates hosted by the Museums Association, museum speakers addressed the complexity of documenting and interpreting an event in which people lost their lives, and which involved overt conflict between the rioters and the police. Many felt that it would be better to let some time elapse between the events and their interpretation, to allow perspectives to mature.

Museums can be places of debate and dialogue – they have a profoundly important role to play in helping people understand and address the causes of events such as this.

The International Council of Museums (ICOM) defines a museum as, “a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.”

While this definition serves as a useful description of what a museum does, it says very little about what a museum means to the society it serves. Whether they focus on art or architecture, science or technology, all museums are united by a common purpose to inform the future development of society by enabling it to reflect on its past.

Museums weave objects, knowledge and experience together to create narratives which help people understand the world around them.  It is sometimes tempting to think of this process as objective and apolitical, focusing on the inherent quality of things themselves. But collecting, documentation, interpretation and digitisation are all highly subjective activities, defined by personal and national perspectives.

In our role as documentarists of both the good and the bad of society, museums must be unafraid. We must challenge orthodoxy, confront prejudice, shine the light of knowledge on propaganda and oppression. In so doing, we are creating an important social contract – the public will entrust their nations treasures to our care, in return for which we must be responsible custodians and storytellers.

At the same time, we must entertain. There is a careful balance to be struck between the didactic, campaigning museum and the provision of rich, aesthetic experiences which improve the quality of life, give people respite from their daily work and help them think about the world from a fresh perspective.

We must guard against passivity – our role is not simply for people to come and enjoy our galleries and exhibitions. We must use every appropriate tool and technique to reach out to audiences, to make ourselves relevant to them and to educate them about the world around them. Not that this exchange is purely one-way – museums around the world are working in partnership with their users to shed new light and bring new perspectives to their collections.

And finally, we have a duty to protect. A nation’s heritage is of vital importance to its self-confidence, its national identity and the pride of its people. It can help unite cultures, faiths and tribes, teaching people about each other and promoting tolerance and understanding. These treasures need to be managed, cared for and kept safe in an environment which balances control and sustainability and minimises the effects of decay.

The most successful museums are those which achieve all of these aims under the same roof, and this is the key to the unique role that museums and collections can play in a healthy, prosperous and confident society.

(I should emphasise at this point that I know very little about the specifics of the Wedgwood situation, the Collections Trust has not been involved in any way and the following post should be treated as a general comment and not in any way a reflection on the situation at Wedgwood).

There is a long-established vocabulary which defines this relationship - collections are held ‘in trust’, they are a ‘heritage asset’ - most of which imply that heritage collections enjoy some specific status which confers on them protection from being treated as a commercial asset.

While this language is comforting, it very often has little or no basis in the practical or legal structure of the organisation or its Collections. This theme is explored further in the new Collections Trust publication ‘Collections and Governance: A Practical Guide‘ (RRP £24.99) - and I can’t recommend highly enough that you buy a copy if you think this is likely to be an issue for your museum.

More than half of the UK’s Accredited museums are independent organisations with some form of Charitable status. The implications of different types of governance model have been thrown into sharp relief both by the economic downturn and by the significant number of museums that are looking to make the transition away from Local Authority funding and towards some form of independent trust status.

Changing governance structure can open up new funding options, and many museums are successfully negotiating ‘hybrid’ arrangements whereby the Local Authority continues to own some of the assets (such as the building) and the liabilities (such as maintenance costs) while the museum is able to make more flexible and creative use of their Collections.

Different governance structures (and different governing documents) establish different relationship with the Collections. If the museum is established as an unincorporated association, for example, the collections are personal, as opposed to corporate property. If the museum depends on a governing body, then the measure of protection of the collections (and the extent to which they may be treated as an asset of the governing body) needs careful definition. Critically, the purpose of a charitable trust may be dependent on having a colleciton, but if the collections are not held under special trust status then it is entirely possible for the governing body to dispose of them (see our book for more on ’special trust’ status).

The Charity Commission publish a useful guideline  ‘RR10 - Museums and Art Galleries‘ which covers some important areas - including the important distinction of the ‘criterion of merit’ which touches on the potential for the collections to support the education of the public. It also discusses the definition of ‘public value’ which is critical to the attribution of charitable status.

Wedgwood is not an isolated case - many Charities are finding themselves confronted with a significant long-term and unexpected financial burden as a result of the re-valuation of pension funds, poor performance of investments and a sudden drop in commercial trading activity.

For many social enterprises operating within a strict reserves policy, there is little that can be done other than to roll up the sleeves and prepare to hand over a significant chunk of annual turnover to the pension fund managers for the forseeable future. But if we are to fulfil our civic duty to current and future generations, it is important that every museum ensures that it understands its legal relationship to its collections and that they adopt the governance structure which affords the maximal protection.

What Wedgwood and similar situations also highlight is the real need to ensure that the status of collections (and the museum’s ownership of them) is adequately documented. We still receive calls from museums who have partial records, are missing transfer of titles forms or other accession information and who find the ownership of their collections disputed. Good documentation, and a clear governance structure are two of the most basic measures a museum can take to protect its long-term future.

‘Collections and Governance: A Practical Guide’, written by Alex Dawson, is published by the Collections Trust. RRP £24.99. Buy your copy online from http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/shop/product/view/2/11 or call 0207 942 6080 to place an order.

Fast forward a decade, and the picture is nothing like as simple. Walls? Pah. A museum is so much more than walls - it is an attitude, a belief, a set of principles, a pop-up in a shopping centre, a tent on the foreshore of the Thames.

Things? So 90’s. Yes, of course we need some stuff, but only to the extent that they help us tell the human story of the world. Collections are the heart of the museum, but they are (or should be) subordinate to design, interpretation, narrative and experience.

Respectful visitors? Sod that, culture-nazi. Museums are places of joy, celebration, learning, entertainment and egalitarianism. They’ve even got kids in, for god’s sake. Where once the museum had every right to expect its visitors to be quiet, well-behaved and have at least a nodding acquaintance with clerical latin and taxonomy, nowadays it is very much the duty of the mountain to make itself available for Mohammed.

And Curators? Well, thereby hangs a tale.

Every good story needs its heroes and its villains. It needs simple 2-dimensional characters we can boo and cheer at. And in the story of the progress of museums in the past decade, it is very often the curator that has found themselves the villain of the piece.

If the thrust of museum discourse is essentially progressive, the curator has come to represent everything that is retrograde about the ‘old’ museology. Where much of the rhetoric about museums is about openness and equality of participation, the lazy characterisation of curators is as hoarders of knowledge, using their control over ideas to exter control over their colleagues - indeed over the museum itself.

The archetypal curator is essentially an academic - highly specialist, extremely focussed and driven not by the impulse to share knowledge with a non-specialist audience but by the urge to enhance the general fund of scientific understanding. This is a gross characterisation, of course, there are many curators whose greatest gift is communication but there are just as many for whom the public role of museums is an unfortunate inconvenience to be tolerated not celebrated.

The heyday of the ‘old-school’ curator in England really ran between 1890, the great period of expansion and collecting (not just in museums) and the 1950’s. During this period, the supremacy of the curator as the arbiter of knowledge and objective truths was largely axiomatic - nobody really questioned it. Then, of course, society changed, and museums changed - the great expansion of social policy, the invention of social history, the re-coding of the museum’s role in society all happened between 1960 and 1980, and things have never been quite the same since.

Today, in all but the largest National and Regional museums, the idea that every collection (not just every museum) should have a curator is almost an anachronism. The assault on curatorship came from numerous angles all at once:

• There was the argument of simple economics - as museums have had to increase delivery on diminishing budgets, the idea of a specialist curator attached to every collection became simply untenable. Indeed the idea of having a specialist curator in every museum (along with the concept of having in-house access to a professional conservator) is now regarded simply as a financial impossibility by many.
• Then came the Collections Manager - if you look back over the last 10 years of Museums Journal recruitment ads, there is a marked trend. People stopped advertising for specialist roles like ‘curator’ and ‘documentation officer’ and instead started advertising for more broad-spectrum curatorial roles like the slightly suspect ‘keeper’ and, particularly ‘Collections Manager’. The Collections Manager was expected to bridge two worlds - the world of business process/management and the world of curatorship. In the process curatorship came to be seen as a set of repeatable processes, and started to become detached from the idea of scholarship and subject authority.
• Then came a profound shift in the design idiom of museums. We abandoned almost completely that onslaught of skeletons and picture frames and handwritten labels and camphour fumes that characterised the Victorian museum and embraced instead light, space, sparseness - the idiom of the art gallery and the experience. Where once people came to a museum to see as many unusual things as possible, now they come to experience the whole museum.
• Then came the Internet, and with it the appropriation of the word ‘curate’. People today curate their shoe cupboard, they curate online exhibitions by choosing some pictures, they curate social media strands of conferences (apologies for that one). A ‘curator’ meant someone who had deep specific technical and/or scientific knowledge of the subject of their collection, and who used that knowledge to develop the collection, to research it and to enhance the general fund of knowledge. Like an academic forced to perform on a reality TV show, the need for the curator to reduce this knowledge to a form suitable for public exhibition was not always a comfortable fit.

There are all sorts of reasons, practical and political for the devaluation of the currency of curatorship. And yes, there is a case to be made that the control exerted over the museum by its curators had become a limiting factor on its ability to change, and that some degree of positive action was necessary to redress this balance. But we have to guard against the risk of going too far in the opposite direction.

The Collections Trust’s vision of a sustainable museum is inherently about balance. Like the Ancient Greeks believed that health was a question of keeping the humours of air, earth, fire and water in balance, we believe that a healthy museum is one in which four priorities - humans, collections, knowledge and money - are kept in equal and mutually respectful balance.

A balanced museum cannot function without curatorial knowledge. Curatorial knowledge cannot function without the support of learning, access, outreach, gallery and web. Neither can function without money. None has a purpose if they are not used.

The risk of not having access to ‘old school’ curators is that museums will gradually stop moving forward, and will instead begin to feed on the knowledge and collections accumulated in the 40 years either side of the turn of the century. A revolving video in the Natural History Museum tells visitors that ‘90% of the worlds species haven’t been discovered yet’ (how do they know??) and yet many museums have quietly stopped acquiring, stopped carrying out new research.

Two candidates have emerged in recent years to backfill the loss of specific knowledge that comes from having a curator. One is crowdsourcing, the other is joining together what remains of the UK’s ‘network of expertise’ into Subject Specialist Networks. The crowdsourcing vision holds that knowledge of the collection is not the preserve of the museum, and that if we can but unlock the vast untapped reserves of knowledge in the community, we can extend the idea of participatory culture to embrace participatory curatorship. I have always been troubled by this - the flipside of the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ is the ‘immense self-reinforcing stupidity of the crowd’ - the fact that when crowds are right, they can often be more right than experts, but when they are wrong, groupthink can make them forget to question.

Subject Specialist Networks are a vital, indeed thriving way of opening out specialist knowledge, of filling gaps and of helping people support one another - but they are an adjunct to, not a replacement for, the idea of having curators in museums working with their collections.

And so what to do? We cannot go back - a return to the hegemony of the curator would help neither curators not the rest of the essential functions of a museum. But perhaps we could made some different decisions about how we go forward. Instead of regarding curators and ‘other staff’ as being at odds, perhaps we could focus instead on their common aim to preserve heritage and to make it available for education, enjoyment and research. I think too much has changed to re-assert the old role of the curator. Perhaps instead we could think about how we assert a new role that is fundamentally predicated on balance.

Now, I freely admit that I approach ethics with a healthy dollop of skepticism. Having studied it first at UCL (as part of an MA in the History & Philosophy of Science) and latterly at Cranfield Business School (as part of a course on ‘Case Based learning’) I know that discussions of ethics can very quickly dissolve into a miasma of semantics and end up sounding more like a 6th-form cider-fuelled theology debate than a reasoned discussion.

However, at the risk of prefacing the next meeting’s discussion - it has never been more important that we revisit, engage with and really test the foundation of our ethical principles. The entire sector is being tested on the forge of relevance, and it is at times like these, when there is no real political or professional pole star to orientate by, that ethics is pretty much all we have. The only way, in other words, is ethics (sorry, but I managed to hold that in throughout the entire meeting).

The network brings together a really interesting group of people - David Fleming from National Museums Liverpool, tireless campaigner for social justice and human rights, Manchester’s Nick Merriman, Leicester’s Jocelyn Dodd and new(ish) recruit Janet Marstine, Eithne Nightingale, the V&A Head of Diversity Strategy, Mark O’Neill from Culture and Sport Glasgow, NHM’s John Jackson and a whole range of others.

The semantic issue was neatly side-stepped by James Dempsey o fthe University of Leeds, who works with many different types of business and organisation to explore the meaning and function of ehtics in their institution. He provided a neat triumverate of ‘ways of expressing ethics’ which I will try to reproduce here:

1. Case studies - which have the advantage of a loose, organic approach to ethics which helps people to think rather than presrcibing answers (but with the corollary that they are relatively unstructured)

2. Codes of Conduct - which are clearly-expressed and have the quality of sets of rules, but which militate against creative and informed decision-making based on sound judgement.

3. Values - tacit or explicit expressions of corporate principles or values which provide a broad frame of reference within which decisions can be made.

James pointed out that none of these is mutually exclusive, and that they all centre on the idea of a rational individual who will bring to them their own personal frame of reference. I think this is a neat exposition - although I think that in reality decisions are more often made on the basis of custom, practice or process and that whether an action is good or bad, right or wrong, is really an emergent property of the process of being a museum. I am not sure, outside a smallish number of highly specific contexts (such as restitution, repatriation or potentially controversial subject matter) whether people think very much about ethics in their daily work.

Next up was Nick Merriman, who had been asked to give a potted history of the development of Codes of Ethics for Museums. Speaking with characteristic erudition, Nick explored the way in which the idea of professional standards for museums emerged from the idea of museums as a ‘profession’. Mark O’Neill observed that this was, itself, partly a response to Thatcher’s concerted attack on the professions in the mid-1980’s, which prompted many sectors to codify themselves as professions. Nick explored the emergence of the MA Code of Ethics as a curatorially-led development, supported by a broad framework of discourse and training. He looked at the broader definition adopted by ICOM  and the way in which both were ultimately assertions of professionalism on behalf of the broad spectrum of people working in museums.

From there, the discussion opened out into a broad exploration of the different dimensions of ethics. I have a visualisation of this discussion, which I will post here when I can next get to a scanner, but to characterise some of the dimensions:

1. The concept and expression of ‘professional ethics’ as a codified set of principles and associated governing rules of behaviour. Both the MA and the ICOM Code of Ethics fall into this category, and there was an interesting discussion of the intellectual model of museums manifest in both documents. There was a feeling around the room that both are too anodyne and lacking in ambition and direction to form a useful direction for the ‘virtuous museum’ (a beautiful content of John Jackson’s and one to which I am sure we will return). In particular, there is nothing in either document which speaks to the moral imperative of engagement, inclusion, representation or diversity.
2. The connection between ethics and social policy - I got nervous here, as I do whenever people speak of a polarity between ‘collections’ and ‘people’. There was a slight tinge of ‘museums have focussed on procedural and structural standards for collections (cover your ears, SPECTRUM) because this is easier, or less challenging than addressing social issues. There was a really interesting discussion about the idea of ethics in relation to the principle of democracy and the right to representation.

   At this point, there was a fascinating discussion which I can’t do full justice to here about the implications of the current change in political and strategic direction for the sector. Some felt that with the Coalition Government, we will see an end to projects and developments focussed on diversity and democracy, that the advances of the previous decade will be set aside as inclusion comes to be seen as an unaffordable luxury and that a new trend towards appointing Trustee’s with strong right-wing views will undermine the hard-won egalitarianism of modern museum practice. Personally, I think this is too apocalyptic, but it is hard to argue with the fact that there is a lot less emphasis on inclusion in the current and forthcoming generation of funding programmes.

3. The connection between ethics and human rights - the fact that Collections Trust takes as our starting point in all collections-related work the principle enshrined in Articla 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (’that everyone shall have the right freely to participate in the cultural life of their community’) and that actually both the MA and ICOM Codes of Ethics are quite sufficient if you incorporate this fundamental assertion of ‘rights’ in front of them.
4. The extent to which the public role of museums, based as it is in the concept of trust, is rooted in our professional ethics. Several people questioned whether the more flexible approach currently taken to ethical decisions (particularly around financially-motivated disposal) would either undermine the public trust in museums or help them to understand the ethical dimension of our work.
5. The extent to which ethics is informed by the financial circumstances of the UK museums sector - including an interesting discussion of how museums can make ethical decisions about the companies with whom they enter into partnership.
6. The ‘philosophical’ idea of ethics as a domain of discourse and where, if at all, museums have open discussions based on the realities of current working practice.
7. The idea of ’systemic’ ethics - that ethical implications arise as a by-product of the simple act of managing a collection and can be an emergent property of the systems we use to do the job. In this context, it is interesting to look at the issue of whether documentation, selection, digitisation - which are often presented as ‘neutral’ processes, can either serve to reinforce prejudice or highlight and guard against it.
8. The idea of environmental ethics - the responsibility to the object, to the public and to the impact on the broader environment. In this context, we discussed the Eden project as well as the new radical wing of conservators who are taking a more aggressively ‘risk-based’ approach to thinking about environmental management.
9. The idea of ethical codes as a defence mechanism - that while the majority of people never read or refer to the MA or ICOM Codes, they frequently invoke them either to defend their practice or to help inform non-museum colleagues about the value and impact of their work.
10. The idea of ethics as a necessary element in addressing the statutory requirement to demonstrate public benefit required of museums as charitable organisations.

There are, I’m sure, many other dimensions - but I found it fascinating to explore the ways in which ethics impact directly both on practice but also, critically, on public value, trust and identity.

And so to the afternoon session, which focussed on ‘Social Engagement and Ethics’. Again, I confess this had me worried initially - there had been an interesting undercurrent to the morning session that the focus of professional practice on collections had somehow been to the detriment of their ’social’ function, or at least that museums had been much more successful in being explicit about the former, but less so the latter. In the event, though, my concerns were more or less unfounded - it turned out to be less about collections-bashing and more about something much more interesting - social justice.

I want to explore Mark O’Neill’s presentation in detail and at greater length elsewhere. It was, frankly, scintillating - a brilliant, clear exposition of why museums are where they are and how they got here. I’ll restrict myself to covering a couple of his core ideas:

There are 3 ‘types’ of museum (actually, there are 3 stages of progression, but it’s simpler to say ‘types’):

• Elite museums - of which there are very few left, but which exist in splendid isolation from ideas of audience or social utility and are able to focus instead on art for arts-sake and the pursuit of truth and beauty in and of themselves.
• ‘Welfare’ museums - which are essentially elite museums onto which the functions of education and inclusion have been grafted. These form the majority of museums, and while they pay homage to and use the language of inclusion and diversity, are still essentially focussed on the idea of transmitting privileged knowledge. As an aside - we talked about what happened to Renaissance, and there was an interesting sense that the Renaissance Hubs had been aborted in the transition from elite to welfare museums, and before they had an opportunity to achieve the kind of root-and-branch long-term change required to change them permanently into category 3, which is….
• ‘Social Justice’ museums - which understand and pursue truth and beauty, but which are fundamentally constructed around the needs of real people and which also recognise the role of inclusion and diversity - that there are many truths and many subjective forms of beauty, that are egalitarian rather than privileged and which work in partnership with their audiences.

I am paraphrasing inadequately, of course, and Mark said much more besides. I suspect that there are very few museums now that do not at least aspire to be museums of social justice, but I was fascinated by the ‘path’ to museum enlightenment (my words not his) which Mark offered. He described a progression through a number of stages:

• Avoidance
• Tokenism
• Projects
• Bolt-on services
• Integrated services
• Full integration

I think this is valuable because I think it helps to think about where on this progression your museum is, and whether Mark and David are right that we risk slipping back a few rungs in the current political climate.

Next up, David Fleming. Instead of giving a presentation, he started with a simple statement ‘Museums serve elites’, then stood up and read the National Museums Liverpool’s Strategic Plan. I’m not sure if this is publicly available anywhere, but if it is, I suggest you track it down. Better still, I suggest you track David down and get him to read it to you. It begins with the words ‘We change lives…’ and continues on to address public stress, the welfare and prosperity of Liverpool, connectedness and - to me the most fundamental word of all - confidence. It could not be a clearer expression of the museum as agents of social change, as needing to deliver real value for a city where deprivation and joblessness are endemic. He finished by sharing some interesting statistics about the socio-economic profiling of the audiences of National Museums, published by the DCMS in their annual review of KPI for the Nationals.

And so where did all this get us? A long way and nowhere at all, really. We rehearsed some familiar ground about the sociological function of museums, we heard some interesting ideas about how to structure thinking about professional ethics, we highlighted the value and limitations of the existing Codes of Ethics. We know about the ‘triple bottom-line’ of museums, about the many ethical dimensions of daily life. We acknowledged the chasm between ethics and practice.

The real question, of course, is not the subject itself, but in the idea of change. There was a suspicion that, if the political tides have turned against instrumentalism and social policy, then ethics could become a more ‘palatable’ vehicle through which to pursue the same principles. It was pointed out that social engagement is a campaign which polarises, whereas appealing on the basis of ethics is a much harder line to deflect. Some people suggested a toolkit, others felt it would be sufficient to explore the issues, others, too, felt that it was time to revisit the MA and ICOM Codes of Ethics and to use them to express a statement of intent on behalf of all museums.

And me? Well, I spent the day in the company of some brilliant brains, and there are three phrases which stood out for me:

• ‘Museums should be unafraid’
• ‘Relevance is the key to survival’
• ‘Ethics is the basis of confidence’

I’ll blog the next few sessions, and I really look forward to seeing how the discussion evolves from here. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on the question of the role of ethics in museums!

Last month, Steve Jobs died leaving behind him a company whose projects have touched the hearts and changed the lives of millions of people. I never met the guy, and I know nothing about him other than what I have read in the press both before and after his death. And yet, the mythology is of a man who transformed the world of consumer electronics because of at least 4 fundamental qualities:

1. Exceptional leadership
2. Extradordinary design sensibility
3. A singular focus on the user experience
4. Strong business acumen

The reaction to Steve Jobs’ death was one of genuine sense of loss - that something uniquely valuable had gone from the world. It isn’t often that someone who essentially makes a living by making stuff and selling it to people achieves this kind of personal relationship with their customers. And it got me to thinking - museums should always look outwards to other industries to see what we can learn from their success. In previous posts, I have drawn on examples from gaming, from manufacture and from logistics, but never consumer goods. So, I wondered, what if Steve Jobs had made a museum?

Lesson 1. Playing your own tune

On the face of it, in a culture defined by open standards and open content, Apple should not be a success. It uses proprietary formats,is ultra-secretive about new products and polices patent infringements with enthusiastic vigour. Apple products ask their users to subscribe to the Apple way of doing things in a way that must have struck terror into the hearts of the team responsible for marketing the 1st generation iMac.

That they can do so is a result of at least two factors - (1) immense confidence and (2) the knowledge that if you offer people simple, functional and beautiful experiences they are going to be willing to meet you halfway when it comes to acquiring the skills and vocabulary to use them. Apple products demand that their users do things the Apple way, but the payback in terms of attachment and depth of engagement is correspondingly greater.

So if Steve had made a museum, I think these would have been the founding principles. It would be 100% rock-solid in its confident assertion of its place and purpose in the world - without trying to be all things to all people as museums can sometimes do - and unapologetic in asking people to engage with it on its own terms (rather than trying to rewrite the ‘vocabulary’ of the museum to present a more user-friendly face to the world). It would accept that some people are simply not ‘museum’ people, in the same way that some people aren’t now, nor ever will be, ‘Apple’ people, but be ready all the same to welcome them in the event of an epiphany.

At the heart of it, having the confidence to know that you do what you do best, delivering something that solves a genuine problem, and knowing that people want what you are delivering are the most fundamental ingredients of success.

Lesson 2. Inside-out design

Steve Jobs famously once said ’some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. To design something really well, you have to get it’. So, while the beautiful aesthetic of many Apple products is the first thing most users see, what really differentiates them is this holistic, end-to-end approach to design which results not only in beautiful things, but also beautiful interfaces and, ultimately, beautiful experiences.

So Steve’s museum would, of course, adopt the same design philosophy. All of the elements of Steve’s museum, from stores, to galleries, to reception to the loos would have been designed with this integrated view in mind. He would have ‘got’ the fundamentally interconnected roles of museums to collect, preserve, interpret and share, and he would have ensured that all of these elements co-operated seamlessly to deliver a coherent, beautiful and compelling end-user experience.

This, as luck would have it, is exactly the design philosophy which inspired the Collections Trust to create the BSI Code of Practice for Collections Management (PAS197), which has as its very core the principle that the quality, depth and relevance of the end-user experience is directly and implicitly connected both to the strategic mission of the museum and the processes by which it manages its collections. Steve would have approved!

Of course, with his legendary attention to detail, Steve would not have been happy until the design of his museum had been stripped of anything extrinsic, unneccessary or which presented any kind of barrier to the user experience. From the steps up to the front door, to the font on the website, everything about the presentation of and interface with Steve’s museum would welcome the user, draw them in, encourage them to form a lasting personal, emotional and psychological bond with it. Visitors to Steve’s museum would, I am certain, have left with the impression that it was theirs, designed around and with an implicit understanding of their needs and values.

Critically, too, Steve’s museum would leave people feeling empowered with a sense of their own cultural literacy - that they had encountered, learned and acquired the necessary skills to make the museum their own - rather than culturally passive, disempowered or even bored.

Lesson 3. Making money

This morning, Apple Inc. shares are trading at $385.33. The ‘brand value’ of the company is approximately $153.3bn. Apple products are used in affluent nations throughout the Western world. By any measure, it is a massively successful company. Its success is not purely economic - it has also succeeded in carving out a leading position in a highly competitive marketplace through a culture of innovation and quality.

So would you have to pay to get into Steve’s museum? I rather suspect that you would. Not only would you have to pay, but you would almost certainly pay a premium slightly above the price point of other similar leisure attractions in your area. But pay it you would, because nothing else would deliver the depth, engagement and value that Steve’s museum would be offering you. And yes, that price point might well be exclusive, which flies in the face of a decade or more of opening up and diversification but at the same time, the museum would move from being something egalitarian but disposable to something desirable, aspirational and financially sustainable.

But, perhaps most importantly, Steve’s museum would be characterised by movement and momentum, not by stasis. It would explore multiple platforms, multiple points of delivery. It would look for new problems to solve, integrating technological innovations as it goes. Building on a clear core philosophy and aesthetic, it would expand laterally, defining new relationships and articulating new value propositions for its audiences.

The good news is that Steve’s museum exists everywhere, in different forms and with differing emphasis. For many, particularly those battered by spending cuts, it is hard to be confident about the future and about the intrinsic value of what we do for people. There has been too much emphasis on hitching museums onto other people’s value propositions and not enough on the unique core value proposition of museums in their own right.

Sometimes, the integrated design philosophy has been lost in successive waves of change. But at heart, the museum profession’s conception of what constitutes an effective modern museum is dynamic, responsive, user-focussed and streamlined. Museum professionals everywhere are confronting new challenges with innovation and creativity, and using design idiom to have new conversations with the visiting public.

I’d like to think that Steve would approve.

If you haven’t already done so I encourage you to check it out and create an account. I was responsible for making the user guides and help videos on the site. I hope you find them useful. The site is a place to find and share expertise related to collections management. It is also a great place for social and professional networking within the sector.

My other task was getting things started on the Collections Link Content Partnership. This is an exciting new initiative in which the Collections Trust is actively seeking out organisations to take on a leadership role on the site. These organisations will be sharing their expertise to help others unlock the potential of their collections. I had the pleasure of meeting with the British Museum and National Museums of Scotland to discuss their involvement with the partnership. Look for their content and expertise on the site soon.

Once again I encourage you to checking out the site not just for the access to incredible Collections Management resources but also for networking and collaboration.

Thank you,
Jason Marceniuk

How do you feel?

The idea of applying the principles of Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) to Collections Management is not new. Indeed, in some ways it is much older than most people think - harking back as it does to the very early days of using remote terminals to access processing power provided centrally on a mainframe. Back in the early 1980’s, museums all over Europe would ship their hard-copy record cards to the MDA Computing Bureau to be transcibed into electronic records, again, making use of the economies of centralised computing power.

Fast forward 30 years, and the scale, complexity and richness of electronic recording of information about museum artefacts have expanded exponentially. Documentation and cataloguing are a global business, supported by a thriving community of highly specialised software applications and standards such as SPECTRUM.

The prevailing model of computing in museums is (as it is in most other types of enterprise) to have a number of relatively highly-powered machines connected to a Local Area Network which acts both as a conduit to the Internet, a firewall, a communications layer and a shared filestore. Until relatively recently, most Collections Management Systems were engineered to operate in this environment - either installed across the network or on a dedicated internal server. 

This model had its advantages. A LAN could include multiple physical locations, enabling, for example, curators onsite and conservators in offsite stores to interact with a common dataset. It empowered the museum to run its own kit, and to establish policies for things like backup and disaster recovery. In essence, it put the information about the collections inside the same physical context as those collections.

But the networked-application model also has some profound drawbacks. It is inherently inefficient, requiring expensive user support and onsite technicians. It requires physical space appropriate to the operation of high-powered and energy-hungry machines. It places a barrier to the upgrade path for the software, requiring manual intervention, downtime and occasionally bespoke development. The knock-on effect of this is that innovations funded by one user of the software are seldom cascaded automatically across the entire user community (or where they are, the time-delay involved can be considerable).

Collections Management Software as a Service, in which Collections data is held on low-cost, scalable offsite storage and manipulated using browser-based interfaces, appears to hold the solution to many of these issues.

It makes sense from the developers point of view - hugely reducing the complexity and therefore cost of maintaining 2000-3000 separate installations of their software. It provides a relatively painless path through which upgrades and new features can be cascaded out across the entire user-base of a given system. Not only this, but it offers a development path for new features and functionality - perhaps in the form of integration with tools for Digital Asset and Digital Rights Management, Workflow Management, Visualisation or Digital Preservation.

It also makes sense from a managers point of view - onsite IT infrastructure (and the skills to maintain it) can be very expensive. The space required for dedicated onsite kit can be given over to storage, administration or other hard-pressed functions. CMSaaS can be cheaper, offering the flexibility of subscription-based models which scale with the content and its uses, and in the process, offering a means of futureproofing against the evolution of the museum and its information management needs.

It makes sense, too, from a professional point of view. A community of clients using a common Cloud-based Collections Management System forms, almost by definition, a community of practice. It leads to the sharing of knowledge and expertise, to mutual support and other forms of collaboration. Not only this, but it naturally tends towards the principle of openness with museum datasets, encouraging the more proactive use of data through API and 3rd party applications and websites.

For all of these reasons, the majority of the leading Collections Management Systems have either already developed fully-hosted versions of their applications or are in the process of developing them. And business, it seems, is booming - at least partly in response to the strictures imposed on museums by funding cuts. Most vendors are reporting significant increases in the uptake of their Software as a Service offers, with some confidently predicting a full transition to Cloud-based, browser-based Collections Management within the next decade.

And yet there are many for whom the idea of Cloud-based Collections is unpalatable, to say the least. Some point to the inherent instability and insecurity of the Cloud as being too much of an operational risk to entrust their Collections data (which is intended to be the canonical and authoritative record of the Collection) to it. Others point to the fragility of their connection to the web - raising the prospect of downtime, lag or failure. Others point to the creativity and innovation which comes from having technologists, technology, curators and data under one roof. Others, too, suggest that this places them in a position of total dependency on their vendors and software providers, effectively rendering them hostage to the vendors charging model. It is also suggested that each and every installation of a Collections Management System represents a bespoke tool, specific to the needs of that museum and that SaaS would fail to deliver the kind of local configurability that museums and their Collections demand.

It is too early to say whether all of these concerns are equally valid. Certainly many museums run antiquated hardware and suffer from poor Internet connections - although people suffering with a bad PC should in theory benefit from the lighter processor load of using browser-based applications. Many are also governed under a Local Authority IT Policy which stipulates requirements that make CMSaaS all but impossible. It is also fair to say that many Browser-based applications are not quite as responsive as their locally-installed counterparts (although the gap is closing).

As to the risk inherent in Cloud storage, I suspect this may be based on an overestimation of the stability and security of locally-based physical media. After all, the data is still bits encoded on a spinning disk (or solid-state drive) whether it is under your stairs or sitting in racks in a data warehouse somewhere. I also suspect that the inexorable and inevitable rise of mainstream consumer-focussed applications which run in the Cloud will gradually help people to overcome this concern.

As to the creativity and innovation that comes from having museum technologists on the team - this has doubtless led to the flowering of ideas and applications, but it may simply not be sustainable in the face of the economic realities confronting museums in most countries worldwide. This is, of course, a gross simplification, but we may come to see a relatively small number of museums (outside of the larger institutions) that are able to maintain this kind of staffing and capital overhead. Many museum technologists - disaffected in some cases by the inability of the museum to enable them to deliver what they know they are capable of, have themsevles defected to commercial vendors and development houses.

In reality, we are unlikely to see a total transition to Collections Management in the Cloud anytime soon. This is a tremendously diverse sector, with a huge range of different types and scales of institution. There will always be those who need an installer and a locally-based application, for whom this is the simplest and most effective option. What I do think we’ll see, particularly over the next 4-5 year cycle, is two significant trends:

1. A significant swing in the medium-to-larger end of the museum community towards full-service online Collections Management Software and;

2. The emergence of more online tools with a very low barrier to entry (both in terms of cost and complexity) which are suited to the needs (and budgets) of smaller local and community museums.

Is it time for Collections in the Cloud? I’d love to know what you think!

It’s both a critical and a timely issue for museums, archives and libraries. Many of the projects funded under the previous regime are having to face very real questions about viability and sustainability. As I have suggested before, I believe that sustainability is a by-product of success, but what exactly constitutes success for a museum, library and archive website?

The Conference has grown out of the joint action-research project led by Culture24 with a consortium of 24 UK arts & culturual organisations - see the paper from this years Museums and the Web conference for more background.

Personally, I think that part of the challenge lies in the multiplicity of use models which cultural websites are intended to support. These are constantly evolving, but a casual survey of some museum, library and archive sites yields all of the following functions:

• ‘Brochure’ information in support of visits
• Exhibitions programme
• Venue hire/booking information
• Opening hours and other access information
• Online Public Access Catalogues/Collections Browse
• eCommerce/merchandising
• Online public enquiries service
• School group bookings
• Events programmes (including adult learning)
• Book issues
• Open/linked data

In other words, the average cultural website seems to run a gamut of purposes from simple information/publishing through user engagement to ‘transactional’ functions such as ecommerce and online Collections browse.

In this kind of environment, it is all too tempting to fall back on the ‘more is better’ proposition when it comes to thinking about online success. There is also a kind of relative judgement which kicks in (and which makes people fiercely competitive) - should a museum website be looking for the same kind of mindshare as Wikipedia? Does my public library site get a bigger audience than yours?

The problem is partly that all too often, funding and celebrity attach to better numbers. But in most of the above cases, more may actually equate to worse - or at least to a perfunctory delivery of a function which ought to be qualitative.

Is it better that 10,000 real humans perform a search on your OPAC per month, or that the OPAC consistently meets the needs and expectations of its users, irrespective of how many they are? Does the income strand from the online shop mask the real costs to the organisation of taking and fulfilling orders?

I am really hoping that Let’s Get Real will provide an opportunity to engage with these and the many other questions that arise when thinking about success online. What I do know is that unless we can reach a reasonable consensus about how online success should be measured and valued, it will be increasingly difficult to articulate a consistent value proposition to funders and other stakeholders.

We’ll look forward to seeing you there!

Our aim is to make Collections Link much more than a website and a load of links. Since the earliest concept sketches, we have envisaged it as a community, enabling museum professionals to share knowledge and expertise both in the UK and internationally. Not only this, but we also wanted to avoid making just another portal, and instead to provide direct, easy access to authoritative and expert content, training and resources.

Collections Link is closely entwined with the aims and activities of the Collections Trust. Hence, all of our Standards work is driven through Collections Link, as are programmes such as Revisiting Collections, which aim to drive debate about new approaches to Collections.

After an initial project to redevelop the site in early 2010, we began to look for a flexible platform which could support a range of social and collaborative functions, including:

• User profiles
• Groups and networks
• Collaboration, messaging and communication
• User-generated Content and articles
• User-generated uploads
• Tagging and discovery by skills/interests/disciplines
• Events listings
• Suppliers listings
• Integrated eCommerce

Having done a lot of development work with client and partner organisations in the past using Joomla, we started looking at the suitability of Joomla as the development platform for Collections Link. Joomla is deployed in 50,000+ websites worldwide, across applications ranging from commercial operations to eGovernment and social collaboration.

As a modular, open-source platform, Joomla offers both the extensibility and migratability we needed to ensure that this generation of Collections Link could evolve and adapt to meet the needs of our audiences. An active support community and an excellent range of 3rd party applications enabled us to move rapidly to implement a prototype site (now live at http://www.clbeta.org.uk).

A key aim in developing the new Collections Link was to reflect current developments in the sector by clustering content not only by professional discipline (such as Conservation or Documentation) but also by Collection Type (for example, Coins and Medals or Ceramics). To support this, we will be inviting our friends in UK museums to ‘curate’ the Subject-specific sections of Collections Link - ensuring that these new divisions of the content reflect the need for subject specialist expetise in the sector.

A common criticism of the previous version of Collections Link was the difficulty of using the insite search to find content by keyword. A lot of work has therefore focussed both on implementing an improved search function (which now searches inside Word documents and PDF files as well as metadata) and on providing richer keywording of the content. This has provided a much more powerful search which allows users instant access to the depth of content that we have managed to build up over the past 6 years.

In implementing the new design for the site, we went back to its origins as a magazine of professional content and expertise. We therefore looked to news and magazine sites such as the Times Online for inspiration - drawing heavily on their presentation of content alongside a rich body of contextual material. We toned down the ‘green and purple’ pallette that we’d used since launch and focussed instead on a simple, crisp and clean CSS template. This has given us the added benefit that we have been able to optimise Collections Link for use with mobiles and particularly platforms - which our stats indicate represent an increasing proportion of our use base.

Having built the basic beta site in Joomla, we then began to populate it with legacy content from version 2. With hundreds of documents, descriptions and references, we are still working to ensure that everything has made it across safely. Collections Link is going to be a critical platform the rollout and support of the new Museum Accreditation standard in October, and we have created new sections containing updated material on Accreditation, Designation and our new standards such as SPECTRUM 4.0, BSI PAS 197 (Code of Practice for Collections Management) and Benchmarks in Collections Care 2.0.

We think we have created an open, powerful platform to support a sector that is undergoing a very difficult transition. In the process, we are very keen to ensure that the knowledge and expertise of the previous generation remains available to current and future generations of practitioners. Along the way, we hope to deliver some of our other aims - bringing together the commercial suppliers and the sector to support more efficient procurement, for example, or opening up a conduit for students and academics to share their insights and innovations with the broader sector.

But the full launch of Collections Link version 3.0 isn’t the end of the story. In fact, in the following 6-8 months, we have some really exciting additions to the platform. The first of these will be a fully integrated Collections Search, powered by the Culture Grid - enabling museum people to find other museums and collections of interest to them.

Alongside our standards development platform/wiki (http://standards.collectionslink.org.uk), we are also going to be launching a professional development/learning platform at http://learn.collectionslink.org.uk and a sector data repository at http://data.collectionslink.org.uk.

We’ve got plans to collaborate with leading National Museums and research institutions to publish collections of new knowledge in critical areas such as Digitisation and Conservation. We’re also really excited to be working towards video streaming through collectionslink.tv to bring professional development right up to date!

Like all of the work the Collections Trust does, Collections Link belongs to the sector. It only works to the extent that people engage with and make use of it. We’re also always open to good ideas, criticism and questions to help us understand where Collections Link needs to go next. We’ll be announcing the full launch of version 3.0 soon, but in the meantime, why not head over to http://www.clbeta.org.uk and have a look at the pre-launch beta release? We think you’ll be impressed!

INTRODUCTION

The meeting was introduced by Mr Khalil Rouhana, Director of Directorate E (Digital Library Initiative) at the European Commission.

Mr Rouhana began by reaffirming the importance of the Digital Libraries Initiative to the Digital Agenda for Europe. Key action 15 of the DAE sets an objective to find a sustainable funding model for Europeana and the Digitisation of cultural resources.

Mr Rouhana made reference to the new IP Strategy announced in April, including the new recommendations on Orphan Works proposed by the Commission and the forthcoming revisions to the Public Sector Information Directive.

The Commission is working on preparing the next financial framework, including support for Europeana to 2014. The funding package, including funds for Digitisation and Europeana, will be agreed on the 29th June.

The proposal has been to support Europeana not through the Innovation platform, but through the Infrastructure platform. Post-2014, the Commission will be working on the legal framework to support its long-term funding programmes.

Mr Rouhana reviewed awareness-raising and promotional activity, and highlighted the fact that the Commission is considering a revision to the 2006 Recommendations on Digitisation and Digital Preservation.

WORKING GROUP ON EUROPEANA

Mr Rouhana introduced a status report on the development of Europeana by Jill Cousins, Director of the Europeana Foundation. The key points included:

The Europeana funding model is currently running at a projected cumulative deficit of EUR371,787

The UK is one of 11 EU Member States that has still not committed any funds, alongside Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia

The average national commitment is circa EUR30k per annum

Mr Werner Weber raised concerns about the lack of contributions from the Member States. He noted that the deficit was simply unacceptable. Calling on people to think through their national contribution.

NP affirmed the support for Europeana from within the Cultural sector in the UK, but noted that we have failed to secure support at a Ministerial level even for the limited investment required to be a party to Europeana. We’re beyond the doubts about the value of Europeana. There’s a need for these nations to covercome the political issues.

Greece made an unnofficial commitment for EUR15k for 2012 - it was noted that if Greece, with all of its financial problems, is able to make such a commitment, then other EU Member States really had no excuse for failing to contribute. The German representative requested that the matter of investment should be raised at the next formal Ministerial meeting.

The UK is now the 3rd or 4th largest contributor to Europeana, but Jill Cousins requested that the National Experts provide the Europeana Foundation with contact details for the key political contacts. The Romanian delegation noted that it was not the National Experts, but the Ministers who should be embarrassed about the lack of funding for Europeana.

Mr Rouhana noted that the report of the Comite des Sages created a new impetus around Digitisation, and that this report would provide a fresh opportunity to convince the Ministers.

SUPPORT THROUGH THE ICT Policy Support Programme

The overall objectives of the ICT PSP were to:

Enable the widest access to European Cultural heritage and to create the best conditions for bringing out the value of cultural resources for the benefit of content holders, users and businesses.

• The total contribution to UK institutions was approximately EUR8m
• The UK is the 4th largest beneficiary after Europeana, Italy and the Netherlands

CIP ICT PSP Call 5: Commission has allocated EUR30m for:

• Aggregating content for Europeana
• Digitising Content for Europeana
• Raising awareness of Europeana

A total of 50 proposals submitted, with more than 800 institutions involved and a total value in excess of EUR120m (ie. 400% oversubscribed). Looking at Europeana not just as a portal for content, but as an entire ecosystem of re-use, promoting engagement with digital cultural content through a wide range of channels.

Next steps:

• Continue to foster digitisation and aggregation
• Build public/private partnerships for Digitisation & reuse of cultural content
• Support Europeana short-term (2011-13)
• Support Europeana long-term (2014-20)

The Commission counts on the national partners for 2011-13 in order to secure the long-term future of Europeana. The Chair was then passed to Richard Swetenham, the new Head of the Digital Libraries Unit at the European Commission

EUROPEANA CONTENT ROADMAP

Jose Amaral Lopes, Information Society Directorate, European Commission

Europeana’s milestones:

• To hold 30 million objects by 2015
• To hold all European masterpeices by 2016

The roadmap was recommended by the Member States Expert Group in May 2010. Member States were asked to complete the roadmap document by October 2010 (extended to 14th January 2011 and then again to 8th April 2011).

As a second phase, Member States were asked to identify their national plans to handle identified gaps and increase the content accessible through Europeana.

As at the date of this meeting, only half the Member States (including the UK) have completed their responses, so the deadline has been extended again to July 15.

It was noted that a number of European Member States have no national plan for Digitisation and Digital Preservation, and hence that it is difficult for them to respond. The Commission noted that MS agreed to create such a plan in 2006, and that we are simply failing to deliver on this obligation.

There was then a presentation concerning the National Digital Library of Finland, which includes more than 70 people across more than 11 working and management groups.

A collective approach to Digital Preservation infrastructure in Finland has cost 5 times less than the total cost of developing solutions for the individual organisations. The Finnish delegate noted that it is ‘hard to sell something that will cost mroe every year, but this is the nature of long-term Digital Preservation’. More information is available at http://www.kdk2011.fi/en.

A presentation was also made concerning the German National Digital Library. The German Digital Library involves mass-digitisation partly involving the use of 3rd-party Digitisation services, following the issue of a Europe-wide tender. Assessment of the tenders will be completed before the end of July, and the

final decision will be made by the Federal Government in the Autumn. A presentation was made concerning the progress of Digitisation in Greece:

There are a number of large-scale Digitisation projects currently underway in Greece, as part of the National Plan towards the Digital Content Roadmap. There is a sense that the crisis in Greece has both focussed the mind and overcome inter-organisational conflict and competition in order to help build critical mass.

Greece has been involved in a wide range of European projects, including Europeana Local, EUScreen, European Film Gateway, JUDAICA, Eclap and many others. In spite of this, the material digitised to date represents a very small cross-section of the country’s cultural heritage. Many organisations have digitised their content through structural funds, but have failed to secure investment to preserve it. In Greece, the Hellenic MInistry of Culture is responsible for museums, archives and monuments.

The Ministry of Education is responsible for libraries - hence responsibility for Digital Libraries spans two Ministerial portfolios. So far, 18m pages of books in Greek have been digitised by the Ministry for Education, and more than 5m pages of archival material. A projected investment of EUR80m will be made in large Digitisation projects:

• Public Radio & Television Archive (EUR10m)
• Archaeological Land Map
• Multimedia and multichannel Tourism Services
• Content-based (A/V material) Services by the Greek FIlm Centre
• Digital services by libraries (EUR5m) and Universities (EUR2m)
• Cultural content in museums (EUR3m)

Commitment shown by Greece is heavily built on Education and Tourism, in response to the current economic circumstances.

CONTENT UPDATE FROM EUROPEANA

Jill Cousins reported on the content contributions made by different Member States to Europeana. There are currently 19.1m items accessible to Europeana now.

There is a significant gap in the provision of A/V material, and currently there are only approximately 5m out of a potential 100m book titles available online.

Europeana is predicting a flatline in cotent for the next 2 years in spite of the ingest of new material (presumably to allow for falloff resulting from the License Agreements). Very strong/growing use of Europeana via Facebook/Twitter, Search Engines and significant increases in mobile use.At peak times, Europeana is running at between 250-300k unique page impressions per day as a result of increased reach.

EUROPEANA DATA EXCHANGE AGREEMENTS

Jill Cousins presented the background and context to the new Data Provider and Aggregator Agreements.

The new Europeana Strategic Plan included feedback from users, providers, policymakers and the market, where each community were asked what they wanted from Europeana. Users said that they wanted easy access to re-usable content. Providers wanted visibility and discoverability. Policymakers wanted Europeana to take a leadership role and to solve some of the issues confronting the reuse of this content. The ‘market’ (loosely-defined, but including Wikipedia) wanted easy access and clear licensing conditions for reusing the content.

Europeana recognises the insufficiency of ‘metadata’ as an expression for museums content, but failed to find a suitable alternate. It was therefore decided to proceed on this basis, resulting in the 4-track Strategic Plan:

• Aggregate
• Facilitate
• Distribute
• Engage

Jill highlighted the range of applications which could not be supported under the current licensing framework:

• Embedding into Wikipedia
• Repurposing through widgets onto blogs carrying commercial advertising
• Sharing with seervices such as Artfinder
• Can’t make content available to commercial mobile applications

The consultation process for the new Agreements included:

• 5 workshops
• Online consultation
• Input from an Aggregators Workshop
• Discussion by the Legal Workgroup of the CCPA
• Now endorsed by the CCPA and the Europeana Foundation
• A new draft (issued on the 16th June 2011)

A total of 104 responses were received:

• 45% said ‘Yes’
• 12% said ‘No’
• 43% said ‘Yes, provisional on legal advice’

The largest group of responders were the libraries - of whom circa. 85% said ‘Yes’. Fewer archives (77% said ‘Yes’). 36% of museums said either ‘No’ or ‘Yes, subject to additional legal advice’. Europeana has secured the agreement of the Directors of several museums, including the Rijksmuseum.

For the Aggregators, a number have indicated that they are not able to sign yet - that they need to spend more time consulting with their contributing communities and providers in order to encourage them to come onboard.

There are some concerns that the CCPA is too close to Europeana to act as a dispute mediation body in the event of a dispute arising from the application of the License Agreements. Nick Poole, as Chair of the CCPA, defended its independence, but also urged colleagues to use the CCPA as a channel to influence the direction of the Agreements.

In light of these reviews, Europeana has decided to proceed with the planned introduction of the new Europeana Data Provider Agreements from September 2011. There are a number of new resources to help people find support and clarification about the Agreements, along with current versions, on the Europeana version 1.0 website (shortly to be revised). Notification of the termination of the current Agreements will be issued on the 30th August 2011, and a handover period will run to the 31st December 2011.

The Italian delegation raised a number of queries about the Agreements:

• There is a significant difference between museums and libraries in respect of the content they are dealing with and also their readiness to share metadata.
• Museums want to learn gradually and test the waters before plunging into aggregation
• Many parties are worried about losing stewardship of their data
• There is a concern that people will withdraw their content from CulturaItalia and Europeana once presented with the reality of the licenses

Jill Cousins observed that this is a fight which the national aggregators would want to take up (to enable new forms of use of cultural content, for example for educational purposes) so it is not solely Europeana’s battle. Also, the most vocal opponents to the license agreements are now signatories - because they have decided to take the risk in the interest of realising the benefits.

Concerns were raised about the legality of CC0 in different legislations and a report has been commissioned by the Europeana Foundation in to this. Now completed, the report will be published on the Europeana website. The French delegation also raised the issue that more time is needed in order to understand the implications of the Agreements for the forthcoming amendments to the Public Sector Information legislation.

A number of delegations also raised the concern that it may not be lawful for cultural institutions to share their information in this way because the metadata may contain 3rd-party material (including public libraries) that cannot be re-licensed on a commercial basis.

AUSTRIAN NATIONAL LIBRARY & GOOGLE

The Austrian National Library presented information about its Public/private Partnership with Google - called Austrian Books Online. They have agreed a set of ‘principles’ as the cornerstones of their collaboration:

• Respect for Rightsholders
• Transparency
• Access

The collaboration has been 3 years in the making, and will Digitise approximately 600,000 volumes - a total of some 180m pages.

The Agreement is binding on both parties even after the end of the project, including the obligations relating to access to and reuse of the material. The Austrian National Library are able to:

• Hold Digital copies for the library
• Re-use the matieral (all files available for non-commercial use, can be shared with Europeana and available to research partners)
• Re-digitise the material (ie. it’s not exclusive)

The Library also insisted on the following provisions:

• They would select the books
• The Institute for Conservation had to be involved
• The agreement could be terminated without prejudice

Typiical cost per book of digitisation would be between 70-100 EURO per book if the Digitisation were being done by an independent 3rd party. Although no specific figures were given, it is understood that this is analogous to the costs being covered by Google for the profgramme. Google is paying for:

• Transportation of the materials
• Insurance
• Scanning
• Image processing
• post-processing
• Quality-control
• Provision of the material via Google Books

National Library is paying for:

• Book selection
• Internal logistics
• Conservation assessment
• Metadata
• Barcoding
• Data download and control
• Data storage and Digital preservation
• Digital Library management

There are 70+ national library staff involved, of whom about 20 are working on the project full-time. There is no individual selection of books - selection is done by shelf, and every book has a conservation assessment as part of the process and fewer than 1% have been withdrawn for reasons of conservation/fragility.

The only reasons for de-selecting books are:

• Format
• Condition
• Value

Massive logistics challenge - putting books back in the right place on the shelves after they have been Digitised. The checking/barcoding and movement of the book out of the library’s catalogue system takes 4 minutes per volume - which means that this one step of the workflow alone requires 5,128 working days or 24 person years across all 600,000 volumes!

The Austrian National Library and Google have a contractual agreement which includes procedures for location and movement control to ensure that logistics are implemented efficiently and without damaging the books. On average, a book that is going through this process is unavailable to the public for about 3 months.

Quality control is being carried out through:

• Automated tools
• Representative sampling
• Digital checking of ‘error clusters’ (repeated errors)
• Crowdsourcing (eventually, but not currently)

The Austrian National Library expects to derive a number of benefits from the work:

• New research using the full-text record
• Data enrichment
• Named entity enrichment
• Use of linked data
• Support for new forms of humanities research based on large datasets

Further information is available at:

http://www.onb.ac.at/ev/austrianbooksonline

PROPOSAL FOR A DIRECTIVE ON ORPHAN WORKS

The proposals have been in development since 2005 with the i2010 Digitial Libraries Communication, and have been through a number of steps including a Green Paper and several Commission communications, including the Memorandum of Understanding on Diligent Search guidelines.

Copyright in the Knowledge Economy (2009) clearly highlighted the need for a legal instrument to address the issue. This was followed in 2010 by the Comite Des Sages recommendation that any legal instrument should comply with a simple 8-step test (which incluided cross-border recognition of Orphan Works as a central issue).

Within the Orphan Works Directive, the elements relating to the status of orphan works (Articles 2 & 5) highlight:

• Diligent search
• That an Orphan Work where one rightsholder (out of a group) is known, it ceases being an Orphan

The definition of the scope of the directive is contained within Article 1.1 and extended by Articles 1.2 and 9. A work that is considered an Orphan Work in one Member State shall be deemed an Orphan Work in all Member States.

[The presentation is highly detailed and technical. A link will be posted here when the slides are made publicly available].