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.

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.

This prospect raises a very interesting possibility, and one which I believe we should proactively pursue in the coming months. If we don’t have access to in-house skills, and we don’t have budget to contract skills, then there is a possible third way - which is to use the network effect in the cultural profession to build a barter economy, in which skills and time are traded as real, tangible assets for our institutions.

Imagine the scenario - your library has bought a scanner and trained someone in how to use it. You also have a rare books collection but have lost the person who knew about ventilation and mould prevention. You advertise a trade - a few hours access to the scanner with a skilled member of staff in return for an afternoon’s training in basic preservation. A museum a few miles up the road responds, provides the training and scans some prints.

One of the really interesting things about this kind of skills trading is that 80% of the benefits are not the immediate outcomes (the scanning, the training), but in the intangible social and professional capital that comes out of making a connection, working with someone, supporting one another. In a way, it’s our own professional version of a Big Society (we’ll call it a Big Sector for now).

Before I go any further, I should wholeheartedly acknowledge that what I am suggesting is nothing new. Not only does it exist in many other industries (eg. skillsbarter.com), it already exists in the culture sector, in the form of the magnifient SHARE project in the East of England.

SHARE is one of those ideas that comes along every once in awhile that has the potential to be genuinely revolutionary. It harnesses the power of social and professional interaction, enabling people to develop (mostly) self-organising networks through which people share their knowledge and expertise. SHARE has already enabled the development of networks in a number of areas, including:

• Museums archaeology
• Natural history
• Costume and textiles
• Audience development
• Design and display
• Museum learning

SHARE also provides a conduit for bringing the funded layer of expertise and knowledge - from people like Museum Development Officers (it’s primarily a museum thing at the moment, because of its genesis in Renaissance), freelancers and curatorial advisers - to bear in a much better-targeted way which is capable of meeting genuine, on-the-ground needs. Organisations can flag a need, or make a proposal, and can call on assistance from across the entire network (there’s even a workflow for delivering collaborative, SHARE-based projects).

Of course, everything isn’t really as rosy and sylvanian as SHARE makes it look. Yes, it took Renaissance funding to kick-start the network and yes, it takes a highly motivated, focussed and visionary coordinator like Simon Floyd to make it happen, and yes, it takes time, money and effort to keep it going, but as I said before, the value goes far beyond the simple access to skills and knowledge. It builds bonds between individuals and organisations. Because it promotes self-reliance and cooperation, it builds confidence in the sector. Because the feedback is very real, and very immediate, it makes people feel good about supporting each other.

I’m not saying SHARE is perfect, but the skills economy is going to look very, very different in two years time. In place of centralised, monolithic authority structures, we’re likely to see the emergence of networks, Subject Specialists, barter, subscription-based consultancy and self-starting local and sub-regional action, all of which are designed to help people, by helping each other.

The idea of sharing skills also caused me to think about the fact that museums in particular are regularly involved in reciprocal agreements which involve the transfer of funds. Take loans as an example - museums of a reasonable size will regularly be both charging for loans and paying out to other museums worldwide. And since a lot of these transactions are cross-currency, they incur the penalty of exchange fees and fluctuating rates.

How much more efficient would it be, if we think of museums, libraries, archives and the arts as a closed loop - a community of sufficient scale to make collective action feasible - to evolve the concept of bartering in order to develop a currency of our own? How much better would it be, instead of converting pounds to Euro and back again, simply to exchange a currency that is held in trust between two parties and which can be traded between insitutions within the network.

Imagine a scenario - you have a large-scale project, perhaps a transfer from an old store to a new one. You have a complex, multi-part project which needs specific skilled intervention at specific points. The costs of specifying and tendering for skills are high, and besides the scale of the work (reviewing the security provision for the new site, for example) might not justify it.  Imagine that, instead, you convert some funds into a Culture Currency and use these Culture Dollars to buy an afternoon of someone’s time. Imagine then that they keep their currency in an account until it has built up to the point where they could afford to do something on a scale which would never otherwise be financially possible.

You might think this is a ridiculous suggestion, but actually it is surprisingly easy to invent a currency - at least one that acts as a token of exchange of nominal value that is agreed between parties (it is technically illegal in most countries to set up a monetary currency!) Like all ideas that depend on collective action across the culture sector, it is unlikely ever to happen, but the germ of the idea - of exchanging, earning, storing and spending not money but tokens of value which can be used to ‘buy’ skills, time, support, mentoring or any of the other elements of the new ’soft’ economy could well be the answer to a lot of people’s prayers.

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).

I can’t distil here everything that was said, but standout moment for me was Graham’s inspired use of the historical view on the history of design across multiple media to extract some golden threads of where the future might be going. I was particularly struck by his assertion that modern web design is about information design - and as we see the web fragment from destinations to applications and channels, this is certainly already coming true.

I started my presentation, as I find I am doing more and more often these days, by revisiting article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s worth repeating here, because I think it is fundamentally important:

Whereas everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of their community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

There’s so much in this little sentence that matters. I like the way it shamelessly elides culture, the arts and sciences. I like the universality of it, which skates over short-termism, tokenism and positive action. I like that it’s not ‘culture’, but ‘cultural life’ - in recognition of the fact that culture and heritage are being made every second of the day, all around us.

I then took a look through the main ‘pillars’ of the Collections Trust’s work with libraries, archives, museums, collectors and others. I was recently accused by someone very senior in the sector (who should know better!) of flitting from one idea to the next, never settling on any. There may be a grain of truth in it, in that we are constantly forging ahead, but I was proud to look across SPECTRUM (soon to become SPECTRUM 4.0), the joint BSI/Collections Trust PAS 197 Code of Practice for Collections Management, the new Collections Link, OpenCulture, the Culture Grid and even the Collections Trust itself and to see how we are putting these theoretical principles at the heart of next-generation practice.

The main element of my lecture, though, took the form of a David Hilbert-style challenge to the students and practitioners at Leicester. I presented 10 questions about the future of museums, which I offer to you here for discussion and comment:

1. What are Museums for? If you had to summarise the role of museums in contemporary society, what would it be? (there was a lovely rejoinder to this later from Stuart Davies, quoting the MA definition of a museum verbatim - good on him)
2. How can we avoid what Chimamanda Adichie calls the ‘danger of the single story’? How do we avoid instantiating and perpetuating our cultural bias through what we collect and what we choose to digitise?
3. Is a museum a business or a public good? The current economic situation is, in the words of the brilliant Steve Little in the South East Renaissance Hub, pushing people either towards greater dependence on subsidy or towards greater economic independence, what are the implications for their role as custodians of culture?
4. Is there a Right to Culture? Not only in the sense of a human right, but should everyone, every subculture have an equal right to share their cultural viewpoint through museums?
5. How do we balance authority and openness? This is rapidly becoming an old chestnut, but the early experiences of user-generated interpretation and citizen curation have been a mixed bag, and we haven’t yet addressed it as a core challenge.
6. Should museums own stuff? There is simply not enough money in the system to collect everything we want to collect - the global art market has skyrocketed and it is no longer feasible or publicly defensible for us to use public funds to support a relatively tiny cultural elite in the competitive acquisition of works of art. What other models are there? How might we use things like tax breaks or collectivism to define a new form of relationship with Collections?
7. How can we get rid of more stuff? Museums should be able, like any other business, to sell or write off unusable stock, and to use this financial freedom to invest in their future. Why should a museum not sell off parts of its collection to create an endowment which will ensure that the good stuff can be enjoyed by future generations?
8. What is the Internet for? The online, Tesco-style browsing experience of cultural heritage is horrible, doesn’t correspond to a known user need outside the needs of a small number of academic researchers, and costs the public a fortune. How can we embrace the idea of culture as an application, or as digital assets to be spread throughout the online universe, used and repurposed in any way people want to?
9. What role should the State play in museums? Our contract with Government is about to change, and with it not just the financial rules, but also the ethical and political ones. Should the State concern itself with the provision of museums, and if so, why?
10. How should we collect the future? The rate of acquisition throughout the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s has left our generation with an undigestible pabulum of collections. We are so preoccupied with the economic and professional realities of curating this immediate past history that we are failing to effectively curate the present one. How can we release museums to collect contemporary culture, rather than act as storehouses for a gradually aging sideshow of Victoriana?

Big questions all, but they matter. as I said to the students, right now is the time when we get to invent a new role for museums in the world. The same is happening in libraries, and will continue to happen for all cultural sectors as society moves through its cycles of development.

For the Collections Trust, we have a vision of a new type of museum, and a new type of museum professional and we want to make a profound contribution to helping realise the tremendous potential of this new generation. I’d welcome any and all comments, either on the challenges above, or how we might more effectively pursue the solutions.

It was a great opportunity to meet with some new and emerging talent in the sector, and I’d really like to thank Dr Ross Parry and Dr Richard Sandell at Leicester for giving me the opportunity!

The OpenCulture initiative has been running for around two years now, and has already delivered a number of programmes with the common aim of promoting a more open, democractic approach to cultural services. These include:

• A revised version of the SPECTRUM standard incorporating the Revisiting Collections methodology which helps cultural organisations to capture user-generated knowledge alongside their own Collections information.
• The Culture Grid, which connects digital content from libraries, archives and museums with the mainstream of online service provision.
• Incorporating the principles of OpenCulture into Museum Studies, Library and Information and other HE/FE course curricula

The OpenCulture event in 2011 will capture the key threads of this conversation across the International community, addressing:

• Whether Culture is a human right, and what this might mean for cultural services
• How cultural institutions can collect, preserve and curate the modern world
• The role of Culture in promoting tolerance and understanding in a time of conflict
• Whether all Cultures have an equal right to representation
• What is the duty of the international Cultural community to repatriate artefacts
• What is the real Digital Opportunity for Culture on and through the web

Through these high-level discussions, we hope to engage with strategic agencies, policymakers and active practitioners to have an open and honest conversation about the role of Culture in a stable, harmonious, integrated and econmically productive society.

I’ll keep this blog updated with further information about the event as it progresses. In the meantime, I would welcome comments from any of you about these themes, or themes we might have missed which would be worth including.

I was prompted to think about these things by a meeting of the Strategic Content Alliance’s Funding Advisory Council this morning. The purpose of this initiative, funded by JISC and the SCA and carried out by the splendid Nancy Maron from US-based ITHAKA (http://www.ithaka.org/), is to look at ways of connecting UK and US-based funders and helping them ensure that the outputs of their funding programmes are more sustainable.

From the outset, though, this raises an interesting question. Should it be the role of funders to fund sustainability? Can sustainability even be funded? I have long held the view that sustainability is a by-product, not a feature, and that specifically it is a by-product of the extent to which a particular project or product continues to satisfy a valuable use or business case on an ongoing basis.

In this view, it ought to be the role of funders not to ‘fund’ or ’sustain’ (one has to marvel at the tautology in the current crop of short-term ’sustainability’ funds) but to provide initial seed capital which enables organisations to invest in skills, infrastructure, products and services the upfront costs of which they could not otherwise afford to fund. The fund is not a gift, but a challenge - a challenge to the organisation to internalise the value of the product or service and to invest in its future growth and success.

I used the example of the classic 3-year startup model for a new business. I can finance the upfront capital costs of investing in equipment, people and product if, and only if, I can demonstrate that the people lending me the money are more likely than not to see a tangible return on investment in the 2nd and 3rd year of trading. The money is an enabler, but it is also a debt, and the aim is to transition out of debt so that I can grow the business on a sustainable basis.

This is not, however, the model for grant funding - which far too often in my experience sails too close to dependency. Even those funders that make it clear that their investment is a challenge to the organisation to internalise and sustain the resulting outputs, too many of these organisations find themselves surprised and dismayed, at the end of the stated funding period, that the original funder will not be dazzled by their success and pursuaded to reinvest to further build on this success.

Which raises the very real concern that we are simply operating two parallel but exclusive sets of success criteria. The view of success for the funder may well be more mechanical - were the funds distributed, were they spent, were they accountable, were they applied to the purposes set out in the funding criteria. To the recipient, success is usually more explicitly defined in terms of the specific project - does it get done, is it delivered within forecast schedule and forecast budget, is it exciting, interesting or popular with the target audience? The recipient often returns to the funder and asks them to share in their excitement at the ’success’ of the project when the funder is operating a totally different calculus of success and value.

At the meeting, we discussed our experiences of how Venture Capitalists tend to make value judgements about their investments, and particularly how they develop the skill of identifying which early-stage businesses or ideas are more likely to succeed than others. In some senses, it’s a brutally simple set of calculations. First of all, there is the question of whether the idea has a genuine, viable and sustainable market. Secondly, there are the characteristics of the entrepreneur or team responsible for  driving the idea. Are they passionate, are they experienced, are they motivated? Finally, there is the question of how much the entrepreneur is willing to put on the line to make the idea work - in short, how much of the risk are they willing to share? And yet, these are precisely the elements which receive the least attention in the majority of funder’s decision-making processes. Instead, they focus on the eloquence of the application and its apparent fit with the funding criteria, too often treating the idea of ‘match’ funding as an inconvenience, to be dismissed through fiscal sleight-of-hand.

We also spoke about the legacy of the New Opportunities Fund Digitisation Programme, and the way in which it illustrates different value judgements for funders. There is a view that NOF-Digi was a failure - the view that £50m of taxpayer-funded resources are sitting in a cyber-limbo, unloved, unused and gradually decaying. Then there is the equally valid view that NOF funded a once-in-a-generation transformation in the infrastructure, knowledge, expertise and ambition of the entire sector, a transformation which has led directly to the new vision of museums, libraries and archives at the forefront of a Digitally-literate society. Which is right? Both, and neither, of course. Was money wasted? Possibly, but only if you expect the return on the funding investment to be direct and tangible. If, on the other hand, your calculus of success is able to encompass donwstream, long-term, secondary impact then you could argue that the taxpayer’s investment was returned in spades.

But these are really just variations on a theme - they don’t go to the heart of whether competitive grant-funding, in the way we know it now, is really the best way to achieve long-term, lasting improvement for a museum, archive and library sector that is undergoing an epochal transformation.

The cultural funding industry model may have succeeded in the 90’s, in a time of massive Government investment, but as we now know, that model has proved in itself to be unsustainable. So, what might we replace it with? Two options include the model of microfinace, taken from the international development community (examples such as Kiva), and the model of tapered seed capital or challenge funding, taken from several other public sectors.

The microfinance model is interesting because it offers a potential solution to a perennial problem in the UK funding model - that it costs as much to apply for £5000 as it does for £50,000, and sometimes people only need relatively small amounts of money, but find themselves engineering large projects to fit into the model of industrialised medium/large-scale funding. One interesting example in the museums sector is the way in which Museums Galleries Scotland runs its small grants programme essentially as hyper-targeted investments (albeit as grants rather than loans) with a rolling deadline and rapid turnaround to support their community through specific points of transition or development.

It is interesting to set the idea of microfinance for the culture sector in the context of the Government plans for the Big Society Bank. Here, too, the problem is not big funds to big organisations, but small, agile and targeted interventions helping people who are willing to help themselves. I have written elsewhere about how we are moving towards a self-help sector, but it is interesting to look at how the funding model for museums, libraries and archives could morph into something more conducive to this kind of self-starting development.

Historically, the large-grants model has made it difficult for people to adopt the model of fail-once-fail-quickly, rapid innovation which is so widely espoused in the technical service community. The infrastructure and expense of bidding for, administrating and servicing a small grant is often disproportionate to the lightweight infrastructure needed for agile development. Microfinancing technical innovation in the culture sector could offer a way of releasing this specific area of research & development from the constraints of more admin-heavy models.

The second model, of tapered investment, is basically structured around the idea of a managed transition from incubation to the open marketplace. There is a risk that the end of a funding period essentially represents a cliff-face, and that a service or product currently has to make too sharp a transition from a nurtured, protected environment into a competitive one. Tapered investment, on the other hand, gradually withdraws support while at the same time gradually exposing the product to the marketplace.

The interesting thing with this model is that experience tends to suggest that even where you make grant recipients aware that the support will taper and eventually stop, they cling to the idea that it will continue - with the result that a significant number of new services fail at the point of transition.

The final point was to do with failure. although some may find this hard to swallow, it has, for many years, effectively been impossible to fail. Every project has launched with a fanfare, and been hailed as a success within 2-3 months - long before time and the audience have had a chance to test them. We have risked devaluing the currency of success - although recent successes such as the Pre-Raphaelites website from BMAG, A History of the World in 100 Objects from the British Museum and #followamuseum from @museummarketing on Twitter show that real excellence will always shine through. But for every one of these, there has been 20 small-scale services which achieve modest traffic before being quietly ignored into obscurity by their host institution. But failure - of funding applications and of funded projects - is an inevitable part of this environment. The skill is to ensure that we extract value from failure, including by recognising the simple human capital that is generated by getting people to work together on funding proposals.

It seems likely, as a corollary of the economic challenges to which I have referred in previous blogs, that the architecture of funding, developed as it has been over the past 10 years of large-scale (and largely unquestioning) public investment, will need to undergo its own transition in the next 18 months. On the one hand, it will become significantly more competitive, and therefore carry the potential for a far higher failure rate - which means that we need to find more and better ways of extracting value from failure. On the other hand, the industrialised and monolithic process of handing out chunks of £10,000 to £500,000 may need to scale down to become more micro-targeted and agile. At the same time, we may find that funders start to think of themselves much more like charity banks or incubators, providing upfront finance to enable people to do important, exploratory work. Just don’t be surprised if you find them knocking on the door and asking you either to demonstrate real return on their investment, or their money back.

Following extensive consultation and some really valuable comments and contributions from colleagues in the sector, we have refined the scope of the proposal, and are now nearly ready to launch it at the forthcoming COLLECT2010 event on the 28th June.

The general feeling was that there is already a thriving market for Digital consultancy in the sector and that it might confuse people about the Collections Trust’s role to enter this market. In fact, we already do some Digital consultancy, but only ever at a strategic level and only where it fits with our strategic mission.

Where people did feel we could add value, though, was in negotiating access to (or providing directly) Digital infrastructure and services which could, in essence, reduce the costs of sharing content online and increase reach.

This role connects very neatly with our work on the Culture Grid, which is all about providing scalable infrastructure to connect content providers to content users and to open up digital cultural content to mainstream audiences in partnership with mainstream media partners. Hence, from the 28th June, we will be offering the following services (with more coming online in the following months):

FREE (with the support of MLA and the European Commission)

• Aggregation/harvesting of metadata into the Culture Grid
• Syndicaton of your collections metadata into 3rd party services, including Google, the BBC CenturyShare platform and Europeana
• The abilty to use our QueryBuilder tool to create embeddable and configurable searches of your own and other people’s content from the Culture Grid
• The SPECTRUM Software Survey, including information about SPECTRUM Partners and compliant systems
• A Culture Grid Contributors Network on the new Collections Link
• A Culture Grid HelpDesk to provide support in uploading your metadata

PAID:

• Low-cost hosting of datasets, images and other media ‘in the Cloud’
• Higher-cost hosting and Digital Preservation of datasets, images and other media
• A subscription-based tool which archives a snapshot of the records from your Collections Management System and holds them in ‘deep storage’ - essentially a digital Acquisitions Register
• Subscription-based online access to SPECTRUM Business Processes, a new tool which supports critical assessment and simplification of your in-house systems

PARTNERSHIP:

• A joint service to offer Print-on-Demand services to museum, archive and library collections aggregated via the Culture Grid
• The possibility for large-scale public/private partnerships involving the upfront funding of Digitisation costs in return for a share of the lifetime revenue
• A joint initiative to review the images of your collection, identify the parts of the collection with commercial potential and license them to global image distributors and image libraries on a commercial basis

In addition, we will be working with the SPECTRUM Partners on a comprehensive update of our information about their systems, and also with partners such as Media Equation to promote next-generation solutions based on Digital Asset Management.

This is only the beginning, but we feel that this first generation of services offers real support to the sector in making the transition into the next phase of Digital development. We welcome your thoughts, comments and observations - you are our market and we want to ensure that we get it right!

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.

The past decade of museum policy has been less about the intrinsic value of museums in their own right, or about the central value of cultural memory to a stable society, but more about what museums can do in addition to being museums. An essentially instrumentalist policy has focussed more explicitly on the contribution museums can make to social policy, to formal and informal education, to sense of place and to social cohesion.

As Alec Coles once vocally pointed out to me, these are good and necessary functions of museums in society, and museums must indeed continue to perform a social function. But they are only the most externally-visible outcomes of museums, and in some sense have been artificially extenuated in response to the prevailing political climate of the past 13 years.

Yes, there will be cuts, but in the constellation of Government expenditure, Culture and the Arts are marginal, and the value of national-level cuts in museum budgets is more figurative than fiscal. Some parts of the sector may even see increases in revenue, for example as the dampening effect on currency leads to increased tourism. More likely to have a lasting effect on the provision of culture to people in this country is the long-term squeeze on Local Authority expenditure.

Part of the problem is that the severity of the damage done by underfunding culture is felt not at the next Election, but by the next generation. The cumulative effect of not being able to acquire things and not being able to afford to conserve things is that we start burning up our culture without renewing it. And that, as with any other resource, is a disservice we do to the future.

So, beyond the world of more initiatives, more research and more reports demonstrating the economic value of museums to UK Plc, how might we really construct a defense of Culture in the new Economy?

Well, one idea is to look at how other countries have done exactly that. Even though, as one overseas visitor said to me today ‘the UK invented museums’, we must guard against the idea that we know best about how museum policy should be made. And one way that other nations have defended their culture is to implement a legislative provision for museums – a Museum Law.

Consider the following benefits claimed for the French Loi de Musees, implemented in 2002 and operating successfully for almost a decade:

• It defines, under Law, the social function of a museum as an agent of cultural democracy and representation, and makes it a statutory function of Government to protect this for the electorate.
• It harmonises and unifies the National and Local Government frameworks for museum provision.
• Defines, inalienably, the status of collections as part of the public domain, and hence the obligation of Government to ensure their protection.
• It makes special provision for the VAT and tax status of museums.

Now, forgive me if I am oversimplifying (and the French Loi de Musees is certainly not perfect, and has many opponents in France) but don’t those benefits sound pretty tempting for UK museums right now?

Legal frameworks for museums are particularly prevalent in Francophone countries – Canada, Belgium, Switzerland (whose new Museum Law came into force on the 1st January 2010)  - a legacy of the Code Civil de France (also known as the Code Napoleon). In most of these countries the effect has been positive and fast. In Belgium, for example, the cultural heritage sector has experienced significant advances in recognition of their value because, some argue, the Museum Law has brought them into political and public awareness.

Nor does a Museum Law necessarily just work in favour of the museums. In several cases, they have presented an opportunity for Governments and the public to state their expectations of their museums, and for museums to respond to make a formal commitment to delivering value for people.

Of course, creating a Loi de Musees for UK museums would not be easy. The plurality of funding sources, for example, has always worked against clear, concerted action on a national basis. Museum Laws work best where the Government is the majority funder of culture. But the principle, that a UK Museum law would present a newly-structured museum sector with a clear opportunity to renegotiate terms with society is surely worthy of consideration?

Think, too, of the other benefits. There can be little doubt that we need to reconnect our leading National museums with the rest of the museum sector, and at a level more meaningful than national/local loans or the export of museum superbrands to the provinces.  But National museums are of a different nature to other museums, which creates a disconnect and a kind of political myopia about the broader picture of cultural policy. But if the two ‘halves’ of our sector were united under a common statutory framework, which balanced out London-centricity with the idea of a genuinely distributed national cultural provision?

And what of Accreditation? Respected the world over, our excellent Museum Accreditation Scheme holds no legal or statutory status. How much more effective would it be as a mechanism for defending against asset-stripping, forced disposals or closures if backed by a clear legislative framework.

As I say, times like these call for big ideas. They call for reimagining how things could work. We need a new contract between museums and society. Maybe it is time we started thinking about a Loi de Musees of our own.

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.

In a world in which Twitter helps us look at a resolution of ‘23 seconds ago’, and the Election is pushing us to look at a resolution of the next 6 months, it is really useful to remember that the further back you stand, the more these incipient crises resolve into the flutterings of a general trend that is moving forever upward.

I was invited to keynote, and inspired partly by the general air of implacability, took the opportunity to take a very harsh look at the realities of the current environment. The main thrust of my presentation was that there can be no doubt whatsoever that the Golden Age of cultural funding, which began with Chris Smith in the mid-90’s, is coming to an end, and that there are two ways we can respond.

The first is to shrink back into our shells, abandoning in the process the great advances in museum thinking over the past two decades, and wait until the sun shines once again on culture. The second is to embrace this inevitable transition from one professional model to the next, and to try and proactively seize it as an opportunity to consolidate and shout about the new narrative of how Collections can serve society.

We run the risk, as organisations trample over each other to demonstrate their public value through exhibitions, acquisitions and outreach, of abandoning one of the most important achievements of the past decade - which is the unification of Collections and public service as two parts of the same process. We risk a return to the old polarity, and in the process a loss of that tremendous momentum towards ensuring that culture is reflective of life, and not reductive.

This, to me, is the risk of trying to preserve what is now (which is only, after all, the professional reality of the past 10-15 years and not some immutable fact about the world) against the colossal, epochal shifts in the wider political and consumer environment.

On the other hand, we can regard the current chill wind as a natural part of the cycle of the sector, and one for which we can prepare by ensuring that we are suitably provisioned and equipped to deal with it. I put forward the idea that the best way of working with the grain of the current emergent situation is to go back to first principles, and make sure that we are confident in the basic tenets of our profession.

To the meeting, I offered the following points, and I offer them also here for comments, thoughts and criticism!

1. I suggest that, in some appropriate forum, we strip things right back to the very first principle - which is the question of why society should care about Culture. I think that the majority of people working in Culture share a common belief, which is the belief in what happens when someone stands in front of something they have never experienced before, could never experience anywhere else, and come away having been transformed by it.That is the basis of our contribution to society, and on it are built great inventions, great cultures and great advances for humanity.This is the unique power of Culture, and it is telling that so many people I speak to have lost touch with it. So many people are so entrenched in fighting the battle that they have lost sight of that divine spark of inspiration which says that this business is worth protecting, and worth committing a career to.If this is what we, collectively, believe then we have everything we could wish for - a common, powerful motivation. From this, we can ask ourselves the questions of how it should best be achieved, whether the museums of today are the best vehicle for achieving it, how we can imagine a future in which we do it better. But the first step in weathering this particular storm has to involve reconnecting with the intrinsic wonder of working with Collections and people.
2. The second proposal is that we drag out into the cold, harsh light of day our collective family secret, and deal with it. We have way, way, too much stuff and we are looking after a lot of it really badly. We have more stuff than we can keep safe, more than we can document, more than we can preserve. And having too much stuff does profound damage to our ability to look after, interpret and protect the stuff that does matter.Worse than this, the secret of the crap we’re hanging onto is accreting like an undigestible lump in the pit of our collective stomach. Every cupboard bulging with material, every unaccessioned object, every corner of the store piled high with unmarked boxes to be ‘dealt with one day’, every single one of these things is holding us back, and staining us with an indelible mark of unprofessionalism.Because that ‘one day’ is here. While we were rushing towards the future, sustained by the rocket fuel of easy funding, it was ok to ignore a few incomplete accession forms here and there, to put that broken cartwheel to one side. But not that growth has stopped, that the fuel is spent, now is the time when we have to confront those easy decisions and make up for them.We have to deal with this legacy of poor and incomplete practice swiftly and decisively before it becomes toxic, before it critically undermines our ability to advocate for what the sector has achieved in becoming more progressive and open than ever before. I suggest that to do this, we look to the mantra of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People ‘do it, delegate it or delete it’. With our collections, we must use them, hand them on for someone else to use, or dispose of them. And we must do it proactively, positively, in plain sight and in open consultation with our audiences.
3. The next proposal, which builds on the last, is that we go back and query that other great tenet of the museum faith - that we should own everything. We must ask ourselves as a professional community whether the first responsibility of museums is to own things, or to curate, interpret and present them. Because if our real endgame is ownership, then we are going to fail in our mission to collect and reflect contemporary material. The market for art and antiquities is global, and while in some collecting areas is may be possible to use public funds to collect material, it is no longer tenable to use public investment to participate in a competitive art market that has lost all touch with notions of real value. Public Private Partnership is neither a sin nor a political trick - if you take the capital letters away, it is about two different communities with different but mutually complementary aims working together to achieve both their own singular aims and those of the common good.
4. My next proposal is not really a proposal at all, but an observation. That in Tony Butler’s No-Growth Economy, in this brave new cultural economy that will start in 8 weeks and continue for the next 5 years, the first and most fundamental principle has to be sharing. No museum is an island, although they sometimes behave as though they were when the chips are down. But survival in this economy will depend in part on your willingness to share - large institutions will become small, small ones will band together, unweildy top-down structures will have to become more agile and connected.And in the process, a new mantra is emerging of shared infrastructure, shared services, shared people, shared knowledge, shared time, effort, even comfort. Solidarity is likely to become the new byword as people overcome the short-term discomfort of living in closer proximity to each other and depending more on each other than they had to in the past.But it is not only with each other that Museums will need to share. They will need to learn to share resources, spaces, audiences with other sectors - be they private, public, commercial, non-commercial. Wherever our interests are in common, we will need to explore how best to work with other people to achieve our objectives.And we will, I hope, also continue that vital golden thread of the past 10 years of learning to share with our users. As the hyperbole about Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing recedes, what is left is a return to the basic idea of a volunteer economy - and this is an economy which has continued throughout the past two decades of development.It is telling that of all the sub-divisions of the Culture sector, the one that is set to weather this incipient storm with greatest dignity and fortitude is the National Trust - which has been constructed since its foundation on the twin principles of the long-now and the ability of collective goodwill to move mountains, and which perhaps binged less than any of us on the ready availability of taxpayers cash in the past.
5. And my final proposal concerns standards. There is a risk that the current generation of professional standards, born as they were in a foment of creativity and reinvention for museums in the 70’s and 80’s, don’t come to be used as a tool to obstruct the changes that need to happen in the sector. Standards such as the new Museum Accreditation Scheme, which is soon to be released for sector consultation, must be useful, relevant and agile enough to ensure that they promote the interests of the sector and its audiences.

So, to conclude, I offer the my closing remarks from the talk to the West Midlands Museum Federation (which wasn’t nearly as good, by the way as Maurice Davies absolutely outstanding talk on his Sustainability work - of which more in a future post). As I say, I’d welcome any and all comments!

There are, it seems to me, two ways we can go from here, two paths we can take. One is to retreat, to enter hibernation and to wait for the sunshine to fall once again on the old way of doing things. A sunshine that may take a very long time to come, if it ever arrives.

The other is to take ownership of our destiny, positively and proactively, and to create a new narrative about how Collections can help stabilise a troubled society, how they can contribute to the process of rebuilding, how we can make ourselves more efficient and more open, and how we can deliver public value in the process.

So I’d invite you not to think about sustaining what is, but to embrace the process of change, to reimagine the future and help to create a new, clear and compelling narrative about the value of what we do and the wayw do it.

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’.

Roy Clare of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) was on top form as our keynote speaker in the morning. He spoke with conviction about the power and potential of partnerships and about the role of collections in communicating heritage with the public. The two standout lines for me were:

“Collections are not about heritage. They’re a way of looking into the future.” and

“We are entering the most challenging funding climate our generation has ever faced.”

These twin pillars represent both the opportunity and the challenge for our current generation - the role of collections as a real, vital part of social development has never been more important. On the other hand, we are going to have less money than ever before with which to achieve this potential.

Jason Webber of the Museum of London spoke about the experience of the Exploring 20th Century London project, and particularly of both the trials and tribulations of building a sucessful partnership across museums of different scales and resources.

I am on the Steering Group for Exploring and have seen at first hand the power of sharing resources in this way, but also the tremendous effort that has gone into keeping the show on the road. Jason also gave a much-appreciated nod to the Culture Grid as the underlying infrastructure for the project.

Sian Wynn-Jones from the BT Archives spoke next. Sian was the driving force behind the whole event, inspired partly by her work on the Connected Earth project. She spoke about the process of developing collaborative approaches to collections development, and of the process of building a consistent framework (matrix) for contemporary collecting across telecommunications.

Connected Earth is interesting in that it looks to a future in which collections development is not a solitary activity, carried out by each organisation individually, but rather something that is shared across a number of organisations, working strategically in partnership to extend their individual capablities.

Next, the irrepressible and inspiring Simon Floyd from Renaissance East spoke about SHARE. SHARE, if you aren’t familiar with it, is an ingenious way of tapping into the expertise latent in cultural organisations around the Eastern region. Essentially a kind of skills exchange, it enables people to access the skills of colleagues in other museums in return for sharing their own expertise.

SHARE shows how small, self-organising communities can socialise their expertise and build their own capacity by avoiding big strategic initiatives and going for simple, practical solutions on a regional and sub-regional basis.

After Simon, Liza Giffen of the University of Leeds Special Collections and Kirsty Shields of the M&S Archive spoke about the really remarkable collaboration between their two organisations, which has resulted in the development of a new joint storage and display facility for their collections.

Perhaps most striking, apart from their highly polished presentation, was a particular project which Kirsty highlighted concerning ‘Shrinkage’. ‘Shrinkage’ at M&S means waste, through loss or damage. When the company was looking for ways to reduce shrinkage, they looked to the archive. There, they found the company’s 1960’s Shrinkage policy. When the re-introduced this to the company in the 00’s, they managed to reduce waste by up to 40% across the M&S empire.

The M&S/Leeds project is a great example of two organisations across the public and private sectors sharing a common need, and managing to work together in a genuinely mutual and collaborative way to achieve a solution that was greater than either of them could have achieved on their own.

Tilly Blyth of the Science Museum gave a fascinating presentation of their work on using new technologies to promote collaboration and partnership through the Locating Communications Heritage project. Locating Communications Heritage uses the best of current mobile interfaces to present augmented reality views of locations, based on data drawn from multiple sources.

The project really underscored the idea that the future is likely to be built around consumer-centric platforms which emphasise the integrity of the user experience over the identity of the sources. It takes a big leap for organisations to forego their own identity like this in the name of better services.

A series of breakout sessions saw participants attend two out of four seminars:

• A session on what the new Collections Link can do for museum, archive and library people (due to launch at the end of this month)
• A session on the BT Telecommunications Wiki Thesaurus - a really nice platform crowdsourcing the development of a telecomms thesaurus
• A session from the University of the Arts, Lonfon on Knowledge Transfer and innovative collaborations
• A session on the Archives for the 21st Century Action Plan from the National Archives

After the breakouts, Anra Kennedy from Culture24 spoke about the utterly brilliant Caboodle project. Caboodle uses contemporary games design to provide an interface which lets kids curate their own collections online (I spent most of Saturday afternoon with my 5 year-old putting together the world’s best shell collection!).

Finally Almut Gruner from the Thackray Museum spoke about her wonderful Medicine at the Movies project, which put video production kit and facilities in the hands of punters and gave them the opportunity to make a series of short films making use of heritage collections.

All in all, a really fascinating day, albeit one scored with an undercurrent of concern at the forthcoming cash crisis and it’s implications for all of these projects. So what did we learn about what makes a successful partnership?

Well, that partnerships come in all shapes and sizes, but across all of the projects that we heard about, there were some features in common:

• A visionary individual or group of people willing to invest the time, energy and enthusiasm to drive the collaboration;
• A powerful will to make things happen, in spite of obstacles of time and money;
• A lack of resources leading to creative, lateral thinking and problem-solving;
• A ‘just do it’ attitude and a belief in the power of on-the-ground action over large-scale strategy

It sounds glib, but the most remarkable thing about the day’s proceedings were the people. All of the speakers had in common a charisma and a commitment to getting things done. I have to say, I can’t think of a more positive message as the cuts continue to hit the sector - that the things that will really move us forward are creative energy and commitment, rather than cash.

I can’t sign the day off without a note of thanks to the Collections Trust team, Eleanor Lovegrove, Laura Whitton, Tammy Lorimer and Magda Howlett, as well as the fantastic David Hay and Sian Wynn-Jones at BT for putting it all together. The event was filmed, so we’ll post the results on YouTube as soon as they are available!

Oh yes, and we launched a new business venture over lunch, but that is definitely another post!

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.

Digital, when invoked by policymakers, tends to concern the process of creating digital content (pictures and words) and delivering this to users. It gives rise to an ecology of product - Digital Asset Managment Systems, Digital Image Libraries -and exotic new areas of practice such as Digital Preservation and more outlandishly, Digital Curation.

But, whisper it, aren’t we all just, really, kind of, a little bit over Digital? Not in the sense that it doesn’t matter, of course it matters in a profound and fundamental way. But in the sense that the first wave of infatuation is over, and we’re starting to think about the post-Digital sector and what it means to be a truly hybrid service industry. An industry in which the digitality and physicality of different parts of our stuff, and different channels for delivering our services, are simply background facts of life for museums, archives and libraries.

Because, let’s face it, Digital hasn’t turned out to be the magic bullet. Yes, it has been transformative in many ways, but it turns out that many of the great imponderable problems of managing physical stuff (lack of clarity about core purpose, poor planning, confusion about consumer demand, acquisition beyond our means)  we have simply carried with us from the physical domain to the virtual one.

Digitisation, it has turned out, is acquisition with a plug. And yet, in the giddy thrill of our own little dot.culture bubble, we lost sight of the fact that all of this stuff we were acquiring would also need managing and yes, paying for. The skills we had, it transpires, are the skills we need. We just need to brush them off, dust them down and get over the idea that ‘Digital’ somehow equates to ‘Other’.

This line of thought has been prompted by two things.

Firstly, at a Museum Accreditation Scheme Strategy Group last week, we agreed that one of the most profound principles of Accreditation should be a kind of format-agnosticism. Not that we should refute the difference of Digital, but that we should treat these two imposters - physical and digital - just the same. That it should be a fundamental principle that the stuff of concern/interest to cultural institutions occupies a multiplicity of formats, and that with these formats come particular disciplines in terms of management, preservation and delivery. It is both exciting and challenging to think about how far the current generation of standards has to come in order to catch up with this basic principle.

Secondly, the brilliant Tony Butler’s equally brilliant article about ‘Museums in a No-Growth Economy’. Whatever the real economic realities of the next 2 years, the Realpolitik of a Recessionary economy demands a new vocabulary. And the new vocabulary of culture is sharing - mutualisation, shared services, shared infrastructure, less with less, simpler, smoother, easier. And alongside this, the idea of the hybrid organisation - something which has the features of a museum, an archive or a library (or all 3), but with a central value proposition that is at once both digital and physical.

All this coupled to the realisation that in 3 years time, people are highly unlikely to be talking about Digital. Project forward to a time when wireless is everywhere, copyright is a memory, phones are supercomputers and children are weaned by robots (well, not quite, but you get what I mean). It would be as anachronistic to think of something as ‘Digital’ , or to talk of ‘going online’, as it would be to look forward to a cocktail and a cigarette on an intercontinental flight.

So, here’s to post-Digital, hybrid culture! The real challeng, of course, is going to be thinking of the new hook, once the political willingness to spend money on digitisation has evaporated (newsflash, it’s gone already). What is the new political impetus for investing in culture going to look like? Could it, could it possibly, just be good old, old-fashioned enjoyement, quality, distinctiveness and meaningful experiences delivered through whatever channel is most appropriate? This correspondent, for one, certainly hopes so.