OpenCulture

These are serious times. And it is time to be serious.

The events of recent months, and the cuts that are still to come, are not a temporary aberration. This is not a bump in the road. Museums are entering a new era. We are a country in crisis. A country at war. We have a Coalition that does not fundamentally believe that culture should be funded by the taxpayer. This is not a question of sitting it out, of waiting for the sun to shine again. Read the rest of this entry »

The Spending Review announcement of October 20th was characterised by an oddly short-term quality. Having stirred up a foment of public support for cuts to public services, and generated an atmosphere of fear through a combination of strategic slash’n'burn (BECTA, anyone?) and wildly varying numbers (25%, 40%, higher, lower!) the end result was a careful blend of ‘bad, but not as bad as we expected’. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great things about my job is that I get to spend time working across museums, archives and libraries. I have recently been invited by 3 different organisations, broadly relating to each sector, to participate in planning days, all of which included a PEST (Political Economic, Social, Technological) analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

The Collections Trust has announced OpenCulture 2011 - a 2-day Collections Management event for the UK and international community.

The first international event to focus on current and next-generation practice in Collections Management, OpenCulture 2011 features a Great Collections Management Exhibition and Trade Fair and a conference addressing key themes in Collections policy and practice, including:

• The Strategic Role of Collections
• Next-generation Collections Management
• Collections Management and the End-user

Delegate fees start from as little at £66 plus VAT and there are attractive earlybird discounts for people registering before December 2010.

Find out more about this exciting event and register online at http://www.openculture2011.org.uk

The Museums Association. To some it is a rock, a beacon, a standard-bearer for all museums, the original and best of the national professional associations. To others it is capricious, obscure and, to the technologists among us, just a bit weird. So which is it? And why should we all love the MA? Read the rest of this entry »

The sad news of the proposed closure of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), UK Film Council and Advisory Council on Libraries is the opening salvo in a battle that promises to be both bloody and strangely one-sided. The Treasury has brilliantly engineered public support for a Spending Review which will most likely change the entire landscape of museum, library and archive service provision and there is little hope looking either to the general public or to the media for support in the coming months.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

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

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

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

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

Members join the Council in order to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was recently lucky enough to be one of four speakers invited to address the final day of the Leiecester University School of Museum Studies Summer School in New Media.

I was asked to speak on the subject of the ‘Future of Collections’, alongside Stuart Davies, consultant and president of the Museums Association (on the Future of the Profession), Nigel Llwellyn of Tate (on the Future of Research) and the splendid Graham Howard of System Simulation (on the Future of Design). Read the rest of this entry »

In June 2011, the Collections Trust will be holding an international conference to explore and progress the themes of OpenCulture. Our aim is to work with the International Council of Museums to bring together some of the world’s leading thinkers about the arts and culture and to explore the shape of cultural services in the years ahead. Read the rest of this entry »