OpenCulture

Funding. It’s a funny old word, which has somehow become woven into the fabric of the UK culture sector, carrying with it a set of behaviours, values and models which are seldom tested. There are funders, and there are the funded. There are funding programmes, grants, calls for applications, initiatives and priorities. We have industrialised the process of distributing public and private money to achieve particular purposes. But what purposes? And is this really the best way to do it? Read the rest of this entry »

OK, so it’s been a little while since I’ve been able to update you about the development of our Digital Agency (see previous post on this topic), but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy!

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.

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As I may have mentioned before, the next few years look set to be challenging for museums. We don’t yet know what proportion of the impending public sector spending cuts will fall on museums. But we do know that the cuts will come, and with them a different way of working for museums and museum professionals across the country.

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.

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I was lucky enough to be invited to speak yesterday at the West Midlands Museums Federation event on A Sustainable Future? It was interesting, partly because it has coincided with a real rush of Green Museum events and discussions elsewhere this week, and partly because I think that some of the messages coming out of yesterday have a much deeper resonance across the rest of the sector.

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.

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Last Friday, the Collections Trust and BT Archives held a joint event at the BT Auditorium in the heart of the City. The theme was ‘Connecting Collections: Successful Partnership working across the heritage sector’ and the aim of the day was to look at some of the most interesting current examples of partnership working and see what makes them tick.

As we move through what is likely to be a very challenging time for UK Culture, the principle of partnership - and particularly of partnerships which extend beyond the traditional museum/museum collaboration - is becoming increasingly important. But what makes a successful partnership? Can they be created, or do they simply arise by happy coincidence? The answer, it seems, is ‘a bit of both’.

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Every once in a while, things shift imperceptibly but fundamentally on their axis. Devout views, long-held, become the laughable fancies of childish innocence. Entrenched positions become blurred as tectonic plates beneath them start to grind into motion. And so it is, it seems, with ‘Digital’.

Digital. The banner under which museums, libraries and archives unite. The ultimate priority of Governments across the Western world. The word has become axiomatic - ‘Digital Britain’, ‘Digital Economy Bill’, ‘Digital Culture’. But like all axioms, it is ultimately meaningless. Or at least, it means so many things that it has lost its way in a semantic miasma.

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I have recently been assessing a number of applications on behalf of a UK funder. The purpose of the funding programme is to support innovative research into different technologies with potential application to Collections Management.

As I work my way through the piles of papers, business cases and ‘aspirational’ timetlines I find myself becoming both increasingly excited and increasngly concerned.

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

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So, if today’s reaction on Twitter is anything to go by, it appears that people are interested in following the development of the Collections Trust’s latest venture as it comes together over the next 12 months. We’ll be announcing a new Twitter account for this project shortly and in the meantime, we’ll be using this blog to keep track of things.

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Wikipedia describes itself as a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. With over 14 million articles (of which some 3.1m are in English) it is used by people all over the world as a source of reference, a place to share knowledge, and sometimes as a source of amusement.

Anyone responsible for managing a public-facing website in the past 5 years will have watched the proportion of hits originating from Wikipedia gradually creep up alongside the all-encompassing Google clickthroughs. The reason for this is that Wikipedia has achieved that magical online double-whammy of combining breadth with market-share, and it shows no sign of diminishing (recent news stories notwithstanding!).

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