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Colleagues As an attendee of the last night's seminar and a member of a NOF project back in the "early naughties" I feel Carole and Roy's guarded comments about mass digitisation were understandable. The failure of some NOF projects and that includes the one I was involved with (East of England Sense of Place) was that it geared to doing mass digitisation, which it did very well, but little or no thought was given to making it accessible or, and this is the killer, sustainable. There's no point in digitisation tens of thousands of objects or archives if no one can access them. It would be interesting to see how many digital images saved on CDs or DVDs from NOF projects have now been lost due to physical deterioration, a significant portion I bet (that's part of the sustainability issue), let alone readable images residing on moribund websites. I suppose we were a bit lucky 10 years ago when mass digitisation was fine for funders, 10 years earlier mass documentation was a sure fire winner to get funds, and before that the Manpower's scheme was responsible for kick starting a lot of museums with grants, all good stuff but regrettably history now. As for HLF If you work with them for a length of time it becomes clear that the amount of funds they give is linked to the usage of the heritage being funded. E.g. HLF won't give you £1M if you only expect to have 10,000 extra users/participants a year, that's true for a new visitor centre, digital archive or community history project. They may give you £50,000 but in these Olympically stringent times that's all they can afford. I am afraid its down to footfall or clicks, they won't say that but that's the yardstick. Putting this into context MLA is in a general mood of retrenchment (as is HLF), which is not good, especially if you are small organisation that doesn't have a national profile, smaller local grants have been axed, and the long heralded announcement of £1M grants scheme pa, is actually rather small for England, and I am not sure how a national body like MLA in Brum will be able to get these funds to innovative small organisations, it was hard enough when there were regional MLAs! Regrettably the talk, which incidentally was titled Curation in the C21th, did not really discuss these matters and was frankly a little disappointing bar some good questions at the end, mind the wine and company afterwards was excellent! Must dash I've got some collections to catalogue and digitise. Stephen Lowy Deputy Head of Collections & Principal Community Curator Hampshire Museums & Archives Service Chilcomb House, Winchester Hampshire, SO23 8RD [log in to unmask] Tel: 01962 826717 HSPN: (8)327 6717 Explore Hampshire Museums In May.. www.museummayhem.co.uk/ -----Original Message----- From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bridget McKenzie Sent: 01 May 2008 13:05 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: 21st Century digital curation I just posted this on my blog. Any advances on my suggestions about what such lead bodies should be doing to invest in 21st century digital curation? "I went to a seminar at UCL last night, to hear Roy Clare, CEO of the MLA and Carole Souter, CEO of HLF talking about the future, the funding context and how their respective bodies will contribute to curation in the 21st Century. I'm not going to supply a full transcript of the event, but have picked up a key issue about digital strategy. Carole Souter insisted that the HLF would not fund digitisation (only 'real people doing real things'). She conceded that there could be some catchy, engaging digital culture projects, for example the Tate's campaign inviting the public to buy a brushstroke of a painting. A questioner asked 'Call me naive, but surely if digitisation is what we are crying out for, why do you make these restrictions?' The response was 'We're getting tough with people. You have to look at the breadth of our aims. We're an additional funder, not a funder of core activities. If you tell us that 200,000 more people are going to look at your website because of it, well, so what? How do you know they have really been engaged?' So, her suggestion was that if you are going to include digitisation into an HLF bid, it would have to involve people in specific thematic projects of local interest. Roy Clare highlighted the NOF Digitise project as an example of where we went wrong in assuming that mass digitisation and online publishing of collections would be engaging. He said that when he (when at the National Maritime Museum) and partners were planning Port Cities http://www.portcities.org.uk/: 'Did we think about how anybody would ever find it? How they would engage with it?' His response seemed to suggest that we shouldn't do digitisation because these projects were difficult to market. However, my argument would be that the NOF projects are an example of the limited thematic trap that the HLF approach to digital culture encourages. The Port Cities project may not be as successful as it could have been precisely because they made too much effort to define a theme, to define a collaboration between several museums, to focus on particular markets and so on. What is needed is a flexible approach to digitisation that enables collection items to be presented in multiple thematic, social, institutional and technological contexts and to be interpreted in multiple ways and combined with other collections in multiple ways. Investment in a) the continuation of mass digitisation and b) in incubating approaches to tagging, indexing, syndicating etc are what we need now, and we should see this being championed as the core of 21st Century Curation by bodies such as MLA and HLF." ************************************************** For mcg information and to manage your subscription to the list, visit the website at http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk ************************************************** ************************************************** For mcg information and to manage your subscription to the list, visit the website at http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk **************************************************