Hello all,

I am notifying you of a really interesting event coming up in Cambridge on the 28th and 29th of November.

In the evening on the 28th Jane Alexander from the Cleveland Museum of Art will be giving a pre-conferece key-note discussing the work of Gallery One and how the CMA's mobile strategy fits into the wider picture of R&D around mobile devices and cultural collections. This will be followed by a reception in the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology.

The conference on the 29th (see further details below and online) will draw together AHRC-funded research in Cambridge exploring the challenges and possibilities for making cultural collections mobile for which output will be available online towards the end of the year. Alongside Jane Alexander, we have an impressive line-up to speak on the day with opportunity for discussion, so we welcome your attendance too.

Both events are free, however spaces will be limited, so please book soon by visiting the conference web site: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/25206.

Regards,
Carl.

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Making Cultural Heritage Mobile: Challenges and Possibilities

The growth of mobile internet access coupled with advances in technologies for aggregating and searching collections data has opened important debates about how mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets might be used to enrich the way we engage with cultural information.

Museums, galleries, libraries and archives are among the key cultural institutions grappling with the legal and technical challenges of balancing visitors’ changing expectations with creators’ and publishers’ rights and their own well-established practices in cultural information management, following the adoption of digital collections management systems.

At present, the UK museum sector is experiencing a digital Research and Development phase with numerous development programmes underway exploring the role of smartphones and tablets inside and outside cultural venues. Similarly projects supporting the aggregation of collections data at local, national and European level have received significant funding in recent years.

This conference will bring together experts from the UK and the US engaged with the use of mobile devices in their respective cultural sectors to address questions in three key areas:

·  What is the potential for experiential-led use of mobile devices in museums and galleries, and what practical elements are necessary for such ventures to succeed?

·  What are the key legal issues pertaining to both early stages of digitization projects (eg rights clearance, orphan works) and exploitation of digitized content (eg licensing models, exploitation strategies) and to what extent are any of these issues specific to mobile devices?

·  What are the challenges and possibilities opened up by the combination of collections across different institutions and how is smartphone access to cultural information challenged by the quantitative nature of aggregated collections?

The conference will open with a key-note lecture by Jane Alexander of the Cleveland Museum of Art at 5.30pm on Thursday 28 November, followed by a full day of panels and round-table discussion starting with a key-note from Andrew Lewis on Friday 29 November.

Conference speakers include:

	• Jane Alexander (Director of Information Management and Technology Services, The Cleveland Museum of Art)
	• Andrew Lewis (Digital Content Delivery Manager, Victoria and Albert Museum)
	• Catherine Draycott (Head, Wellcome Images)
	• Loic Tallon (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
	• Tim Knox (Director, Fitzwilliam Museum)
	• Ross Parry (Senior Lecturer in digitisation, web, mobile and in-gallery interactivity, University of Leicester)
	• Ben Templeton (Creative Director, Thought Den Ltd)
	• Eleonora Rosati (Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, University of Cambridge)
	• Carl Hogsden (CRASSH & Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
	• Jonathan Griffiths (Reader in Intellectual Property, Queen Mary, University of London)
	• Rosie Peobright (Creative Director, Splash and Ripple)

The lecture and conference are free to attend and open to all, but spaces at the conference are limited so pre-registration is required. Please visit the conference web site to book:
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/25206

Mobile Collections is a Research Project based at CRASSH funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) with Creative Economy Knowledge Exchange funding. 

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Carl Hogsden
Research Associate
University of Cambridge
[log in to unmask]  

Postdoc Fellowship - Creative Economy Knowledge Exchange
Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Alison Richard Building -- 7 West Road -- Cambridge -- CB3 9DT

Technical Lead - Digital R&D
Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology
Downing Street -- Cambridge -- CB2 3DZ

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