>>On Behalf Of Nick Poole
>> it really comes down to whether your organisation has embraced the marketing, engagement and professional (internally and externally) benefit of being open.
I must admit it still seems to me that the main argument is "its a good thing" and that hasn't won funding/resourcing arguments here for a long time.
In a situation where our government funding has been cut by 35% over the last three years and our targets include covering operating costs (for our collections at least) through earned income. The questions that I will be asked are "will this bring more people to our sites?" (and in particular the sites where we charge and entry fee), "will this incease sales of our images and publications?" and "will it reduce our operating costs?". At the moment in terms of collections information the answers are "no", "no" and "it may even incease them" (e.g. IT support for new systems).
There are arguments like increasing use of our stored collections by researchers which will be listened to sympathetically but they won't get treated with priority against projects which can answer yes to one or more of those questions.
>>on behalf of; Mike Ellis
>> rather than - for instance - media files, promotional material, exhibition dates, etc.
If you ask the same questions about opening hours and events the answers become "yes", "possibly" and "probably".
Slightly off topic but a related issue in my world is commercial licencing/use. At the moment this generates non-trivial amounts of income e.g. http://www.littlegreene.com/paint/collection/colours-of-england (paint), http://www.littlegreene.com/wallpaper/collection/london-wallpapers (wallpaper), and beds http://www.andsotobed.co.uk/beds/wooden-beds/natural-finish/brodsworth-bed-in-sienna-mahogany-2.html. Any suggestion that information about our collections is licenced to commercial organisations without us getting a cut is unlikely to get much support.
In practice I find that COPE as a strategy is wonderful in theory but breaks down in practice. Here the curators (and conservators) create most of the data, and as we move towards making our collections data available on line the curators want to re-write descriptions and notes for the intended audience (up till now they have understood the audience of the Collections Management System to be internal colleagues). The same is true of exhibition labels and panels: the label for a painting when it is in an exhibition on slavery will not be the same as when it is in an exhibition on war in the country house. Although I am slowly persuading them to store the facts and the links in our Collections Management System, this is an extra overhead for them, they will have written a piece of coherent text and then need to separate out information about people, events and the object into different fields and authorities. While having that information available in the future will mean that they (or future colleagues) don't have to redo the research, there is no short cut way of generating a coherent piece of text for the next exhibition.
Trevor Reynolds
Collections Registrar, English Heritage
tel: +44 (0) 1904 601905. 37 Tanner Row, York, YO1 6WP
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Portico: your gateway to information on sites in the National Heritage Collection; have a look and tell us what you think.
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/archives-and-collections/portico/
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