Dear colleagues,
Thanks, Sarah, for these really useful comments. We will take them into
account when collating the overall responses.
It is a real Catch-22 situation. This has always been a developmental
effort - I have been at pains to point out that Culture Grid, and indeed
putting collections online, ought to be a logical sequitur from the past
30 years or so of standardisation, digitisation and encoding of
knowledge about collections, which has happened primarily through
SPECTRUM and more recently through parallel developments in Digital and
other forms of Asset Management.
On the other hand, we live in an age in which funders want to fund
additionality rather than 'core' activity. By this logic, the long-term
development of museums to the point at which they are ready and able to
engage with these secondary platforms and initiatives is their own
business, not the business of funders.
Nobody is downplaying the developmental part of the process, but in the
current funding climate in the UK, the project and platform-based
interface layer is growing much faster than the underlying developmental
layer. Indeed, you could argue that the underlying core part of museums
is atrophying as capital budgets decline, while the options for new
platforms and interfaces is accelerating.
In practice this leads to a hollowing-out of the overall proposition -
the machinery for online, social and mobile mass-distribution and
engagement is there, but in the absence of investment there'll be no
more raw material or underlying asset management to feed it. We've seen
this almost everywhere in the UK in the loss of key staff and with them
the expert knowledge which is the key to creating great experiences. As
you say, invoking the crowd to resolve this capacity-and-content gap
only gets you part of the way - because the resulting material often
still needs mediation and intervention prior to publication.
In the absence of a magic money wand (or, more realistically, a
joined-up national strategy which factors in core developmental funding
alongside strategic 'challenge' funding), we can only keep plugging away
at the existing approach, which is to promote standards, workflows and
automation - which is why these have been the focus of SPECTRUM
(http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/spectrum) and SPECTRUM Digital Asset
Management
(http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/spectrum/spectrum-digital-asset-mana
gement) for the past 4-5 years. That way, when people in museums *do*
have time and money to invest, we can try and ensure that their
investment represents a further step in the right overall direction -
which includes the ability to participate in all of these distributed
content platforms.
Culture Grid was only ever meant to be one option to surface the output
of a presumed development in museums. I completely accept the challenge
that if we neglect that part - the actual development support of museums
in opening up collections - then we can't be surprised if there's less
material to surface, nor that it takes people longer to get to the point
where this is a valuable exercise!
All best,
Nick
Nick Poole
Chief Executive Officer
Collections Trust
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Tony Crockford
Sent: 11 November 2014 12:43
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] Consultation over the development of the Culture Grid
> On 11 Nov 2014, at 12:18, Sarah Saunders <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>
> The story starts in the individual museums and they need help
organising their knowledge and assets in tandem with launching exciting
web and mobile based access projects.
+1
Well said Sarah.
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