Thanks Nick - this is a quick and easy tool to use and provides a useful snapshot of where an organisation is at any given time.
I guess it would be hard to express with this tool but I would be interested to know, for instance, the degree of autonomy of organisations or departments in developing digital projects.
For instance, where I work we score 5 for Systems as part of a corporate council wide network though I assume we would have a much less say (i.e. none at all!) in how this is administered when compared with a similarly scoring organisation that can commission and design its own IT systems.
Also ENUMERATE sounds like a very positive step to me.
Perry
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nick Poole
Sent: 17 July 2013 11:34
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Digital Trends in Museums 2013 presentation
Dear Perry (and MCG colleagues),
Apologies for the prolonged delay in coming back to you about this, but I just wanted to let you know that the full Excel version of the free 'Digital Benchmarks for Museums' tool is now up on Collections Link at http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/discover/sustaining-digital/1608-digital-benchmarks-for-the-culture-sector.
To set this in context - the Collections Trust has been working on a project called ENUMERATE (www.enumerate.eu), which is about creating statistical intelligence about digitisation and digital preservation in Europe's GLAM sector. As part of the survey work, we found that a consistent picture was emerging about how cultural organisations are integrating digital activity across all areas of service provision.
In response to these findings, we wanted to develop a framework for supporting organisations through their digital development. A key step in this process is to work out roughly where a museum is at in terms of adopting technology and digital engagement. Hence the Benchmarks tool.
We will be doing more work to roll this out over the next few months, but in essence the idea is to give museums a self-assessment tool which allows them to reflect on how digital is integrated into their work. We hope people might use it as an internal training or development tool, or even just at a staff meeting.
The visualisations which the tool generates should give museums a useful way of communicating both what they have achieved and areas in which they might wish to prioritise.
Our consultation with museums did highlight two drawbacks with the tool, which we hope to find a way of addressing in future iterations:
1. The implication of the visualisation is that every museum should aspire to fill in all of the chart. Of course, not all of it may be relevant or achievable, depending on the circumstances of the individual museum, its collections, resources and audience. The important thing is to have established a view on the integration of digital into your work that is proportionate to the nature of the organisation. We hope to address this through some form of weighting in future, but are still working on this.
2. There may well be areas we haven't looked at which ought to form part of an integrated approach. Indeed, for example, 'learning and education' isn't there as a set of range statements. We had to start somewhere, but we would welcome views on how to extend the set of range-statements to make the picture more complete.
I really hope that people will download and use the tool, and we will be promoting it further as part of the integrated set of Digital support services we offer (including the more recent work on Digital Asset Management in museums). I would welcome all thoughts and feedback on how it works!
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 Bonewell, Perry
Sent: 07 June 2013 08:56
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Digital Trends in Museums 2013 presentation
A great set of slides.
I hope I'm not being thick here but I'm interested in the digital benchmarks tool. As far as I can tell the presentation only gives an example of how to score for Strategy.
Is there anything that explains the tool in more detail?
Cheers
Perry
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nick Poole
Sent: 06 June 2013 16:12
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Digital Trends in Museums 2013 presentation
Dear Robert,
Many thanks for your response. As ever, you raise a very useful and interesting point!
To me, the greatest strength of digital content is also one of its most significant challenges - which is its essential non-linearity. The power of the hyperlink opens up the capability for everything to connect to everything else. This unlocks tremendous opportunities to create new relationships between bodies of knowledge, but it creates an immense challenge in creating coherent experiences for users.
A book is a linear and bounded object. You open it, and in the process you accept the rules of engagement - pages are (generally) in a numbered sequence. The knowledge is (generally) sequential and incremental. The knowledge contained in the book is the knowledge contained in the book and once it is imprinted on the page, it doesn't change.
These rules of engagement do not exist in a digital context, and to my mind most efforts to create structured virtual experiences are variations on the theme of trying to create boundaries and interfaces which in some senses constrain the freedom of the format but which do so to make the experience more coherent for the user. At one end of this might be, for example, a wholly constrained gallery interactive at the other end might be something like Google's 'Exquisite Forest' (http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-exquisite-forest).
This is important for museums in particular because so much of the 'unspoken' value and impact of a museum experience resides in the nature of the interaction and the way that it is bounded by an existing way of behaving. In essence, when people walk into our museums, they are accepting a particular type of stylised experience - walk here, look at that, touch this, learn that - within which we can create coherent narratives about history.
Museum theorists will, I am sure, argue endlessly about how *valid* those narratives are (and the impression of linearity and progression they give), particularly given their slightly mono-cultural nature, but I have always been happy to accept that our professional deontology means that even if not perfect, our narratives strive for balance.
I was very struck by Mike Edson's recent presentation on 'Scale, Scope and Speed' at the GLAM WIKI conference at the British Library. One of his postulates is that things which are unbounded (like a wiki) scale much better than things which are bounded. I am not sure that museums are at liberty to create completely unbounded/dynamic experiences because trust and authority are such a key component of our social function, and they depend to some extent on constraint.
The capability of technology has undoubtedly outstripped our understanding of how best to deploy it, but I think that's ok. I think the tremendous potential here is to be able to use the flexibility of digital content to create many beautiful things from the same body of knowledge, each of which will be bounded in its own particular way. Hence, technology allows us to make beautiful books, beautiful experiences, beautiful apps, beautiful websites and beautiful products in museum shops, all from the same material.
In other words, I'm not sure the goal is to find a way of using digital to create an alternate that is as coherent and bounded as a book, but to open up the capability of museums to create books and a potentially infinite range of other outputs as well, each of which serves its own potential use case.
I'll stop there I think!
All best,
Nick
Nick Poole
Chief Executive Officer
Collections Trust
2-3 July 2013, The Kia Oval
www.openculture2013.org.uk
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bud Robert
Sent: 06 June 2013 15:33
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Digital Trends in Museums 2013 presentation
To me as a curator, and I think to several others of my colleagues the central question remains, how can one create a real work of art analoguous to the wonders of a book in a previous age using a combination of digital resources and textual interpretation. The book was essentially a text based medium and the coffee-table book relied on images of beautiful things. The digital media enable the really smart and illuminating cross-relationships of different digital things and text as well. With the possibility of user engagement. That makes the museum a much more central to the new media but also raises the challenge of how one creates the compelling product.
Dr Robert Bud
Sarton Professor, 2012-2013, University of Ghent Keeper of Science and Medicine The Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD
________________________________
From: Museums Computer Group on behalf of Nick Poole
Sent: Thu 06/06/2013 14:28
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Digital Trends in Museums 2013 presentation
Dear colleague,
I thought you might be interested in a new presentation on 'Digital Trends in UK Museums 2013' which we have just posted to Slideshare - http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/discover/sustaining-digital/1938-digit
al-trends-in-museums-2013.
The presentation was developed for a meeting with Oxford ASPIRE, and we would really welcome your views and comments. Have we captured the main current issues? What have we missed?
Please tell us what you think using the comments on the page!
With best regards,
Nick
Nick Poole
Chief Executive Officer
Collections Trust
2-3 July 2013, The Kia Oval
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