Hi Kate,
I really enjoyed your reply. I think it is spot on.
I was going to respond in a detailed way to the assumptions made from the very limited survey evidence and some of the responses to them on here, then sighed, reminding myself that many museums who didn’t know about the survey, that don’t know about MCG and maybe even Nesta are still doing great digital things and really know and understand their digital communities.
Small museums shouldn’t be assumed to be less able - where is the evidence for this? An absence of personnel does not equal an absence of skill. There may be large numbers of people in large museums whose digital literacy levels are low and therefore reliant on one or few digital postholders—might this distort a picture too?
For those of you who are quiet on here, just keep up the good work you’re already doing.
This report is already today’s chip paper.
😂
Tehmina Goskar (Non-specific artform—genuine label given to me by ACE)
@tehm
On 3 Oct 2017, at 10:38, greenland ship <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Firstly, am I having a particularly dim morning, or have some of the messages posted here failed to turn up on the Jiscmail archive? I can't see any called Nesta Digital Culture survey there, although more recent message sets are up.
I've also been going through the stats on the Nesta survey (for the NMDC newsletter), though admittedly not digging into the core, and being a bit led by the headline narrative of 'museums doing 'less well' than the rest of the arts sector, except rather obviously on archiving. I think Mia's question is a really good one:
"Do the large numbers of less digitally enabled small museums distort or reflect the picture of the sector?"
-- it's my impression that you're more likely to get a just-surviving museum, run by few or no staff and volunteers hanging on than an arts organisation in a similar situation. But then are such institutions really likely to be filling in Nesta's survey? Only 200 museums filled this in, and I'm not sure how representative they are, or if self-selecting. There's also the truth that a museum can be doing useful stuff (looking after the collections) when there's a lull in the footfall, more than an arts space, so there's more of a drive in the rest of the sector to invest whatever resources there are in marketing.
This relates too to another recent inconclusive exchange: Ed Vaizey said museums were miles behind the tech sector for innovation, and that if anyone made him a museum director, he'd install an exciting tech startup there to add a bit of rocket fuel:
http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2017/09/12/ed-vaizey-the-tech-revolution-barely-touching-the-world-culture-and-it-should-be
This aroused the ire of Jim from MuseumNext (who I'm sure is much more informed than me about the best things going on) who said that museums were doing loads of creative stuff that Ed V had missed entirely, and that he was wrong. But I wonder again if this simply comes down to size of institution - whether you're looking through the distorting lens of people-who-can-afford-Museum-Next, vs a museum wondering how it's going to muddle through with declining budgets. The Nesta stats show huge and rather impressive strides by large museums (40% > 73% using digital centrally in business models in just four years) - given the resources, there's every sign of the sector being fast to learn and innovate.
Kate
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