A Definition of Memory

Jan Assmann:

Memory is knowledge with an identity-index, it is knowledge about oneself, that is, one’s own diachronic identity, be it as an individual or as a member of a family, a generation, a community, a nation, or a cultural and religious tradition (p. 114).

Digital Culture: How Arts and Cultural Organisations in England use Technology

Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Nesta have commissioned independent research agency MTM to track the use of digital technology by arts and cultural organisations in England between 2013 and 2015.

Download the full report or the report summary here:

http://native.artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/DigitalCulture_FullReport.pdf

http://native.artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/DigitalCulture_Summary.pdf

Results are now available from the first year survey of 891 arts and cultural organisations, including digital activities, barriers, enablers and impacts. It shows that arts and cultural organisations have transformed their marketing and operations through digital technology, with many reaching bigger and more diverse audiences than ever before. They are also seeing major benefits for creation and distribution, whilst in other areas like new revenue generation, important opportunities remain.

Further details can be found here:

http://www.museumsassociation.org/comment/17012014-mia-ridge-museums-need-to-explode-the-myth-that-they-are-technologically-backward

Museums on the Web 2013 (MCG)

The Museums Computer Group’s 2013 Museums on the Web conference was held at Tate Modern on 15 November 2013. The theme for UKMW13 was ‘Power to the People’. Links, photos, slides and further information are available at: http://bit.ly/1hi19NB

Time		Session		Speakers
9.30		Registration. Tea and coffee sponsored by Squiz. Game: ‘Curate-a-Fact’ begins.
10:00-10.20		Chair’s welcome, venue welcome and sponsor welcome		Mia Ridge, MCG John Stack, Tate Bert Degenhart Drenth, AdLib
10.20-10.50		Opening Keynote Lessons the Guardian has learnt about community engagement online		Hannah Freeman, Guardian Community coordinator for culture
10.50-11.20		Tea and coffee break, sponsored by Squiz.
11.20-12.20		Learn and play (inside and outside the organisation) Chair: Andrew Lewis, V&A
		First Rule: Talking about Computer Club		Jesse Alter and Simon Delafond, Imperial War Museums (IWM)
		The power of Flickr Commons		Nicole Cama, Australian National Maritime Museum
		Ten Most Wanted: Hunting down missing information about cultural artefacts		Marcus Winter, University of Brighton; Susan Lambert, Arts University Bournemouth; Phil Blume, Adaptive Technologies
12.20-12:50		MCG Annual General Meeting
12:50-1:50		Lunch break, sponsored by Stickyworld
1:50-2:20		Lightning talks Chair: Irida Ntalla
		Jane Finnis, Culture24 – Let’s Get Real. James Morley- GathrIt, a prototype toolset to enable discovery, crowdsourcing and sharing across cultural collections Sarah Saunders, Electric Lane- Attribution – the scandal of lost images on the web Marcus Winter, University of Brighton- Social Object Labels Franziska Mucha, Historisches Museum Frankfurt – Frankfurt Now! an interactive city mode
2:30-3:10		Grassroots meets technology Chair: Anra Kennedy
		Using algorithms and people to put a large radio archive on the web		Tristan Ferne, BBC Research & Development
		‘A great place: a lawless hole with rancid drinks and reckless drunks…’ Multiple voices, multiple memories: Public history-making and activist archivism in online popular music archives.		Paul Long, Birmingham Music Archive / Birmingham City University
3:10-3:40		Tea and coffee break, sponsored by Squiz
3:40-4:40		Communities and citizen history Chair: Juno Rae, Museum of London
		Crowdsourcing a Community Collection (and the After Effects)		Kate Lindsay, Alun Edwards & Ylva Berglund-Prytz, University of Oxford
		IT buddies, virtual volunteers and super-users: Building an online community for Britain from Above		Sandra Brauer, English Heritage
		Diaries of the First World War: Citizen history on the Western Front		Jim O’Donnell (Oxford University)
4.50-5.20		Closing Keynote		Michael John Gorman, Science Gallery
5:20-5:30		Wrap-up and close

BBC signs Memoranda of Understanding with Europeana, ODI, OKFN & Mozilla

The BBC has signed Memoranda of Understanding with the Europeana Foundation, the Open Data Institute, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation to enable them to work together on common priorities including the publication of open data and the promotion of open standards in web development. This is an important step in 'mainstreaming' the role of cultural heritage organisations in publishing open data from their collections, and provides an opportunity to bring collections-related content and information to a far wider audience. For further information, see the Telegraph article on the announcement:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10472903/BBC-throws-weight-behind-open-data-movement.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=market+watch

MLAs interested in sharing their collections information as open data, and making it available to Europeana, should do this through the Culture Grid, which is maintained by Knowledge Integration Ltd on behalf of the Collections Trust.

Sharing data through the Culture Grid involves taking structured data and images from collections systems or accessing an online platform for direct entry. They can then be shared with Europeana via a periodic harvest. Culture Grid also provides access to a range of tools and widgets such as a collections search box generator which can be hosted on organisations' websites.

All data shared with Europeana is shared under the Europeana Data Exchange Agreement (http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/data-exchange-agreement), which permits Europeana to share it under a CC0 license.

Collections Trust are also currently working with a group of software providers under the SPECTRUM Partners Scheme to embed the capability to share data quickly and easily with Europeana into Collections Management Systems (as part of the Europeana Inside project - www.europeanainside.eu).

Measuring the Value of Culture

Measuring the value of culture: a report to the Department for Culture Media and Sport was written by Dr David O’Brien (Leeds Metropolitan University), who carried out a 6-month fellowship, jointly-funded by AHRC, ESRC and DCMS, from April to October 2010.

The report considers several solutions to the problem of how to value culture, giving an overview of techniques from environmental and health economics, arts and humanities research and recent studies on subjective wellbeing. Overall the report concludes that, in the context of HM Treasury’s Green Book, the economic valuation techniques supported by the Green Book should be used by the cultural sector when articulating its value to central government.

In light of this conclusion the report makes three specific recommendations for DCMS and the sector:

* DCMS, in consultation with the cultural sector, should create clear guidance on how to use the economic valuation (rather than economic impact) techniques already deployed across central government and recommended by HM Treasury.
* DCMS should develop closer links with academics working in the area of cultural economics, to use existing and future studies as best practice guidance on the use of economic valuation for the cultural sector.
* DCMS should use existing work in this area to explore the possibility of developing a multi-criteria analysis for cultural decisions, of the type recommended in DCLG’s Multi-criteria Analysis: a manual.

The report can be viewed here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/measuring-the-value-of-culture-a-report-to-the-department-for-culture-media-and-sport

Collections for the Future - Hidden Histories

When it was published in 2005, Collections for the Future aimed to reinvigorate the debate about museum collections and to move it further up the policy agenda. It set out suggestions and recommendations for ways that museums could improve engagement with museum collections and the ideas associated with them: how they could make their collections more dynamic by revisiting approaches to acquisitions, disposal and collections mobility; and how they could work together to share knowledge and develop museum professionals for the future.

Much has changed in the time since the report was published and so in July 2007 the MA published Making Collections Effective, an update to the original Collections for the Future report. Links to each of the reports can be found below.

Collections for the Future report: http://www.museumsassociation.org/download?id=11121

Making Collections Effective report: http://www.museumsassociation.org/download?id=14112

The collections for the Future Report includes references to the hidden histories initiative, stating that:

The MA considers the hidden histories approach to be an important way forward, and will look for ways to support and encourage it. 

New intellectual approaches like these invigorate collections, and museums have a responsibility to be open to all alternative perspectives. And yet it has become clear from the inquiry that the extent to which museums can or should share control over the meaning of objects remains a highly contentious issue, although the debate around the question is still oddly under-developed. 

On one hand, it is an established intellectual orthodoxy that audiences always play an active role in making meaning; meaning is not determined by the author or producer. Furthermore, today’s museum users are not used to passively accepting advice and information from experts; they expect to have their opinions and experiences valued and taken seriously. They may also expect that services will be tailored to their individual needs and interests. Accordingly, some respondents to the consultation advocated a radical abdication of power by museums in this area. If collections are public, they argue, so should be their interpretation; museums need to stand back and stop being overly protective of their intellectual territory. 

Other respondents were keen to stress that museums are valued and trusted as authoritative sources of information, and that they should not risk compromising this by taking overtly post-modern approaches or ducking out of offering information and opinion altogether. Visitors may in fact increasingly value the kind of authoritative information that museums can provide, precisely because we live in a world where there is such a proliferation of information. Museums also need to be clear that they are not ideologically neutral spaces; visitors may value clear advocacy of points of view – a danger of ‘balanced’ interpretation is that museums shy away from criticism, challenge and provocation, which should be part of their role. 

Museums need to engage actively with this debate and work out its implications for the way that their collections are presented. They should find ways to be authoritative without being authoritarian. Perhaps one way to do this is to be more open about the role of museum professionals as mediators. It is still the case that the vast majority of their work is hidden behind the scenes, in spite of the fact that when museums open their own processes up to visitors, the results can be very rewarding. Conservators have offered a lead here, with many trying to find ways to let visitors see and understand their work. Museums could do more to open up the work of curators and researchers, so that visitors see where the information and opinions that museums present are coming from. 

Museums can also utilise new technologies that make it easier to offer more than one perspective on an object or collection. Electronic storage of information and images will help to make these multi-layered approaches possible, and indeed has the potential to transform all experiences of museum collections. Many museums have already begun to explore the potential of interpretation using handheld electronic devices. As the technology becomes cheaper and more accessible, all museums should be able to offer visitors a variety of pathways through ideas and information about their collections. 

Beyond the museum, the internet offers remote access to many collections and, crucially, to a wealth of information about them. However, the inquiry shows that some museum staff are sceptical about the benefits of investing in digitisation, believing that online access to collections offers a relatively poor-quality experience for a relatively high cost. But this is to underestimate its future potential. Digitisation is not an end in itself so much as a means to an end. It does not offer quick-wins but rather represents a long-term investment. Moreover, the potential of digitisation is not limited to collections themselves. In a digital environment, the ideas and research around collections are just as valuable a resource. 

Museums must continue to digitise their collections and the information that accompanies them, as building blocks. There will be uses of digitised collections that cannot be imagined yet. Museums of the future will use the digital resources created today for their own ends, just as museums today use the buildings and collections established in the past for their own purposes. Continued investment in digitisation is vital, and should not be held back by scepticism about the quality of some of the products that currently use digitised collections.

The Memory Network

The Memory Network is a multi-disciplinary enterprise that brings together researchers, authors and artists, and organisations to provoke and fuel original thinking about memory in the twenty-first century. It is led by the University of Roehampton and Durham University and is funded by the AHRC: http://www.thememorynetwork.net/