Digital roundtable
- Kate Arnold-Forster, director, Museum of English Rural Life
- Karen Brookfield, deputy director (strategy and business development) Heritage Lottery Fund
- Gail Durbin, head of online museum, Victoria and Albert Museum
- Rheinallt Ffoster-Jones, programme manager, People’s Collection Wales
- Adrian Friedli, director of digital projects, Arts Council England
- Sue Howard, director, Yorkshire Film Archive
- Ross Parry, academic director and senior lecturer, school of museum studies, University of Leicester
- Jim Richardson, managing director, Sumo
- Fiona Talbott, head of museums, libraries and archives, Heritage Lottery Fund
Museums Journal: What are the barriers to digital innovation?
Jim Richardson: Time, is what you always hear: “We want to do this but we do not have time.” But the organisations that are doing really well, and the people who are keen to do it, they aren’t working 9 to 5 – they will take a bit of work home with them. If people want to really get ahead, that’s what they have to do.
Ross Parry: There are 2,400 museums, 1,700 of those are accredited. That means that there is a group there that aren’t meeting basic standards in many parts of their provision. We know that there is a shining group of around 30 stunning national museums with talented media teams, that are innovating.
We know of that other chunk in the middle, four or five hundred local authority museums, where there is neither the expertise in the building, nor the authority. A picture starts to emerge of a very large sector that doesn’t have the time, the space or the expertise.
Gail Durbin: One of the barriers is fear and museums have to work very hard to try and shed that fear. They cannot control things once they become digital. You have to try to get yourself in a state of mind where you’re prepared to lose some of your power in order to gain so many other things.
One of the great things you can do with digital is you can start to get your visitor and their expertise used. People have been talking about this for years, but they never do it. Why not? It is easy to start very, very simply.
Even if you have only got a computer and somebody who knows how to work it, your visitors can send you an image, and you can do something with it. You do not have to have vast amounts of money.
Adrian Friedli: The fear factor is allied to a capacity issue, as in: “We cannot begin to work out how we would take this on.” If every organisation, big or small, tries to grapple with these issues on its own, then they will stay locked in fear or worrying about capacity.
If there are ways of brokering conversations, working together, within small groups of organisations or across common issues, then there can be a sharing of knowledge and resources that starts to make these things feasible.
The experience of our digital opportunities programme is we’ve got arts organisations ranging from those working at the cutting edge of digital technologies, to a very small number of organisations who have just about got a computer and almost know how to turn it on.
The vast majority are firmly in the middle. And if we can start to encourage a greater sharing between organisations, then there is more chance that whatever we do will move the majority of organisations further towards the cutting edge.
Kate Arnold-Forster: There is the trade-off between doing the kind of bread-and-butter stuff that you have to do to keep the show on the road, against doing something innovative which may or may not work. Maybe it is the wrong way to look at it, but I think most of us feel we’ve still got to keep cataloguing those objects and getting the basic records up.
RP: There is a long professional culture that says: “We are venues with physical objects and people come to see curated exhibits.” It is there in our curricular, in Accreditation, in our professional ethics and in our professional language. So digital is still not a natural thing to do. Also there is a lack of proactive brokering.
Sue Howard: I think that the innovation should not necessarily all be on the creative or access side. There has to be an awful lot of joined-up thinking about how we use the technologies behind it all. If we can innovate so that we can get the standards to digitise that we want, that work across the sector, then that’s fantastic.
In terms of the production and the technologies, that’s innovation. It won’t be seen by our audience and that’s great because it shouldn’t be seen. If we could get some investment into that sort of innovation as well, then fantastic.
Rheinallt Ffoster-Jones: Good leadership allows for good ideas to come forward and to be actioned and implemented. We went through a number of fears with the People’s Collection in Wales.
What we tried to do is, instead of thinking of the hundred reasons why not to, we thought, “what could be done with it?”. We couldn’t call it the People’s Collection without having people contribute, so we needed moderation.
When we opened the digital gates of the People’s Collection, we knew it could be inundated with all kinds of material. We invested a lot of time and money to develop a moderation system and the initial fears were that we were going to have thousands of pornographic images pouring through every day.
We’ve had one swear word. We had to go through that process. It’s ensuring that the end result is worth it and there is a mitigation of the risk.
Karen Brookfield: Digital innovation may mean very different things and innovation for one organisation is not necessarily innovation for another. We wanted people to think about whether we take risk or not.
I am sure there are lessons from previous initiatives where we should look and think: “Did we weigh up the risks sufficiently? What can we learn?” If we can try and get that conversation going, it would be very helpful, rather than a feeling that either innovation isn’t happening at all, or that it needs a lot of money.
JR: Digital media allows collaboration and that can mean that you need very little money. Some of the stuff that we’ve done on Twitter has brought together hundreds of museums from around the world to work together.
It has brought attention to the sector from people who might have not been thinking about museums, and it takes no money. It takes an idea and then some people to spend a tiny amount of time each doing it and the effect is massive.
AF: It is difficult to conceive of a serious programme of innovation where you’re not taking risks and, in the current climate, that’s challenging. But if there is an approach right from the start that you take on those risks and, whether they succeed or fail, if the kind of learning that takes place is available and shared so that more than only the organisation involved is able to benefit from it, then everyone moves forward as a result of those risks.
If organisations know that if they’re going to try something new and challenging, that they can learn from what other organisations are doing, it means that everybody doesn’t have to take a risk around every aspect of what they are exploring. This means the huge and unreasonable pressure on people to succeed at everything they take on is lessened.
MJ: Has there been any meaningful evaluation of previous projects?
RP: There are formal evaluations. There is the University of Edinburgh report on the national museums online learning project and there have been formal reports on Culture Online.
Sitting next to those are the academic papers, and we just need to look through the last 13-years worth of online proceedings for the Museums and the Web conference and you will find hundreds of papers there, written by practitioners and academics, where they’re reflecting on what we did and what we learned. Then there is the live conversation on the Museums Computer Group, on the archive and museum informatics social networking site.
KB: Are there also lessons about getting something into the mainstream of the organisation? We’ve touched on leadership and why we’re doing something in terms of a business objective, but is there an element of having to slow down and asking that question about why you’re doing it? Lots of practitioners seem to be saying: “I feel I have to do this because my chief executive wants us to.”
MJ: Who are we doing it for?
SH: There is no Facebook link on Yorkshire Film Archive online, there is no Twitter link, because we need to think about why, what is it that we’re trying to do? How are we going to use it effectively and what is it that we’re trying to say when we do?
As organisations, sometimes we do just need to stop and reflect a little bit, and there never seems to be the time to do that these days and that’s partly funding driven, but it is also, partly, needing to keep up with the massive change of pace in digital technologies.
But, of course, the other thing for a small organisation is that whatever our websites or our online offers are, there is also an assumption that we just put that little icon on and get our Facebook going. It takes time.
There has to be somebody at the other end doing it and if we’re not smart about how we communicate and have those conversations, then it very quickly dies and that’s a fear for me that I probably need to get over or allocate resource to make sure that when we do it, we do it well and we embed it in part of our practice as an organisation.
KA-F: We’ve spent the last few years arguing for the investment for just upgrading our system and simply moving our digital records on to the right generation of system, and now we may have a little moment of opportunity where we can put our head above the parapet and start to engage in all of this.
Nobody is offering you exciting rewards for doing that, or funding for doing that, and just about every local authority and museum in the country will also be having that battle.
GD: I sympathise with the issue of whether you have the resources to keep a Facebook conversation going. But I do think that with many of these digital things, the only way to find out about them is to do it and that unless you’re prepared to sign up for Twitter, maybe just use it yourself or open your Facebook account, you cannot see the potential.
It is not something you can do in theory. I would very strongly advocate that museums do not spend ages thinking about it, that they just do something small. Don’t be over ambitious but just get in there and try it. Because once you have done that, you will have opinions and ideas.
RFJ: The approach taken by us is posing the question: “Who are you doing it for?” And what we realised is that it’s everybody. Start with a business plan but then try to break it down. We used the ladder of participation, which breaks down the overall usage of the site.
In web use, about 52% are inactive in the sense of not engaging much in the use of the web: right at the top you have the very actives who are blogging, tweeting, etc, and then you have got the in-betweens.
We realised that a better approach for engaging our key audiences was for them to gain some skills. We use the data to assess how many people we progressed on the ladder of participation.
The majority of people are mainly consuming: viewing it, reading it, enjoying it but we’re seeing now how they go up the ladder and put up a comment for example. That’s why we need to spend time on who we’re doing it for, so we have the ability to make a more three dimensional audience structure.
RP: Every day I get to sit with a whole year’s worth of bright postgraduates who are beginning their careers and they are naturally immersed in this world. In the ideas that our students are coming up with, in exhibition designs and practical projects, digital’s embedded. It is not “other”. They do not use the word innovation. There is just education. There is just marketing. There is just good collections management.
MJ: Do we know much about what our audiences want?
AF: Yes, there is research into public behaviours and what appetite might there be for better, greater, cultural provision. There is a pretty clear message saying that it could be better and it would be welcomed.
Why would we think that the areas that we’re interested in would be, somehow, completely separate from how people live the rest of their lives? It is not about the technology, it is about how people use the technology.
Most people whose business and interest is in developing technology, rarely predict how it is going to be used. The technology is socially shaped by how it is then adopted. Ultimately, it goes back to the question of: what are organisations trying to do?
They’re trying to bring the content that they hold or the activity that they are passionate about to audiences. What technology increasingly is making possible is new and inspiring ways that that can be achieved.
Fiona Talbott: Are we saying we have the stuff there and they will come? As a funder, that’s quite a difficult question for us because we cannot fund everything. We have to have some sort of framework and we have limitations of money.
It is not the way that you would do an exhibition, and then think what your target audience is. As a funder, we have to have some lines drawn somewhere. And so we would expect an organisation to say to us, well we’re doing this project and we’re digitising this material because we are reaching X, Y and Z.
RP: There is a big shift that we’re going through in a moment, which is that it is not about building museum websites and big databases and waiting for people to rock up and start using them.
It is about making sure that content is out there and, some of our audiences may not notice or care whether it is museum content, it is just usable content that is there when they need it. That’s what our model is becoming. So, it is not building huge monolithic museum web sites and waiting for people to come to them, but actually to go out to where people are on the web.
GD: “Getting it out there” in the digital world is not easy and it isn’t what the average museum can cope with very well. I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about that.
We have created our database of our one million objects, which is available for anybody to access and use, but that’s the more advanced end of digital activity and my feeling is that for most museums signing up for Facebook or Twitter might just be the better end to start.
AF: The YouView project is very interested in how the arts sector could get all of its content into YouView because, of course, if you create a platform like YouView, what you desperately need is content.
This goes all the way back to the digitisation question – arts organisations have content but do they have it in a form that, even if they wanted to, they could make available through this new platform, YouView? Probably not.
The ways in which audiences reach organisations are many and various and what we’ve argued strongly with the organisations that we work with is that they need to address the fact that if you’re not present in this digital arena at all you will increasingly be invisible. You will, as new generations come on stream, struggle to engage with the audiences.
To what extent you are visible and in what ways you engage with the web or with digital technologies can be many and various and can suit the scale of the organisation. But getting everyone, or the vast majority of people, plugged in is the first step.
This digital roundtable is part of the Heritage Lottery Fund’s wider consultation into its future strategy. The deadline for responses is 26 April. www.hlf.org.uk
To download the full transcript, click here (pdf)
www.ted.com
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Guardian app: the newspaper app has had over 200,000 downloads since 2009.
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Streetmuseum: a Museum of London iPhone app that guides users to over 200 sites across London where they can view archive images and information.
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Historypin: a site where people can come together to share their historical pictures and stories.
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Artfinder: access to hundreds of thousands of paintings from around the world. Users can create profiles, receive personalised recommendations and share and discuss art with friends via Facebook and Twitter.
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Trove: a website focused on social science, literature and local and family history in Australia. Includes images, biographies, music, newspapers and books.
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