A decade ago this spring, Britain's "virtual museum" opened its digital doors to the world. As the 24-Hour Museum blinked into life - backed by £70,000 from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and conferred instant "national" status by the culture secretary at the time, Chris Smith - the initial reaction was one of widespread public indifference, and scepticism from the sector.
Wind forward two years, and the site - now operating from a poky office near Brighton's seafront, and with newly granted independence from government - was attracting 25,000 visitors a month.
Yet, with its venue listings and collections-related stories still only updated fortnightly, it was some way from tapping the potential market generated by the restoration of free entry to national museums and the impending launch of Renaissance in the Regions.
But times have changed and on the eve of its 10th birthday the 24-Hour Museum has 10 times as many monthly visitors, with sister sites Show Me and Icons drawing another 185,000 between them. Fresh from restructuring, it now employs nine full-timers from a office in Brighton's bohemian North Laine.
It has acquired a new name - Culture24 - and a new site launched last month that promises to make searching far more user-friendly for professionals, teachers and the public.
But will this new-look website be enough to shunt the sector on from years of disagreement over the merits of digitising collections and interacting with "online visitors" that has so far stifled its embrace of the digital era?
Culture24 chief executive Jane Finnis seems confident it will meet the demands of curators and the public, without alienating either. The site contains links and information - pitched at all levels - for 4,000-plus cultural venues, 1,000 upcoming events, and 800 educational resources.
Replacing keyword searches, drop-down menus span the top of the homepage - split into categories such as "subject" (art, history), and "time" (Medieval, Tudor; today, next Monday). Usefully, having "drilled down" into one category, visitors can switch laterally at any time - jumping sideways from, say, the teachers' menu to the curators'.
Finnis is proud of the site's fluid navigation: "There are three levels of terminology. You've got the way museums refer to things, what they're called in the National Curriculum, and what 'real people' call things. We're creating a bridge between these worlds."
Focus on sustainability
Content-wise, the watchword is do-it-yourself. Individual venues will access the Culture24 server directly to update their collections and event information - bypassing editorial. The City Heritage Guides are being rebranded, and no longer focus on cities. It will be up to local museums to keep entries for the places featured bubbling with up-to-date content.
Finnis's team is "tagging" the 6,000-odd articles in the old 24-Hour Museum's archive to relevant search terms on the new site. Meanwhile, the revamped news pages have more of a magazine feel - with staff writers jostling for space alongside guest commentators from the museum and heritage sectors.
Culture24 now also has a direct role in promoting tourism, feeding news to VisitBritain's website, and is running the Museums at Night weekend (15-17 May), which has replaced Museums and Galleries Month. Then there is its relationship with Google - on whose iGoogle homepage there's a new "gadget" linking to its own.
But what of that other longstanding expectation of the 24-Hour Museum - that it would morph into the fabled Knowledge Web, once touted by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) as a single portal into a comprehensive nationwide database of digitised collections?
There has been some progress in this direction. The Collections Trust, an organisation that aims to improve access to collections, was enlisted by the MLA last June to draw together the blizzard of digitised data generated by discrete DCMS-funded projects.
Relics of Enrich UK, Cornucopia, and Every Object Tells a Story are being corralled with individual museums' digital efforts to form the basis of an embryonic national online collection.
Finnis explains: "We'll take the stuff the trust is bringing together, package it, and add value, presenting it in ways that meet audience needs."
These are early fruits of a new "statement of digital values and principles" drafted to guide the sector by Finnis; Collections Trust chief executive Nick Poole; Liz Lyon, the director at digital research organisation UKOLN; and MLA director of programme delivery, Hedley Swain. But will they satisfy diehard digitisers still hoping all UK collections will one day be online? Probably not.
Finnis is outspoken about poor digital leadership from the DCMS since Chris Smith's departure in 2001, "they don't get it", and is no fan of digitising per se. She'd like a "moratorium" - at least until what's already out there has been rationalised.
Poole adds: "We're against the completist vision that things won't be finished until everything's digitised."
Beyond digitisation
Poole feels the place for digitisation is in museums' cataloguing - not as an "end in itself". In the Web 2.0 age, curators should concentrate on interacting "dynamically" with a digital-savvy public that are comfortable with 3G mobile phones and social-networking sites:
"Consumers shouldn't have to walk through doors marked 'museum' to access cultural content," says Poole. "There's a generation who believe they have a right to view content on a web page, and to create and add their own."
Poole's enthusiasm for social media is shared by Jon Pratty, ex-editor of the 24-Hour Museum, now an arts journalist and freelance online publishing consultant:
"We sit in front of our computers, and we're fluent in Facebook. We expect a web that works for us, rather than the passive one of 10 years ago. But we go into our museums and galleries and all of a sudden switch off. We're in a non-internet environment and we don't have the same expectations."
John Newbigin, chairman of Culture24, and one-time special adviser to Smith, agrees: "The term digitisation is a period piece. Reducing everything to a rotating 3D image ain't where things are going."
So how will we be viewing collections information online in five years? David Anderson, director of learning and interpretation at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and joint author of a soon-to-be-published feasibility study on the future of digital collections in the UK for the National Museum Directors' Conference (NMDC), sees several alternatives - including the European Commission-funded Europeana, which draws digital objects from collections across the EU onto one database.
"Museums could also look at federated searches, enabling people to jump between different online collections, or work with commercial partners," he says. "We're reaching the conclusion that there's no 'killer answer'."
Agent for change
Some museums are already harnessing the brave new world of Web 2.0. The British Postal Museum and Archive experimented with allowing virtual visitors to challenge interpretations of its objects on a Wiki - until this was sabotaged by spam attacks.
Trials have been more successful north of the border, inspiring Museums Galleries Scotland to draft a new three-year Digital Content Action Framework. Over coming months, Scottish curators will undergo training in related issues, including digital copyright.
London Transport Museum, meanwhile, uses so much user-generated content that it's developed a separate server where comments are stored while being screened for offensive language - and catalogue "corrections" are checked by curators before being uploaded.
Another champion of interactivity is Gail Durbin. As head of V&A Online, she's presided over years of innovation - including the World Beach Project, which saw web-users, including some living on remote Pacific islands, submit images of art crafted from pebbles to a digital gallery.
She's also steering the National Museums Online Learning Project, funded by a £1.7m Invest to Save grant, which goes live in late March with two key services: WebQuests, an educational tool enabling children to complete tasks by surfing the online collections of nine participating national museums, and Creative Journeys, an application focusing on lifelong learning.
Durbin is supervisor of the V&A's Factory Project, which converts 80 prints and drawings a day into digital format. At heart, she's a hardened digitiser: "Good digital records are the foundation of any museum website. If we want to improve access, digitising makes things accessible to people who don't come to museums, as well as those who do."
So, as the digital debate moves on, how far have we come since the 24-Hour Museum started - and can it claim credit for leading us here? Newbigin says: "Its public value is that it's an agent for change in how the whole cultural sector uses technology - and what it persuades others to do with their collections."
James Morrison is a freelance journalist
Wind forward two years, and the site - now operating from a poky office near Brighton's seafront, and with newly granted independence from government - was attracting 25,000 visitors a month.
Yet, with its venue listings and collections-related stories still only updated fortnightly, it was some way from tapping the potential market generated by the restoration of free entry to national museums and the impending launch of Renaissance in the Regions.
But times have changed and on the eve of its 10th birthday the 24-Hour Museum has 10 times as many monthly visitors, with sister sites Show Me and Icons drawing another 185,000 between them. Fresh from restructuring, it now employs nine full-timers from a office in Brighton's bohemian North Laine.
It has acquired a new name - Culture24 - and a new site launched last month that promises to make searching far more user-friendly for professionals, teachers and the public.
But will this new-look website be enough to shunt the sector on from years of disagreement over the merits of digitising collections and interacting with "online visitors" that has so far stifled its embrace of the digital era?
Culture24 chief executive Jane Finnis seems confident it will meet the demands of curators and the public, without alienating either. The site contains links and information - pitched at all levels - for 4,000-plus cultural venues, 1,000 upcoming events, and 800 educational resources.
Replacing keyword searches, drop-down menus span the top of the homepage - split into categories such as "subject" (art, history), and "time" (Medieval, Tudor; today, next Monday). Usefully, having "drilled down" into one category, visitors can switch laterally at any time - jumping sideways from, say, the teachers' menu to the curators'.
Finnis is proud of the site's fluid navigation: "There are three levels of terminology. You've got the way museums refer to things, what they're called in the National Curriculum, and what 'real people' call things. We're creating a bridge between these worlds."
Focus on sustainability
Content-wise, the watchword is do-it-yourself. Individual venues will access the Culture24 server directly to update their collections and event information - bypassing editorial. The City Heritage Guides are being rebranded, and no longer focus on cities. It will be up to local museums to keep entries for the places featured bubbling with up-to-date content.
Finnis's team is "tagging" the 6,000-odd articles in the old 24-Hour Museum's archive to relevant search terms on the new site. Meanwhile, the revamped news pages have more of a magazine feel - with staff writers jostling for space alongside guest commentators from the museum and heritage sectors.
Culture24 now also has a direct role in promoting tourism, feeding news to VisitBritain's website, and is running the Museums at Night weekend (15-17 May), which has replaced Museums and Galleries Month. Then there is its relationship with Google - on whose iGoogle homepage there's a new "gadget" linking to its own.
But what of that other longstanding expectation of the 24-Hour Museum - that it would morph into the fabled Knowledge Web, once touted by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) as a single portal into a comprehensive nationwide database of digitised collections?
There has been some progress in this direction. The Collections Trust, an organisation that aims to improve access to collections, was enlisted by the MLA last June to draw together the blizzard of digitised data generated by discrete DCMS-funded projects.
Relics of Enrich UK, Cornucopia, and Every Object Tells a Story are being corralled with individual museums' digital efforts to form the basis of an embryonic national online collection.
Finnis explains: "We'll take the stuff the trust is bringing together, package it, and add value, presenting it in ways that meet audience needs."
These are early fruits of a new "statement of digital values and principles" drafted to guide the sector by Finnis; Collections Trust chief executive Nick Poole; Liz Lyon, the director at digital research organisation UKOLN; and MLA director of programme delivery, Hedley Swain. But will they satisfy diehard digitisers still hoping all UK collections will one day be online? Probably not.
Finnis is outspoken about poor digital leadership from the DCMS since Chris Smith's departure in 2001, "they don't get it", and is no fan of digitising per se. She'd like a "moratorium" - at least until what's already out there has been rationalised.
Poole adds: "We're against the completist vision that things won't be finished until everything's digitised."
Beyond digitisation
Poole feels the place for digitisation is in museums' cataloguing - not as an "end in itself". In the Web 2.0 age, curators should concentrate on interacting "dynamically" with a digital-savvy public that are comfortable with 3G mobile phones and social-networking sites:
"Consumers shouldn't have to walk through doors marked 'museum' to access cultural content," says Poole. "There's a generation who believe they have a right to view content on a web page, and to create and add their own."
Poole's enthusiasm for social media is shared by Jon Pratty, ex-editor of the 24-Hour Museum, now an arts journalist and freelance online publishing consultant:
"We sit in front of our computers, and we're fluent in Facebook. We expect a web that works for us, rather than the passive one of 10 years ago. But we go into our museums and galleries and all of a sudden switch off. We're in a non-internet environment and we don't have the same expectations."
John Newbigin, chairman of Culture24, and one-time special adviser to Smith, agrees: "The term digitisation is a period piece. Reducing everything to a rotating 3D image ain't where things are going."
So how will we be viewing collections information online in five years? David Anderson, director of learning and interpretation at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and joint author of a soon-to-be-published feasibility study on the future of digital collections in the UK for the National Museum Directors' Conference (NMDC), sees several alternatives - including the European Commission-funded Europeana, which draws digital objects from collections across the EU onto one database.
"Museums could also look at federated searches, enabling people to jump between different online collections, or work with commercial partners," he says. "We're reaching the conclusion that there's no 'killer answer'."
Agent for change
Some museums are already harnessing the brave new world of Web 2.0. The British Postal Museum and Archive experimented with allowing virtual visitors to challenge interpretations of its objects on a Wiki - until this was sabotaged by spam attacks.
Trials have been more successful north of the border, inspiring Museums Galleries Scotland to draft a new three-year Digital Content Action Framework. Over coming months, Scottish curators will undergo training in related issues, including digital copyright.
London Transport Museum, meanwhile, uses so much user-generated content that it's developed a separate server where comments are stored while being screened for offensive language - and catalogue "corrections" are checked by curators before being uploaded.
Another champion of interactivity is Gail Durbin. As head of V&A Online, she's presided over years of innovation - including the World Beach Project, which saw web-users, including some living on remote Pacific islands, submit images of art crafted from pebbles to a digital gallery.
She's also steering the National Museums Online Learning Project, funded by a £1.7m Invest to Save grant, which goes live in late March with two key services: WebQuests, an educational tool enabling children to complete tasks by surfing the online collections of nine participating national museums, and Creative Journeys, an application focusing on lifelong learning.
Durbin is supervisor of the V&A's Factory Project, which converts 80 prints and drawings a day into digital format. At heart, she's a hardened digitiser: "Good digital records are the foundation of any museum website. If we want to improve access, digitising makes things accessible to people who don't come to museums, as well as those who do."
So, as the digital debate moves on, how far have we come since the 24-Hour Museum started - and can it claim credit for leading us here? Newbigin says: "Its public value is that it's an agent for change in how the whole cultural sector uses technology - and what it persuades others to do with their collections."
James Morrison is a freelance journalist
Public art online
The BBC became part of a museum digitisation project in late January when it announced plans to team up with the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), a registered charity set up in 2003 to photograph and record all paintings in publicly owned collections in the UK.
The partnership is aiming to give the public online access to every one of the estimated 200,000 publicly owned paintings in the UK by 2012.
The BBC will provide access through an area of its website called Your Paintings. This is described as a one-stop-shop for the public to view and find information on the paintings. PCF director Andrew Ellis says one of the aims of the Your Paintings website will be to encourage the public to visit museums and galleries after seeing works online.
The PCF deal is part of BBC director-general Mark Thompson's plan to create partnerships to strengthen its commitment to the arts, with much of the focus on getting content online.
As part of this, the BBC also announced that Radio 4 is working with the British Museum on a complementary online project for its series, A History Of The World In 100 Objects. It will feature a 100 15-minute episodes on Radio 4 telling the history of the world through objects from the British Museum's collection.
The BBC became part of a museum digitisation project in late January when it announced plans to team up with the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), a registered charity set up in 2003 to photograph and record all paintings in publicly owned collections in the UK.
The partnership is aiming to give the public online access to every one of the estimated 200,000 publicly owned paintings in the UK by 2012.
The BBC will provide access through an area of its website called Your Paintings. This is described as a one-stop-shop for the public to view and find information on the paintings. PCF director Andrew Ellis says one of the aims of the Your Paintings website will be to encourage the public to visit museums and galleries after seeing works online.
The PCF deal is part of BBC director-general Mark Thompson's plan to create partnerships to strengthen its commitment to the arts, with much of the focus on getting content online.
As part of this, the BBC also announced that Radio 4 is working with the British Museum on a complementary online project for its series, A History Of The World In 100 Objects. It will feature a 100 15-minute episodes on Radio 4 telling the history of the world through objects from the British Museum's collection.
Links
www.bbc.co.uk
www.thepcf.org.uk
www.bbc.co.uk
www.thepcf.org.uk
