MCG Spring Meeting in partnership with Culture24 – Brighton – 17th June

Friday 17th June 2011

10am to 5pm (arrival from 9.30am)
Lighthouse
28 Kensington Street, Brighton, BN1 4AJ

Now – perhaps more than ever – is a moment for the museum sector to look outwards and see the opportunities for collaboration.

At a time when the sector’s governance is being re-shaped, the funding landscape re-formed and individual services and institutions restructured, the drive for joint ventures and partnership have become more relevant than ever. In particular it is co-operation with the wider arts sector and with the commercial world that seem to demand attention and offer exciting possibilities for everyone.

Alert to this, Culture24 have brought together professionals from across the creative industries to reflect upon and share their experience of working digitally with cultural sector partners. Through a series of roundtable discussions, this day-long meeting will explore some of the evolving models for online collaboration and discuss the existing and perceived barriers and divisions between different sectors and the public/private worlds.

Those in conversation will include:

Andrew Nairne: Executive Director, Arts, Arts Council England
Honor Harger, Director Lighthouse
Kevin Bacon, Digital Development Officer, The Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove
Chris Thorpe, Founder & Technologist, Artfinder www.artfinder.com
Andy Budd, Director of user experience, Clearleft http://clearleft.com/
Laura Scott, Laura Scott: EMEA External Relations
Freya Murray, Senior Arts Executive, BSKYB
Alyssa Bonic, Arts Manager, BSKYB
Jane Finnis: Director Culture24

Agenda

Download ‘Go_Collaborate’_Agenda (PDF, 99KB)

There will also be a special trip to Brighton Museum with their new Digital Development Officer Kevin Bacon. This will include complimentary tickets to the ‘Radical Bloomsbury’ exhibition .

Become an MCG member now (for FREE) and save 50% on registration for this meeting:
http://bit.ly/MCGjoin

hosted by the Museum of London

Including a joint evening session with Wikimedia UK

hosted at the British Museum

The hashtag for this event was #ukmw10.

Themes of the day:

The UK cultural heritage sector is entering a turbulent period. The policy landscape is being reshaped, funding streams renegotiated and portfolios of responsibility changing hands. The challenge we have been set is to think creatively about the future, to show courage and ingenuity, as well as share illustrations of what we do well.

Confronting head-on our immediate digital challenge, this year’s ‘UK Museums on the Web Conference’, convened by the Museums Computer Group, will explore the ways digital heritage can respond to these difficult times. As well as decoding what the recent policy and funding announcements will mean for you and your institution, and for our community of practice as a whole, the conference will highlight four clear and distinct ways in which, together, we can engage with the challenges ahead: through smart aggregations of our digital collections; open-source tools and methods for designing our systems; creative approaches to collaborative working; and new and imaginative models for funding our work.

The day will aim to highlight how these open, creative and smart approaches might allow us to rise to the digital challenge … and, crucially, do more with less.

For over six years the annual UKMW conferences have been the place for high quality presentations and discussions on the matters that are shaping museums online today. By remaining in touch with the leading edge of research, the politics of policy, as well as the day-to-day realities of professional work, UKMW continues to appeal to practitioners and academics, technologists and curators, policy makers and the commercial sector – with over 100 delegates from across the sector attending each year. And the event has built a reputation for the calibre of its speakers, the affordability and accessibility of its content, as well as the focus of its debate.

We very much look forward to welcoming you to the Museum of London on 26 November, and to UKMW10.

The event was held in the Weston Theatre, Museum of London, 150 London Wall, LONDON, EC2Y 5HN

Programme

And in recognition of the MCG-Wikimedia partnership this year, UKWM10 delegates were able to register for a preferential (half-price) rate for Day 2 of the GLAM-WIKI:UK event (27 November).

25 Dollman Street, Birmingham B7 4RQ
Training Room

About the MCC

The Museums Collections Centre in Nechells is a 1.5 hectare site that contains over 80 per cent of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery’s stored collections under one roof.

Fully booked!

For over five years the annual UKMW conferences have been the place for high quality presentations and discussions on the matters that are shaping museums online today.

The Sackler Centre

By remaining in touch with the leading edge of research, the politics of policy, as well as the day-to-day realities of professional work, UKMW continues to appeal to practitioners and academics, technologists and curators, policy makers and the commercial sector. And the event has built a reputation for the caliber of its speakers, the accessibility of its content, and the focus of its debate.

As museums’ activity online continues to be drawn into the power and possibility of the social Web (of networking and user-generated content) and the machine Web (of semantics and APIs), this year’s conference takes us back to the everyday, sensory and ubiquitous experience and encounters of online content.

Today, the Web is becoming increasingly a more multi-sensory place, with new visual interfaces, rich sound content, where content can adapt to our physical location, and even where interactions can be triggered by bodily movement. Likewise, software and services (just like our content) can today move with us.

This year UKMW will look at digital heritage in the everyday – situated, sensory, social.

Programme

Co-hosted by Birmingham Institute of Art & Design & Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

David Wilson Library, University of Leicester [campus map]

organised by the Museums Computer Group
sponsored by Culture 24

How (and why) should museums connect their online collections?

• Should museums pursue a policy of standardised and heavyweight national integration, or a mixed portfolio of more localised lightweight solutions?
• Should the sector continue to plan for users visiting museum Web sites, or is the future instead of more agnostic usage of distributed content?
• Might semantic technologies (rather than a ‘Semantic Web’) hold part of the answer?
• And what role is there for non-sector partners and specialist (perhaps commercial) Web services in making museum collections discoverable and useful online?

By drawing together an impressive range of national and international speakers, from academia, from industry and from the sector, this year’s UK Museums on the Web conference explores how a raft of new projects and initiatives are beginning to take museums into a new era of online integration.

Some slides and reports are still available online (plus photos on Flickr):

• Tom Loosemore – UKMW08 Keynote speech
• Making sense of cross-museum collections websites
• The Mashed Museum Event
• A collection of UKMW08 posts at Open Objects

There’s also a report on the Spring meeting at Open Objects, and the Autumn meeting at Making information work for us: the 2008 Museums Computer Group autumn meeting (with photos on Flickr).

Is it time to become more ‘Web adept’?

From Web ethics, to user-generated content, and from the implications and possibilities of mashed-up content, to the need for new values and holistic approaches to accessible design…this year’s conference will explore the many ways the Web is being transformed around us, and how museums can respond to – and perhaps lead – this change.

UKMW will, as in previous years, be an accessible and affordable event welcoming around 100 delegates. It will aim to bring to together a programme of high quality speakers with a national and international perspective, from inside and outside the sector, offering creative, leading edge thinking relevant to anyone working with museums and the Web today.

PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME

9.30-10.00

REGISTRATION

Henry Wellcome Building, University of Leicester,

10.00-10.15

Welcome from Debbie Richards (MCG Chair) and Jane Finnis (Director, 24 Hour Museum)

10.15-11.15

KEYNOTES

Sebastian Chan, Powerhouse Museum (Australia) balancing the possibilities with the realities of the ‘social tagging’ of museum collections.

Michael Twidale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) on the museum ‘pioneers’ venturing into the ‘Second Life’ experience.

11.15-11.40 coffee break, kindly sponsored by Eduserv

11.40-12.30

THE MASHED-UP WEB:

Mike Ellis (Head of Web, NMSI) will lead a live ‘mash-up’ of cultural content from around the Web to demonstrate the possibilities that ‘pipes’ and APIs have for museums.

12.30-1.15

THE ETHICAL WEB:

Drawing upon the work of Naomi Korn (Naomi Korn Copyright Consultancy) and MDA this session will unpick the rights issues that are embedded within the new Web 2.0 environment – not least what permissions and legal questions are associated with user-generated content. Alex Whitfield (British Library) will also help us to explore some of the ethical questions only just beginning to emerge for museums on the display of sacred images on-line.

1.15-2.30 buffet lunch, hosted by Blitz Games

2.30-3.15

THE PERSONAL WEB:

Who curates and who contributes to our museums’ on-line channels? This session will hear from Frances Lloyd-Baynes (V&A) and Mia Ridge (Museum of London) on how the boundaries of shared authorship and authority are being pushed and challenged.

3.15-4.00

THE REWIRED WEB:

Is the ‘Semantic Web’ already here? Is it being driven by users and the growth of ‘microformats’, or will it (for museums at least) need a more coordinated top-down agreement on standards? And if so, who might lead this coordination? Jon Pratty (24 Hour Museum) and Paul Shabajee (HP Labs) will help to steer us through both the promise and the mirage of the ‘Semantic Web’.

4.00-4.20 tea and cake, kindly sponsored by Eduserv

4.20-5.15

THE ACCESSIBLE WEB:

To what extent are the technology enhancements described during this day (mashups, social tagging, user-generated content, virtual environments …) likely to breach Web accessibility guidelines? Is there a legal requirement (and a ethical obligation) for public sector bodies to comply with such guidelines? In the concluding (interactive) session of the day Brian Kelly (UKOLN) will outline a ‘holistic approach to Web accessibility’ and describe how new accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0) can provide a more flexible framework for deploying new technologies.

5.15-5.30

Summing up and take homes

A day of papers, presentations and discussions concluded with an anniversary reception at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, the venue of the first ever MCG meeting 25 years ago.

On the 19th March, the conference was preceded by the concluding workshop of the nine-month project ‘Semantic Web thinktank’, supported by the MCG, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

And, taking place around the conference, delegates were also encouraged to participate in: ‘Discursive formations – place, narrative and digitality in the museum of the future’ A pilot project funded by the AHRC.

Timetable

9.15 to 9.45: Arrival and registration
The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3ER

9.45 to 10.00: Chair’s and host’s welcome

10.00 to 11.15: SESSION 1 – Strategy

David Dawson (Senior Policy Adviser Digital Futures – MLA)

ICT Strategy in Scotland
Dylan Edgar (ICT Development Manager, Scottish Museums Council)
The presentation will provide an overview of the Scottish museum sector, along with specific reference to the Scottish Museum Council’s national ICT strategy. It will highlight SMC’s general strategic priorities, while focusing in more detail on some of the individual projects and initiatives that have formed the basis of the three-year action framework. The presentation will also explore the issue of cross-domain working in Scotland, and identify future areas of work and potential opportunities for UK-wide and European collaboration.

11.15 to 11.35: Break for coffee

11.35 to 12.45: SESSION 2 – Collections

Digital projects in the East of England region: a review of activity and trends
Gordon Chancellor (Regional Development Officer – Archives – MLA East of England) and Jenny Duke (Regional Learning Officer – MLA East of England)
An exploration of some of the work currently taking place including the ‘Think Digital’ toolkit, The Digital Archives Regional Pilot (DARP), and the resources made available to schools through the Broadband Consortium Web portal.

MDA and ICT for Museums
Nick Poole (Director – MDA)
MDA’s vision for the future development of knowledge and information systems in museums, looking at stable infrastructure, business process, sustainable development and core skills in ICT.

12.45-2.15: Buffet lunch (provided)

2.15-3.30: SESSION 3 – Interpretation

Why are on-line catalogues useless for access? Experiences and Developments at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology
Robin Boast (Deputy Director – Curator for World Archaeology – Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology)
Robin will explore the problems of the catalogue, assumptions about access and developments at the MAA, in the United States and beyond. He will challenge the idea that on-line catalogues equal better access, and why we need much more experimentation and exploration.

‘No photography or mobile phones in the gallery please’
David Scruton (Documentation and Access Manager – The Fitzwilliam Museum)
An overview of current and future initiatives involving digital technology within the galleries at the Fitzwilliam Museum. These include handheld electronic guides, image recognition and wireless networks. How do these technologies relate to the Museum’s interpretation strategy and how well do they fit with visitor requirements and expectations? What are the operational implications for a museum such as the Fitzwilliam?

3.30-3.50: Break for tea

3.50 to 5.00: SESSION 4 – MCG activity

Interim report on the ‘Semantic Web Thinktank’ (an AHRC-funded project
supported by the MCG)
Mike Lowndes (Interactive Media Manager – Natural History Museum)

25 Years of the MCG – a walk through the archive
Ross Parry (Lecturer in Museums and New Media – University of Leicester)

5.00 to 5.15: AOB and close

6.00-7.30 Celebratory Reception

Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EQ