Pre-UKMW11 networking and drinks event, the Marlborough Arms, 36 Torrington Place, London, WC1E 7HJ from 5.30pm.

Date: 25 November 2011

Venue: IWM London (find out how to get to IWM London)

Tickets for UKMW11 are now on sale at http://ukmw11.eventbrite.com.

The annual UKMW conferences, convened by the Museums Computer Group, have long been the place for high quality presentations and discussions on the matters that are shaping museums online today. As the UK heritage sector continues to live through difficult times, this year’s conference is an opportunity to reflect on the new landscape museums are now in, learn from inspiring speakers and network with your peers.

As the MCG’s Spring Meeting in Brighton showed, a renewed emphasis on partnerships inside and outside the sector will continue to challenge museums to be more flexible in their working practices. Sharing the stories of our successes and learning to discuss failures constructively is more important than ever before. The conference will frame solutions for the issues affecting the museum sector, and feature positive case studies with actionable lessons.

We’re excited to announce that our keynote speaker is Mark O’Neill (formerly CIO at the Department of Media, Culture and Sport), founder and leader of the UK Government’s ‘Skunkworks’, which brings together developers and government in an innovative, collaborative, agile space.

To be held at the Imperial War Museum in London on 25 November 2011, the conference will also include inspiring and practical sessions on getting projects right from the start, redefining success and designing for the future.

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’ll keep this page updated as speakers are announced, and will include details of the schedule for the day and the AGM.

Register now on Eventbrite

The MCG committee often gets enquiries from people interested in speaking at our events about calls for papers. Due to popular demand, and because we want to make sure the presentations at UKMW11 represent the latest work in the sector and cover the issues that affect our members, we’ve decided to open a call for papers. We’re giving this a go within a pre-defined set of themes to try and keep it manageable. (All the work that goes into organising events for the MCG is done on a voluntary basis and each committee member balances our MCG roles with busy full-time schedules.)

The three themes are (we’ll refine the titles and order once we know what the papers are!):

• Session 1 – getting it right from the start (project infrastructure – tendering, management, partnerships, collaboration)
• Session 2 – designing for re-use/for the future (making the most of what we’ve got)
• Session 3 – redefining success (better metrics and beyond)

For each theme we would like to have one paper that frames the subject and puts it in the context of the landscape we are currently working in, and one or two positive case studies/success stories. We would like all speakers to include actionable lessons in their papers.

If you would like to propose a paper for one of these three themes, please email contact@museumscomputergroup.org.uk by 2 September 2011 including the following information:

• Your name
• The organisation you work for if applicable
• The theme under which you envisage your paper sitting
• A short summary of what your paper will cover (up to 200 words)
• Have you given this paper or talked about this project at a previous conference? If so which conference and when?

We will aim to make a decision on which papers to include and let you know by 9 September 2011.

If you know of any projects, even if they aren’t your own, that you think we should know about for the conference, please let us know by emailing  contact@museumscomputergroup.org.uk

We look forward to reading your proposals. Please don’t hesitate to contact us via twitter (@ukmcg) or contact@museumscomputergroup.org.uk if you have any questions or comments.

Best wishes,

Ross, Gemma, Denise, Mia, Rhiannon, Carolyn, Angelina, John, Angus, Dafydd, Dave and Linda for the MCG Committee

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).

[This week's guest post is by Rhiannon Looseley, E-Learning Officer (Web), Museum of London, and MCG Committee member. It was originally published on her blog]

Early (very early) on Thursday morning, I got up and got the 7.03 train from Euston to Birmingham for this year’s Museums Computer Group (MCG) Spring Meeting. The theme of the day was ‘Programming, Promotion and Policy’ and I was looking forward to the interesting range of topics that we had on the programme, particularly hearing from the people behind the immensely successful way in which the story of the Staffordshire Hoard find was announced, and the round-table discussion in the afternoon about what the post-election climate has in store for our sector.

The day didn’t disappoint. What I particularly liked, having never attended one of the smaller MCG meeting before, was the atmosphere. Rather than the usual conference atmosphere at the bigger meetings, this was much more informal, chatty, and friendly. I’ve really enjoyed the two UK Museums on the web conferences that I’ve attended but this was refreshingly different.

First up after Ross’s introduction and a few words about Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) from Jo Smith, was my fellow MCG committee member Linda Spurdle. Linda is the Digital Manager at BMAG and talked about some of the projects that she is working on, particularly the new BMAG galleries – Birmingham: A city in the making – for which stories and images will be gathered from the community using social media. Linda talked enthusiastically of the vibrant and flourishing social media scene in Birmingham which I hadn’t heard about before. It was really cheering to hear about a community who are proud of their city and keen to get involved in cultural projects. Linda also talked a little about the Staffordshire Hoard and the amazing scenes of 3-4-hour long queues outside BMAG when it first went on display. 65,000 people visited the Hoard in 19 days and web visit-or figures increased 12-fold. The effect of this amazing find has been felt right across BMAG and it sounds as if staff across the organisation have risen to the occasion to make the most of it, with conservators offering to blog about their work to clean up the treasures and live-question-and-answer sessions happening in the galleries and online. This set the tone for the day for me as the Staffordshire Hoard was a recurring theme throughout the day and what really struck me was the admirable way in which BMAG and all those involved in the project had acted so fast and in such an effective and organised fashion.

Immediately following on from Linda’s talk came Tony Adams from Stoke Museums who also have parts of the Staffordshire Hoard on display. Tony was talking about an ambitious project he is working on to create a virtual Staffordshire museum online by pulling together data from all the museums across the region which will in turn also feed into the Culture Grid and Europeana. I have to admit to glazing over slightly once James Grimster, the web developer for the project started talking the techy acronyms of web geekery which I’m afraid still evade my understanding. Nevertheless, I was already hooked on the atmosphere in the room and already feeling that now-familiar buzz that I get once I realise that a conference is giving me ideas and helping me to think properly again (I blogged on the evening of the conference about what I love about conferences and this freeing up of my thought processes is a key aspect). What particularly struck me about Tony’s talk was the fact that he described the project as ‘writing the rule book’ as they go along. This, to me, would feel a little frightening in a world where we’re increasingly encouraged to be accountable at all times, but I admired Tony’s brave and enthusiastic attitude as he described how exciting he found this.

After these two talks, Ross Parry, chair of the MCG, set the tone for the relaxed nature of the day by taking time out of the programme to encourage some discussion about the talks. He encouraged Jeremy Ottevanger (recently of the Museum of London, now at the Imperial War Museum but also heavily involved in the Europeana project) to describe what was going through his head as he heard James talking through the technical aspects of the Staffordshire museums website and the way that data would be collected. I don’t know if Jeremy will blog Thursday’s conference but I hope he will as he might be able to give you a better idea of some of the things James covered which I couldn’t do any justice to here. Keep an eye on Jeremy’s blog over the coming weeks!

After a short break we moved on to the next part of the day: the Staffordshire Hoard and the publicity campaign around it. This session stemmed from an idea by another committee member (and key organiser of the spring meeting) Gemma Sturtridge who was really struck when the story of the breathtaking find broke by the coordinated way in which everyone pulled together so that nothing was leaked in advance and that various aspects of a slick media campaign exploded all at once. As a committee we agreed that hearing about how this had happened would provide valuable lessons to us all. We weren’t wrong.

The session started with an interesting talk by Dan Pett of the Portable Antiquities Scheme who is responsible for building theStaffordshire Hoard website (Dan has shared his slides for his talkonline already). As an archaeologist by background, Dan was able to give us an insight into how big a story the Portable Antiquities Scheme immediately realised this was. Whereas a usual find is worth around £50-100, this one was valued at about £3,285,000! The impressive thing to note about Dan’s work on the website is that he was given 1 week’s notice and no budget to build it, and so it cost £0 to make! Using textpattern, Dan built a website which relied heavily on social media. All the images were uploaded to Flickr under a Creative Commons license (so no images were actually hosted on the server making the site faster under the strain of a lot of visitors) which proved popular as it allowed people to make use of them on their own blogs and websites and the site also pulled in people’s tweets as the news broke.

Once the news broke the website did come under a certain amount of strain with 2000 connections a second at one point but Dan was able to harness the power of the great network of museum web geeks that we have on Twitter to ask for advice on what to do to manage this. A quarter of a million people visited the site within three days.

Following on from Dan, we heard from Kerri Keiwan of the Art Fund about the tremendous ‘Save the Stafforshire Hoard’ campaign which raised money to ensure that it was able to stay on display in the region. I’m aware that this post if getting longer and longer so I’m not going to go into detail about every talk here but after Kerri, we heard from Jon Pratty, a man with many hats, but talking here with his journalist hat on who gave some very insightful tips on breaking news stories on a museum website. These included amongst much other valuable advice, discussing what stories you will have coming up 6 months in advance, making sure that you always put a sensible and useful subject when you email a press release to journalists, and making sure you always attach a small, unedited picture to your press release.

During the lunch break we had an interesting tour of the Museums Collections Centre where the meeting was held, getting a behind-the-scenes insight into BMAG’s collections which are housed here.

After lunch, Caroline Moore of Renaissance East Midlands talked to us about the project that she and Bryony Robbins are working on at present called Mubu which gathers together a series of learning and community projects across the East Midlands which all have a digital output. Caroline also touched on the project that I’ve blogged about before called My Life as an Object which used four different social media platforms over four weeks to experiment with engaging audiences with museum collections in different ways. It was a project with Rattle Central and I was delighted that Caroline gave me a copy of the newspaper that was produced to gather together the results of the projects at the end.

We then moved on to the open mic session which I was chairing. This is where we open up the floor to up to speakers to talk about a subject of their choice for 5 minutes, without slides and with only internet access. The call that we had put out had been fairly general but it was great to see that actually the four talks that were eventually presented pulled together some of the themes for the day quite nicely.

Firstly we heard from Laura Whitton from the Collections Trust who talked about the new Culture Grid website which has recently been launched and had already been on everyone’s lips earlier in the day. The website basically pulls together data from across the sector and allows cross collections searches – check it out, it’s pretty cool!

Next up was Lucinda Donnachie from the National Maritime Museum with a quick five minutes on a project she’s working on withwww.naval-history.net to improve the data that they have based on an old card catalogue of 20,000 vessels.

Following on from Lucinda, we heard from Rebecca Cadwallader about the fascinating http://www.wevee.co.uk/ which encourages users to ‘mashup’ film footage from the UK Film Council to make their own creations.

Lastly, Jon Pratty gave an off-the-cuff presentation of a personal project he’s working on called Americanium which pulls together RSS feeds from various different cultural sites to make a website which is simple to produce and pulls together a lot of American cultural material in one place – quite a cool idea! This was the first time Jon had talked about this project in the UK so you could say it was a national premier!

We then moved on to the round table discussion of the effect of the events of 6 May 2010 on the digital heritage sector. My notes here become quite sketchy because there was so much to say and many people speaking. I hope I can give a flavour of what was said but I can’t promise that there aren’t inaccuracies. Here are a few of the main points:

Katie Peckacar, MLA Policy Advisor warned us that we still don’t know a lot of what will happen but that it looks like we will be a lot more scrutinised than we were about why projects are important and whether or not they are aligned to our organisational strategies and aims. Partnerships with software developers and academics who have priorities aligned to ours will be important. An example model Katie quoted was the Tank Museum which has given a games company access to their collections in order to create a game which they can then use for free. MLA are also putting together a kind of buddying system to pair up software developers in academia who are interested in solving practical problems with museums and various events and hack days are being organised to further these kinds of working models.

Katie had to leave at that point but it was then the turn of Bridget McKenzie of Flow Associates to put her thoughts across. Bridget wants to push for a more creative cultural strategy – one that’s much more about advocating the value of cultural content to the economy and to cultural public life rather than risk a return to silo-ised way of working that might come out focussing in to much on local need and the improving each institution. Bridget spoke of the need for a body to strongly advocate for the value of our content and the potential of the services that that content can make rather than the fun stuff that technology enables you can do for the sake of it.

Jon Pratty pointed out at this point that the digital inclusion agenda and the work that Martha Lane Fox is doing to to regenerate and to empower and to join people up using technology seems to be one of the few growth areas of digital heritage. He suggested that perhaps culturally we should be projecting ourselves over towards that sector. Jon advocated, along similar lines to Katie, ensuring that your organisation has a very joined up and cross-thinking perspective when writing its digital strategy to ensure it is aligned with business plans etc before applying for funding.

These interesting and valuable discussions were rounded up with Ross’s summing up of the themes for the day and then some of us moved on to see the Staffordshire Hoard for real at BMAG in Birmingham City Centre. This was a great ending to a really interesting day. I would recommend going to see the Hoard if you haven’t already. I know very little about the Anglo-Saxons but the thing that struck me was the detail and the amazing craftsmanship of these sometimes tiny objects that were thought to have been produced around 600AD. We were lucky enough to get a curator’s tour which made the whole thing so much more meaningful and really rounded off a great day. Once again, I was struck by how quickly and effectively BMAG must have responded to the news of the find. In a sector that can sometimes feel slow to move, I was really struck by how well they appear to have worked together so that the hoard could be dug up, put on display, funded and publicised so smoothly in such a short time.

I hope that those of you that weren’t there on the day have been able to get some sense of what went on and the positive threads of enthusiasm, creativity, inspiration and joined-up thinking that went on. It was a great, informal, friendly day that, as conferences often do, reminded me of my passion for the sector I work in and the work I do. I hope that those of you were there shared my enjoyment of the day and urge you all to keep an eye on the meetings section of the Museums Computer Group website for details of our annual conference which should be held in London in November/December of this year.

I will start with a confession: the title of this post is really a lie – I’m mostly writing about the last fortnight in cultural heritage.  As one of those stranded overseas by Iceland’s volcanic ash, my post-Museums and the Web conference week was oddly disrupted, and it’ll be a while longer again before I’m caught up on everything else I was meant to be doing in those eight days.

I arrived in Denver early to take part in the Wikimedia@MW2010 workshop.  I’ve been reflecting on the results for several days, and I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on it.  At first, I felt that museums and Wikimedia were two ships that passed in the night, however friendly and well-intentioned the waving between them.  I didn’t feel we really engaged with the big issues between museums and Wikimedia on the day, though perhaps this was too much to expect with a large group in just one day.  Each group is decentralised  – individual Wikimedians must answer to the distributed community of Wikimedians, and a single museum cannot speak for any other museum – so while there was lots of interesting discussion, it’s difficult to pinpoint any big headline outcomes from the meeting.

However, in the short term the real result will probably be lots of smaller partnerships that will map the path to future discussions through their successes and failures.  It may be that the only way to really understand each other is to encounter and resolve a thousand tiny misunderstandings.  I hope that these projects will help us learn more about each others’ motivations, difficulties and issues (perhaps even to understand enough to feel empathy) so that we can work together to help everyone access quality content and experiences online. After all, as one of the keynote speakers said, ‘we’re all dedicated to preserving human knowledge’.

Discussions about automated harvesting and publishing at the technical breakout session started me thinking about what become one of the themes I mused on of the rest of conference.  While there are basic technical issues that we need to solve to provide a core level of service to the wider community, we will always need curators to define and select objects and stories that are of more intrinsic interest. We all have hero objects, and we all have more widgets than heroes, even if your widgets are pottery sherds or flying ants rather than spark plugs.

I think we will also see an increasing demand for curators, educators and specialists who can communicate with distributed communities of visitors who want to continue accessing and learning with collections regardless of the barriers of time and space.

Personal highlights of the MW2010 conference were Thursday’s ‘Collections: Tag / Search / Deploy’ papers, and the unconference. [At that stage we didn't know we'd be holding a few more to keep ourselves occupied while grounded] There were several interesting papers I didn’t get to see in other sessions – luckily all the papers are online so I can catch up with them later.  I was also involved in the creation of the Spinny Bar Historical Society, which effectively demonstrated that with a bit of know-how, several social media addicts and about $100 you could create an effective, multi-channel online presence for a small organisation in just 24 – 48 hours. The SBHS even has a collections management system, though we admit that in this case it did help to have their CEO at the conference.

The end of the conference was somewhat overshadowed by anxious thoughts of being stranded in Denver.  As those fears turned to reality, we were able to make the most of it, organising further unconferences, meals and frisbee sessions as well as simply banding together and working in the same space.

The ‘mobile games’ post-MW2010 unconference session at Leela’s Cafe

[This week's guest post is by Jeremy Ottevanger, Web Developer at Museum of London

Pecker up, Buttercup!
Following the uplifting experience of the 2009 Jodi Awards, I vowed to stop being such a miserable sod and to blog some optimism. Well, due to some duplicity on the part of the space-time continuum that never happened, so now is my chance to set that straight. I have to confess upfront that I suddenly have my own particular reason for feeling optimistic (I’ve got a new job), and in contrast I know some of you may be facing all sorts of work-related strife of your own, and you have my heartfelt sympathy. I hope you can see it through.

For you more than anyone, though, you who are struggling with motivation or threatened by the state of public finances and politics, as well as those of you in happy and healthy organisations, why not stand back for a moment and say “this is digital heritage, ain’t it grand?” So here’s are three overlapping reasons why I think digital heritage is in good shape, and getting better. I’ve picked out big-picture things and largely neglected more specific and enervating stuff – cool apps, innovative ideas, exciting content – but why not add a comment with the top 3 things that excite you? Be as broad or specific as you like, and we can crowd-source a list of guaranteed-to-titillate digital heritage slam-dunkers to go along with the Best of the Web awards coming up at Museums and the Web 2010 next week in Denver.

#1 An awesome community
I’m sure many other professions have vibrant communities of practice, but it’s striking in ours where expertise is spread so thinly across the globe. The Museums & the Web conference, those of the MCG and MCN (call for papers out this week) along with their mailing lists, and many other irregular meetings worldwide really do seem to bust the bounds of geography that make it unlikely there’s more than a handful of practitioners in any given city. Together with Twitter, blogs, social sites like Museum 3.0 and conference.archimuse.com, LinkedIn and all the rest it can sometimes even become too intense (right?). A few years ago I was content in my job and was part of a good, motivated team, but didn’t really participate much in a bigger community; since waking up to what I was missing I feel better informed, more engaged and networked, and I would hope I am a stronger museum technologist and more valuable asset to my museum. It’s a pretty healthy ecosystem, it’s growing all the time, and we all benefit from it.

My big caveat to this, or what I want to see change, is that the networks on my radar are composed almost entirely of practitioners in the English-speaking world. There are some invaluable exceptions – especially people from countries where speaking excellent English is as common as speaking the native tongue – but when it comes to sharing experience with Asia, Africa, South America or much of Europe we’re at the stage of sending and receiving the occasional diplomatic mission, not of building truly global communities (Taiwan is the exception here in having its own thriving chapter of MCN, and Europeana is also a network as much as a project). Digital heritage being what it is, in principle we have the opportunity to do things that can’t be done in the real world, like creating new or impossible intercontinental collections, services and aggregations of knowledge and creativity. This sort of collaboration, though, really needs to start with networks of people, and we need to make these more global. Of course, starting (relatively) small and then trying to scale is a way to approach this. Which takes us smoothly to Thing 2…

#2 Networked knowledge
I’m not going to do an API/Linked Data/Semantic Web/federated search thing here, only say that after a decade of stuttering starts I believe that we are seeing the true beginnings of properly networked (or at least massively aggregated) knowledge. This has been built on top of hard-won standards, and has recently been given a huge boost by a number of governments opening up their data and encouraging people to find ways to hook it all together. This includes UK.gov opening up big-time (Ordnance Survey, you can come out now, you need no longer be ashamed of yourself. It’s worth remembering that this is the Dr Jeckyll aspect of the UK government: Mr Hyde, on the other hand, just passed the Digital Economy Bill, and who can love that?

Why is this important? Well cultural heritage data is fine on its own terms, but I think we’ve come to realise over the past few years that hooking it together with more of the same is great in itself but limited: knitting it into a wider ecosystem of data is what will really make the network effects take off, so the a glut of new non-heritage data sources appearing now really could provide that impetus.

You may not be surprised to see me mention Europeana here, too. Whatever else it is, it’s the grandest experiment yet in what happens if you mass structured cultural heritage content together from many different countries and lanaguages, and how you do it in the first place. The challenge is every bit as much about gaining consensus from participants who always have the option to pull out, as it is about technical problems, and I don’t know of another project that has braved quite this challenge before in
digital heritage. Anything we learn is good, but with any luck we’ll end up with a core of content massive enough to attract all sorts of unexpected attention and novel uses. That’s the strength of networked knowledge.

#3 Professionalisation, recognition and integration
Lots of the people I know in this game got into it in the same way as I did: entirely by accident. Many picked up their tech skills on their semi-random walk from somewhere in the arts, the sciences, maybe a museum studies degree (but a few have built on a proper education in computer science). As a result my peers have amazingly diverse backgrounds and each brings a unique perspective to digital heritage. This is surely partly why we have such vibrant discussions and creative ideas zipping about.

And yet, it’s also time for professionalisation, and it’s coming. In the UK I know of several universities running courses in digital heritage and digital preservation or relevant modules on museum studies courses*. A deepening literature and progressive theorisation of the discipline all play a part too, as do the communities of practice and partnerships I mentioned before. We need museum management to recognise that our work is a valid branch of museological practice, peopled by skilled specialists possessing knowledge you can’t find in a coder plucked off the street, and that we can shine a new light on the museum’s mission.

So whilst it would be a shame if we lost all the diversity that the first colonisers of this “museum computing” space brought over its first couple of decades (ok, Ross, let’s say four decades), I’m sure that professionalisation and recognition are worth a bit of a trade-off in that regard. But not too much, I hope.

For an example of professionalisation and recognition we can probably look at the overlapping field of archaeological computing, where some of the most proactive people in the digital heritage community actually work. From my glancing acquaintance with academic and commercial archaeology it strikes me that practitioners are recognised as another kind of archaeologist, just like geoarchaeologists, finds specialists, osteologists or geomatics folks, rather than being seen as the necessary nerd in the corner. Museum computing and archaeological computing are twins serving different masters, but the one is regarded quite differently to the other and it will be good if we see that situation improve.

*check this distance learning MA out: http://www.le.ac.uk/ms/study/digitalheritage.html. I must declare an interest (like half the MCG board), but it’s a ground-breaking beast.

#4 the iPad
Ah well why not have an unplanned fourth thing? I’ve been way too serious so far, and anyway the iPad is the talk of the week I’m meant to be covering. Whether it turns out to be the long-awaited paradigm-shifter and market-maker for slate-style gizmos, or merely a cool toy we’ll have forgotten in a couple of years, well, it’s certainly got us talking about what we can do with something like that – when it finally reaches these shores, of course. And I imagine there’ll be a small glut of them coming over at the end of MW2010…

That’s it, then. A list of things that make me think “hmm, this is a great profession and it’s getting better”, despite the Sisyphean sensation we often feel at the chalk-face. So, if your director thinks “social media” means a growth substrate for bacteria; if open data equates to an invitation to IP theft in the mind of your information managers; if, at your museum, any chance of failure is seen as worse than never developing; if your IT manager can recall their yearly targets but doesn’t know the museum’s purpose or values; if your manager is a marketer for whom “digital sustainability” means how long they can hold up two fingers at you; you have my sympathy, nay, my empathy. But surely these people are on borrowed time. No cultural heritage organisation that sees digital media as anything other than integral to achieving their purpose will succeed and grow - perhaps this is even more true during financially straitened times, which is one inference I take from both Nick Poole’s and Günter Waibel’s excellent recent posts – and so these myopic attitudes must inevitably die out. Funders will look at examples of places large and small that do it well and will ask searching questions of those institutions that haven’t worked out their place in this fast-evolving world. At that point, when a dazed-looking director knocks at your asking how your museum can “lead at digital” or some such vapid nonsense, as the realisation dawns that they’ve been missing something and no one’s going to pay them to fail their audiences forever, it falls to you, me, we to be prepared with a plan, a feel for what’s out there and what your gaff could be doing with some imagination, some support, and some cojones. Then you can show them a profession with rigour, cohesion, vitality and loads of whizzy stuff, and more opportunities than you can shake an accounting package at. I think that’s a pretty good place to be.

I can’t help but end on a selfish note that is a little at odds with the tenor of this post. As I mentioned earlier, my own reason for optimism is chiefly that I’ve been offered a really exciting new opportunity to work at the Imperial War Museum, which has put a spring in my step. Which means that, whilst I’m sure that attitudes to digital heritage will mature, accompanied by a recognition of the validity of the discipline, I’m not waiting around for that change to come to my present place of work. But maybe after 8 years of me they need me gone as much as I need to move on and it will do us all good to start again.

So, comment away with what gets you excited in digital heritage, I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

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

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).

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

Hosted by The University of Leicester; sponsored by The 24 Hour Museum, mwr and Simulacra.

Thank you to all participants and speakers for making the day such an inspiring and successful event.

Presentations and conclusions are below.

UK Museums and the Web is not affiliated to Archimuse’s North American Museums and the Web conference.

Today, amidst the information age, the idea of ‘object’, ‘visit’ and (even) ‘site’ have been transformed. The ‘collections’ our visitors engage with are just as likely to be digital in format, bringing with them an array of new curatorial challenges as well as audience expectations.

Our community holds one of the richest sources of such information and knowledge available in the world. Much of this knowledge does not make it into physical galleries, but can be ideal for the web. In communicating this knowledge we need to understand the world of publishing better and consider seriously the permanence of digital material and access to it. At the same time we need to aid understanding of the widest possible audiences by explaining and bringing to life its value to them. A tall order, and all within our limited budgets.

Squaring up to these major changes, and by drawing together a range of practitioners, consultants, scholars, policy makers and industrialists this year’s UK Museums and the Web conference focuses attention on to the ‘digital object’.