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By Suzanne Keene - October 2000
The digital cultural space in the UK is rapidly developing, as large scale government funding is made available for public networks and content. This builds on investment in digitisation sustained over a number of yeas by higher education funding bodies. Political, economic, social, technical and organisational trends are shaping the future space. Museums have multiple stakeholders, and their current expectations need to be appreciated, from the perspective of the kind of electronic content that museums can produce. Possibilities for museums in the future digital space have been set out in the report from the National Museum Directors' Conference, A Netful of Jewels [1]. The content that is already available, however, is imaginative and highly attractive, and shows the potential for museums to take their place in the digital space.
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The UK government is backing the concept of the information society / economy in all its ramifications with policies and substantial funding [2]. There is also strong backing and funding from the European Union.
Government is increasingly driving forward its policies and objectives via funds for specific objectives obtained through competitive bidding. The newly established Resource: the Council for Archives, Museums and Libraries [3], will begin to pick up and drive government policies. It does not control the largest UK cultural institutions: the national museums, the British Library or the Public Record Office, although it can be expected to exercise influence.
The museum sector is also expected to deliver on broader government objectives: education ... social inclusion ... access ... participation ... two way rather than 'us to them'. Many programmes are predicated on producing educational content (sometimes broadly described as lifelong learning), and technical standards are being deliberately pitched towards low-end equipment to assist affordability [4].
Government funding is providing capital investment – through higher and further education bodies for those areas; through the National Lottery for museums, libraries and archives: the Heritage Lottery Fund (the HLF) [5] and the New Opportunities Fund (the NOF) [6]. Other government sources are also possible, such as the Treasury's Invest to Save programme, which has funded the A2A (Access to Archives) [7] programme.
It is not yet clear where the ongoing funding will come from to sustain the permanent digital resources and services that will be created. There are three possibilities: museums can redirect funding from other activities (but public funding for museum activities is in general decreasing); additional public funding can be supplied; or income can be generated from users of the content generated by the capital investment.
If the latter, there are a number of models for generating sustainability income. Government sources have described the quarry in which museums develop raw material - digitised captioned images and illustrated catalogues - and commercial sector companies develop authored productions. In museum co-operatives, such as AMICO [8], a number of museums band together to jointly market their digital property. In another model, licensing, museums simply license the rights to use their content to third parties such as Corbis [9]. Museums are taking the first tentative steps towards charging directly for rights to use - for example the British Museum in its COMPASS project, and the National Portrait Gallery. No doubt a mixed economy will eventually emerge. SCRAN [10], the Scottish cultural resource network, claims success from licensing access and use of its content, though some museums are not comfortable with the comprehensive rights it obtains from museums to use and re-use their materials.
The National Grid for Learning as originally defined was expected to stimulate a market for content such as that produced by museums, by providing the funds for schools to purchase electronic teaching and learning material.
Online provision by museums for their various interest groups is now the norm rather than the exception. Stakeholders include the general public; funding bodies including government, local government, and sponsoring commercial companies; museums' special constituencies such as scientists, the art market, local organisations; commercial publishers; educational establishments; and many others.
The UK is still among the lead countries for penetration of the Internet. Surveys of museum visitors now commonly find that 50% of them have online access from home.
People really are using the Internet more at home. There are high access figures for museum and other cultural Websites (such as the Public Record Office and the British Library). Effects on numbers of actual visitors to museums are if anything positive.
Broad band communications are often seen as creating greater opportunities for museums. This is not necessarily so. The complex video, film and sound, which this technology will enable, are not natural media for museums. Broadband content will be both elaborate (requiring large internal resources) and expensive to produce, while existing Web based content is relatively inexpensive. However, some spectacular broadband museum based productions, perhaps using virtual reality environments, can be expected.
Delivery via digital TV should create more populist audiences, and better enable routine two-way communication.
Multimedia productions of various kinds such as are delivered over the Internet now are more natural to museums. Museums have hardly begun to exploit some of the more exciting possibilities, particularly those involving participation and two-way communication with their audiences. The New Opportunities Fund programme can be expected to produce some innovative results here.
The potential to integrate databased information, such as catalogue information and labels, with screen based delivery mechanisms is very significant for museums. It is seen as politically desirable to provide digital access to a large proportion of the objects in the collections. An ongoing puzzle is how to present catalogue type information in ways that demonstrate the interest and significance of the objects.
Across the spectrum of electronic businesses and organisations, there is collaboration and convergence, vertically and horizontally. Internet service providers, for example, are becoming fewer and larger. Media companies are merging. Teleco's are becoming some of the largest companies around, such as Vodafone in the UK.
These trends are seen in the public sector too. The higher education digitisation body, JISC [11], and JANET, the national higher education network, are extending to cover further education (colleges etc.) as well. Together with the other developing public networks, the Peoples' Network (public libraries), the National Grid for Learning, and the University for Industry, there will be a comprehensive digital cultural and educational space for all citizens in the UK. Where are museums situated in that space?
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| Figure 1: The educational cultural networks in the UK |
Museums, libraries, archives and higher education organisations are equally affected, and those in lead positions are forming partnerships, e.g., AMICO, SCRAN, Fathom.com [12]. Smaller museums have to work much harder to form a critical mass. However, collaboration is being encouraged by funding programmes, which increasingly expect bids from groups of museums and other organisations. From the users' viewpoint, co-operation is likely to provide more popular results than specialisation. For example, collections relating to the history of science could be combined with history, or art and design, or military history, or current science, to form a resource with wider appeal than any single subject.
The task for museums, if they wish to succeed in the future digital space, is to design strategies that enable them to use the geographical features of this new landscape in pursuit of meeting stakeholder expectations and their own objectives.
Museums notoriously have to play multiple roles. Currently, there are political pressures on them to become more to do with people than with collections: to expand their role as communal as well as cultural meeting places, to interact more, and to accord validity to contributions from their audiences equal to that that they give to interpretation outwards by museum staff.
Fig. 2 (Fig2.jpg) The parameters of the future space for museums
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| Figure 2: The parameters of the future space for museums |
The role of the collections themselves, and of the information they embody, is unclear, although there is strong political pressure to make comprehensive collections information available online.
There are already excellent examples to illustrate the kind of content that the four domains of the museum future space will contain. Those below are drawn from UK organisations.
Populist infotainment - Perhaps because they have to try harder to engage their audiences, science museums provide some of the best examples of this. The Science Museum offers Exhibitions Online, for example Challenge of Materials [13], the Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester [14] is another excellent site offering material of this kind.
Academic authority - A few museums are using the medium for specialist academic online publishing - for example, the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, with Sphaera [15]; the National Maritime Museum with its Journal of Maritime Research. [16] The National Maritime Museum in particular offers a comprehensive and impressive amount of serious material on its subject area.
Interactive participation - Possibly the best example is the Science Museum's STEM project, where schools are invited to create Websites based on the Museum galleries [17]. Some of these are equal to anything the Museum can commission commercially.
Information provision - Collections online catalogues are growing. Art collections were perhaps the first - the online catalogues of art galleries such as Tate and the National Gallery. It has been argued that catalogues are dreary stuff if not to do with images, but the Natural History Museum's Earthlab datasite shows the way to create meaningful access [18]. Through their Earthlab, online visitors can access their mineral catalogue. On-screen choices entice exploration through interests that anyone can relate to - place, date, type of fossil and others.
Purpose-made educational products - Some museums are offering these. The Association of Independent Museums is just undertaking a project to create pilot projects and to disseminate the skills of making them. However, the cost of any but the most straightforward html offering is proving high. Another issue is how schools would actually use these products: less, perhaps, for teaching using direct online productions, and more as downloadable and printable briefing papers and worksheets. The Science Museum's Flights of Inspiration, made collaboratively with the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, was specifically designed for use in formal school settings [19].
Museums seek funding to pursue their aspirations, but funding is used by the UK government to drive achievement of its policies. A sum of £50 million has been made available to create content for the National Grid for Learning and the People's Network (the public library network). These NOF funded projects will begin to come on stream in 2002. This will rapidly create a critical mass of digitised content from all three Resource: sectors. The cultural online world in the UK can be expected to rapidly evolve.
Large amounts of funding continue to be provided via higher education bodies to create the distributed national electronic networked resource (the DNER) [20], with a national gateway, the Resource Discovery Network [21]. The latter (and we may speculate, eventually the former) will embrace higher education, the public libraries network, the National Grid for Learning.
Museums are not yet the primary target for any major sources of funding in the UK, although there are programmes that they can enter if they wish. To be successful they are having to adopt government priorities: education, access, inclusion; collaboration, co-operation. Some museums are finding themselves dealing with strange bedfellows in the New Opportunities Fund projects, for example. Whether they will see this as an opportunity for creative partnerships, or prefer to forgo funding and continue to define their roles more narrowly, remains to be seen.
The context for museum digital information in the UK is evolving as rapidly as ever. Sustained funding over a number of years has been applied to establishing high quality networked provision for higher education research and teaching. Other networks and services are now in the planning stages - the National Grid for Learning for schools; and the Peoples' Network, for public libraries. Museums may have a place in all of these, although they are the particular target of none. It is possible that these networks will coalesce eventually to become an overarching digital cultural and educational network for the UK.
There are pressing current strategic issues for museums. There is as yet no source of funding specifically targeted at the content they can create. The mechanisms to fund the permanent preservation and maintenance of the publicly funded digital assets that will be created are unclear; and the co-operatives or overarching organisations necessary to properly realise their potential for content delivery and for revenue generation have not emerged, apart from some for art museums.
The significance of the integration of collections databases with Web-based templates or other automated Internet access is that people will be able to, so to speak, help themselves to the information that the collections embody without mediation or interpretation, or even contribute to it. Many museum professionals have not yet accepted that they should actively encourage this. However, opportunities will arise through broad band technology for them to communicate much more directly with their audiences, and the implication of this is that knowledge will become more important than collections.
Despite these issues, museums have created a large amount of highly imaginative and high quality content on the Web, and they attract high numbers of Web visitors. This confirms that they will be a valuable national and global asset once they find their place in the future space.
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Suzanne Keene
Head of Collections Management
The Science Museum
s.keene@nmsi.ac.uk
<http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/>
Suzanne Keene has worked in the fields of archaeology and museums for many years. From working on the research publication of excavations in Winchester she moved to the Museum of London to head conservation. While there she developed one of the first computerised systems for recording conservation across all disciplines. In 1992 she moved to the Science Museum, as Head of Collections Management. Major projects have included LASSI, the Larger Scale Systems Initiative, to specify and procure collections management software available to all UK museums; the Netful of Jewels, a report to government on behalf of the National Museum Directors’ conference; and the National Collections Centre, to house a variety of large scale collections to be visited by the public on one of the Science Museum’s sites. She has authored two books, most recently Digital Collections: Museums and the Information Age.
She currently serves on the board of The Tank Museum and continues to lecture and publish widely in the fields of museum information and collections.
Comprehensive references to online published information,
including that referred to in this article, can be found on the
portal Website.
URL: <http://www.s-keene.dircon.co.uk/infoage/>
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For citation purposes:
Keene, S. "Museums in the Digital Space", Cultivate Interactive, issue
2, 16 October 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue2/space/>
Date of Article: 16 October 2000
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