Behind the scenes

I suppose I ought to explain the image in the page header. It’s part of the Haddington set of weights and measures from 1707, which is a particularly nice set including Avoirdupois weights (the one illustrated is a 2lb - 2 pounds for those who don’t understand all that non-metric stuff - about 0.91kg), Troy weights (like a set of nested brass flower pots), pint and Wine Gallon (smaller than an Imperial gallon) measures and a big brass bushel. In addition we have at least one measure that pre-dates these: a Scots pint. Scots pints, like Scots miles were larger by a fair amount than their English equivalents.

What is the significance of these weights and measures? Apart from their indication of the role of the local burgh in regulating trade, ensuring that traders gave good measure and didn’t cheat their customers, they have a particular political significance. By Article XVII of the Act of Union, English weights and measures were to be used throughout the newly-established Kingdom of Great Britain (”…the same weights and measures shall be used throughout the United Kingdom as are now established in England, and standards of weights and measures shall be kept by those burghs in Scotland to whom the keeping the standards of weights and measures, now in use there, does of special right belong; all which standards shall be sent down to such respective burghs from the standards kept in the exchequer at Westminster, subject, nevertheless, to such regulations as the Parliament of Great Britain shall think fit.”).

Scots money, by the way, was worth less than the English equivalent - one pound Scots was worth 1s 8d (about 8.5p, one twelfth of a pound Sterling).

The Digital Resource Development Team project is funded by a grant of £300,000 from the Scottish Executive for three years. We’re already into year two now and finished sub-projects are starting to roll out.

In developing the project idea (and how long ago that seems now!) I was most concerned to avoid providing a series of training events, since in my experience (both my personal experience, and in seeing others whose training I have authorised) most training is wasted unless what you learn is pretty well immediately applied in a real-world situation. If you just attend the training course, do a couple of imaginary exercises unrelated to your real job, and then return to your normal schedule of activity you will very quickly forget what you have learned. It’s practice that embeds the learning.

So my concept for the DRDT was that the learning would take place through participation in real projects - producing end results (digital objects, websites, publications or whatever) that increased the participants’ knowledge, skills and experience, but also benefitted institution as an outcome.

As with most projects of this type, most of the money is spent on paying staff - just over two thirds of the £300k in this case. This always seems a lot at first glance, but the difficulty is not so much in raising money to buy things, but rather in finding people to undertake the tasks. It is the eternal problem of small museums - yes, we can get a grant of £10,000 for this project - but who is going to actually do it? And who’s going to do their job while they are working on the grant-funded project?

The remaining third of the RDCF funding is financing the partner projects. A key question here has been how to stimulate project ideas and involve  the partners in activities, when they lack the knowledge and confidence to say what it is they would like to do. That is, it’s no use asking people what they want to do until they know what thay can want to do - until they understand the range of possibilities, all they can ask for is more of what they already know. Yet we don’t want to impose our ideas of what they should do, lacking any knowledge of their individual institutional needs. The approach has been for Kye and Angus, the Project Officers, to meet the partners on their own sites and talk about the sorts of things they are currently doing and would like to do, and to offer suggestions as to how digital technologies could make a contribution to those ambitions. Kye and Angus then work with the partners to put together project proposals.

The original business plan was deliberately vague (i.e. I had no idea at the time*) as to how the ‘projects’ money would be allocated. Currently a substantial proportion has been set aside as a ‘Challenge Fund’ which offers grant of up to 100% to partners in a series of roughly quarterly application rounds, the second of which was decided at the end of last month. Most of the projects have been modest in size - a project should not strain the capacity of the applicant actually to deliver - ranging from setting up a CMS-based website to accompany a new exhibition in the City Arts Centre in Edinburgh to providing the equipment to enable the Scottish Fisheries Museum to move over to digital reproduction of its photographic archive, by way of interactives for galleries, the digitisation of video and the production of DVDs.

Meanwhile we have also been helping partners find ways to keep their websites up to date (without detailed technical knowledge), delivering a range of basic training to provide a background in webby stuff and working with digital images, and in putting together a ‘kit’ to enable the production of panoramas for virtual tours - in particular to enable a form of access to those hard-to-get-at parts of museums up spiral staircases and the like.

The real test of all this, of course, will be not in the material produced through the project, but in what happens after.

*The time scale for the application to the RDCF was very short - the guidelines were published on 22nd December 2003, with a deadline for applications of 31st March 2004 - effectively eleven weeks to build a regional partnership, devise a project and agree an application and business plan. Of course we were already somewhat prepared, thanks largely to City of Edinburgh Museums earlier in the year, but that is another story…

East Lothian Council had put together an application to the Big Lottery Fund’s Living Landmark programme for Prestongrange (combining the museum and the Morrison’s Haven site across the road). The commitment to redevelopment at Prestongrange is a long-standing one, but the Living Landmark scheme offered an opportunity for funding that in many ways would have been less complicated than the funding routes we were previously looking at (these involved a number of different funders for different aspects of the redevelopment). However, as is the way of these things, many are called, but few are chosen - and Prestongrange did not make it through to the next round of selection. Well, they don’t call it the Lottery for nothing.

Still, the work that was done in producing the application will not have been wasted, as it will form the basis for our subsequent applications. In particular this process has given us a much clearer integrated vision of what we would like to do with the site, and the process of public consultation which will inform the development process has got underway. We always knew that Prestongrange was a site of enormous significance in Scotland’s industrial and social history. This has been reinforced by the results of the first phase of the Community Archaeology project. Now we have a vision for the site. All we need to do now is work with the community to fill in the details - then fill in the applications and win the grants.

After that the hard work will really start…