A bit of a giveaway
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…