Behind the scenes

I’m always on the look-out for cheap (or free) ways of doing things - I am using WordPress for this blog, after all - and new ways of using services and applications in a slightly different way to further the aims of the museums service.

Scran was a marvellous example where the funding model meant that we could get work done that we needed (documenting and recording the collections) by staff and contractors entirely paid by the grant, since our match funding came from the value of the licence we granted to Scran to make the material available for education through their web site (which, strangely enough was something else we wanted to do).

So too with the mobile phone (that’s cell phone for US readers) audio tour at Prestongrange. The audio tour was planned anyway, but the mobile phone aspect was simply a cheap way of making the same material available through a different medium. When we began the planning for the tour MP3 players were rare and expensive gadgets that only technophiliacs owned. These days they are almost given away with breakfast cereals, so we’ve made the same content available for download as well.

Now I’m investigating another route for disseminating information about the collections. I have to give the credit for this idea to Dylan Edgar of SMC - but I don’t think he imagined I’d just run off and do it…

One of the great problems about putting collections databases online is that, generally-speaking, people don’t make use of them. But even if the information is online in a more accessible format, items still aren’t found by searchers because the descriptions used by curators are often very different from the words used by non-experts in searching for those self-same items. Yes, I am talking about folksonomy - though the term itself does seem sometimes to generate more heat (though I can see what he means) than light. So on to the experiment…

I’ve put fifty items from our collection into a Museums photostream on flickr.com (fifty-one images, though because I added a detail of one of the objects). It seemed to us (Dylan and me that is) that flickr offered two potential benefits, especially for smaller museums - a quick way of putting collections images and information online, and a way of enabling visitors to add their own information, comments, notes and tags. Or not. We shall see. The key thing about using flickr rather than trying to do the same thing on your own site (say by means of a wiki) is that we can tap into an existing huge community of people who otherwise would be very unlikely to come across our stuff.

You will see (at any rate you will if you have javascript enabled) a random selection from the set at the top of this page. Fingers crossed.

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…