The Culture Paradox (or, why Shakespeare is Spanish)

24th March 2012

The Cultural Imperative…

• To select, collect, interpret and present

• In highly controlled contexts

• Over a long period

• Creating ‘high-end’ knowledge

• Based on authority & credibility

• To create public trust

National Museum’s Mission Statement (Google it)

The Museum's responsibilities are to safeguard and enhance the value of its pre-eminent assets:

• Its collections• Its expertise• Its buildings

Objectives

The Museum's objectives are to spread the benefits of these assets by:

• Maximizing access and inspiration for all users• Satisfying stakeholders, locally, nationally and internationally• Effective organization and sound financial management

The barriers to openness

• The barrier is not a question of cost

• The barrier is a question of mission & value

• Success in ‘open content’ world is maximising re-use

• Success in ‘culture’ world is maximising engagement on our terms

• The problem is that we share the same mission in word, but not in meaning

• Economics, copyright & technology are all surmountable issues, but only if we want them to be

A difference of opinion

Cultural organisation

Controlled context

Authority

Recouping investment

Expertise

Quality control

Long-term

Open Content Lobby

Open

Open

Taxpayers money

Open

Crowdsource

Open

Where next?

• More and more cultural organisations are exploring open as a form of engagement

• An emerging model based on 80%, 15%, 5%

• BUT it is precisely the high-value cultural items that people want to be able to repurpose

• £250m of public investment has digitised maybe 7% of collections

• Metadata in the culture sector is not just metadata

• Declining subsidy will only make it worse

Thank you!

Professional network & expertise – www.collectionslink.org.uk

Follow Collections Trust - @collectiontrust

Or follow me - @NickPoole1