A netful of jewels

A NETFUL OF JEWELS: NEW MUSEUMS IN THE LEARNING AGE

A Report from the National Museum Directors' Conference 1999

FUNDING THE DIGITAL MUSEUM

Enhancing the cultural, sporting and creative life of the nation is a vital part of Government. The activities that we sponsor and support as a Department have a fundamental impact on the quality of life for all our citizens. They provide enjoyment and inspiration. They help to foster individual fulfilment and well-being. They help to bind us together as a community. They are important for the quality of education. They assist with the work of social regeneration. And in themselves, and with the allied importance of tourism, they form a crucial part of our nation's economy.
Chris Smith A cultural framework Department of Culture Media and Sport 1998

A number of agencies include in their remits the possibility of funding for museums and galleries content on the networks. But it is at best ancillary to their main programmes, and a priority for none. And for some crucial areas there are no specifically designated funds.

Much can be done if these funding agencies adopt policies to make full use of the public national resources of museums. We hope that they will take account of what museums and galleries can contribute, and involve them in the development of their policies. But, if the full vision of museums in the learning age is to be realised, there needs to be significant additional and dedicated funding.

Popular attractions

SOME FUNDING SOURCES

The New Opportunities Fund

The NOF is providing central support for the development of the National Grid for Learning, the New Library Network, the Community Access to Lifelong Learning project, and community services including the Community Grids. Museums are identified in those reports as major providers of content for these networks. This report sets out the many ways in which museums can contribute to meeting NOF objectives, and identifies the resources that are needed in order to make this contribution. We would welcome a dialogue on how best to move rapidly forward on this.

The Heritage Lottery Fund

The focus of the HLF remit for digitisation is preservation and access: basic inventory and catalogue information for whole collections.

Higher Education Funding Councils

The Electronic Libraries (eLib), and the JISC Image Digitisation and Research Libraries Support programmes all support the digitisation of material for higher education and research use. These programmes could include museum content, and this should be encouraged.

Department for Education and Employment

Museums can make a major contribution to learning at all levels, and the DfEE supports their contribution to some extent through the National Grid for Learning. There is clear scope for museums to support DfEE policies, and it would be very productive to extend the dialogue between the DfEE and the DCMS to consider how this can be achieved.

The Department of Trade and Industry

Museums could provide valuable support for the DTI's Information Society Initiative, and its actions following the recent White Paper on competitiveness. A dialogue needs to be established with the DTI to see how this support can best be gained.

Government sponsoring bodies

Government bodies that provide direct funding for museums include the Department of Culture, Media & Sport, the Governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and the Ministry of Defence. Devolution will bring further opportunities to develop and fund distinctive cultural strategies in the four Home Countries.

Local Authorities

Museums in Newcastle were recently voted the most popular service offered by that authority. We hope that recognition of the importance of museums to learning and to delivering other community benefits will help local museums to achieve a higher position in Local Authority funding priorities.

Regional Development Agencies

These, too, may come to fund the creation of cultural content as part of their support for regional activities. The subject needs to be high on their agendas.

The European Union

The Fifth Framework Programme is potentially a major source of funding for creating cultural multimedia. UK museums are already well represented in these discussions. Greater support to assist museums in formulating bids could result in substantial additional funds.

THE NUMBER OF DIGITAL MUSEUMS

By 2002 there should be 400 museums providing digital services on-site and online. This number is realistic. To illustrate this, of museums now, 400 have more than 50,000 visitors each year, and a similar number have education staff.

This number could achieve:

* an effective geographical spread across the whole of the UK
* a variety of interactive services and collections content
* access to significant collections and educational expertise wherever they are found
* effective community involvement.

In further phases, by 2007 all museums should be able to play their full role in the National Grid for Learning, from the very smallest museum, managed by a dedicated team of volunteers, to the largest National Museum.

THE FUNDING NEEDS

Significant investment will be required in the first instance if we are to establish a critical mass of digital content that will make sufficient impact to stimulate use and exploitation. Some investment may come through public / private partnership arrangements. But to create the new digital networked museum kick-start funding is needed, just as it is for the new library network.

Our cost estimates are informed by the calculations in the recent Library and Information Commission Report Building the New Library (1998).

Content creation and online activities

Information centres within museums - a popular resource

Museums are highly inventive places, and with the stimulus of proper resources we can expect a wave of innovation that will deliver experiences that we cannot yet predict. We would expect bids for funding for content to include a wide variety of elements, such as:

* Basic digitised collections information, images, sound and moving images to be managed as a permanent resource
* Multimedia productions and on-gallery interactives derived from these
* Interactive and participative services and productions
* On-site information and interactive centres requiring hardware, digital equipment, and internal networking.

Funding must therefore include an element to encourage experimentation. Every project should also provide for evaluation, and many will include training.

Museums innovate

Museums will be eligible to bid for projects within the £50 million already allocated for content on the New Library network. Over and above that, we estimate the necessary additional investment to create content and activities to be £35 million.

Connections and access: the infrastructure

Museum hardware and public access points within museums would be provided as part of funded projects.

The average cost of providing a broadband connection to an appropriate managed network would be about £25,000 for each of the 400 connected museums - a total infrastructure cost of £10 million.

Content delivery and organisational infrastructure

The digital museum will deliver large volumes of content, and interactive services, to millions of users. This large scale commitment requires proper organisational arrangements to be put in place to provide the services. These include, for example, selecting projects, maintaining quality, and rights management. To allow a start to be made on establishing these organisational mechanisms we suggest the provision of £2 million.

Cooperative rights management

Maintenance and sustainability

Just as the maintenance of museum collections themselves is funded as ongoing investment in a permanent national asset, so the ongoing maintenance of digital collections and services, as a permanent national asset for the future, needs to be assured.

This is a new service for museums. Pressures to continue to provide their existing services at ever higher quality will become ever greater, so funding cannot be released by redeploying existing resources.

There are two first sight sources for funding:

* Central funding
Fund the services centrally through general museum funding. This could be through increased grant-in-aid or local authority funding, or it could be left to individual museums to set priorities for this from their existing funding level.

* Funding through income from digital services
There are sources of income from digitisation that will help to defray costs. The guiding principle is that content created with public money must be made available for educational purposes free at the point of use. However, organisations such as schools and libraries can be charged license fees, and museums can charge commercial providers and publishers, both print and digital, for the use of their digitised assets and services.

Collections of information - the new national resource

Experience in SCRAN and elsewhere shows that it is not possible to generate sufficient income to completely cover the cost of maintaining these resources and services. While a few museums with collections of high commercial reproduction value may enjoy large scale income, the vast majority of museums will not. In our opinion additional permanent funding will be needed, because museums will be providing more services, and maintaining more permanent public assets. We identify this as a serious issue, but we make no estimate of the cost.

Training

There are approximately 40,000 staff, including volunteers, working in museums overall (Museum Focus: MGC 1998). Staff in the 400 connected museums will need training. As well as staff in these, projects are likely to include smaller museums that are not connected, within collaborative groups. Volunteers need training, too. Museums not connected in the first phase will need to be gearing up for the further phase beyond 2002. We estimate some 10,000 museum people, including volunteers, in total, at an average cost for training of £800 per person - a total cost of £8 million.

THE COST

To enable the first phase, in which about 400 museums will be able to deliver services on the cultural network, we estimate that there will be a need for £55 million over and above that currently available from other funding sources. This investment will deliver the benefits that can be derived from using assets - content and skills - that are already held by museums.

The sums involved are not large in relation to the benefits that will flow from them. Indeed, they will enable the museums, galleries and archives sector to add value to the investment that has already been committed to the National Grid for Learning and the New Library Network.

The cost of digital museums: first phase to 2002

                                                            £ million
* Infrastructure                               10
* Training                                          8
* Content and activity creation    35
* Maintenance                                 2

TOTAL: £ 55 million

Popular attractions
The Museums and Galleries area of the National Grid for Learning is currently the most rewarding to visit. The Museum section seems to be implementing the very essence of the National Grid better than most of its other components.
Computer Shopper February 1999

Information centres within museums - a popular resource
The Micro Gallery is the National Gallery's multimedia information centre. Opened in 1991, it is a complete multimedia guide for visitors, who can access information about all 2,200 paintings in the Gallery's collection, look up artists, places, and other historical contexts, and print out a selected tour.

COMPASS is the British Museum's public multimedia system for the Millennium. Specially prepared to appeal to a wide public, it will give access to records for 5,000 objects, and related 'Encyclopaedia' information. It will be accessible through 60+ on-site terminals, and the Web. COMPASS will demonstrate just what can be done with the latest technologies, and highlights the effort needed to create suitable content for public use.

Museums innovate
The Smithsonian Institution in the USA is developing ways of visualising the contents of its complex object databases. The relationship between objects and related material in the database is displayed as a dynamic web of associations that the user can manipulate to pursue their interests.
http://www.si.edu/revealingthings/

Cooperative rights management
Scotland's cultural institutions have jointly set up a company to manage digital intellectual property rights. Digitised assets contributed to SCRAN are governed by a licence agreement protecting the contributors' commercialisation rights. Licensed members can download multimedia assets, copyright-cleared for free educational use. SCRAN collects and distributes the income to the museums.
http://www.scran.ac.uk

Collections of information - the new national resource
The Science Museum is developing its collections management system to hold object information; contextual information about people, places and inventions; text, images, sound and movie clips, and other multimedia resources. This digital collection forms the basis for all kinds of multimedia productions, online and off-line.

For example, The Feather Trade and the American Conservation Movement is an online multimedia exhibit created by the Smithsonian Institution. Software was used to draw much of the content directly from the museum collections database.
http://www.si.edu/nmah/ve/feather/
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