In its 2016 Culture White Paper the British government said it wanted to ‘make the UK one of the world’s leading countries for digitised public collections content. We want users to enjoy a seamless experience online, and have the chance to access particular collections in depth as well as search across all collections.’
This series of blog posts explores the things museums would do if they could indeed bring together information from across different collections in a seamless and futureproof way. Join in the conversation on Twitter with #ItsGoodToShare, and please get in touch if you’d like to write a blog piece on this topic.
Staff and volunteers from around 40% of UK museums are without access to the collections information they need to work remotely from home. That’s the headline finding of a survey by Collections Trust in the first few weeks of the nationwide lockdown. It’s a problem of basic digital resilience affecting museums large and small.
A roundup of the additional support and information Spectrum Partners are offering users of their collections management systems and digital asset management systems during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns in the UK and many other countries.
AI technologies have great potential to help us discover meaning in museum collections, says Kevin Gosling, but they need to be trained using big data at a scale that’s currently hard for most institutions to delivers currently hard for most institutions to deliver.
Sharing museums collections data has traditionally been a ‘right faff’, but things are moving on and standardising incoming data should soon be the job of the harvesting tool, not the museum supplying the data, says Kevin Gosling.
Kevin Gosling blows the dust off some of the initiatives to connect the nation’s collections that almost everyone has forgotten about.
Surely Google can help us find objects in collections across the UK’s museums? Chief Executive Kevin Gosling addresses a key question at the heart of the Collections Trust’s recent feasibility study for DCMS on mapping digitised collections.
Kevin Gosling, Chief Executive of Collections Trust, introduces a recently-published study, commissioned by DCMS, into the feasibility of mapping and connecting digitised cultural collections with a view to making them searchable across organisations and disciplines.
In our latest #ItsGoodToShare blog post, researcher Anna Reeve talks about her experience of tracking down information about ancient Cypriot collections. She discusses the difficulties posed by not being able to search across museum collections.
In our latest #ItsGoodToShare blog post, Rick Lawrence, Digital Media Officer at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery (RAMM), discusses his museum’s experience of sharing collections data online and their aspirations for the future.
In the first #ItsGoodToShare guest blog, David Dawson, Director of Wiltshire Museum, explains why Wessex Museums Partnership would like to combine their online collections to offer users a joined-up service.
This is Collection Trust’s response, in 2017, to the #CultureisDigital consultation on cultural infrastructure by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. It asks DCMS to make programme funding available to one of the government-sponsored national bodies to take responsibility for the infrastructure needed to bring together collections information from UK museums and make it available for re-use.