how museums can thrive in a new media age

The Revolution Will Be DigitisedHow museums can thrive in a New Media age

This presentation is about the future of museums

Museums are….what?

Brokers!

Mediators!

Publishers!Entertainers!

Guardians!

Sexy!

We seem to be in the middle of a profound identity crisis, but…

“The institutions within the sector have reinvented themselves from being passive repositories of the past, becoming deliverers of social and economic value and playing an empowering role in a more participatory, engaged and multi-cultural society.”

John Holden, DEMOS

Our first – and biggest – challenge is a million miles away from technology. The world now is different from the world of 10 years ago. Who wants us and what do they want us for?

Museums are an industry

Our products are experiences and understanding

We’re in a competitive marketplace…

YouTube fed 100 million grainy clips a day to 20m unique visitors a month for the whole of 2006

6,363,325 votes were cast during the final of Big Brother 2006, many by SMS

Inexplicably, 8,250,000 were cast during the final of Fame Academy last year

“The key in the past was volume and frequency. Now its going to be quality.”

David Clark, MTV Networks

We can’t compete on numbers.

We can add value to existing services.

Imagine…

The value a consumer places on the brand. If it is trusted, the brand has positive equity. If it is not credible or trusted, the brand has negative equity.

Brand equity is more than intrinsic value placed on the product or service, and encompassing everything that a consumer thinks, feels, and knows about a brand.

“Brand Equity”

Museums are a huge part of what we call the ‘soft’ economy. It can’t be measured in hard terms, but it’s about what it feels like to live in and contribute to a society that values its own heritage.

It may not be easily measurable, but it has a profound impact on our economic life.

Thanks to Tony Travers, LSE

“The Net is brutally centrifugal, fragmenting newspapers into articles, movies into clips and CDs into songs.”

Spencer Reiss, Tech Journalist

Collections into…?

“Don’t bet against the Internet”

Ancient Venture Capitalist Proverb

All-time Great Business Mistakes

• Create the supply and then go look for the demand

• Artificially inflate the market with upfront investment, but fail to figure out how to monetise when the grant runs out

• Fail to standardise the product

• Do the same as better-resourced competitors, but do it worse

• Create lots of small/medium enterprises doing broadly the same stuff

Digitisation

(homo-nofiensis)

Databases

(SPECTRUM Man)

Record Cards

(Neanderthal Man)

Distributed Content Services

(homo-pratty)

Our role in Internet world is not going to be providing websites.

Our role is content, context and credibility

“You have to put together a whole consumer offering, a great instantaneous experience. A simple service that fills an obvious need and can be offered for free.”

Nikklas Zennström, Skype co-founder

We look ridiculous

If it has to be free at the point of use

and the Government won’t pay for it

and we don’t get enough traffic for advertising

then where is our business model?

Create a mechanism in which market forces balance supply and demand

What does it cost you to digitise one image?

What do you charge a school child to use it?

What do you charge Ross Parry?

What do you charge Dorling Kindersly?

2% of museum content is economically viable

98% of our digitised assets are riding on the back of these

Upwards of £75m of public money has gone into mass-digitisation

The majority of this material is now inaccessible, unavailable, in many cases permanently irretrievable junk

Hundreds of thousands of curt, non-descriptive object records have been put online in the past 10 years, hidden behind poorly designed interfaces.

Why? Who for?

We can thrive, and we can deliver unique online services, but the audience has raised its game, and so must we.

e nick.poole@mda.org.uk

w mda.org.uk

w collectionslink.org.uk

w culturalpropertyadvice.gov.uk