Museums: A View from Outside

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Museums A View from Outside

• Chris Yapp
• Head of Public Sector Innovation
• Microsoft

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Revisiting my themes

• Museums and organisational drift
• Complexity of purposes
• Governance
• From collections to connections
• Thoughts on the Virtual Museum

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Organisational drift

• Libraries
• Museums
• Galleries
• Archives
• Theatres

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Complexity of Purposes

• Education
• Scholarship
• Preservation
• Tourism
• Regeneration
• Campaigning
• Identity and citizenship
• ..

A very diverse sector
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Governance

• National, Regional, Local
• Public, Private, Voluntary
• Stand alone, institutionally attached
• Sources of funding
• Core competences?

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Core Competence

• Some leading edge challenges
• People and skills in sector
• Information and knowledge management

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From Collections to Connections

• Collection Management
• Connecting objects to objects
• Connecting objects to stories..
• Connecting objects to locations
• Connecting objects to people
• Connecting people to people
• Connecting institutions to institutions

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Thoughts on the Virtual Museum

• Full collections
• Personalised
• Accessible
• Substitution vs Complementary
• Thematic
• Without walls
• Digital only museums..

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Difficult issues

• Prioritisation of digitisation
• IPR, licensing
• Long-term preservation
• Renaissance or dark ages