‘Innovation’: the Emperor’s new clothes?

Scott and I travelled down to Cambridge last week to speak at the Museum Computer Group’s Spring Meeting, ‘Innovation’: the Emperor’s new clothes? It was a very informative day that began with Peter Pavement, SurfaceImpression, giving us a history of digital innovation in museums. Including the first audio guides and the Senster, which was the first robotic sculpture to be controlled by a computer.

First Museum Audio Guides from Loic Tallon Flickr

First Museum Audio Guides

Peter discussing the Hype Cycle, where would you place new technological innovations?

The Hype Cycle

Sejul Malde, Culture 24, followed on from Peter. He discussed using existing assets and content, as well as small ‘process focused’ innovation rather than innovation through giant leaps. His emphasis on creating a rhythm for change made me reflect on how short sprints enabled us to get Collections.ed online. (Looking at our Github commit history highlights sprint deadlines.)

Scott and I then discussed the work we have being doing at Edinburgh to get our collections online through Collections.ed, which has been an iterative process starting off with four online collections launched May 2014, we now have eight collections online following the recent launch of our Iconics collection. We have also recently made a first import into Collections.ed of  776 unique crowdsourced tags we have obtained through Library Labs Metadata Games and those entered into Tiltfactor‘s metadata games.

The tags can been seen online in these two examples:
Charles Darwin’s Class Card
Bond M., White House in Warm Perthshire Valley

The slides from our presentation are available on ERA http://hdl.handle.net/1842/10415 and have a film theme running through them.

The new Iconics home page (I think it is my favourite so far):

iconicswithborder

In the afternoon Lizzie Edwards, Samsung Digital Discovery Centre, British Museum, lead a practical session where we had to think about how we could use new technologies in Museums. Jessica Suess, Oxford University Museums, spoke about their ‘Innovation Fund’ programme and how it had led to new ways of working and new collaborations with colleagues. She mentioned one project using Ipads as Art Sketchbooks http://www.ashmolean.org/education/dsketchbooks/ which was also showcased in a lightning talk.

Lightning talks and a Q&A session with HLF and Nesta finished off the day, you can find out more from Liz Hide’s storify of the day: https://storify.com/TheMuseumOfLiz/the-emperor-s-new-clothes

Claire Knowles and Scott Renton, Library Digital Development Team

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