Blog

Creative forces line up behind plan for greater digital access

Andrew | 16 Mar 2010, 16:22

C&binet comment: Margaret Hodge, Culture Minister, Department for Culture, Media and Sport

Last week was a big week for opportunity in the creative industries. On Monday afternoon I was at Number 10 to launch a £600K Creative Bursaries Scheme with the Prime Minister and a quartet of Billy Elliots. Then on Tuesday I kick-started the seminar at Tate Modern on digital access that I mentioned in my last blog.

Our Creative Bursaries scheme is designed to open up equal opportunities to young people from low income backgrounds to succeed in jobs in the arts.  Too many young people who manage to graduate from a conservatoire, a drama college, or an art school then find they haven’t got the contacts or the money to break through into a successful career.  This scheme, administered by Jerwood, will guarantee them an income at the rate of £15,000 for up to a year, and a placement with our best orchestras, dance companies or theatres.  It’s a Billy Elliot opportunity for graduates.

I also want to see better digital access become the next iconic moment for UK culture. Bringing in free admission a decade ago opened the doors of our national museums to a much wider audience. Greater digital freedom has the potential to tear down new walls, and bring in new audiences.

My thanks go out to all the people who came to critique and comment on Jonathan Drori’s digital access draft paper – it was uplifting to hear from so many people so knowledgeable and so energised by the possibilities. We’ll publish the finalised paper as soon as all the feedback from Tuesday’s event has been digested.

For me, trust came out as the common thread. Spencer Hyman urged cultural bodies to ‘share the love’ – to trust the online community with cultural content, to trial it, and share their experiences and recommendations friend to friend.

Nick Poole of the Collections Trust consigned the old business model based on content transactions to history and urged trust in social capital.

Jane Finnis of Culture24 urged publicly funded cultural organisations to trust each other with their market research.

The current and widespread public suspicion of authority figures, including experts, was raised by Christine Wall, and she spoke about how this initiated a change of attitude at English Heritage, from asking the public to trust them, to asking themselves to trust the public.

Lynne Brindley pointed out that the public already expects the British Library to be online, and offered practical advice on how public cultural collections can work profitably with private sector partners (‘You can do business with Google!’) to the advantage of both. It’s possible, in Lynne’s view, to use digitisation to enhance revenue, reach and reputation, and the British Library are in the process of drawing up guidelines based on their experience.

I had to leave, reluctantly, at the point when the delegates broke out into groups to dissect the paper – but the outcome of those discussions and the pledges for progress made will be published shortly at culture.gov.uk. I’ll let you know when. 

Finally, I encourage all of you who have ambitions to develop new ‘apps’ or to do business with those that can, to attend Rewired Culture, which DCMS is hosting on 27 March.

Digital access to culture is a world of opportunity for creative businesses

Alastair | 08 Mar 2010, 12:24

Society advances through the connections we make. Some quite surprising. Last week I discovered a link between Rolf Harris and the search for a breakthrough on nuclear fusion.

Listening to a Desert Island Discs podcast, I caught Jim Al-Khalili talking about the part the BBC World Service played in his Baghdad childhood. He told a story about listening on his birthday with his brother and hearing the presenter dedicate Two Little Boys to him. Anglophile tendencies and English connections eventually brought the family to Britain in the 1970s following Saddam Hussein’s rise to power, and Professor Al-Khalili is now one of our most eminent theoretical physicists – and a brilliant communicator about science.

Also on my list of podcasts to catch up on has been Neil MacGregor’s entrancing British Museum and the BBC. The British Museum contributes the artefacts and Neil MacGregor’s erudition to the partnership, and the BBC its communications expertise. “ title=“A History of the World in 100 Objects “>A History of the World in 100 Objects – a product of a connection between the British Museum and the BBC. The British Museum contributes the artefacts and Neil MacGregor’s erudition to the partnership, and the BBC its communications expertise.

By the magic of digital technology, anyone with a broadband connection, at any time, anywhere in the world (one likes to think), can simultaneously study in close up a 12,000-year-old clovis spear point while listening to Neil associating it’s exquisite yet lethal design with humanity’s ‘restless struggle towards something not yet experienced, something better, more useful, more beautiful.’
The BBC’s figures suggest thousands and thousands of people are doing exactly that. In its first two weeks over 800,000 editions of the programme were heard via online streams or downloads and the podcast went straight to the top of the iTunes chart – normally dominated by comedy and entertainment. Offline, the British Museum says visits are up by ten per cent on the same period last year (which itself was a busy time in the middle of the popular Babylon exhibition).
A History is unquestionably a brilliant example of digital enriching and opening up access to culture, and culture enriching and opening up digital – a relationship I’ve been championing for some time. Last year I asked digital guru Jonathan Drori to come up with a ‘to do’ list for cultural organisations, a guide to using digital access to open up and make the most of our cultural resources.
Tomorrow, Tuesday 9th March, I’m hosting a seminar at Tate Modern with cultural leaders to discuss Jonathan’s recommendations – including freeing up rights to publicly owned cultural material, opening up cultural organisations to social networks, integration of digital technology, encouraging partnerships and experimentation with material, and ideas for revenue sharing deals.
I’ll report back afterwards, but I already see great opportunities here for the creative industries to make mutually beneficial and profitable connections with cultural bodies.