But what about the day after the closing ceremony – when the last visitor has made their way through the turnstiles, the detritus cleared and the merchandise removed from the shelves. Where does culture stand the day after the Olympics?

This is a question that will be occupying DCMS at the moment. The management of the delivery of the Olympics has given it a clear focus during a period when much of its sector has been significantly reduced. Once the Olympics are over, it is possible that the already-shrunk Department will see further reductions in staffing. With a severely restricted budget, it might struggle to secure influence across Whitehall and in the process to represent the interests of the sector effectively.

And so we may find ourselves faced with an interesting question. Is it better for the portfolio of ‘culture’ policy mandates (museums, libraries, archives) to be held within a single Department or to be distributed across the Treasury, Local Government and Business, Innovation and Skills?

When the responsibilities of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) were transferred to the Arts Council, one of its former Directors noted that this is the first time in 40 years that there has been no national strategic agency with a specific mandate for museums. This, he said, left the sector exposed to the risk of marginalisation, leaving it to fight for its share of a larger budget.

In practice, this is not how things have gone down – the Arts Council has made difficult but considered decisions about the deployment of a diminished funding pot, but it has protected museum funding for museums. But the Arts Council, too, will be looking ahead to the day after the Olympics and wondering exactly how it does more for the sector with the funding that remains to it.

While it can be hard to see what lies beyond the Olympics, one political fact is likely to hold true – that there is no margin in mourning the loss of public subsidy to the Arts and Culture. Difficult though it may be, the strategically smart play is to gather our energy, fix our best smile on our faces and go forth into the world with a fresh, positive and optimistic product to offer. Whatever our personal politics, whatever the fortunes of our individual organisations, the only successful gambit will be to turn around and say ‘well, that was tough, but look at the incredible things we can do for this country and its beleaguered economy’.

And in this process, I’d argue that we absolutely need a Department with a Ministerial portfolio that can help us make the case for Culture. Individually, our voices are thin and discordant. Neither museums, nor archives, nor libraries in their own right hold sufficient political pull to influence their own futures. Collectively with the visual and performing arts and the Creative Industries, however, our voices are stronger and more compelling.

But DCMS is only as good as the ammunition they are given for the fight. And the reality is that we have been sending them into war with sticks and stones. When DCMS officials, and Culture Ministers go into Treasury to secure investment in museums, libraries and archives, they are going head-to-head with Transport, Health, Education and Foreign Policy. Where other Departments either *must* be funded or can demonstrate a real Return on Investment, we are left trying to bridge an evidential gap between ourselves and tourism.

These are the real mechanics of a Spending Review, and in this process DCMS is our champion, not our enemy. So far, we have specialised in feudal battles – arguments about the disposition of funds from the Arts Council or HLF. But this risks looking politically naive. The real battle is with the people who decide what funds are available for the Arts Council and HLF to distribute. The proper target of our advocacy is not DCMS, but the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and the Number10 Policy Unit.

So if we want the day after the Olympics to feel like a fresh start for the Arts & Culture, then we need to come together and work out what product we can sell to the real locus of influence. And that product  needs to key into the real preoccupations of this Government, which would mean empowering local communities, supporting economic growth, promoting inward investment from overseas, amplifying the impact of education and helping UK business become globally competitive.

That’s it. That’s the radical insight. Exactly the same argument we’ve been making for years. But the difference is that it is not enough to say it, we have to mean it. And when we make the case, we have to make the case as an industry, not as 10,000 individual organisations. The only way we will claim ownership of the national narrative about culture-sector funding and use it to describe a better future is if every voice, from every corner of the industry, from every sector comes together with a singularity of purpose. And when we are all speaking the same message, we need to provide DCMS with the solid evidence they need to drive it home. They need facts, evidence, anecdotes, statistics. They need champions, Lords, media figures, luvvies and Britpop-era artists to be shouting the same message. All so that when they go into Treasury, they cannot be dismissed.

So, the day after the Olympics, DCMS needs our help. It needs all of us to decide that our fortunes lie in unity not competition. It needs us to behave with dignity and optimism, and yes, I do know that’s an awful lot to ask. We need to fill in the questionnaires, send the emails, lobby the MP’s, put on the world-leading exhibitions, so that when the time comes to make the decision about funding, we look like a sparkling opportunity to invest in UK Plc. That, or we can argue amongst ourselves while the mandate for cultural policy is spread quietly across Whitehall.

There is something gloriously oxymoronic about writing a blog for a website section called ‘Sustaining Digital’ when digital is not a thing in itself which can either be sustained or preserved. It is a portmanteau term covering a range of activities, technologies, business models and skills which focus on transcoding information into binary and transmitting it through wires and circuits.

It is a peculiarity, perhaps, of the pace of postwar technological development that for some ‘Digital’ is still new, and filled with potential, while for others it is yesterday’s idea. Wired magazine runs a regular feature called ‘Wired, Tired and Expired’. Digital, in the culture sector at least, appears to be all 3 at the same time. There is a fun game you can play (for those of us without social lives) of trying to figure out where someone is on this journey when you meet them for the first time.

But if we can agree at least that these developments emerge, disrupt and are then assimilated into the mainstream, then it seems likely that in a few short years from now, we won’t be using the term ‘Digital’ much at all, in the same way that we seldom use ‘Atomic’ and ‘Electronic’ has come to acquire an ironic cyberpunk charm. And if this is the case, I thought it might be interesting to speculate about what we will be using instead, and what that might mean for museums, archives and libraries.

There are, of course, the current contenders – ‘mobile’, ‘social’ and ‘cloud’. Of the 3, two are about atoms and electrons, and one (social, in case you were wondering) seems to be about people. In Mia Ridge’s wonderful phrasing ‘technology changes, people don’t', and certainly, the dizzying growth of social networks and the integration of the ‘social graph’ into e-commerce and e-Government seem to point towards a fundamental development in technology which serves a basic human purpose.

There are two things which prevent me from suggesting we’re heading into a ‘Social Age’, though. The first, most obvious, is that we have alway been in a social age. Social networking has been the foundation of most of human experience, and it is telling that Dunbar’s number seems to hold as true for Facebook as it does for tribes. In many ways, then, the social graph represents the normalisation of technology into existing patterns of behaviour. It is not so much a radical departure as a reappropriation of technology for a very basic human purpose.

The second is that the ‘social’ experience online is a peculiarly stylised one – as though a software engineer who had never attended one had been asked to code a dinner party. Facebook is less a ‘social’ experience, and more like a virtual equivalent of Rear Window, allowing users to peer into a strange public/private hybrid rendition of our lives. LinkedIn is us at a job interview, and Google+ gives rise to the highbrow joke ‘I thought it was only Dante that liked to put his friends in Circles’. While social certainly extends the museum, library or archive’s arsenal of engagement and partnership with its audiences, it remains a different kind of relationship from a truly ‘social’ one.

So if ‘social’ is an expansion of ‘Digital’, and if both are in the process of assimilation into mainstream culture, then where might we be going next? The answer, I suspect might come not from technology but from the far greater context of global economic and social change.

The next two generations will have grown up against a backdrop of geopolitical, social and personal change. They may be experiencing and interacting with this brave new world through screens, but it is the world, and not the screen that matters.

Contrary to the Daily Mail fantasy of feral, socially-irresponsible children roaming the streets and ram-raiding JB Sports on their stolen mopeds, and at the risk of social stereotyping, many children and young people are reaching political and social maturity early (often of necessity) and taking their social responsibilities very seriously indeed. I suspect that the low levels of political engagement reported among the 18-25 demographic are far more to do with a disaffection with the way we do politics than with politics itself.

The challenges facing the next two generations are significant. Restore faith in the integrity of the state, adjust expectations of personal wealth and progressive growth, sustain the momentum of tolerance and integration, adjust to a career based on flux and uncertainty, find innovative, practical solutions to environmental change and the scarcity of resources. That’s on top of the usual concerns of health, education, security and welfare. And somewhere in this mix they will need to begin to find answers to profoundly important questions of transparency, equality and social justice.

In this world of 10 years’ time, bandwidth will be ubiquitous in industrialised nations, and convergence will have delivered consumer-oriented devices that allow the physical and digital worlds to become one and the same – information will become physical, the Internet of things will be all around us. The ‘Digital’ Agenda will be the agenda, and ‘Digital Culture’ will be ‘Culture’. Sensors will make things responsive and intelligent, enabling people to encode the millions of actions and interactions of their daily lives and interpret them as data.

So it will not be the ‘digitality’ of this age that counts. It will be the connectedness of things and people, and they ways in which technology allows us to create and manipulate those connections that counts. I have sought high and low for an expression to describe the age we’re heading into, and I can find no better formulation than that it will be a Connected Age – in which people are connected socially, digitally, personally and politically in a kind of augmented communitarianism.

And in a Connected Age, our serious 18 year olds will become serious adults, taking responsibility for the construction of a transparent, accountable and just society – which even if they fall short of the Utopian ideal, will help correct some of the iniquities they will have inherited.

So what would a Connected society mean for museums, archives and libraries? Everything. Connection is what we do – showing people the global implication of their personal context, demonstrating that cultures across the world share more in common than in conflict, empowering literacy in the fullest sense – linguistic, informational and cultural – to equip this future generation with the tools both intelligently to navigate the abundance of information and to use it to achieve social justice.

The idea of museums provides a Connected society with depth, validity and context – it makes their advance incremental rather than cyclical. The library is a place in which people become connected and which, critically, can help overcome the increasing risk of disenfranchisement and illiteracy. The archive provides a fund of prior knowledge upon which to build future ideas. All 3 domains play a vital role in a society that seeks to use connection to make itself both more stable and more prosperous – which is why the more enlightened emerging economies are busily investing in cultural infrastructure as a token of economic and social development.

When we think of the challenges which confront museums, archives and libraries today, they are not simply challenges of marketing or presentation, funding or political profile. Nor are they challenges of how to ‘go digital’. They are challenges of relevance – our fluency with social media will define the confidence with which we step into the Connected Age. Our comfort with shared authority and interpretation will define the extent to which we empower or disenfranchise our users from creating and exploring their own connections. Our commitment to integrity and transparency will define the extent to which the coming generations will see us as part of the problem or part of the solution. Our deftness with open business models will define whether our future customers understand, and are willing to pay for, the value we can add.

Progress is rarely smooth, and predictions are usually wrong, but as we wrestle with the questions at the heart of Digital, it might well be worth looking up every now and again and thinking about how what we do today will decide whether we have a place in tomorrow.

EUROPEANA INSIDE is a €3.8million research and development project in partnership with 10 leading Collections Management Software providers, all of whom are members of the Collections Trust’s ‘SPECTRUM Partner’ Scheme. The project will develop open-source tools, enabling cultural organisations to manage the sharing and re-use of their Collections online. Further information is available at http://www.europeanainside.eu

PARTAGE PLUS is a 24-month project worth €3m to digitise Art Nouveau objects, artworks, posters, and buildings to create around 75,000 items, including 2,000 3D models, of content for access through Europeana, the central channel for European culture online at http://www.europeana.eu. The project is being led by the Collections Trust, with partners from Member States across Europe.

ENUMERATE is a networking project which aims to provide up-to-date and comprehensive intelligence about the costs, methods and impact of digitising collections in museums, archives and libraries. Coordinated by the Collections Trust, the ENUMERATE network includes national coordinators in all 36 Member States of the European Union. Further information is available from http://www.enumerate.eu.

LINKED HERITAGE is a major initiative to help cultural organisations open up their collections as Linked Open Data, ensuring that it can be re-used to support new applications, innovation and creativity across Europe.

“This new investment by the European Commission represents a milestone in the Collections Trust’s international strategy and a huge opportunity to help museums, archives and libraries bring the richness of their collections to online audiences”, says Collections Trust CEO Nick Poole. “It is a recognition of our pre-eminent position in delivering complex projects on budget and on schedule and our role at the heart of some of Europe’s most active cultural networks. It provides a great foundation upon which we will build a leading role in the digital agenda for the sector.”

ends

Further information and Press enquiries

Nick Poole, Chief Executive, Collections Trust. Tel 0207 942 6080 e-mail: nick@collectionstrust.org.uk
John Woolley, Development Director, Collections Trust. Tel: 0207 942 6084, e-mail john@collectionstrust.org.uk.
Collections Trust

The Collections Trust is an independent UK-based organisation working with museums, libraries, galleries and archives worldwide to improve the management of their Collections. Its mission is to help museums, galleries, libraries and archives unlock the potential in their collections.

It does this for the collections community by providing know-how, developing and promoting excellence, challenging existing practices, pioneering new ideas, and bringing experts together.

The Collections Trust is also an independent registered charity. It receives funding from various national partners including Arts Council England and the national organisations in Scotland and Wales.

The omission of cultural heritage from HORIZON 2020 would have serious long-term consequences for the availability of funds for research and development in cultural organisations around Europe. It would undermine the basis of existing policy and funding programmes, potentially for many years to come.

Please help lend your voice to the petition, and encourage the Commission to reconsider their position and reinstate cultural heritage!

‘Put Your Library on the Map’ is a campaign led by the Collections Trust, with the support of the Society of Chief Librarians and Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) to encourage people to show their support for their local libraries, and to find out about the exciting range of services they offer.

Using the cross-platform ‘Find a Library’ app (http://www.findalibrary.org.uk), people go to their local library with their mobile, click ‘Use my Location’, select their library and then ‘Put Library on the Map’. This will ensure that their library is included in the national database of public libraries, which is freely available to all Internet users and includes information provided by the BBC and the national UK Online initiative.

Speaking about the initiative, Culture Minister Ed Vaizey MP said, ‘This campaign is a great way to encourage people to make use of their public library services. Libraries provide invaluable opportunities for literacy and learning and I really hope that people get behind this campaign and put their local library on the map. I will certainly be doing so for my local library.’

‘Find a Library’ includes basic information for 4,300 libraries in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Notes to Editors

‘Put Your Library on the Map’ is led by the Collections Trust, with support from library organisations including the Society of Chief Librarians and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).

‘Find a Library’ is a website optimised for smartphones, which allows users to find libraries by location. It is free to use, and the information is kept up-to-date by UK librarians. It can be accessed online at http://www.findalibrary.org.uk.

The Collections Trust helps make museums, archives and libraries more accessible for the public to use and enjoy. We have developed online apps and websites which open up the richness of UK collections. For further information, visit http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk.

To arrange to interview Nick Poole, Collections Trust CEO, please contact Katie Smith on 0207 942 6080 or by email at katies@collectionstrust.org.uk.