Jez Collins, of the Birmingham Popular Music Archive reflects on a recent article about the use of Twitter and Facebook by the archival community.
I started the Birmingham Popular Music Archive as way of engendering civic pride through the wide range of music activity that has emanated from Birmingham and as a way celebrating and recognising those individuals and organisations that have played a role in this.
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Members of the Interactive Cultures research group attended/took part in a panel at the recent Un-Convention event in Salford writes Paul Long.
Jez Collins, the originator of the Birmingham Popular Music Archive chaired a panel consisting of: Dr Marion Leonard, who was the curator of Liverpool’s The Beat Goes On, and who oversees on ongoing project to examine how museums collect and preserve (or not) popular music; Alison Surtees of the Manchester District Music Archive; Eve Wood, the director of the documentary (2001) and Mike Darby of Bristol Archive Records.
Speakers offered insights into each of their projects, revealing the variety of practices in this field, the public appetite for music heritage and the innovations and connections that curation has been making. Surtees for instance outlined how the online MDMA had generated input from around 2000 individuals, half of which regularly posted material on the site. Some of these were members of the bands featured and indeed, these explorations of music past also connected with the present scene in ways that avoided the potential necrophilia of such work.
As promised (although delivered later than I planned) here’s a round-up of the Digital Participation – Measuring the Unmeasurable seminar that we ran here at Birmingham City University on the 19th July 2010. We had about 50-60 delegates on the day. The delegate pack for the day is available for download (PDF).
Our three main speakers have allowed us to share their presentations with you:
Alison Preston from Ofcom – outlined Ofcom’s approach to measuring participation online. She highlighted recent results from Ofcom’s ‘Tech Tracker’ survey:
[Data Sources: The Q1 Technology Tracker datasets which are cited in the above presentation (main and subset PDFs) have now been superseded by the Q2 data (main and subset PDFs).]
Paul Watson from Newcastle University – talked about the work of his Social Inclusion Through the Digital Economy project.
Catherine Bunting, Arts Council – took us through some existing work on audience segmentation
There followed a brief panel discussion during which we looked at some innovative work being done by Nick Booth of Podnosh and heard from Audiences Central about how the Arts Council’s research has shaped their delivery of the Arts Nation project.
During the afternoon there were breakout groups – the group discussing ‘depth’ have had their discussion written up in detail up by Jennifer Jones.
Reaction:
There are a few bog posts from delegates about the day –
Steve Mackenzie has written a detailed reaction – ‘Digital Participation, Digital Inclusion and Social Learning‘ – and useful adds additional links to resources.
“From a professional stance, all this was gravy,” reflected Kathryn Ashcroft in her weekly blog column – Ever so social (media) (about half way in).
Trevelyan Wright ‘loved‘ Nick Booth’s work and took away some pointers for an he’s organising himself in 2011.
Fraser Henderson – ‘No Measure‘ felt the event didn’t quite live up to expectations citing a failure to recognise existing research into democracy, e-participation and e- inclusion.
Finally, there’s a record of the twitter stream from the day itself and in and around the day.
Next steps:
The university is keen to make this area of work a key focus and in particular is interested in developing a network of researchers, policy-makers and other interested parties to develop a seminar series on this topic area. Do let us know if you’re keen to contribute (email )
Under the Labour government digital inclusion became something of a hot topic, and was moving towards the mainstream of policy. Digital inclusion – increasing access to and literacy of IT, broadband and digital media platforms – cut broadly across several areas of policy and brought together ministers from several departments including Communities & Local Government, Business, Innovation & Skills, and Department for Education. In their final year in office the agenda was brought into the mainstream through the appointment of Martha Lane Fox as a “digital inclusion champion” tasked with, amongst other things, raising awareness of digital inclusion amongst the general public.
A change of government brings changes in policy direction, so what now for digital inclusion under the Lib-Con coalition government? Will digital inclusion projects survive their cut backs? To answer that question, it’s helpful to consider some of the positions that inform digital inclusion policy arguments, and map these, broadly, onto right and centre right positions.