Digital Resource Development Team
Digital technologies open many new opportunities for making museum collections accessible and understandable through publications, exhibitions, websites, and other interactive media. The partners have embraced these opportunities to varying extents, but all have identified training and development needs that cannot be addressed from existing sources.
The creation of a regional digital resources team provides a mechanism to share skills and resources, offer advice and support, and increase the overall capacity of the sector to appreciate and apply the benefits of digital technology, as well as producing a range of resources for the public to use for education and enjoyment.
Through the appointment of two project officers with appropriate knowledge, skills and experience, the project supports:
- The digital publishing of exhibitions, publications and learning resources
- Training and skills development for paid and volunteer staff in partner museums in digital/web publishing
Digital publishing helps to:
- Preserve the fruits of research and collecting undertaken for temporary exhibitions, and making them permanently available.
- Engage visitors
- Find wider audiences
- Increase the reach of museums and availability of material geographically and over time
Development opportunities for museum staff continues to help build:
- Skills: the knowledge required to create their own digital resources in future
- Confidence: to build on those skills, expanding their abilities into new areas
- Knowledge: of what the technologies can (and can't) achieve, how they work, and how they may fail
- Understanding: the technologies underlying the provision of web content
Leaving staff also better placed to commission work from suppliers without being overwhelmed by jargon
Long-term sustainability is enhanced, especially for smaller, volunteer-reliant partners:
- Keeping down costs by promoting the use of affordable software solutions
- The promotion of simpler, low-cost solutions, appropriate to the scale of the particular project and the partner organisations
The team approach promotes collaboration and the sharing of best practice, and provide a mechanism for strategic action to secure further benefits and enhance the long-term sustainability of the partnership.
Masses more about the project...
Challenge Fund
In the project business plan £60,000 was identified to fund partner projects. We have established a Challenge Fund (initially of £30,000) to which partners can submit bids for funding over the next 12 months.
Project Business Plan
The project business plan was submitted as part of the application at the end of August 2004. It contains an outline of how we envisage the project developing over the course of the three years.
Executive
The Executive Group meets every two months to receive reports from the Project Officers; to monitor the progress of the Project Plan; to give advice on the shape and future direction of the project; and to provide ideas for projects, partner working and evaluation.
Project Staff
The two project officers took up their posts on 31 January 2005.