Making it FAIR: understanding the lockdown 'digital divide' and the implications for the development of UK digital infrastructures
Lead Research Organisation:
University of York
Department Name: Archaeology
Abstract
This proposal responds to challenges faced by smaller museums struggling to engage online with audiences during varying levels of lockdown, and beyond.
Problems include: low levels of basic digital literacy; poor understanding of audiences (including those with specific access needs); uncertainty over how to transfer real-world interpretive practice to the digital realm; lack of guidance about technical solutions; barriers to future-proofing digital assets in line with the FAIR data principles (data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable); and shoestring budgets.
The project will create a community of practice that will (through sector-wide dissemination) extend beyond the immediate participants to museums across the UK. The core cohort will receive training, mentoring and technical support to develop digital collections-focussed content to stay connected with existing audiences, and reach new audiences. Technical support will, as appropriate, pilot solutions (based on integration of existing tools) and demonstrate how a fully-developed infrastructure for cultural heritage data, when coupled with digital skills support, might benefit even the smallest museums, as well as well-resourced and digitally-savvy IROs. This community of practice will explore prototype solutions for user-group testing, that respond directly to emerging challenges, informing the TaNC discovery process. The study is action research with a cohort of staff and/or volunteers from small museums, who will create online content based on their collections. The methodology is built around the collaborative action research approach developed by Culture 24 over a number of previous projects but adapted for delivery online in a time of home-working and social distancing. The hallmarks of the approach are:
Learning from others - including a variety of voices and perspectives from within and beyond the cultural sector, to inform, support, guide and reflect on the challenges at hand.
Learning by doing - encouraging practical action research and supporting participants to experiment in the context of their everyday work, testing out hunches developed through collaborative discussions.
Learning together - creating a community of supportive peers with a shared sense of purpose, turning them into invaluable sources of understanding for the wider cultural heritage sector.
As well as the core collaborative action research, the study will include a socio-technical challenge: as the participants encounter difficulties along the way, the project team will respond where possible and prototype simple tools that demonstrate how a fully developed infrastructure might support even - perhaps especially - the smallest and least resourced museums.
This project will engage with six to eight smaller museums who have been navigating these challenges, reporting back to the wider museum sector, and helping others during the what for some have been make-or-break months. Through critical evaluation of current practice in microcosm through online workshops, and a technical gap analysis, the project will draw scalable lessons to inform Towards a National Collection's (TaNC) discovery phase, and AHRC's infrastructure planning.
Problems include: low levels of basic digital literacy; poor understanding of audiences (including those with specific access needs); uncertainty over how to transfer real-world interpretive practice to the digital realm; lack of guidance about technical solutions; barriers to future-proofing digital assets in line with the FAIR data principles (data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable); and shoestring budgets.
The project will create a community of practice that will (through sector-wide dissemination) extend beyond the immediate participants to museums across the UK. The core cohort will receive training, mentoring and technical support to develop digital collections-focussed content to stay connected with existing audiences, and reach new audiences. Technical support will, as appropriate, pilot solutions (based on integration of existing tools) and demonstrate how a fully-developed infrastructure for cultural heritage data, when coupled with digital skills support, might benefit even the smallest museums, as well as well-resourced and digitally-savvy IROs. This community of practice will explore prototype solutions for user-group testing, that respond directly to emerging challenges, informing the TaNC discovery process. The study is action research with a cohort of staff and/or volunteers from small museums, who will create online content based on their collections. The methodology is built around the collaborative action research approach developed by Culture 24 over a number of previous projects but adapted for delivery online in a time of home-working and social distancing. The hallmarks of the approach are:
Learning from others - including a variety of voices and perspectives from within and beyond the cultural sector, to inform, support, guide and reflect on the challenges at hand.
Learning by doing - encouraging practical action research and supporting participants to experiment in the context of their everyday work, testing out hunches developed through collaborative discussions.
Learning together - creating a community of supportive peers with a shared sense of purpose, turning them into invaluable sources of understanding for the wider cultural heritage sector.
As well as the core collaborative action research, the study will include a socio-technical challenge: as the participants encounter difficulties along the way, the project team will respond where possible and prototype simple tools that demonstrate how a fully developed infrastructure might support even - perhaps especially - the smallest and least resourced museums.
This project will engage with six to eight smaller museums who have been navigating these challenges, reporting back to the wider museum sector, and helping others during the what for some have been make-or-break months. Through critical evaluation of current practice in microcosm through online workshops, and a technical gap analysis, the project will draw scalable lessons to inform Towards a National Collection's (TaNC) discovery phase, and AHRC's infrastructure planning.
Publications
| Description | Making It FAIR was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Towards a National Collection programme (TaNC) as part of UKRI's call for COVID-19 projects. The project responded to challenges faced by smaller museums struggling to engage online with audiences during lockdown, and beyond. The difficulties faced by these smaller museums (and many larger ones too) mattered to AHRC's aspirations for the digital humanities, because they would leave a huge amount of potential source material simply unavailable to researchers. In the team's experience, too much museum activity relating to digitised collections was resulting in outputs that did not meet the FAIR data principles (data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). The project team drew on academic researchers, museum sector support organisations and commercial IT practitioners, each bringing different skills and perspectives to bear on both the action and research sides of the work. Project Partners included: University of York, Museum of London Archaeology, Culture24, Collections Trust, The Audience Agency, Intelligent Heritage and Knowledge Integration. Making it FAIR was framed as a research project wrapped around an action project. Between January and September 2021, the project team worked with a cohort of eight small museums as they navigated the challenges of staying connected with existing audiences, and reaching new audiences, through collections-focussed digital content (the Action Project). The cohort received training, mentoring and technical support to plan and carry out digital storytelling experiments. The Action Project methodology was built around the Let's Get Real collaborative action research approach developed by Culture24 over a number of previous projects, but adapted for delivery online in a time of home-working and social distancing. The Research Project consisted of a core collaborative action research study which included a socio-technical challenge: as the participants encountered difficulties along the way, the project team responded where possible and prototyped simple tools that demonstrate how a fully developed infrastructure might support the smallest and least resourced museums. The methodology concluded with a critical evaluation of the experiences of all involved, reflecting on the implications for Towards a National Collection and AHRC's longer-term planning of research infrastructure. By considering a fully rounded picture of the digital problems faced by small museums, the project revealed insights into the scope and nature of the national infrastructure challenge, which may be missed with the current focus on well-resourced Independent Research Organisations (IROs). |
| Exploitation Route | Project Recommendations Person-centred Development The Making it FAIR programme benefited from small-scale action-based training, premised upon responsive mentoring and support. The first recommendation is that such 'person-centred' rationale be applied to future initiatives. The focus should be on building 'digital confidence' through a combination of sympathetic understanding of need and tailored skills training, alongside user-centred design initiatives that complement the needs and competencies within small organisations. Such user-centred initiatives could be built on extended ethnographic research and should centre upon a range of elements including the design of training programmes, applications and systems, and policy communication. Capturing Content As the technical challenge demonstrated, it is possible to develop tools that mitigate the limitations of museums' own systems, and taking the person-centred approach recommended above, go with the grain of familiar and established workflows. The second recommendation is that support is given to developing tools that, like the demonstrator, allow content to be captured along with appropriate metadata at the time of creation and without the person creating it having to do anything extra. Once such tools are available, their use should be embedded into digital skills training of the kind exemplified in the Action Project. Digital Preservation The third recommendation is that storage space in trustworthy digital repositories should be freely available to smaller museums as part of future infrastructure for the digital humanities, to ensure their data is preserved according to FAIR Principles. Once again, this is in the interests of those who would use the content created by these museums. Rather than each of the UK's 1,700 museums making its own ad hoc digital storage arrangements, it would be far better to offer shared solutions that not only made life easier for staff and volunteers, but secured the long-term digital preservation of their digital assets as FAIR data. Strategic Recommendations Methodology It may now be possible to design a more realistic programme that enskill participants in FAIR in such a way that embeds the FAIR principles in their everyday collections practice, thereby supporting FAIR use outside of the context of social media production alone. A Making it FAIR follow-on project is recommended, with tailored tools for FAIR capacity building and direct funding of small museums to allow their dedicated participation. Museums in the cohort developed a keener sense of the need to monitor and categorise the impact of their projects but reported considerable challenges. Further exploration of small museums' needs in this regard and potential solutions is recommended. It is unclear how much museums' interests in digital social engagement are specifically linked to the conditions of the pandemic. Further consideration of the unique impacts of the pandemic on the social media usage and associated training needs of museums is advised before Towards a National Collection assumes this is a priority area for investment in the long-term. It is recommended that further research is undertaken into museums' understandings of reach and exclusion linked to online content/media, and to their perceptions of open data. It is possible that the potentials of FAIR data in terms of their ability to fundamentally increase openness, reach and accessibility of collections are misunderstood, hence organisations opt for forms of online practice that appear more inclusive on the surface, even though in reality, their reuse value and positive impacts on people and institutions are highly constrained. Implementation Learnings and insights from the operations of medium-sized organisations are important to informing the future roll-out of the recommendations from Making it FAIR. Further consultation with a representative selection of these medium-sized institutions is recommended. Equally, the IRO and HEI community has existing digital infrastructure that could be leveraged to support smaller institutions. An audit of existing IRO digital infrastructure and existing IRO practices of engagement with and redistribution to smaller organisations is suggested. In light of global efforts to shift towards online decentralisation (Web 3.0), we may also consider the advantages of more distributed models that enable greater flexibility and co-ownership over the infrastructure, and/or infrastructure that is spread out in a fashion that supports region-specific or subject-specific priorities. Further investigation into distributed digital infrastructure models is also advised. |
| Sectors | Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Description | Making It FAIR was divided into two different sets of complementary activities: the Action Project and the Research Project. The Action Project focused on helping eight small museums carry out digital storytelling experiments that met objectives they set themselves, while the Research Project reflected on the implications of their experiences for Towards a National Collection and longer-term infrastructure planning. The project team provided a planned programme of training, mentoring and technical support for the cohort of 8 small museums. Culture24 and The Audience Agency organised five online workshops that formed the core interaction between the participants as a group, and between the participants and the project team. Culture24 produced a series of eight case studies detailing the museum's experiments and learning, for an audience of their peers in museums across the UK. These were promoted and disseminated across the UK museums and heritage sector in December 2021 |
| First Year Of Impact | 2021 |
| Sector | Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural |