MLA London Knowledge Transfer Programme blog

*Museums, libraries and archives of London are they are more influential than ever before in the history of the city. "
Posted by Victoria Ward 6 months ago. 1 comment.

We’ve been getting imaginary futures in order, with the help of a workshop last week and a final meeting of our lively advisory group this week. I’ll be posting more specifically next week when I’ve assembled my understanding of their versions of the future and the possible pilots and projects which could move towards it.

Meanwhile, here’s an edited v…

Horticultural heritage makes good kitchen tiles
Posted by Victoria Ward 6 months ago. 0 comments.

I’ve been ferreting about catching up with a backlog of raw materials and tracing through the links that are prompted by dropping them into the database, tagging, setting, analyzing, standing back and looking for patterns. In so doing I’ve been looking again at the collection of what we’re calling ‘knowledge transfer events’ that were collected from cura…

What is it about London?
Posted by Victoria Ward 6 months ago. 2 comments.

London, as its residents and politicians regularly point out, is a special city. Not just a national capital, but a global one as well, with business and cultural attributes that attract people from around the world. And yet it’s a localised place made up of villages, as one recent tourism campaign put it, where some people never stray outside their boro…

gathering blackberries
Posted by William Ross 6 months ago. 0 comments.

There aren’t many places where you can’t get some work done these days. I’ve even seen someone using a crackberry on a treadmill. He wasn’t running very fast, and I don’t think he was taking in much of his email, but it did make me think: the only thing people do at their desks these days is eat lunch.

(I should confess that I was looking through the…

How the end of the Cold War changed the story
Posted by Victoria Ward 6 months ago. 0 comments.

I mentioned in my last blog that I’ve been reading ‘The Gift’ by Lewis Hyde, first published in the US 25 years ago and more recently published here by Canongate. It’s been very illuminating (and well worth a read for anyone in MLAs, or in business and interested in culture). The part I want to draw attention to now is the afterword, written on the more…

Attractive Opposition
Posted by William Ross 6 months ago. 1 comment.

We see a lot of organisations turning to their heritage to reinvigorate the conversations they hold internally and with the world.

Sometimes this happens in quite a fumbling or ad-hoc way, and usually it’s local and tactical rather than strategic, but if we were allowed to generalise wildly, we would say that many firms and the people in them are awa…

Rounded workers?
Posted by Victoria Ward 6 months ago. 1 comment.

A small gap to digest Christmas pudding and turkey and back into the fray. With a short detour via Time Out’s enthusiasm for the Poetry Library at the South Bank Centre which opens with some Ogden Nash: ‘Poets aren’t very useful/Because they aren’t consumeful or very produceful.’ (In fact I’ve been reading a marvellous book over Christmas ‘The Gift’ by…

Permission to engage
Posted by Victoria Ward 7 months ago. 5 comments.

One consequence of information and research services being more and more available electronically is that people don’t need to pick the phone to the company librarian so much, and don’t need to stroll to the local reference library to find something out. Apart from the lost opportunity for the librarian to give a gentle helping hand, written about in the…

googling not good enough
Posted by William Ross 7 months ago. 2 comments.

One of the strongest feelings to come out of our investigations is a baffled regret at the loss of the information professional. This is true not just in libraries and archives but among business people, often in the form of rueful self-awareness after the fact.

The fact is, or seems to be, that supported discovery is a luxury in an age when every fact…

What is knowledge transfer? What isn't it?
Posted by Victoria Ward 7 months ago. 4 comments.

Knowledge transfer is the programme we’re working in and the commission we have is to look into knowledge transfer between business and MLA in London. It sounds simple, but we’re encountering a very wide range of definitions and assumptions about what knowledge transfer is and isn’t. Here are two of the questions on our minds:

• Should we stick to t…

Keeping the wheels turning
Posted by Ellen Collins 7 months ago. 0 comments.

One of the people we’ve interviewed told us to think about two spinning wheels. One is very fast, one slower, and when you bring them together sparks are likely to fly. The sparks are exciting, but they’re also dangerous and somewhat scary.

The faster wheel is the business world, driven by the constant pressure to perform better, sooner, quicker. The …

Putting things in order
Posted by Victoria Ward 7 months ago. 6 comments.

There is going to be lots of detailed discussion within these themes, but here might be the right place to talk about the themes themselves, whether they’re right and what might fall between the gaps.

1. there is a role that sits between business and museums and libraries and archives and makes each one understandable to the other. We’re thinking mos…

On getting dressed in public
Posted by William Ross 7 months ago. 1 comment.

We’re three months in, and things are starting to make sense. Which is just as well, as we only have eight weeks left and Christmas is looming. Up until now our work has mostly been interviewing, researching and understanding. A lot of people have been pestered with a lot of questions, and behind the scenes we’ve been cataloguing, mapping, arguing and, we…

Could it be more than parties?
Posted by Ellen Collins 7 months ago. 5 comments.

As we probably could have predicted, it seems the most typical relationship that a museum has with a multi-national company is as a venue. For meetings, for events and most especially for parties. These last tend to be champagne-sodden affairs, with the museum giving a ‘halo’ of culture and the actual collections playing a fairly peripheral role – if any …

Pushing boundaries and perceptions of crafts practice
Posted by Victoria Ward 7 months ago. 2 comments.

I was browsing through the Origin catalogue from the London Craft Fair in search of Christmas presents. Through one of the designers, Melanie Tomlinson, I stumbled across Craftspace who seem to hold the innate qualities that so many have referred to when they talk about how culture and business can intersect at their best. What’s noticeable is that ‘Ar…

What could librarians possibly know about business?
Posted by Victoria Ward 8 months ago. 3 comments.

Sometimes I feel like a twitcher. My enquiry binoculars start to shake a bit when I think I’ve sighted something rare but full of promise. Except of course that we want it not to be rare to get excited about it. We don’t want the lesser spotted red-backed shrikes (I don’t think there are actually those birds but by way of illustration) of the knowledge…

The cherry on top of capitalism
Posted by Victoria Ward 8 months ago. 1 comment.

I caught this story on Newsnight last night where the Chapman brothers were seen in action, defacing £20 notes. One note was then up for sale at another stand for £100. The Chapman brothers called art ‘the cherry on capitalism’ which made me laugh. A lovely fondant fancy, fairy cake kind of a picture. The story, by Alan Yentob, broadened out to look a…

The Linnean Society of London
Posted by Victoria Ward 8 months ago. 0 comments.

Society. I can’t help thinking the word society, in this particular sense, is very pertinent to our enquiry. I found the Linnean Society through the obituary of Alan Southward yesterday (‘He was an eminent marine biologist and world expert on the taxonomy of barnacles’ – what a marvellous way to leave a trace’).

He was an honorary member of the socie…

A cocktail of art and business
Posted by Victoria Ward 8 months ago. 0 comments.

Ellen and I headed off to a private view of Adam Dant’s work this week. Labelled ‘the Hogarth of hedge funds’ his work has gained some attention in the press this week and we were interested to explore the motives behind the commission for, and use of his work by Spears Wealth Management Survey.

We met artists and art restorers, curators, insurance b…

We have forgotten the value of our heritage
Posted by Victoria Ward 8 months ago. 1 comment.

In sending out the invitation to participate in this enquiry to people in our networks, I got back an email from a colleague which seems, at first blush, not to be about business engaging with libraries at all, but about children:

“When I was a child books and toys were precious. I knew that if I scribbled all over my book or broke my toy I wouldn’t ge…

The steps of the National Gallery are a great place to work
Posted by Victoria Ward 8 months ago. 2 comments.

I was interviewing an old colleague from an architectural practice which is more knowledge-conscious than many – insofar it it developed metaphors of different kinds of knowledge space a good few years back.

He spoke of the changing trends in work, how much of what we do now is done en-route, with handheld devices. He himself takes increasing advantag…

People, places and things
Posted by Ellen Collins 8 months ago. 1 comment.

A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour or so at Origin, the Crafts Council exhibition at Somerset House, talking to makers.

One thing I noticed pretty quickly was the sort of incredulous face that met my question ‘do you use museums, libraries and archives at all?’ Either because they never did, or because it’s so fundamental to their work that they co…

Richard Guyatt - a man with a heart
Posted by Victoria Ward 8 months ago. 0 comments.

I was moved at the weekend by the obituary of Richard Guyatt in the Guardian. His role in the reform of the Royal College of Art in the late 1940’s.

“With a certain sense of relief, but not much conviction, the name graphic design was chosen. No one was quite sure what it meant, but it had a purposeful ring.”

It seems that some combination of the g…

What about retro-innovation?
Posted by Ellen Collins 9 months ago. 0 comments.

Speaking with another client, we were talking about what museums, libraries and archives can do for long range environmental research, which is her specialist area. She said ‘you can’t look forward without knowing where it came from’. She’s coined a term ‘retro-innovation’. We’re all being told ways now of conserving energy but it’s just what our parents…

The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker
Posted by Ellen Collins 9 months ago. 0 comments.

As part of my general collecting, I’ve been asking people I come across about their experiences of museums, libraries and archives and whether they’ve made a difference to their business. I’ve not done this systematically yet, but I did ask a shop manager in Brick Lane at the weekend, and the local shoe repair man and dry cleaner.

The shop manager, al…