We’ll start this off with a few questions that we have had to answer in our own preparations or that we expect people will want to ask. If your question is not answered here, log in and ask it!
Lots of reasons, but chiefly because we don’t imagine that we know all the answers. This is a genuinely open-ended enquiry, and not at all the kind where you decide the findings at the start and then colour them in. We have a skeleton of key topics that we want to address and questions that we think will be revealing, but beyond that it’s a journey of discovery. We find that narrative enquiry is the best way to let people guide us towards a true picture.
We also believe that the texture and vividness of firsthand testimony have a communicative power that mere summary cannot approach, and the reporting from this project is very likely to combine our findings with paraphrases and excerpts from the original voices of our respondents.
Because that’s the area we (MLA London) represent. We are also looking for good practice and inspiration from around the country and overseas, but the heart of our enquiry is among the people that we represent and serve.
Two reasons: because we think the role of museums, libraries and archives as a cradle of ideas is much less appreciated than their role as a source of reference and guidance, and because some of the funding for the project comes from the LDA’s business-innovation budget.
So that people and institutions in the cultural sector can talk confidently about the value of their work. So that businesses can be made aware of opportunities and practices that will benefit them. So that we can identify opportunities and eliminate obstacles to fruitful cooperation. So that an interesting group of people can form around a subject that matters and enjoy sharing their points of view.
The next phase of this project will be a suite of pilot projects built on the findings of this initial investigation and designed to bring out the best of what we’ve discovered. We hope that they too will attract funding from the LDA and other bodies, but that depends on us finding interesting schemes to pilot.
Sparknow have built a narrative database application that holds and processes anecdotal and qualitative evidence. We are using it as we go along to collate, segment, index and recombine the testimony that we gather, gradually working it into a layered form that summarises and captures understanding without sacrificing texture and clarity.
In late December and January this process will culminate in a report, which we promise will not be at all like all the other reports that burden your desk. It will be built out of original voices and imagery and it our hope that it will be lively, thorough, startling and tartly irreverent.
We also intend that this project will build and leave behind it a lively and informed network and a rich, cross-disciplinary discussion of what is, is not and ought to be happening in the sector and in the business world to make both more fruitful.
MLA London is the strategic development agency for museums, libraries and archives in the region. We are part of the wider MLA Partnership with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the eight other regional agencies. Together we work to improve people’s lives by building knowledge, supporting learning, inspiring creativity and celebrating identity. The Partnership acts collectively for the benefit of the sector and the public, leading the transformation of museums, libraries and archives for the future.
sparknow is a network of knowledge and change specialists of different kinds, from anthropologists and theatre directors to web programmers and experts in management. It specialises in difficult questions, interesting problems and the fruitful spaces in between conventional disciplines.
That’s a very good question. Our plans include lines of enquiry that will yield some numbers, and there are various ways of measuring the economic value of knowledge that we will apply to see what comes out, but we’re not going to force it. This enquiry operates in grey areas of spillover value and change mediated by personal development and a lot of the value we’re talking about isn’t really quantifiable. We will do everything we can to arrive at measurable, testable values both to the individual business and to the business world at large, but we are not going to start pulling numbers out of the air and multiplying them by the population of London.
No. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde very badly, it’s about the value of the cultural sector, not its price. It’s possible that someone will discover in our findings a service that can be charged for, but we are much more interested in expressing the intangible but undeniable value of what already happens in a way that makes it more likely to continue happening.