Technology, we often hear, has transformed both the way that museums and arts organisation do business, and the expectations and behaviours of the people we want to reach. As we look ahead to the 5th decade of the Internet, and the ever-increasing role of social, mobile and cloud technologies in defining how people consume, create and interact with our services, how can we take a holistic view of technology in our organisation and how can we plan strategically to do more of it, do it better, and with greater sustainability and impact. 

It is to address this question that the Collections Trust is opening up a new consultation on a model for benchmarking Digital in museums and similar arts organisations. Building on projects like the EU-funded ENUMERATE, and the fantastic Let's Get Real research from Culture24, our aim is to provide you with a simple self assessment tool to step back, look at where you are in your use of technology, and think about the areas that you need to prioritise. 

The new online platform Vastari.com, launched January 2013, improves the communication between curators planning temporary exhibitions and available works currently in private hands.

Inspired by the trend for digitisation of public collections, Vastari.com incentivises private collectors to do the same. But these digital private collections are not visible to the wider world. The amalgamated database of privately owned objects registered to Vastari.com is only accessible to its institutional members: verified and approved museum curators.

Jisc and Ithaka S+R have announced the launch “Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content”, a new report aimed at helping digital projects to thrive.

This report, which provides a close look at three institutions (UCL, Imperial War Museums and the National Library of Wales) in the United Kingdom confirms:

• How fragmented the digital landscape is at universities and within other organizations
• How there are examples of good practice within and outside higher education that all can learn from but that greater co-ordination is required to deliver this at a UK level
• How little the topic of post-build sustainability comes up at the higher levels of administration
• How risk is present within the current system, concerning the sustainability of digital content

More than 6,500 newly-digitised objects from University College London and the University of Reading’s diverse museum collections are now openly accessible to students, teachers and the public at large, thanks to funding from Jisc. They are available via Culture Grid, the UK gateway to heritage resources, which is managed by the Collections Trust.

The objects include rare Ancient Egyptian artefacts brought to life in twenty-first-century 3D, digital images of zoological specimens in glass jars, strange and beautiful anatomical prints, sixteenth-century portraits, and intriguing nineteenth-century scientific gadgets. The digital artefacts encompass a range of disciplines from sciences to the arts.

Burns Night marks the launch of a unique set of priceless manuscripts, books, relics, art and memorabilia which help shine light on the person and work of Scotland's National Bard, Robert Burns. From Friday 25 January it will be available on the Collection Trust’s Culture Grid.

In this White Paper Alick Mighall, Director of miggle.co.uk, describes the development of a module to harvest data from Culture Grid for use within Drupal, a popular and free to use open source content management system. The paper includes a case study of the use of the module for the Museum of London’s 20th Century London website (http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/ ).

Museums today are faced with a dizzying range of options when thinking about opening up their Collections online. They can deliver content via their own website, mobile-optimised or otherwise, develop platform-specific apps, develop picture libraries, share content with 3rd party platforms and participate in projects like Europeana and the BBC Digital Public Space. 

But how do you decide where and when to place the effort? Which platforms should you work with, and on what terms? What is the cost of participating in these things, and what kinds of benefit can you expect to see back in return? 

A white paper describing an approach to using data from Culture Grid via OAI-PMH within an open source Drupal content management framework. Includes a case study on how this approach was used to build the Museum of London’s 20th Century London site (http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/).