Reflections from the 2023 MCG Conference
Last week, some of the One Further team visited the Royal Academy of Arts for the Museum Computer Group Conference. A gathering that brought together the brightest minds in the intersection of museums and digital technology around the theme of ‘future-proofing the museum’.
For my money, the MCG Conference is one of the best conferences of its kind. It’s very well programmed, and the relatively quickfire format means that you can take in a wider spread of topics without running the risk of being stuck for ages in a session that’s not really grabbing you.
It attracts a really good group of practitioners from across the sector, and the volunteer ethos contributes to a friendly, community feel. It’s also a great opportunity for us to catch up with lots of our clients and other contacts.
We weren’t just there to chat, though. We were there to learn too. There were many highlights, but here are a few of the things that stood out.
Team takeaways
Georgina BRooke
It was interesting to hear from Maria Economou and Cass Kist on the research they’d done into crowdsourcing metadata for collections images.
I’d been part of this study (in so far as I’d contributed to a survey around collection image labelling) and thought their paper presented a really interesting approach to crowdsourcing/democratising our approach to taxonomy and metadata.
It made me wonder whether a similar study could look at the global number of searches for particular terms and how these might be mapped against curatorial suggested terms. In particular, what proportion of searches are for very technical terms, and what might be the SEO advantages of using more contemporary slang or trending vocabulary to describe certain objects.
Alix Geddes
The highlight for me was the keynote by George Oates from the Flickr Foundation. Her talk, “Algorithms are the New Historians” asked whether the large amounts of information we collect about everything and anything are actually useful, and whether it contributes to future-proofing culture.
I particularly enjoyed phrases like “We are currently using the weakest data to describe the most powerful objects”. The issue is that there is simply too much data available, too much information, which ultimately is not giving us more answers. George talked about the dangers present in using computers to fill gaps in cultural records, and the lack of context that exists in those records too.
Her talk segued into a description of her mission at the Flickr Foundation: to keep Flickr photos visible for 100 years, and most importantly to only keep the essentials.
Chris Unitt
I enjoyed Numiko’s David Eccles taking us through the evolution of digital collections. From early instances of searchable databases of records being made publicly available, through the development of more easily browsable ‘generous interfaces’, and on to the current vogue for incorporating additional context through storytelling.
He then suggested a fourth phase, where people might be served a more personalised experience through multiple, dynamic interpretations. While this could make huge demands of content producers, he said this could be somewhat alleviated by making use of the latest developments in large language models and generative AIs.
The future could be very interesting, but there’s still lots more work to be done to figure out what good practice looks like at each of the existing stages of online collection evolution. Especially as it becomes more important to understand the audiences you’re trying to reach and there are hard decisions to be made about resource allocation. That’s an area we’ll be exploring with our Discovering Online Collections project.
Looking to the future
So a huge well done to the organisers, all the fantastic speakers, and also our own Georgina Brooke, who’s just been announced as the MCG’s new chair.
In 2024, the MCG Conference will be heading to Birmingham and we’ll be there too.