Ways forward in information management for museums

I went to this workshop at the Cubic Theatre at the London Transport Museum (a great venue) on Monday 30 March. 

Renaissance London (a partnership between The London Museums Hub and MLA London) are funding a project to examine the importance of information management and its role within the museums sector, based on a number of pilots carried out at the four Hub Museums: Museum of London, Horniman Museum, Geffrye Museum and London Transport Museum. 

I was initially surprised by the lack of information and records management policies within the sector but realised that this is largely because museums focus on creating and managing outward information about their collections for their external audience.  Most museums also have in place policies relating to privacy and freedom of access to information but have yet to develop an overarching information policy that covers the way in which they create, manage and use information across the organisation.

An interesting day and a chance to hear more about developments in a sector which is information-intensive but which has not yet tackled a number of information and records management issues in a cohesive way.

The outputs from the project include an Information Policy Framework that reflects standard approaches to information policy development but which also takes into account the issues raised by the four Hub Museums during the initial consultation exercise.

Further information is available from the London Museums Hub and I did find a presentation about the project by Claire Sussums of the Museum of London who is leading the Hub Information Management Project.

The presentations from the workshop will be made available online at a later date.

Finally, one very interesting snippet that I picked up from a presentation by David Thomas (Director of Technology at The National Archives) was that in 2006 161 exabytes of data were created, more than the sum of all data created up to that point.  The reason?  CCTV.

Melanie Goody

Comments

[Madrid Museums]

Part of the lack of information and records management may be due to budgetary constraints as well. i wonder why this one did not come up.