Press release issued by the University of Glasgow on 24th March 2010

New conservation centre preserves the fabric of the nation

Preserving the fabric of the nation’s treasures for future generations, a new textile conservation centre is to be established at the University of Glasgow.

The Textile Conservation Centre Foundation (TCCF) and the University of Glasgow have agreed to found the new teaching and research facility – the only resource of its kind in the UK – in the University’s Robertson Building.

Professor Nick Pearce, Director of the Institute for Art History and Head of the Department of History of Art, University of Glasgow, said: “This is a tremendous opportunity both for the University and also for the conservation profession in Scotland, the UK and internationally. Expertise, facilities and the wealth of the collections make Glasgow the ideal place for the kind of interdisciplinary research and study which the centre will promote.”

Peter Longman, Deputy Chairman of the Textile Conservation Centre Foundation said: “There was such concern over the closure of the Textile Conservation Centre in Winchester that over the last 18 months we have been approached by several institutions anxious to work with us to continue aspects of its work. We have considered a number of options, but the combination of Glasgow with its world class University and History of Art Department and the unrivalled collections in and around the City proved an irresistible location.

“This is a unique opportunity to build on the UK’s reputation in textile conservation training and related research; we look forward to contributing to its future success in Glasgow.”

The new centre for Textile Conservation, History and Technical Art History will focus on multidisciplinary object-based teaching and research that encompasses conservation and the physical sciences as well as art history, dress and textile history. It will be the first time that conservation training has been undertaken in Scotland and, combined with the University’s recent developments in technical art history, the new centre will have national and international impact.

The new Centre will inherit existing library intellectual property and analytical equipment from the TCCF, so that staff and future students will be able to draw on the key physical and intellectual assets built up over more than 30 years. Students will also have the opportunity to work with some of the best textile collections in the world held by Glasgow Museums, the National Museums of Scotland and the University’s own Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery. New academic posts will be created and the Centre will work closely with the Foundation to establish a global research network in textile conservation, textile and dress history and technical art history.

The first student intake is planned for September 2010 offering a 2-year Masters in Textile Conservation and a 1-year Masters in Dress and Textile History as well as opportunities for doctoral research. These new courses will join the existing Masters programme in Technical Art History, Making and Meaning, as part of the Centre. The Foundation is also offering a limited number of bursaries in the first years of the textile conservation programme and a fundraising campaign is already underway to raise further funds for the new development including additional studentships and new research projects. Potential students who would like to receive updates on the development and course details should email Ailsa Boyd at the University of Glasgow at: a.boyd@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk or t.mccabe@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk

ICOMOS-UK’s new website, based around a blog, is now live. After a marathon month of literally pulling up the hand-break on this web project and changing direction, a completely new and different approach was taken to help the organisation make the most of the web and its audience: quickly and all on a shoe-string [note: what on earth are 'shoe-strings' in this sense?] Without going into too much detail about the background to this, the original plan for a redeveloped website, overseen and directed by me, especially the creation of new content, but technically put together by a company who had promised to sponsor the project, fell through.

I was left with two choices: persevere with the old site: static, of its time, impossible to edit by office staff and members, rigid templates; or start from scratch and grab every useful Web 2.0 and social networking tool going to create something genuinely new and original. As my own reputation was on the line, there was no way I wasn’t going to rise to the second challenge.

It is worth saying at this point that I am much more interested and knowledgeable about web content and how it is composed, than I am in web design (though have very particular ideas about how this should be done, I like other people to do it) so the latter was not something I was looking forward to. So this post doesn’t become an onary read, I am presenting my maverick’s attempt at getting this site together as a recipe. A few generalities first:

The aim of the project was to a) raise the profile of ICOMOS-UK in the wider world, particularly among audiences within and without heritage and conservation, who had not heard of it, or who thought of it as a lofty and cliquey orgnisation; b) to establish an easy-to-update international news service and c) encourage more people to join ICOMOS through the UK committee and get these members to contribute.

My personal aims were to a) create a content-driven website, i.e. content dictates navigation and design and not the other way around and b) to create something that is sustainable for at least the next 1-2 years and editble by non-specialists who work for the Secretariat or volunteer members. One of the things I did not have time to implement were individual user logins but tried to ensure individual’s names were included in posts where relevant. Patrick Steel’s recent article in Museums Journal (August 2008, p. 28) cited the head of the Guardian’s blogging team on the importance of the personal touch in blogging, on p. 31:

“The focus on the individual’s point of view can benefit organisations, says Kevin Anderson, head of bloggin and interaction at the Guardian. “People don’t engage with institutions,” he says.
“They engage with other people.” And he warns: “Dry, press-release-style posts are diametrically opposed to blogging. The benefit is in putting out a human face and being less institutional. The biggest challenge is not that you will be overwhelmed by negative comments, but that you will feel lonely.”

Most of the current content was authored by me on behalf of ICOMOS-UK and I hope that I have managed to convey a personal element in my writing and use of illustrations (thank you also to all those flickr community members who allowed their Creative Commons photos to be used). I included the contributor’s name prominently in stuff they submitted, see for example: Barry Joyce’s Book Review on the diary of an Indian conservationist and Leonor Medeiros’ Student Work Placement report on Mining Heritage in the UK and Portugal.

Owing to the tight schedule, putting this together took me right up to the wire (31 July) no evaluation work can take place as yet. WordPress.com use Google Analytics to provide statistics. Apart from external feedback this will have to do for now. I have a summary of usage of the old site up to last week for comparison. I will be keeping an eye on how things go.

At this stage, I would very warmly like to thank ICOMOS-UK’s web hosts, ICUK, whose patient help and assistance made the transition from the old site to the new one, hosted at WordPress.com but requiring clever redirection, happen. They are quite honestly some of the most helpful web tech people I have worked with. I would also like to thank Tom Goskar, who co-writes this blog, whose superior knowledge about such things as .htaccess files made me ask the right questions at the right time!

Ingredients

Content (from ICOMOS-UK members, UK representatives of International Scientific Committees – like foreign correspondents, news on World Heritage and from the other national ICOMOS Committees, event and publication reviews, consultations, campaigns)

Blog (WordPress.com: it had to be a hosted solution to ensure some form of sustainability after I left; WordPress’s updates are frequent and some ‘themes’ need rebuilding every time; it had to be easy for non-specialists to use)

Photo-sharing (ICOMOS-UK on Flickr.com: see a first attempt at using Flickr’s geo-referencing facility in the London Views Project)

Document-sharing (ICOMOS-UK on Scribd.com: all ICOMOS-UK public documents are, and hopefully more older ones will be, made available via Scribd; the latest document is made available via an RSS widget on the home page)

Presentation-sharing (ICOMOS-UK on SlidesShare.net: see some examples which make up the Summary Proceedings of the Action on Skills Training and Education for the Historic Environment Conference)

Video-sharing (ICOMOS-UK on Vimeo.com: only one film at the moment but hopefully future opportunities might bring more, see the Norwich: People and Places feature; I also used Vodpod to highlight latest films/videos of interest or made by/for ICOMOS-UK)

Navigation, RSS and other widgets (A well-desgined WordPress.com theme: I customised Neo-Sapien by Small Potato, can display a number of widgets in the side bars)

Sidebar 1:

Latest stories (5 most recent blog posts)
ICOMOS Documentation Centre RSS (Latest post)
World Heritage Centre News RSS (Latest post)

Sidebar 2:

Categories (I rephrased this to ‘I’m looking for‘; categories on this blog class the type of story being posted: the first part of content-driven design and navigation, see Features & Reviews category; some stories occupy more than one category making it more discoverable than ‘standard’ navigation would allow)

Tag cloud (I rephrased this to ‘Browse theme‘; each story carries a set of tags, again allowing multiple methods of discovery, see World Heritage tag or urban tag)

Archives (Standard WordPress offering, browse by month, funnily enough July 2008 has been the busiest month for new posts!)

Sidebar 3:

Search box
Latest document from Scribd (RSS)
Latest film on Vodpod
Links (One category of links: Our supporters)

Static content navigation

I wanted to keep static content to a minimum and therefore reserved it for long-term information such as what the organisation does (e.g. Our Work, Who We Are and Membership). In addition I have created an index page to in-depth features to which many of the blog posts lead (In Focus) as a sop to those who prefer ‘traditional’ navigation.

In sum, for a web project with high aspirations but lacking the appropriate resources at the moment, this was an experiment in creativity more than technical know-how. Comments I have received so far include:

This all looks very good and I am optimistic that this will receive positive feedback. It should make a huge contribution to ICOMOS-UK’s vision of being a global hub for conservation work.

“I’m impressed – just what we need! There’s a lot more inforamtion, and it all looks much more friendly and accessible… a website set up by somebody who is actually interested in the subject matter is a great deal more appealing.

The Trust intend to purchase the house and its estate to save it for the nation in perpetuity. It is willing to back the purchase with £6m of its own money but needs to raise a further £6m from public appeal, fundraising and public grants.

Romantic and partly-ruined, Seaton Delaval was built between 1718 and 1731 by Sir John Vanbrugh, architect of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, and is widely said be the finest work of the English Baroque and one of the most important historic houses in Britain.

In quite a firm statement, the NT’s Trustees have said that without public support, both in terms of fundraising and the public demonstrating a desire for the acquisition to take place, they will not proceed with the acquisition.

This announcement comes hot on the heels of the announcement yesterday of a new Chairman for the National Trust, Simon Jenkins, well-known as a newspaper editor, journalist, writer and heritage conservation campaigner. There have been no big pronouncements from him about his appointment and the future of the Trust which is a refreshing change.

So is this a one-off for the Trust and similar bodies? Does the public have to decide such things? Or is this a genuine attempt to change the way society deals with the conservation and preservation of the country’s past? The latest news on their website does not mention the Seaton Delaval campaign but then again the press release was only received 23 minutes ago. However, if I have managed to blog it, I should think they could do the same. I do hope their campaign will properly use such methods to communicate and raise its profile. I watch with intense interest.

Institutions involved with promoting, undertaking or advising on the conservation of historic environments and artefacts are not great at communicating their work. I often wonder, if they were, whether the tensions between access and preservation could be better ‘managed’ (to use a phrase en vogue) but at the very least, better understood by the wider public, and whether funders and politicians would regard conservation as being a cultural activity of the highest value to society and therefore less willing to withdraw or withold support (see my post on the Textile Conservation Centre’s closure).

Interest in history, the past and the environment has never been more keen than it is now. Neither has it been more easy to have your say in front of a global audience with the internet revolution. Why aren’t more institutions involved with conservation adopting open and honest communication with the public through the web in the form of blogs, web forums, podcasts and more? Matthew of Electric Acorns is taking a step forward for his organisation (I do hope they appreciate it). What is everyone else doing? Here’s a short survey.

ICOMOS-UK (International Council on Monuments and Sites UK)

ICOMOS-UK is one of the organisations I am currently working for. They hired me for a period of 7 months, part-time, to take a hold of their web projects: a redeveloped website that would a) raise the profile of the organisation in the UK and internationally and b) provide an information service on international conservation and heritage news relating to cultural historic environments, especially World Heritage Sites: ICOMOS is UNESCO‘s official adviser on cultural world heritage. The second web project was to set up a members-only discussion network (a collection of web fora) where people could discuss and debate various issues relating to the wide remit of ICOMOS and ICOMOS-UK.

Desired result: That committee members and the small staff of the Secretariat will continue to keep up the information service blog on a regular basis with honest, wide-ranging and newsworthy stories, predominantly from UK and international members. They will present themselves as a genuinely independent and leading voice for world and UK conservation and heritage.

A likely result: For this to work the culture within the organisation needs to change, to focus more on providing information to the public and fellow professionals than on corporatising its image and standing apart from its sister organisations. It is this aspect that is, always, the hardest to change but is also the most important. I am no so confident this will happen as a result of my intervention in the organisation. If the concept of harnessing the power of the web is simply endorsed, rather than genuinely understood and adopted, and high-quality information is not disseminated via the blog, the service will not attract interest, few people will subscribe and the organisation will not be taken seriously as a leading voice for world and UK conservation and heritage.

English Heritage

If you search for ‘English heritage blog’ in Google, the first result you get is: Your Place or Mine, a blog and podcasts related to a two-day conference back in November 2006, co-organised with the National Trust. Photos of the event were even put on flickr. For a conference aimed at ‘Engaging New Audiences with Heritage’ not much seems to have happened since. The flurry of comments on the blog posts show that people are interested in how such organisations work, what they do and how it affects them. Perhaps this is one small step towards a change in attitude?

So what’s happened since November 2006? Not a lot (that is visible to me). But look at this blog post by the Birmingham Post on the listing of Birmingham Central Library with subsequent comments. This should be on EH’s website. Wider participation would increase understanding in EH’s philosophy, surely?

Historic Scotland

The first thing Historic Scotland says about itself on its website is that they are an executive agency of the Scottish Government followed by highly corporatised sections on procurement, freedom of information and sponsorship. Meanwhile, a rather crafty but highly visible blog called Independent
Republic of the Canongate aims to tell the “stories behind the PR spin of the developers, the architects, politicians and council officials” in a bid to save the historic fabric of the Old Town of Edinburgh (part of Edinburgh’s World Heritage Site) from insensitive development. A search on Historic Scotland’s website for information about the inquiries into the planning and development of these sites reveals little (even if information is tucked away somewhere). Perhaps HS’s own cause would have been helped with a bit of honest blogging, which needn’t compromise confidentiality or sensitivity.

Natural History Museum

Getting a little tired now so have tried a simple Google search on ‘conservation blog’. To my great and pleasant surprise I found this blog, the NHM’s Antarctic Conservation Blog. It is being written by members of the 2008 Antarctic conservation winter team and describes the really very fascinating conservation work done on objects from the explorer’s hut left behind by Ernest Shackleton in 1908, complete with object record photography. It is written honestly and candidly.

This will surely rank as one of the most historically interesting museum/conservation blogs in future years? A great public advertisement for the cultural value of conservation.

This is but a random and quick sample. I am on the look out for more good examples but I maintain that if only the organisations we worked for, and cared for, took their work to the public and shared it with their fellow professionals just a little bit more openly, the public worth of conservation as a cultural activity in its own right would be better appreciated and therefore more people would stand up for our causes when we need them to.

*I should add that my interest is in the conservation of cultural artefacts, landscapes and sites, rather than the conservation of natural resources and environment.