Weeknote #23: Centrality

A very full-on week involving recruitment, a couple of exploratory workshops and thinking about long-term strategy and funding. With the boy away in Kenya, we've taken the opportunity to redecorate his room and tick off some dull tasks like painting outdoor funiture and servicing the central heating. Exciting stuff.

What happened this week?

Between meetings, my week was filled up with evaluating applications for our CRM Manager role which was a bit of a slog. It's a big, challenging role sitting between multiple teams but there's some fab candidates in the mix.

After an initial scoping meeting with the Scottish Government Digital Team, I ran an internal workshop exploring how we might integrate the ScotAccount identity service with our membership registration. It was tricky to keep the focus on the next-step improvement whilst also surfacing some of the bigger questions around access requirements and what Library membership means at each stage of the process.

Our AI staff survey launched this week. A quick dip into the responses (over 60, so far) has surfaced a wide range of usage and opposing viewpoints. In general, I've noticed a desire to move towards open, sovereign models and private, protected spaces. These approaches align with the core values of the Library but it's hard to implement at scale and move away from centralised services such as Microsoft (even if they are trying to make us addicted to AI assistant).

On Wednesday I spoke to a group of 20 students from Michigan State University's Digtal Humanities Summer School. Lots of probing questions on evaluating digital projects and measuring environmental impacts, and I wished I could've stayed longer.

On Thursday I met with our liaison team from the Scottish Government to provide a detailed breakdown of our digital budget and outline the risks posed by rising costs, increaing cyber threat and accumulating technical debt. Digital remains at the heart of Public Sector Reform and the drive for "efficient" and "joined up" services, although the concrete plans are yet to emerge and an overall drive to "reduce service demand" is antithetical to the mission of cultural institutions.

On a related note, Culture Counts have done some great recent work on a Culture Spending Tracker monitoring local and central government spending across culture. I also had an interesting chat with a CEO of a member organisation facing very similar challenges across legacy systems, embedded ways of working and an over-reliance on proprietry systems. There was recognition that things aren't as easy or good as they should be, but also that the most impactful work involves fixing foundational set-ups over the long term.

On Thursday evening, Jen Ross presented an inspiring Inaugural Lecture at Edinburgh Futures Institute, asking "What does it take to make new digital futures for education?". I loved her take on how to reimagine our dreams about tech abundance and access by leaving space for speculation and uncertainty. Lots of her work with museums and galleries has focussed on discovering new paths of exploration which ultimately, opens up hope:

Speculative methods offer a space in which it is possible to discuss hope. But such hope needs to be active, strenuous and able to maintain itself in the face of the radical unknowability of our futures (Bayne & Ross, 2024)

Friday saw some forward planning for Leadership and Board away days next week. Lots of big thinking about delivering on the current strategy and where we want the Library to be in 10-20 year's time. Katherine McAlpine (a former colleague at the Royal Institution) flagged a brilliant talk from Hannah Fox, CEO of the Bowes Museum considering similar questions at the AIM Conference:

"If this museum is to be genuinely thriving, relevant and beloved in sixty years, what does that require of us now?"

Interesting things

I often crib a couple of interesting links from Ash Mann's "best things" newsletter. This week was edition #100 and you should subscribe here 💯

Forms don't love you back - another fab post from Rachel Coldicutt considering the admin burden of managing our digital lives:

Digital technologies are stretching what it means to live a complicated middle-class life: more of us can get bespoke door-to-door service, but the cost of that is exhaustion and extraction. 

Other links:

• We finally (sort of) know what the National Data Library is
• Do we know what data.gov.scot will be?
• A seasonal note from Hugh Wallace
• Making Software - a nice site providing a reference manual for people who design and build software

Stuff

⚽ The World Cup has a distinctly "AI" feel to it with an abundance of Americanisms ("game time", "shut outs", "goal opportunities"), overbearing stadium announcers and terrible Gemini sponsor ads. That said, the Azteca is still very cool and I will undoubtedly consume a lot of content over the next month.

🏃 Running has not been happening. I blame all the reasons.