Weeknote #36: Pattern recognition

A bit of an epic note from a week which included: a trip to see my parents on the Essex coast, a few days in London, and catch ups with lots of fab people. Most of this was written in the between spaces of cafes and trains.

What happened this week?

On Monday I chatted with Karen Abel, Digital Transformation Lead at the University of Leeds, about their multi-year project rebuilding the core infrastructure around digital collections. Lots to learn about and effective project structures, finding the right partner and the need to keep advocating for ongoing change. (Here's a blog post from Tom Crane at Digerati describing the foundations for digital preservation and access services).

I then spent some "sadmin" time with my Dad exploring his digital legacy arrangements. He's very organised and we chatted through the best way to save passwords and how to spot phishing and scam attempts.

On Monday evening I headed into London to join school pals at a friend's live podcast event (the next big thing, apparently). Everyone is essentially just the same and facing similar life-stage challenges.

Tuesday was all about the British Library with early morning catch ups with Richard Davies and Paul Howley who are always generous with their time. It was super helpful to work in the Technology Office for the day, catching snippets of conversations and being able to chase up specific questions in person (sorry, Paul C!).

My efforts to then sneak into the sold out Bayeaux Tapestry exhibition were thwarted at the first hurdle, so I had to settle for the online version, created by the agency Numiko. I remember creating a similar in-gallery interactive for a Japanese scroll at the National Museum of Scotland (although we lost the battle to take a web-first approach).

At the end of the day I headed for classic London post-work drinks with the forever-brilliant John Stack (National Gallery) and Kati Price (V&A). Lots of laughter, sharing personal challenges and chatting about a range of digital stuff, including AI-powered opera singers (another Numiko thing).

On Wednesday morning I had an early morning coffee at the old-school Caffè Tropea in Russell Square with the BFI's Neil Williams. We share the same challenges in our roles, feeling the pinch of diminishing resources, rising expectations and the rapid pace of change. There's a sense of being asked to be an expert in everything (rather than an expert generalist) and digital leaders are cursed with knowledge of what you could and should be doing, without the means to develop and maintain sustainable operational models.

Ash Mann’s latest post felt very prescient here with a focus on the personal burden of hidden digital work and the tendency for digital leaders to interpret structural challenges as personal failure:

“None of these are signs that you are managing badly, they are the type of thing that these structural conditions produce, for almost everyone, almost everywhere. You did not create them, and you cannot be expected to dismantle them on your own.”

I remember an exercise from the Oxford Cultural Leaders programme back in 2021 where participants stood in a line, ordered by how self-critical they are. I was very much at one end of that line - and marvelled at the far away people able to hold things lightly and keep moving forwards. The challenges of my current role are to accept the areas we cannot change right now, live with and in the messiness of imperfect systems and processes, and, perhaps, be kinder to myself about the hard realities facing most of the culture sector.

Thursday back in Edinburgh was super busy taming the inbox and catching up on project progress. We managed to sign off a range of changes in the Digital Experience team (including a team name chnage) and have a brilliant lead on board for our UKRI-funded project exploring ATR pipelines for digitised collections.

At the end of the day, I joined the Fall Symposium from the Institutional Data Initiative at Harvard Law School Library, led by Greg Leppert. Their central thesis, "Data is everything", is supported by some well-articulated goals, including: "Secure the societal roles of knowledge institutions in an AI future" and "Establish computational access to data as sustainable public interest infrastructure." It's impressive work that is also surfacing the expertise, time and funding it takes to work at scale.

Friday started with an early-morning coffee and catch up with fellow OCL alumni Jack Kirby. We chatted about the joy of analogue reading on holiday, the frustration and inevitability of proprietary systems and helping institutions approach AI. The rest of the day was all about ticking through the to-do list and setting up for the week ahead (which looks incredibly full).

And, finally... the week ended with a dear friend's art exhibition at Leith School of Art, which promises to be both uplifting and also full of shared sadness.

That's probably enough.

Interesting things

• CivTech has launched its Round 12 Challenges.
• It was very sad to see the end of the Audience Agency.
• When everyone is full up, this framework looks helpful to assess a team's readiness across Appetite, Capacity and Skillset.
• Insights from Dr Camilla Stewart, Art UK's deputy-CEO, on their framework for understanding digital audiences, known as FIRE🔥
• Two good people, Matt Jukes and Russell Davies, talking for an hour about working openly.
• Gary Marcus has branded the talk of AI-led human extinction “a superabundance of hype" but is concerned enough by the behaviour of the frontier labs to make a case for a public boycott of generative AI.
• The Arts Council and Braid have launched the Responsible AI Cultural Leaders Academy (just for English-based folk, though).
• The National Library of Denmark have developed an MCP connection to the National Archives, allowing use of existing AI assistants to actively search collections and HTR outputs.
• Culture Counts’ response to the Scottish Government’s consultation on Public Service Reform is robust and to the point:

The Scottish Government is being warned it risks damaging the country’s “national and international reputation” if the culture sector is targeted for savings as part of its public sector shake-up. Industry body Culture Counts ... has suggested that any cuts inflicted on the sector would erode "already fragile infrastructure" and amount to “fiddling at the margins at wholly disproportionate cost”.

• I'm clinging on to my 8-year old iPhone XR, so I'm unlikely to splash £1,999 on an iPhone Duo.
• No human detected.

Watching, listening, reading, doing

📖 I finished Slow AI by Sam Illingworth and found myself underlining a lot of text across its 80 pages. I've been recommending it to others.

📺 Colin from Accounts returns for series 3. A nice distraction.

🎞️ The Mandalorian and Grogu was... fine ⭐⭐⭐

🍜 Lucky and Joy, located 200 meters from our old house in Clapton, had very good noodles and super friendly staff.

🎧 What Did You Do Yesterday live show at Hackney Empire was fun, although a little strange seeing someone you know well on stage (my one celebrity friend). I enjoyed a post-show chat with David O'Doherty critiquing celebrity children's authors, although he was disappointed at my lack of interest in the Vuelta de Espana.