Latest discussion
This is a list of all the discussions going on here, with the most recently updated first. You can also see a more organised list of discussion by category.
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Page Comments:
Finding our way
from
Ellen Collins
on October 17, 2008
Maps everywhere last night at the Origin craft fair: on handbags, scarves, even little cut-out paper shoes. Last year, when I went to interview makers for the knowledge transfer programme research, I don’t recall maps: they obviously didn’t make such an impression. I suspect have observed a new interest in ‘finding the way’ – but does that interest begin with the makers, or with me?
Eavesdropping, as one can’t help but do in such a buzzy atmosphere, I overheard several designers speaking with pleasant surprise of the fact that they’d sold out, or very nearly. ‘I was bracing myself for...
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Page Comments:
Museums, libraries and archives of London are more influential than ever before.
from
Victoria Ward
on January 18, 2008
We’ve been getting imaginary futures in order, with the help of a workshop last week and a final meeting of our lively advisory group this week. I’ll be posting more specifically next week when I’ve assembled my understanding of their versions of the future and the possible pilots and projects which could move towards it.
Meanwhile, here’s an edited version of some of the imaginings that we were working with this week. I’d be most interested to be offered a) fine (or blunt) tunings b) suggestions for actions, activities, provocations, pilots, projects which would be fruitful investments of time and...
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Page Comments:
Could it be more than parties?
from
Ellen Collins.
5
comments,
most recently from
Richard Sved
on January 22, 2008
As we probably could have predicted, it seems the most typical relationship that a museum has with a multi-national company is as a venue. For meetings, for events and most especially for parties. These last tend to be champagne-sodden affairs, with the museum giving a ‘halo’ of culture and the actual collections playing a fairly peripheral role – if any at all.
But does it have to be this way? One client of a major bank suggests that people are ready for a change. If you’ve been to one lavish opening, you’ve pretty much been to them all. And the...
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Page Comments:
What is it about London?
from
Victoria Ward.
2
comments,
most recently from
Tom Campbell
on January 15, 2008
London, as its residents and politicians regularly point out, is a special city. Not just a national capital, but a global one as well, with business and cultural attributes that attract people from around the world. And yet it’s a localised place made up of villages, as one recent tourism campaign put it, where some people never stray outside their borough or even their housing estate.
We’ve focused our research on London primarily because the commissioning and funding bodies are London specific. But we hope our findings will be useful elsewhere in the country as well. There’s a danger though...
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Page Comments:
We have forgotten the value of our heritage
from
Victoria Ward
on November 6, 2007
In sending out the invitation to participate in this enquiry to people in our networks, I got back an email from a colleague which seems, at first blush, not to be about business engaging with libraries at all, but about children:"When I was a child books and toys were precious. I knew that if I scribbled all over my book or broke my toy I wouldn’t get another one or be able to go to the shop and buy another different one. We visited our local Library every week where we would browse for a least half and hour. The...
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Page Comments:
What is knowledge transfer? What isn't it?
from
Victoria Ward.
4
comments,
most recently from
Andrea Westall
on January 9, 2008
Knowledge transfer is the programme we’re working in and the commission we have is to look into knowledge transfer between business and MLA in London. It sounds simple, but we’re encountering a very wide range of definitions and assumptions about what knowledge transfer is and isn’t. Here are two of the questions on our minds:
- Should we stick to talking about the formal, trackable exchange of information and ability, or can we talk about hosting networks and facilitating exchange?
- Does it have to be an exchange in which one of our institutions takes part, or is...
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Page Comments:
Pushing boundaries and perceptions of crafts practice
from
Victoria Ward.
2
comments,
most recently from
Andrea Westall
on January 9, 2008
I was browsing through the Origin catalogue from the London Craft Fair in search of Christmas presents. Through one of the designers, Melanie Tomlinson, I stumbled across Craftspace who seem to hold the innate qualities that so many have referred to when they talk about how culture and business can intersect at their best. What’s noticeable is that ‘Artists, participants and partners are involved in planning, development, collaboration, documentation and reflection.’ So the knowledge transfer comes from intimacy and presence together in a partnership.
It links strongly to an article from one of the Sunday magazines that was drawn to...
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Page Comments:
Putting things in order
from
Victoria Ward.
6
comments,
most recently from
sabine jaccaud
on January 8, 2008
There is going to be lots of detailed discussion within these themes, but here might be the right place to talk about the themes themselves, whether they’re right and what might fall between the gaps.
- there is a role that sits between business and museums and libraries and archives and makes each one understandable to the other. We’re thinking mostly of people who work for MLAs to bring products and services to business, but also of middlemen, brokers, business people who make inspired use of cultural assets in large or small ways to move business forward. Is there a...
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Page Comments:
'What could librarians possibly know about business?
from
Victoria Ward.
3
comments,
most recently from
sabine jaccaud
on January 8, 2008
Sometimes I feel like a twitcher. My enquiry binoculars start to shake a bit when I think I’ve sighted something rare but full of promise. Except of course that we want it not to be rare to get excited about it. We don’t want the lesser spotted red-backed shrikes (I don’t think there are actually those birds but by way of illustration) of the knowledge transfer world, or if we do want species that are rare, we want to encourage them to breed and become a great deal less rare. Or we might want to re-introduce an older species that’s...
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Page Comments:
People, places and things
from
Ellen Collins
on October 29, 2007
A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour or so at Origin, the Crafts Council exhibition at Somerset House, talking to makers.
One thing I noticed pretty quickly was the sort of incredulous face that met my question ‘do you use museums, libraries and archives at all?’ Either because they never did, or because it’s so fundamental to their work that they couldn’t believe I would have to ask. (A slight exaggeration – in fact, they were all extremely friendly and very helpful.) The point is, though, that most people knew immediately about their relationship to the sector –...
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Page Comments:
attractive opposition
from
Will
on January 3, 2008
We see a lot of organisations turning to their heritage to reinvigorate the conversations they hold internally and with the world.
Sometimes this happens in quite a fumbling or ad-hoc way, and usually it’s local and tactical rather than strategic, but if we were allowed to generalise wildly, we would say that many firms and the people in them are aware of the brittleness and vacuity of today’s companies and feel the need to restore some kind of skeleton that will give, or at least display, a sense of value and purpose.
Some of this is just smart brand narrative,...
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Product Development:
knowledge transfer officers
from
Will.
2
comments,
most recently from
Sarah Hinton
on January 2, 2008
Many of the big Higher Ed institutions now have KT officers, whose job is usually to turn scientfiic innovation into business enterprise. The situation is much less clear cut in the case of museums and libraries: there is not the same mutual exchange, where the frontiers of business innovation drive academic activity. But could there be? Perhaps the equivalent role does exist but has to do as much work on bringing business requirements to museums as it does bringing museum capabilities to business. Do you know of anyone who is in this role, or one like it? Perhaps it’s not…
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How do you measure the economic effect of knowledge transfer?:
it's all too easy for the economic effects to slide from view...
from
Victoria Ward.
3
comments,
most recently from
Sarah Hinton
on January 2, 2008
It’s really hard to find viable, not illusory, numbers. Even the hard core business people we’ve spoken to are challenged. I think we might be able to take crude big blocks of an organisation – say research, CSR, human capital development and talent management, product development, and ask some questions about – the current size of, and activity in that block – it’s direct and indirect connections with MLA in that area – whether it uses them for inspiration, information, meetings places, entertainment, brand enhancement – what qualities and effects it might say that the connection has on that part…
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Page Comments:
Rounded workers?
from
Victoria Ward
on December 31, 2007
A small gap to digest Christmas pudding and turkey and back into the fray. With a short detour via Time Out’s enthusiasm for the Poetry Library at the South Bank Centre which opens with some Ogden Nash: ‘Poets aren’t very useful/Because they aren’t consumeful or very produceful.’ (In fact I’ve been reading a marvellous book over Christmas ‘The Gift’ by Lewis Hyde, which explores exactly this question of consumefulness and producefulness in respect of the clash between the cultures of gift and capitalism. We might need to come to that in due course.)
We might be veering rather far from...
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Valuing your Information Professional:
making a case for supported discovery
from
Will.
4
comments,
most recently from
Sarah Hinton
on December 31, 2007
have you made, or encountered, a good business case for information support? Please tell us what the key arguments were (or if you haven’t, make some up!)
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Page Comments:
Permission to engage
from
Victoria Ward.
5
comments,
most recently from
Sarah Hinton
on December 31, 2007
One consequence of information and research services being more and more available electronically is that people don’t need to pick the phone to the company librarian so much, and don’t need to stroll to the local reference library to find something out. Apart from the lost opportunity for the librarian to give a gentle helping hand, written about in the previous blog, it
feels as though there’s great personal regret at the loss of the ‘quiet world of the library’ a place with some luxury to meditate, stand back, consider context, and perhaps pick up some indirect perspectives on the...
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Page Comments:
googling not good enough
from
Will.
2
comments,
most recently from
Ellen Collins
on December 19, 2007
One of the strongest feelings to come out of our investigations is a baffled regret at the loss of the information professional. This is true not just in libraries and archives but among business people, often in the form of rueful self-awareness after the fact.
The fact is, or seems to be, that supported discovery is a luxury in an age when every fact appears to be at your fingertips. It is only with experience that people realise that what matters is not having every fact, but the right fact, and by that stage they have usually closed down their...
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Page Comments:
On getting dressed in public
from
Will
on December 14, 2007
We’re three months in, and things are starting to make sense. Which is just as well, as we only have eight weeks left and Christmas is looming. Up until now our work has mostly been interviewing, researching and understanding. A lot of people have been pestered with a lot of questions, and behind the scenes we’ve been cataloguing, mapping, arguing and, well, mostly arguing about what’s important and what’s novel and what’s worth bringing back to you for more discussion.
I don’t know if we ever explained what the outputs from this project will be? There are two: a report...
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What is Knowledge Transfer?:
What is knowledge transfer? What isn't?
from
Victoria Ward
on December 14, 2007
Our original remit was to consider structured forms of knowledge transfer. A moment of inspiration or a piece of market research which then translated directly into some identifiable product, service, process or restructuring. Quite early, at the first advisory group meeting, it became clear that we needed to move away from this tighter definition, which may originate in the current development of knowledge transfer officer roles. So we agreed not just to look at what the advisory group called ‘entity to entity transfer’ and we’re working with a looser understanding. Some of this is based more in current thinking about…
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Page Comments:
The steps of the National Gallery are a great place to work
from
Victoria Ward.
2
comments,
most recently from
Andrea Westall
on November 21, 2007
I was interviewing an old colleague from an architectural practice which is more knowledge-conscious than many – insofar it it developed metaphors of different kinds of knowledge space a good few years back.
He spoke of the changing trends in work, how much of what we do now is done en-route, with handheld devices. He himself takes increasing advantage of the public realm, and semi-public realm spaces on offer to do work in. By public realm (a diminishing amount of London), he means open public spaces, freely accessible to all. Semi-public realm spaces might be the entrance to the V...
