Cultural Heritage

Yesterday I attended the MCG Spring Meeting 2009 which was held at the Guildhall, Bath. I had been invited to give a talk on “Engaging With The Social Web: A Risks and Opportunities Framework“, which was intended to provide a response to the first set of talks in the morning which described a variety of developments taking place in the Bath Cultural Services department. As I didn’t know in any details what those developments might entail this provided quite a challenge, especially as my talk was given immediately before the lunch break! In my talk I described the risks and opportunities framework which I had outlined in a paper I presented at the recent Museums and the Web 2009 conference. I was pleased that immediately before my talk I heard about plans to make use of Twitter and Facebook to promote Bath’s rich cultural heritage, including the Roman Baths and the Victoria Art Gallery. This particular example was one I had described previously, arguing the need to consider the intended purpose of the services (Twitter as an organisational one-way marketing channel or a two-way communications channel for peer-to-peer support and learning, for example), the perceived risks and benefits, the missed opportunities of failing to use the services and the associated costs.

Due to the lack of time I wasn’t able to describe this approach in any detail. I will remedy this in a forthcoming post in this blog. For now, however, I am providing access to a video of my talk (which is available in .avi format) via the Vimeo service.

I should also add that I have also uploaded this video to my Facebook account – and shortly after doing this I received a message from Caroline Moore saying “Thanks for posting this Brian I was unable to attend yesterday as I was at an engaging users event at the London Metropolitan Archives“. As I suggested to Ross Parry during the talk, shouldn’t we be making greater use of video to record talks at events such as the MCG Spring meeting?