UK arts: the place of digital in the wake of funding cuts (1): Archives and legacy

I'm falling into something of a habit, I realise, of waiting a few weeks until the dust settles on a news story before commenting on it. I like to think of this as leaving a little pause for reflection, but most likely it's because we're so damn busy at the moment. I any case, some weeks after Arts Council England announced its funding cuts - to considerable comment elsewhere, of course - I'm going to have a crack at some thoughts about what the new financial situation might mean for arts organisations' engagement with digital communications and media technology.

Something to get out of the way straight off, however: I'm going to avoid altogether the issues of whether or not these cuts are legitimate. For the record I've written broadly about them on my more, er, ranty blog DGMFS, responding to accusations in the Left-leaning media of Tory Philistinism (short version: the new administration might be many things, but uncultured plainly isn't one of them; conversely, the period under New Labour was hardly a time of unbridled innovation, creativity and quality in the UK arts world).

(And yes, by of full disclosure, I should say that we not only work with many organisations hit by the cuts, we're also working the Arts Council and the BBC Academy on a series of seminars around mulitplatform and interactivity, which Justin wrote about last week.)

Anyhow, the cuts are what they are. What concerns me is that this might me a moment of digital retrenchment in the UK arts world, that in the midst of financial hardship, spending on digital/online activity might seem a luxury - in terms of both resources and focus. Yes, we know this stuff is the future, but right now I'm worried about the present. This might see fanciful. Surely every every major arts body is fully signed up to its digital strategy? Well, maybe, but have a look at the world of television. Sure, in public all the broadcasters are thinking multiplatform and encouraging its commissioning. But in reality, talk privately to people in the industry (programme makers, commissioners) and you'll start to get a sense that a lot of people just wish "this stuff" would all go away, and are using budgets cuts as something of an opportunity to make this happen.

Given what Unthinkable do day in day out it, might seem a tad craven to rehearse the reasons for remaining committed to digital, but what the hell, this is actually what we believe in, so over the next few days I'm going to be looking at some areas where I think digital is an important, if not vital strand, in arts provision and marketing, including:

• archiving and legacy
• outreach and education
• sales, marketing and promotion
• artistic practice
• audience extension
• the changes in the audience's experience of art which digital can bring about.

I'll also have a little to say about that weird and thorny notion: staying relevant.

In the end, I'll leave it to the reader to decide where this all leaves digital in arts organisations' priorities in the wake of the cuts - and, as ever, we welcome your thoughts. So let's kick off the strand with...

Archives and Legacy

So let's start with one that's thornier than you might at first think. I mean, who could possibly disagree that it's imperative for public arts organisations to get their archives online, thereby extracting much more value from the investment made in their creation? (For the sake of clarity, I should say that by archives I'm not thinking here specifically of recorded performances, although I will concentrate on them; I'm concerned with a range of content from performance through complete listings to the bureaucratic guts of an organisation - think of the New York Philharmonic's project to publish an archive online with a central place for business documents like the minutes of board meetings). The Worldwide Web has proven the perfect environment for archiving artistic performance, from the legally questionable but nonetheless awesome public-led informal kind of archiving practised at YouTube, through a million music blogs (a random UC favourite: out jazz specialists Destination: OUT) and the seemingly more "proper" if actually barely more legal work of the underground video art site Ubuweb (another UC favourite) and on to those blockbuster projects like the aforementioned NY Phil or the complete Gramophone archive. All fabulous, surely, and all pointing the potential way for the public arts world.

Well yes, but… Being blunt, this stuff is expensive in every possible way: it requires a vast commitment of time, human and technical resource and cash - an awful lot of cash. And to what actual return? Oh sure, there's kudos-a-plenty in realising everything one does on the web, but is there much of an audience for it? Put it another way: in cash-strapped times, should an arts organisation divert funds from commissioning new work for current audiences into a hubristic celebration of its past?

I find myself rather torn on this. The collector and arts geek in me says: get it all out there! But in truth, how much time do I actually spend sat down each week in front of Ubuweb? (And again, I say this as something of an aficionado of radical video art.) Sure, we've demonstrated the Gramophone archives to Unthinkable clients and described them in breathless terms; but do any of us actually read them on a regular basis? I think you can guess on that one.

But see-sawing back again (I did say this was a thorny one), for all this realism, it still strikes me as somehow fundamentally wasteful for content to languish in dusty boxes (or the virtual equivalent thereof) or for performances to go unrecorded for posterity. But perhaps there's a middle way, if I dare use the phrase - or rather a series of middle ways. It might not be financially and strategically viable for a venue, say to record every show as a multi-camera extravaganzas, but a simple stereo recording of every concert hardly seems too much to ask. If the rights framework doesn't yet exist to exploit it, we can at least operate in the hope that it will, at some point. Likewise, now might not be the best of times for an arts body to digitise its entire archive and create the appropriate online environment to display and disseminate it - but at the very least get a couple of interns or post-grads in to start up an audit. And if a complete archive of your organisation's entire decision-making history isn't viable now (and might never be) then a simple, but complete and clear listing of your performance/exhibition/film screening history is a pretty fabulous way to demonstrate your legacy, and by implication continued importance in the arts world.

To be frank, it's unlikely that any single piece of your archive will ever be a blockbuster. But, then, if the arts world can't look beyond the "hit" as a measure of value, who can?