This theme looks at the bigger picture of knowledge artefacts as social goods, as Participant U2 called them. They are examined in relation to organisational priorities, cultural heritage identity and ethos, and their role across different countries and subject specialisms.

​

User and provider participants recognise the complexity of cultural heritage operations, and the limited capacity that user organisations have: ‘the person opening the door, is selling the coffee, is the curator, is fixing the toilet’ (Participant P17). Curation is a 'broad church … a curator …[is] also responsible for running the shop, doing events, staff rotas …’ (Participant U3). Support organisations have very limited capacity too, but each tries to cover too many specialisms to attract funding and users. Providers note that the quality of knowledge resources they provide is negatively affected by their limited-capacity, short-term grant-funding, and membership-dependent business models of the support organisations.

​

For the users, the diverse and broad range of their operations require ‘the right information, and the most up to date information’ and its absence means that the organisations cannot deliver high standards, nor be innovative, and this has a negative impact on their people who try to do their best (Participant U10). The right information should reflect the priorities. However, the priorities given by user participants and the priorities covered by provider participants are not aligned. User organisations’ participant priorities are to manage complex day-to-day visitor-facing and curatorial operations with limited organisational resources. Priorities mentioned by providers are externally driven and very broad, such as climate sustainability, digital, and governance, but appear to lack both the small operational detail and a long-term cohesion. The common priorities for users that providers also cover, are operational areas that could have legal implications, such as ‘risk management, disaster planning, emergency responses, … collections management, auditing processes, and object movement’ (Participant U11).

​

Alongside the priorities’ misalignment there is the issue of identity. User and provider participants note that there is no agreed boundary of the cultural heritage/culture/ arts/ heritage/ historic environment sector(s) and its habitats, which is (are) fragmented. The fragmentation is causing ineffective use of resources and duplication of work, forming silos that shy inwards rather than learning from successfully demonstrated practice in their common operations. What does unite these subject categories is the ethos across its people:

‘Work in it comes with its own challenges, but I absolutely agree that part of the reason we're here is … to make people's life better. And that's not just the people who are here today, but also … tomorrow. And the only way that you can do that is by building up that social capital and those social goods, which is what these manuals effectively are. There are mechanisms for creating that, and to disseminate that, and to propagate it. And I think that's really, really important. That's very much part of what I'm about.’ (Participant U2)

​

The cultural heritage ethos is to share, to complement not to compete, ‘join them instead of competing’ (Participant P12). The impact of limited funding for the support network, however, means that support organisations are concerned about their viability and are being protective of their knowledge. As such, the individual people’s passion about the cultural heritage’s purpose, is undermined by the unhealthy competitive project-funding environment.

​

‘The ethos of what we do is all about cooperating with other people. … if these organisations are targeting these audiences …, rather than competing, we can look at where there's a gap ... And even when it comes down to things like traditionally what days we've planned to offer school holiday workshops, we've purposefully not chosen days where there's traditionally other offer, you know. So, complement and work with other people rather than directly be in competition with them. There's something in cooperative law called cooperation, not competition … You're supposed to find an alternative way to operate where you're not competing with what would be your natural partners’ (Participant U9).

​

Competing for grant funding is negatively affecting cooperation and sharing, whilst the providers’ alternative main income source, the membership, is creating barriers. Knowledge resources are targeted towards small organisations that need the support, but only the large organisations can afford the multiple memberships and the cost of the training courses (Participant P1). Participants usually can afford memberships during funded projects, but user organisations are left in deep hollows once project funding runs out. The membership barriers also stop providers collectively from knowing what knowledge resources exist, leading to duplications and to unfilled gaps. Collaborating through a membership wall has become a midsummer’s nightmare. Membership networking often becomes a mind-boggling web of exclusive clubs serving an overflow of out-of-date information. As a result, memberships restrict ‘equitable accessibility’ (Participant P23c) as the organisations have variable ability to access knowledge resources.

​

Participants note that organisational variability affects not only access to operational knowledge but also how it is managed. In large organisations, child sites have beneficial access but also limiting ties with their parent organisations. Additionally, provider participants mention that the majority of the cultural heritage organisations are small, and many are volunteer-dependent, with low knowledge absorptive capacity, putting them at higher risk (Participant P16b).

​

An appropriate knowledge design should help ‘adapting content in appropriate ways to reach whichever relevant audience you're trying to reach’ (Participant P23c). The topic of a cultural heritage system-wide knowledge design understandably prompted discussion about its potential effect on standardisation. A participant fearing that a wide design will increase standardisation claimed that ‘the operations are common, but the context within those … is very different’ (Participant U11). Another participant looked at the similarities instead, ‘the application might be slightly different, but the processes are the same’ (Participant U4). Most participants recognised that joined-up knowledge resources on common operations across subject categories can actually increase diversity of the knowledge artefacts and of the user organisations:

‘I think that sort of cross pollination can be really beneficial … everyone's gone to each other's museums. They've all copied off, you know, copied off each other. They're all working from the same texts, and it just gets stale.’ (Participant U16)

‘… European theme park, I feel have got the best customer experience … they really know their visitors, in a way that in museums and heritage we are just still theorising about. If you want to understand knowing your visitors, go to a theme park … We should broaden our horizons.’ (Participant P15)

​

Broadening horizons allows better reflection too. Participants from New Zealand aimed to provide fewer but well-informed and complete packages of resources for specific operations. As a result, user feedback from New Zealand organisations about the knowledge resources is more positive than in UK organisations. Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums in other non-UK countries are still under one umbrella because of their common operational knowledge and shared objectives (Participant U10). And are learning from subjects with common operations that otherwise operate in silos. ‘Museums seem to think they're the only people with collections, … And … many organisations have got archives …’ (Participant P15). Instead, when subject specialisms work together, they create efficiencies and are complementary:

‘… in a combined Arts and Heritage Centre, … a museum and a theatre, that was brilliant because everything was shared across both platforms and that worked really well.’ (Participant U4)

​

The participant expanded on the benefits: visitors are used to pay for theatre but not for museum entry, so by combining the two they can double up on potential visitors, economise by sharing resources, save workload in managing policies and documentation, and combine income sources (Participant U4). It’s a bonus, we have common operations, yet different audiences (Participant U11). Existing knowledge artefacts that are adaptable to user settings are then seen as the obvious choice by participants:

‘Why reinvent the wheel if someone else has got five or six years heads up on what to do and what not to do?’ (Participant U4)

​

Therefore, the role of knowledge artefacts in cultural heritage is as social goods, both in the cooperative way that organisations work and as output for the society. Fragmentation and membership walls have, however, rendered them damaged social goods. Perhaps technology can come to the rescue?