'Digital Prospects for Inclusive Historic Museums' builds a network of expertise between small museums that are thinking in big and influential ways about community participation in museum spaces and how it is facilitated through digitisation of their collections, their interpretation materials and display. 'Digital Prospects for Inclusive Historic Museums' takes place across three organizations, two in England and one in the United States, all of which are working in historic buildings with local communities. Each institution has foregrounded its community relationships in its daily work, and this project supports these organizations as they explore new initiatives to evolve their digital interactions in this context. The projects will explore how activities mediated by digital platforms can extend beyond the usual aims of increasing access, or democratizing knowledge, to embed reciprocity and respect for the physical, cultural and emotional engagement that exists between museums and their audiences. At the core of the project is the creation and testing of a variety of new projects in digital formats. At the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on Sea, an artist will create an artwork which will allow participants to interact with digital recordings to co-produce a new work that explores digital and material space, place and belonging. The Peale Center in Baltimore is creating an exhibition which maximizes interactions with disabled visitors and enables them to generate new material for the Peale's collection through digital recording tools. At the Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton, the project will develop content for an activity that will encourage engagement with the creative and calming properties of the popular Pavilion Gardens. Each of these projects will advance our understanding of how digital materials can be used to support caring and respectful relationships between museums and their audiences, and allow the researchers and professionals involved to share the outcomes with each other and with regional and international professional networks. We also aim to develop the way that we think about the value of this kind of work, and to reflect on how we evaluate it. Consideration and respect are aspects of digital interactions that are not easy to measure using recognized processes such as counting users or 'likes' or visits, so the project will also include reflection on the processes of evaluation and the ways in which we can better understand and describe the important principles in developing new museum content of this kind.

The impact of digital media on museums has been pervasive and profound. The notions of visit and object, collection and exhibition, have all been recoded by the presence and influence of five decades of digital technology. Constructively disruptive, 'digital' has changed the idiom of 'museum' (Parry 2007, 2010). And yet, it is widely recognised that the digital literacy of the museum workforce remains one of the key challenges continuing to impede the adoption of technology within the sector (NMC, 2015; 2016). According to Nesta, the AHRC and Arts Council England (2014; 2015), over a third of museums in the UK still feel that they do not have the in-house skills to meet their digital aspirations, and rather than improving, some digital skills areas have decreased. Addressing this pressing issue, the aim of the 'One by One' project is to leverage interdisciplinary scholarship to understand how to deliver a transformative framework for museum workforce digital literacy. Our project builds upon two years of foundation research and international collaboration, and a call by the international community of digital heritage researchers, enshrined in the 'Baltimore Principles' (NMC 2016), for a shift in the way we think about digital training in museums. Our response is to use the idea of the 'postdigital museum' (Parry 2013) as a conceptual framework in which to use humanities scholarship to design, empirically test and propose an alternative training and development provision. A form of practice-led research, 'One by One' uses the protocols and sequencing of Design Thinking to organise and drive its activities, with Action Research as the method to carry out a series of design experiments (interventions) in an array of localised museum settings across the UK. Having used a series of case studies to review the skills ecosystem for digital skills in the UK museums sector, our project uses a set of 'Literacy Labs' with museum professionals to help generate typologies of museum digital literacy to identify relevant 'activations' for developing each of these digital literacies. Led by our network of six 'Digital Fellows', these typologies of digital literacies and activation are then tested through a series of action research interventions situated in Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, National Museums Scotland, The National Army Museum, The Royal Pavilion & Museums Brighton and Hove, Derby Museums Trust, and The Museum of London. 'One by One' will synthesise the findings of this test phase of the project into a refined 'Framework of Museum Digital Literacy', which it will then share at a major national Skills Summit co-hosted with Arts Council England, as well as in a single open online professional development resource, hosted by FutureLearn, free and accessible for the whole museum sector. We aim to produce measurable changes in the confidence and competence of the museums workforce to use technology in their practice, as well as the awareness and understanding of policy makers surrounding the use of digital in museums. This is research that will benefit not just the museum workforce in the UK, but policy makers working in the fields of cultural policy, heritage and creative economy. 'One by One' is an ambitious collaboration between academics, museums and national cultural agencies: the Museums Association; the Association of Independent Museums; the Museum Development Network; Arts Council England; Culture24; the Heritage Lottery Fund; Nesta; the Collections Trust; and the National Museums Directors' Conference. And, as such, our project responds directly to the new Minister of State for Digital and Culture, who in his first major speech on museums, 22 Sept. 2016), called for museums to harness 'academic collaboration', to 'work better together in the digital age'.

Pacific barkcloth is a little known but fascinating, beautiful and meaningful material. Barkcloth is made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera) and other plants, beaten to soften and expand it into a fabric. It was traditionally used for clothing, furnishings, ceremonial practice and all other 'textile' purposes in the Pacific islands until the 19th century. There are several significant collections of Pacific barkcloth in European, north American and Australasian museums, but there are also innumerable small museums and historic houses in the UK and around the world which contain barkcloth, from just one piece to a small collection, relics of Pacific travel by local 18th and 19th century explorers, scientists, missionaries and administrators. A recent project, Situating Pacific Barkcloth Production in Time and Place, brought together researchers from Pacific art history, materials science and conservation practice to investigate what a close study of barkcloth as a material can tell us. The project has given us new insights into the materials used to make barkcloth, including the introduction of new methods of identifying the plant fibre which was previously extremely challenging. We also now have, for example, a much better understanding of the effect of the different stages of manufacture on the properties of the finished cloth and how this varied across the Pacific. The project results make it possible to provide information in a more accessible form and we will hold five workshops in museums in England and Scotland to engage a wider audience with this fascinating material. The host museums have expert staff with specific collections knowledge and significant collections which will provide reference material for the workshops. The involvement of two practitioners from American Samoa will be vital to the workshops' success: Reggie Meredith Fitiao and Uilisone Fitiao have extensive experience of traditional and contemporary barkcloth making and design. Their involvement in the original project demonstrated the enormous value of working with people for whom this practice has a real, contemporary significance. They will lead the workshops, creating a dynamic link between objects in a museum display case and the living tradition of barkcloth making. The two-day events will cater for different audiences. On Day 1 curators from local and regional museums and historic houses who do not have specialist knowledge of barkcloth will participate in a workshop aimed at raising awareness of its significance, materials, manufacture, decoration, use and history. This will give them context to understand their own collections and the resources, skills and inspiration to make their barkcloth pieces accessible to their visitors and to use them as the basis for engaging activities. This will also encourage further displays of barkcloth, and a greater regional understanding of collections through the formation of networks of interested museum staff. On Day 2 the curators will be invited to take part in a workshop for the general public at the host museum. The workshops will include a demonstration of beating the inner bark, the opportunity to handle the raw materials and modern barkcloths and beaters and interactive activity replicating on paper some of the designs found on barkcloth using traditional methods of painting, stencilling, printing using bamboo sticks and leaves or rubbing over a raised design. Visitors will learn that the meaning of the designs is more complex and has greater significance than is at first apparent. This will encourage museums to broaden the range of their engagement activities beyond the core areas of natural history and European art, enabling adults and children to gain an understanding of the natural history, artistic skill and cultural significance of this probably novel material.