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'.

Summary: This inter-disciplinary project aims at mapping and analysing the emergence, character, and development of the UK independent museums sector from 1960-2020. Between 1970 and 1989, approximately 1300 new museums opened in the UK. The vast majority of these new venues were independent, were founded by community and special interest groups, and individual collectors, and they differed from public-sector museums to such an extent that that they were judged to have 'revolutionized' the sector. There are now some 1600 independent museums in the UK, but despite the extraordinary boom in their numbers we know very little about them. Regional and national funding bodies and museums associations collect data on independent museums, but it is not cross referenced and is limited to their specific remits and areas of interest. They do not keep records on when museums opened and if they close, small museums often fall from view entirely, and the information that is available cannot be mapped or easily searched. In the first phase of the research we will collate and supplement existing information to establish a dataset of all UK museums from 1960-2020 and, in turn, build a database that is searchable according to factors including location, date of foundation, subject matter, size, type of museums, and combinations of these attributes. This information will be mapped visually and will be freely available in open source format on a project website to be hosted by the Bishopsgate Institute. In the second phase of the research we will use the database to identify patterns in the emergence, development and closure of independent museums and then seek to account for those trends (or anomalies) through the use of further visualisations, a focus group with Arts Council England staff, historical research, and an extensive series of interviews with staff in museums. This research will provide the first authoritative database of independent museums in the UK, and the first history of their recent development. It is important for academics in museum studies, arts management, cultural studies, and cultural and social history in that it will: 1. Provide a nuanced historical overview of the independent museum sector. 2. Provide a detailed analysis of a period of massive expansion and change within the museum sector. 3. Identify subjects that were or are of local or national concern. 4. Bring orthodox histories of the UK museum boom into question. 5. Demonstrate the scale and variety of the small independent museum sector, and hence of non-professional cultural production. 6. Generate resources for future researchers. The research will also have benefits for arts funders and policy-makers, and for staff in independent and public-sector museums in that it will: 1. Inform our understanding of the factors that underpin the emergence and closure of independent museums. 2.Track correlations between independent museums' emergence and specific funding streams. 3. Reveal regional differences across the museum sector. 4. Provide a solid knowledge base about their sector and thereby improve capacity for evidence-based advocacy and decision-making. We also anticipate the research being of interest to a general public in that it will: 1. Produce an oral history archive that can be used by amateur historians. 2. Raise awareness of volunteer-run organisations. 3. Offer volunteer-run museums an overview of their sector.

Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage (AAFH) is an interdisciplinary research programme which aims to develop a broad, international and cross-sectoral comparative framework for understanding 'heritage' in its most expansive sense. While heritage has tended to be strictly defined, it is possible to argue that all areas of practice that are informed by notions of endangerment, caring for the future, or which involve the 'presencing' of the past, might be considered to be forms of heritage work. Further, 'natural' and 'cultural' and 'intangible' and 'tangible' heritage have tended to be treated in isolation from one another, when, in fact, the distinction between these realms is often difficult to maintain. Accordingly, this research programme will explore the processes and practices by which heritage is 'assembled' within a broad range of fields which have typically not been conceptualised as forms of heritage, and consider the ways in which the alternative practices and processes of future-making involved in each might inform more conventional aspects of cultural heritage designation, care and management. It will do this through investigating and providing opportunities for knowledge exchange between and across a series of different heritage domains. In so doing, the research programme aims to facilitate a more democratic and informed dialogue between and across various heritage 'industries' and their publics in the twenty-first century, and to contribute to the development of new policies which promote more innovative, shared, resilient and sustainable approaches to heritage conservation. Activities will take place across four work packages, each of which draws together several heritage domains that share common objectives or common practices, but which have not generally been considered in comparative perspective, to examine the ways in which each domain draws on the past to resource the future in the face of future threat. The collection of domains to be considered by the programme are organised under four broad themes: "preparing for uncertain futures" (WP1), to investigate the selection of sites for future disposal of nuclear waste, the transmission of messages from earth into outer space and practices of world heritage designation and management; "managing nature/culture borderlands" (WP2), to explore synergies between landscape rewilding initiatives and the management of ruination in built heritage; "curating profusion" (WP3), to examine discarding and keeping for posterity in households and small-to-medium-sized museums; and "conserving diversity" (WP4), to compare ways of valuing and managing biological and cultural diversity in indigenous landscape management, seed banks, herbaria and frozen zoos. Within these WPs, researchers will undertake fieldwork to understand the practices and processes which are undertaken within each domain, and to suggest ways in which they might be creatively re-deployed in others. Research methods will principally draw on forms of visual and material ethnography, but also incorporate documentary research, creative artistic practice, film making, trans-sectoral knowledge exchange events and exhibitionary experiments. In addition to these WP-specific activities, we will engage in a number of cross-cutting, programme-wide activities which are concerned with co-creating new knowledge through knowledge exchange events, academic symposia and exhibitions. We will work with 18 non-academic partner organisations drawn from across various conventional and unconventional heritage domains. We are guided in our work by an esteemed advisory board drawn from senior representatives of a number of our partner organisations, representing a range of different fields of practice, to ensure our research has wide impact amongst practitioners and policy makers.