 Good morning, and welcome to the 14th meeting of the Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Relations Committee in 2017. I'd like to remind members and the public to turn off mobile phones, and any members using electronic devices to access committee papers during the meeting should ensure that they are switched to silence. Before we begin, you will be aware of the tragic events that occurred in Manchester earlier this week. As a mark of respect, the Parliament will be holding a minute silence at 11 am this morning. If we are still in public session, I will suspend the meeting at that time shortly before 11 o'clock and resume proceedings after the minute silence. Our first item of business today is a decision to take agenda item 3 in private. Are our members content with that? Our second item of business today is an overview session on Scottish Collections, where we will hear from representatives of Scotland's four national collections and from two supporting bodies. I'd like to welcome the witnesses, and perhaps the best way to make our introductions is to go round the table. I'll begin. I'm Joan McAlpine, MSP convener of the committee. I'm Lewis MacDonald, MSP from North East Scotland and deputy convener of the committee. Joan Orr, Chief Executive Museums Gallery Scotland. Marie Evans, MSP for Angus North and Mearns. Pamela Tulloch, Chief Executive, Scottish Library and Information Council. Richard Lochhead, MSP and Marie. Tim Harris, Chief Executive, National Records of Scotland. Jackson Carlaw, MSP for Eastwood. John Scali, National Library and Chief Executive, National Library of Scotland. Tulloch, MSP for Shetland. I spent far too much time in most of your organisations. That's good to hear. Gordon Rintill, director of the National Museum of Scotland. Ross Greer, MSP for the West of Scotland. John Letton, director general of the National Gallery of Scotland. Stuart McMillan, MSP for Greenock Island and Berklyde. Thank you. I'd now like to invite our witnesses to make very brief opening statements of two minutes. I'm going to start on my left, so I'm going to start with Sir John Letton. Thank you, convener, and thank you also to the committee for the invitation to be here this morning. I'd like briefly to make three points, if I may. The first is that, like the other organisations represented here this morning, National Gallery of Scotland plays a very successful part in cultural life in Scotland and we're also a powerful international brand. We are fortunate to look after one of the finest collections of art that you will find anywhere in the world, the world's most important collection of Scottish art, which we show in an international context. We share that collection with a growing audience locally, nationally and internationally. Last year there were 2.4 million visits to the National Gallery of Scotland here in our sites in Edinburgh. That's a 10% increase on the year before. We work increasingly with organisations around Scotland to share ownership and to make the collection as widely available across the country through our loans, displays and outreach activities, and we lend and indeed borrow objects from all over the world. Last year we had a highly successful exhibition in America and Australia. As we speak now, we have an exhibition in Nanjing, China, together with Historic Environment Scotland, attracting many thousands of visitors. Digital engagement has become an increasingly important part of the way that we operate. There are some 2 million visits to our website each year and we have plans in place to have the entire collection digitised and available online by 2020. The second point is that although we are committed to cultural excellence, we feel that our contribution extends across many areas of life in Scotland. We are proud of our contribution to the economy. The economic impact of the galleries is estimated to be in excess of £121 million a year. We are proud of our contribution in education and learning, more than 30,000 visits from schools and higher education every year, as many participants in a range of adult programmes. We are proud of our contribution in health and wellbeing with, for example, innovative programmes for people with special needs. I could go on about the work that we do to help young people into employment, but I think that you get the point that art culture seeps across many areas of life. The third and final point that I would make is that the galleries form an ambitious forward-looking organisation. We have great plans for further investment. That is investment in infrastructure and the collections. For example, the refurbishment plans for the Scottish National Gallery here in the centre, or the plans to create a new facility for the intellectual and physical distribution of the collections here in Granton in North Edinburgh, a regeneration project in a deprived community. We invest in partners, and we are working with various partner organisations to support local cultural development plans across the country. Of course, we invest in people and creativity. A very important strand of our work is providing the conditions to allow an artistic community to thrive and creative industries to thrive here in Scotland. To sum up, I would say that according to our ambition, art and culture are an essential part of Scotland's present and future. We would not claim that art can solve the challenges that we face as a society, but we can be part of the solutions. Art can enhance and transform lives, and in a world that is increasingly dislocated, art and culture can help people to find their way. Thank you very much, Sir John. I would now like to invite Sir Gordon Rintill to make his statement. I could echo many of the points that John has said about the importance of national collections in Scotland and in Scotland internationally and in all sectors of society. Rather than repeat many of the very good points that John has said, perhaps a few specific things about my own organisation. National Museum of Scotland has more than 12 million items in the collection from tiny insects to aircrafts such as the Comet Airtliner and Concord out at the Museum of Light. That in itself is a huge challenge to manage, look after, research and conserve this enormous and varied collection. The past decade at national museums has appeared of enormous change. We have more than double the visitor numbers in that time. Last year we had 2.7 million visitors. The national museum of Scotland, since we opened 10 new galleries last year, our visitor numbers have been up 20 per cent since last July. There is clearly a great appetite on the part of the public. There is also a great appetite in terms of visitors to this country while it is the rest of the UK or internationally. For the past six years, National Museum of Scotland has been the most visited museum outside London. I think that that has demonstrated the fact that some 35 per cent of our visitors to the national museum are now from outside the UK. We are a key part of Scotland's tourism infrastructure. With that comes economic impact and comes employment. Like the national galleries, we are not just about what we do at our sites. A key role that we play is working with communities and other museums across Scotland, whether that is through lending material to other museums, where it is working with community groups, where it is providing specialised advice. A good example of all that is perhaps the recently opened Lou's Castle Museum in Stonway. I am not sure if many members have seen that. I would certainly recommend that it is a terrific place where we are involved pretty much from the beginning in helping to provide advice. Something like a third of the items on display at the museum are actually from the national collections. There is also a key venue in our new touring exhibition programme that we just launched last year with an exhibition. Fossil hunters have just opened quite recently there at Lou's Castle Museum. That is a good example of how a national institution can work very well with local organisations to everyone's benefit and their community's benefit, as well as doing something for tourism up in the western Isles as well. Another point that is worth mentioning is, again, coming back to our collections—a huge number of items. We do not just keep those items for display purposes, because you might say, how on earth would you have displayed 12.4 million items? Our particular collections are also an enormous research resource. For example, our natural science collections are among the largest in Europe, second in the UK after Natural History Museum, and they are used actively by researchers from across the world with many partnerships with higher education institutions here and elsewhere. In many ways, they are actually a record of environmental change and provide a lot of evidence about how our environment has changed as a result of human and other impacts. Scientific research is not something that people normally associate with a museum, but it is a key part of our activities as well. John mentioned the national galleries with its plans to create a new collection centre at Grant, and we already have a site down there, which we have had since mid-90s—a 10-acre site. We have been doing a lot of development there. We have now started welcoming pre-booked tours to come and see behind the scenes and see what goes on. Later this year, we will open a new facility, which will be an internationally important centre for collection science, so that we can use our facilities and resources to investigate some of the collections and, hopefully, give advice to others. We have a very wide-ranging role in Scotland and internationally. I very much inadvertently elevated you to the period. Dr Rintill, I apologise for that. I do not know if apologies are due. We will now move quickly on to Mr John Scali. Thank you. It is Dr John Scali, but that is a mere triviality. I am a librarian as well. My job is to be national librarian and chief executive. There are two jobs there. One is in terms of the library. The other is chief executive to make sure that the organisation works very well in terms of its financial accountability and everything else. National Library of Scotland has a long, long history. It goes back about 325 years, but the committee will probably know it as the National Library of Scotland was established in 1925 under an act of parliament. The route of what the National Library does is legal deposit. Just about every country around the world has a legal deposit library. That is the organisation that has a right to claim a copy of everything that is published in that country. The version of that in Scotland is the United Kingdom. Every item that is published in the United Kingdom, the National Library of Scotland since 1720, or the Advocates Library, the predecessor institution, has a right to claim a copy of everything that is published in the United Kingdom. That has been unevenly taken over the years, but much more recently, certainly since 1925, much more systematic. What that has resulted in is a massive, massive corpus of information. To give you some figures, probably now in 1925 there are about 760,000 items, now there are about 26 million items, and growing every day, sometimes growing by about 700 a day, 700 items. The sense of the National Library is this massive, massive organisation, just as other colleagues were saying, that it is grounded in collections as a really, really important part of that. Another important part of that collections-based approach is the digital shift. Many, many committee members will be involved in this, so there are different ways. Legal deposit is shifting over to electronic legal deposit, with e-books coming rather than physical books. Us managing that transition has been a major, major feature in the past two or three years. When you look at that and you start seeing how that will play through in terms of availability of content, research support and other things that can actually be done with that, then the possibilities become quite endless. Although I should say to committee because we are the legal deposit library, there are quite considerable restrictions on that content and what we can do with that in terms of licensing and making it available. The principal one is that the National Library of Scotland has to make that content available for reference in a building that they own, and that is the agreement with the publishers. There is obvious logic in that, but it is an important limitation for everyone to understand. What that speaks to is the sense of the National Library being a physical destination and a digital destination, and that will continue for many, many years to come. The buildings that we have are just as important as a digital estate that we are developing over the coming years. The impact of all of that is vitally important. Just as colleagues were saying there, what is really important is how much that is used by the academic community, how much it is used by the public and what we can do to reframe that content for schools, for various groups that come to visit, for research visits, over 100,000 research visits a year at the National Library of Scotland. Again, that is dwarfed in that sense by the number of digital visits to the National Library of Scotland. I will give you one statistic. In 2010-11, there was one and a half million visits to the National Library of Scotland's website, downloading content, using content for various means. This year, 2016-17, we have just closed the numbers, and it is over 4 million. We really are seeing an acceleration. What we are trying to do in terms of the impact and what we are trying to do in terms of developing a library, and that has come through in a new strategy that was published last in 2015-20 is to seize that opportunity and to take that forward in terms of the physical and digital estate. Speaking to that quite directly, the new library that we have just opened in Glasgow in September last year is the National Library at Kelvin Hall, and very much that is grounded on our responsibility for the National Documentary Archive and the Moving Image Archive at the National Library of Scotland. We have cited that in Glasgow. We have also moved over all of our work and activity around sound collections. The National Library of Scotland is increasingly taking that co-ordinating responsibility for sound collections across Scotland as well, and partnerships are very important in that. The British Library, and a number of partners including us, we are going to be the northern spoke for a major project that has just received just about £10 million HLF funding in London. A number of things will be coming together in terms of what we do with this strategy, how we deliver it and how the National Library can become a very central point for culture, research for schools and for others to use as Scotland develops. I would like to close in one point around partnerships, which I think is very important, is that the National Library of Scotland is part of an ecosystem of libraries in Scotland, with public libraries in the communities, with higher education libraries and with the National Library of Scotland. I hope, and I am determined to see it happening, taking a much more inclusive role in what it does as a National Library of Scotland to support, to generate activity around those different areas. To give you a couple of examples quickly, we bought the sweetheart bravery, which is a medieval bravery. A beautiful document cost a lot of money. We bought it 18 months ago. It is actually going down to Dumfries and Galloway, where it will be on display and on show there. That is just a tiny window into the way that we view the world now. Not only is it the National Library accumulating material, it is pushing it out, as the other colleagues were saying, to other parts of Scotland. We are just launching a travelling exhibition in Aberdeen over the next couple of weeks. That will be travelling round as well. It is really about the National Library of Scotland becoming a much more porous organisation. That is what this strategy speaks to. Thank you very much, Dr Scali. I would now like to invite Tamellus. Thank you, and I am just Mr. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Many things the National Library of Scotland has in common with some of the other cultural institutions, but we are slightly different. The National Library of Scotland is a non-ministerial department within the Scottish Administration. As chief executive, I hold two roles. One is as keeper of the records of Scotland, which is particularly germane to our conversation today, but I am also a registrar general for Scotland. Therefore, National Records of Scotland covers a wide range of activities, not only looking after Scotland's national archives, documents going back to the reign of King David, the declaration of our growth, right through to the modern records of this Parliament and other public bodies, but I am also responsible as registrar general for the registration of burst marriages and deaths and for taking the census. That gives us a unique and different approach, and it makes our focus very much about information in its totality rather than just in the cultural space, and it makes us an institution that is very interested in questions of identity. Scotland's People is probably our best-known brand that is very well used by genealogists and local historians and plays very well in the heritage sector, and we are very keen to do more of that. We work very closely with the Scottish Council on Archives for engagement with archives across the country, and a huge amount of work is being done at a local and community level in archives. Traditionally, I think that archives have probably been the junior partner in this, but I think that one of the things about the digital revolution is that it is giving the opportunity for archives to really step up and make their mark in a way that perhaps has been less capable in the past. I think that there are some real challenges with that, both for us as an institution and for local and community archives, but there are opportunities there that have not been there in the past, so I am quite excited about that opportunity, as well as the challenge that comes with that. Among other responsibilities, I am also responsible for the Scottish Register of Tartons, and that also plays a significant part in the heritage and culture of Scotland, and, of course, it is iconic material, and it plays again into some of the issues of culture and engagement and identity that are very interesting. I do not want to say any more, but I would be more interested in answering the kind of questions that you would like to ask at this stage. Thank you very much, Mr Reales. I now invite Pamela Togh. Hello, and thank you for inviting me along today. I am the chief exec of the Scottish Library and Information Council, which is the independent advisory body to the Scottish Government of All Things Libraries. We are a membership organisation. We were established in 1991, and our members include all sectors of librarianships for public, academics, school, special interests. SLIC has a new vision statement, which is enriching lives through libraries, and we see that applying to all sectors over our membership. The five strategic aims for that strategy are advocacy, innovation, partnership, standards and funding. Probably one element that brings everything together under that umbrella would be the work that we have been most involved in, and that has been the development and now implementation of Scotland's first strategy for public libraries, which is called Ambition and Opportunity, and it spans from 2015 to 2020. Ambition and Opportunity has six strategic aims, which have probably always been applicable to public libraries, but I think helped to convey the message to people out with the public library sector about what public libraries deliver. Those are reading and literacy, digital inclusion, economic wellbeing, social health and wellbeing, culture and creativity, and delivering public sector excellence. To perhaps bring this to life for the committee, I would like to share some key facts about public libraries in Scotland. Public libraries are the most popular service that local government provides. Last year, in Scotland, we saw over 42 million visits to Scotland's public libraries. That is more people visiting public libraries than attended Scottish Premier League football matches or visited the cinema. Over 20 million items were issued from Scotland's public libraries and over 6 million books were issued to children, which I think is really quite important when we know that there are issues around literacy and attainment. Over 3.2 million hours of internet access used in Scotland's public libraries. We saw 55,000 hours of support provided by local volunteers to deliver added value within public libraries. For this morning's conversation, I would like the committee to remember that that is the context that we would like to speak about public libraries today. Thank you very much Pamela. Finally, I would like to invite Joanne or to make a contribution. Good morning everybody. I work for Museums Gallery Scotland, which is the national development body for all museums and galleries in Scotland. We are quite a small organisation. We are in NGO and we have quite a broad remit. In our family of museums, we have over 400 organisations all over the country from our largest institutions, which are around the table today, to very tiny organisations, totally volunteer run. All of our museums, I would say, are very much rooted in their communities, be that a community of small island community or the community of the nation in terms of the nationals, so we can look at community in quite a dynamic way. Over half our workforce are volunteers and that is very much a demonstration of the passion for heritage that exists in this nation. We have a national strategy as well that was developed very much in collaboration with these organisations and at the heart of that strategy is creating public value. In terms of priorities within that strategy, collections are obviously very high and we work to ensure that those collections are developed and that communities are enabled to explore the collections collect, but also to think about sharing those collections. As Gordon pointed out, the nationals have very strong remit in terms of facilitating that sharing. We will be working partnership very shortly in June on a collection symposium. This is about upskilling and developing skills in the sector. That is just one example. Connecting with communities and ensuring that museums can be seen in the very dynamic spaces. We have met many of you around the table through our advocacy work with museum messages and that was really pushing home and raising awareness that museums deliver on placemaking, on raising economic impact and on tackling inequality. Working with other sectors, museums are starting to really raise the profile of what impact they can bring to communities beyond what you anticipate that you will find within a museum. Going back to that economic impact, we are looking at an estimated economic impact annual impact of £891 million. We are a significant part of our culture and tourism sector. As I said, skills is a major part of our work. We have a small grant programme. We distribute £1.2 million on behalf of the Scottish Government and that is directed specifically at development. Part of that development is raising skills. We also run something called the accreditation scheme on behalf of a UK basis. We are responsible for Scotland. We have 249 organisations that are accredited. That is nearly 15 per cent of the entire UK museums. We also administer the Scottish Government scheme of recognition. We have 47 recognised collections. Those are collections that have demonstrated that they have national significance. We have very much a distributed national collection all over the country. Even in our smallest organisations, we can find extremely fine collections, which is a tremendous resource and asset. We run things like festival of museums, which I hope that some of you will have seen this weekend just past. There were over 149 events all over the country, exciting family events and some of them were adult events. Evening cocktail parties in very unusual parts of the collection that you probably would not see normally. Really exciting things happening. Diversity in qualities is very much one of our key things that we are taking forward. Starting with ourselves and diversifying our workforce, we are about to run a scheme called Skills for the Future, funded by HLF, to bring in trainees, non-graduates specifically and broaden the entry routes into museums so that our workforce is diverse, reflective of our communities and continues to develop. Sustainability for museums is very much on our radar. I am thinking about the future, how we can ensure leadership governance skills are there to think about the future. Finally, going back to equalities, we will be hosting a large conference this year on bridging the gap and tackling inequalities that museums will be putting in a much broader sector of how they can contribute to communities and how they are doing. Thank you very much, Johann. I think that Johann touched on an important point about inequality in her final statement. The Scottish Government has a goal of enhancing the role of arts and cultures to empower communities and to reduce and promote inequality. A large part of that, as Johann indicated, is to take collections out to communities right across Scotland, not just in the central belt. I was interested, Johann, that you said that there are 47 collections of national significance around the country now. I assume that some of those collections are in very small museums. I take it that you are not saying that there are any difficulties in having collections of national significance out in regions first of the central belt? From our perspective, they have to demonstrate a commitment to the collection in order to achieve the recognition status. Some of them are in very small, so we have Elgin who has a paleontology collection that is of international significance. In ensuring that the skills are in place in those kinds of organisations, we ensure that they are invited and encouraged to participate, but it is a balance. You are saying that there is no reason why a collection of national significance cannot be in a community that is far away from Edinburgh or Glasgow? It is a fact that they are. To that end, I want to turn to Dr Rintill. As a member for the south of Scotland, you are very aware of the depth of feeling about the Viking Horde, which was recently awarded to National Museum Scotland by the Queens and Lord Treasurer Remembrance. I know that you are having a fundraising campaign for that at the moment. Can you explain to me why that collection cannot be permanently displayed in Dumfries and Galloway? I am very happy to answer that question. I have a number of points that I would make. First, all the material is clearly of national and international importance, and that is one of our functions is to collect, preserve and make accessible material of that nature. Secondly, that particular Horde will require considerable expertise and resources to conserve it. A lot of it needs its skilled work over many years, in fact. It also needs substantial research work undertaken to reveal its full significance. All that will require resources, expertise and facilities. In our view, we are at your best place to provide that. Why does that have to be in Edinburgh? However, what I would say and perhaps has not been as widely reported in the media is that, since last summer, we have consistently been in dialogue with Dumfries and Galloway Council, we have consistently said to them, look, our proposal is that we would acquire it, safeguard it, raise the money to secure it, undertake all the conservation work, the research work and share the results of that at Dumfries and Galloway Council. We have also proposed to lend a representative portion of the Horde for the long-term for new Cucubri art gallery. Our plans are not that we somehow acquire and keep it all in Edinburgh. That is not the case at all. However, as I know that people have asked you, you have said that a representative proportion of the Horde has not detailed what a representative proportion is, which particular items and how many of them, what percentage? Will it be items that are of more interest to others and you have not detailed that? That is right, that is because it is impossible to do so right now. As I said, much of the material needs significant conservation work. Some of it is very fragile, so it is not even known if any of it can travel or how it can be displayed or for how long. For example, one of the key items is a very rare carolingian pot for those who might be interested in such detail. Rather uniquely, it is wrapped in textiles. I have not even seen it, because it is wrapped up since it was first uncovered and some initial work was done to stabilise it. Can that be displayed at a tall unknown quantity? It is very fragile. Can it tour? No idea. Until we have gained possession of the Horde, which will not be until we raise the money, we cannot undertake the survey work and the conservation assessment to determine what can be displayed, where, when and for how long. Therefore, there is a representative proportion of the Horde going to Dumfries and Galway. Nobody really knows what that means. Can you perhaps explain—I totally understand the point that you are making—that it needs to be conserved and to have expertise? Why cannot that be delivered out with Edinburgh? Well, because no one else has the expertise. Dumfries and Galway Council's museum service over the past decade has been reduced in size significantly. It does not have any—there is no conservation laboratory, no conservators, and it has no curators with expertise in viking age material. Do you have all the conservators currently that you require for this work? Or will you be recruiting people? We have, by far, the largest conservation facility in the UK outside the British Museum and significant facilities at Granton. Even in our case, we are planning to secure funding to employ two more people for two years to support the work because it is an enormous task. The material needs a lot of work done to it—somewhat very delicate, very skilled work—using a lot of scientific equipment to analyse what it is made of in order to determine what treatment it requires. In our view, our proposal is using our resources to benefit other museums and other communities. That seems to be a right and proper approach for a national museum in a country like Scotland to take. When was the last significant piece of your collection that was displayed in Dumfries in Galloway? Did you close the Shambly House costume museum and said that you would make a commitment to put significant parts of your collection there as a result of closing that costume museum? That was not quite the commitment that we made. We said that we would work with and lend things with tour exhibitions. For example, Dumfries museums already had our next-to-kin touring exhibition, our fossil hunters exhibition, and after the New Cwbriart gallery opens, one of our new touring exhibitions does not even open at the national museum until the end of this year, Scotland's early silver exhibition. Those exhibitions are all being provided to them. In addition to that, we have also made a number of significant loans to Dumfries and Galloway museums. We have a pretty strong track record of working with the team at Dumfries and Galloway museum service. Finally, I know that the cabinet secretary has invited you to a summit to discuss the future of the Horde. Will you be accepting that invitation? We are in dialogue with both the cabinet secretary and Dumfries and Galloway museums. We have been waiting for the new administration to be in place in Dumfries and Galloway, which is now, as you know, in place when we are hoping for meeting before too long. You will accept the cabinet secretary's invitation. Yes, we are in dialogue about it. Thank you very much. Can I shift the focus a little bit to the national library and the national library? I am delighted that we have a national library. I am here to give evidence and talk, as you did in your opening statement, about digitisation and digital access as critical issues. One of the other issues that has been raised with me by a number of people is the risk of the digital void. What happens if, at some future point, the vast resources that we now have in digital form is corrupted or destroyed in some fashion or way? What will the 20th, late 20th and 21st centuries look like to future historians? Should that happen? Anyone who was unwise enough to say such a thing could never happen clearly would not have taken advantage of historical study on other things that have happened unexpectedly. I was intrigued that you are doing work on future proofing of information that is digitally originated. I would like to hear a bit more about that, but I would also like to hear more widely not just about the digital origination materials, but generally, given the obvious temptation to put everything in digital format, what are you doing to ensure that there is an alternative format available for all our most precious records? That is a really good one. It probably strikes at the heart of the one of the things that keeps me awake at night is to do with digital preservation and to do with the fact that it is not even a transitional phase. We are in a new world where digital preservation and the production of digital materials, whether it is electronic legal deposit content coming in, and the very brave decision has been made by the legal deposit libraries around the United Kingdom that they will effectively cease to take the physical item, so they will take the digital item. There is a point of possible anxiety for everyone about how we actually preserve that. What I will say is that a banner headline about digital preservation is about multiples and about partnerships. No institution, even whether it is the National Library of Scotland at the scale that we work to, is able to absolutely guarantee that the digital preservation policies that we put in place will guarantee that in 325 years' time, for example, roughly the existence of that embryonic national library, that digital content will be available. What it must be is best endeavours, partnerships. To give you a few examples, with the electronic legal deposit, the British Library is at the centre of that. We have a network that is set up. The National Library of Scotland is one of the nodes. The National Library of Wales is one of the nodes. The British Library is one of the nodes. It is not a coincidence that that is 3, because normally what will work towards is triplicates. We will probably normally try and work towards 3. Anything that the National Library has in terms of digital content, we seek to do that in multiples. We will have one copy on one server, we will have a copy on another server. We are looking at Glasgow and Edinburgh now as possible ones, because we have opened a new library there. We are also looking at a third copy, which again is something where there is a degree of anxiety around where we might hold that in the cloud, and that might be the third copy. We will always work towards thirds. I am pleased to say that we are involved in quite a bit of research on that as well. We are involved in the UDA project at the moment with the European Union, European Commission funded, Horizon funded. Along with the national galleries and a few other partners, we have put about 230 terabytes of information on those scientific servers in the European Union. What we are doing is observing how they are corrupted or otherwise as a result of that process. It is multiples, partnerships and it is about as much as possible making sure that we can re-render or bring that content back up. Your right to raise it is an issue, and it needs funding and support for us to make sure that we get it right in terms of international standards. What you are describing as a digital backup to a digital store is the point. I wonder if Tim Ellis from the national records has a similar strategy or a different take on this? Yes, thank you very much. I very much agree with what John said. We are investing quite heavily in trying to create a digital preservation capacity that will enable born digital materials to be preserved in perpetuity. Our interest is, as an archive, in perpetuity, and that is very difficult when it comes to digital materials. You are absolutely right to raise that as a challenge. It is very important that we work in collaboration with each other, but with academics and others internationally because this is something that has not really been solved anywhere, and it is a piece of work that is on-going across the world where people are interested in this work. I absolutely agree with the principle of thirds. That is fundamental to where we go with this. It is probably also worth recognising that not everything will be preserved forever, and that has always been the case. The fact that we have only a handful of charters from the medieval period, historians 100-200 years into the future will probably only have a handful of bits of information available from the present day. Will they still be readable in the same way? We require experts in Latin now to understand medieval charters. In 200 years' time, I suspect that we will need experts in Microsoft or whatever to understand some of the digital materials that we have now. These are some of the things that are still very much, as John says, in the research statement. It is critical that we put the investment in now and finding the skills and resources to do that is actually very challenging at the present time. I think that probably the skills and resources fact issue is probably one of the most difficult ones for us at the present time. I hear what you both say, and it is certainly interesting, but in a sense the parallels that you draw are precisely what worry me because when the men and women of the dark ages were telling each other the things that were important about their society, they did so in a form that has long since been lost. What has survived is occasional, fragmentary, accidental survivals. From what I hear from you is almost an acceptance that this is a new dark age and that it will be occasional, fragmentary, accidental survivals which tell people about the 21st century. I would be more interested in the parallel with the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries in which a huge physical record of what people thought and did exists and may exist in a form that will last for a very long time. I worry when the comparison is with medieval Latin. I think that one of the things that digital does at the moment archivists generally will appraise and select between five and 20 per cent of an organisation's records for long-term posterity. In the digital era, the potential to safeguard considerably larger proportion of that, much more quickly and cheaply, is much greater. One of the things that the digital era does is give the potential to save much more of current culture heritage records information for the longer term. I think there are some positives to be taken out of it and perhaps there will be more of this era that remains into the future than the past. However, the reality is that, if we are honest, we do not know at the present time that that will be the case. I will add a couple of writers to that. First, preservation is about accepting loss. I think that we need to remember that. You need to at some point accept that there will be loss and it is about how much will that loss be. I have to say as well that whether we look at the medieval period or the early modern period, one of the greatest periods of loss are normally intervention losses, i.e. like wars or like the Scottish Reformation in 1560, which in one aspect, if you interpret it, was a huge act of vandalism right across culture to destroy glass stained windows, to destroy books, to destroy all sorts of things. You can put all sorts of things in place to preserve and all the rest of it and the disruptions in society that we have seen in the Middle East can result in catastrophic loss of culture as well. What we want to avoid in the digital age is that catastrophic loss of culture through viruses, through various activities. That is one of the reasons that we talk about triplicates as well, so that we are actually storing the material in multiples of different places where those environmental and other hazards can be brought to as low a point of failure as possible. Richard Lockhead I want to return to the relationship between national collections and local communities around Scotland. In terms of local government budget constraints, the headlines of the last few years, particularly in some parts of Scotland compared to others, not too far from home where I live, the headlines are libraries of closing and museums are lurching from issue to issue due to a lack of financial sustainability. The organisations in this room have ownership and take care of Scotland's fantastic cultural assets. How do we do more to help our national collections to benefit local communities, local libraries, local museums? I know that there are tours and visits in lending. Is there another model that we should be looking at? There is a range of benefits that could be secured from the money-musk relic, what it is called, the 8th century artefact. Visiting a museum around Scotland would bring in big crowds and famous paintings that local galleries would bring in big crowds and they would help to sustain local facilities. Is there a new model that we should be looking at? The SFA, for instance, brings in money on a national basis, but local football teams benefit from SFA funds in terms of the football world, so should the cultural world act in the same way? Richard Lockhead Can you mean as that one? Should I pick up? It is relevant to John as well, but I am happy to answer the point first. You are quite right to raise the issue of resources in local museums. I encourage the committee to look into it further. One thing that increasingly concerns me and my staff is the increasing limited resources in many local museums and the loss of expertise over the years, such that there are many museums that have broad collections and no expertise in most of the collection areas. That is an increasing challenge. It is not just a Scottish challenge, it is one across the UK, but it has really come to the fore in Scotland. It is a real problem. I know John for his own part for national galleries. We are ready to do a huge amount to support, assist the rest of the respective sectors across Scotland and share collections with them. Much more could be done, but at the end of the day, it takes resources. We are all working within a tightly constrained funding environment. Our approach has been to recognise that we are in that tightly constrained funding environment to seek funding from elsewhere, which might make some of that possible. For example, COMPT fossil hunters exhibition that is touring around is funded entirely by grants from the Natural Environment Research Council and Heritage Lottery Fund. There is no charge to the museums who are taking that. Scotland's early silver exhibition is being funded through a long-standing partnership, through sponsorship with the Glen Morgie Company. Again, there is no cost to the local museums. I could give you many other examples like that. What we are trying to do is to use our resources to secure additional resources elsewhere so that we can do those things around Scotland. At the end of the day, it really is a question of resources and where we can identify that can come from. John, do you want to come in on that? Yes. Just to pick up on two points. Going back to loss and safeguarding and what we keep, what we collect, the big picture, what I have described is a museum community embedded within communities. Communities are making the choice about what they collect, what they safeguard and what is there for the future. Those decisions are made at a local level, they are made at a national level on certain areas—we have talked about the Galloway Horde. That is an empowerment and loss will happen because people will make decisions. In terms of sustainability, you cannot collect everything, so decisions do have to be made. I know that we have talked as well not only about the physical collections but the intangible knowledge that surrounds those collections and the intangible knowledge embedded within communities, traditions, festivals and so on. We see a lot of loss there, and you put that alongside the collection sites. There is a comparison there. Going back to sustainability and new models, in the Highlands we have a very strong museums forum, and we have all the Highland independent museums working collectively together to look at their future sustainability and how they can share resources, how they can use resources more effectively. We are funding a small project there. It is not a huge amount in cost, but it is certainly hopefully going to provide new ideas and models of how going back to Gordon's point about sharing skills and expertise and making sure that those resources that we have are used in the best way possible and that we have a future for those museums. There is one thing that local museums are working together to become more sustainable, which is very important. I appreciate the local museums of a different role to national collections. What I am wondering is whether there should be more of a tie-in between the national institutions and local institutions, because you are down to the whims and you are at the mercy of local government decisions where sometimes some authorities think that culture and arts are not priorities. Should we allow that danger to be there? John Lennon pick up on that point. Your question is a very good one. There is a lot that goes on between national organisations and local authority organisations already. We are touching on a number of issues, one of which is about a sense of ownership and a sense of participation and belonging. I think that all the organisations represented here would think that we would very much subscribe to the view that the collections that we look after belong to the entire people of Scotland. Your question is really about how do we get more of that sense of ownership when you have some communities who have better access to those collections than others. I do not think that there is a single model. There are many. Some of it will involve long-term loans. Some of it will involve touring. Some of it will involve different kinds of outreach activities, but there are a few things that over the years we have learned about partnership, and I think that colleagues would agree. One is that partnership is a very benign word, but it is actually quite challenging in practice. I think that this point has already been made. It is not just about sharing collections because there are fantastic collections all across this country. It is about how you unlock the potential of those collections and creating extra capacity and resource. It is also important that we do not, as national organisations, adopt a sort of patriarchal approach that these relationships should develop of equal respect. Locally, there are different kinds of expertise and knowledge that we can work together. We need to be perhaps more creative about how we make things happen because it is very easy to say locally that there is not a suitable museum, that there is not a suitable venue to take this particular loan. I remember very well when I used to be the director of the Van Gogh Museum. Van Gogh himself said, why do not we have art in schools? Why do not we have art in railway stations? I am not perhaps advocating railway stations are going that far, but sometimes I think the obstacles are more cultural in their minds than they are in rail, and being more creative about how we overcome them could be part of the answer to what you are describing. It was just really to raise the exact point that Richard made, because I think that it is a vitally important one. Sometimes cultural activities can be seen as a soft target when it comes to council cuts. For example, I know that locally, in my area, we have seen museums resort to seasonal opening rather than being open all year round. Hours of libraries are being cut in the public access to that. It was just really to ask you about what your relationships with local authorities are like when it comes to that. Does there need to be a wider change of the perception of the importance of culture, art and history in our libraries to prevent that kind of thing happening from those kinds of things that are happening in councils now from further cuts and potentially closing altogether? I know that, for example, in Edzel, which is in my constituency, we have quite a rare Victorian library collection with one of the only examples of a working caught grieve indicator. I am sure that the library people around the table will probably know what that means more than others. It is entirely dependent on volunteers, so it is only open one afternoon a week. It was a leader funding that allowed that process of the conservation of that to happen. It is vitally important that people have access to that and are able to see it. People are made wider aware of that. There have been a few comments made this morning about libraries closing and reduction in library opening hours. We know that it is challenging times for local authorities. We have seen staff numbers cut and opening hours reduced, and we have in some cases seen buildings closed. To put that in some context, in Scotland, there are just over 3 per cent of public library buildings closed over the past five years, which is not the case in other parts of the UK. The media being all pervasive sometimes paints a picture that is not always true of Scotland. On the reduction of opening hours, I would like to say that libraries are changing the way they deliver services. I mentioned digital inclusion as being a big part of the national strategy for public libraries. We see a 24-7 service provided in downloadable ebooks, audiobooks, e-magazines and newspapers online. There is a service there for people that they did not have before 24-7. The way in which libraries are providing services is changing, and what people want to do in the buildings while they are open is also changing. We have to recognise that and not fall into the trap of defending status quo, because that does not really help us to move forward. Having said that, it is difficult for libraries, especially in small places, to be open to the number of hours that the public wants. Over time, there needs to be some right sizing about that. I mentioned in my opening statement that last year there were 55,000 hours of volunteers used in public libraries in Scotland and that they bring added value. The situation that you describe in EDSL is exactly that. Without the volunteers being involved, that would not be there at all. I recognise what other colleagues have said. It is a very tight public purse that those services are being delivered out of. I do not get a sense when I speak to local elected members that anybody wants to close libraries or reduce opening hours, but they are faced with hard choices, so hard choices make hard decisions. In terms of the local authority and pressure generally on public sector funding, museums are having to present their services in a way that are cross-cutting and show that wider impact and their value within communities. We do have cases, but really as reflecting Pamela, compared to the rest of the UK, very small closures. As a national development body, we keep a watching brief and where possible, if we start to see the signs, we will go and visit and say, look, where we can, this is the value, this is the real value and a cut can happen. However, usually there is a dialogue entered into and it moves forward as a situation. One thing that I would mention is both a positive and a challenge is community asset transfer. We are seeing an increasing number of local authorities looking at the model of community asset transfer, sometimes in a very positive and proactive way. From a museum perspective, it is usually around the building. Collections in terms of community asset transfer is a concern for us and that is something that we think about for the future, because it comes with a whole load of other issues, perhaps referring to the skills and so forth that we talked about before. However, there are positive indications as well where there are opportunities for communities to be upskilled, empowered in order to take the heritage asset forward. That is going back to your other models, but it is always hopefully in a measured way. Where you have that reaction and a snap decision, it can have devastating effects. Those are the concerns as a national development body that we are constantly looking at, constantly monitoring and trying to, as I say, enter into positive dialogue. As you know that, going back to that advocacy work, it was really about raising the profile of this wider value of museums within communities and how they can reach a much broader audience in terms of autistic, young offenders, GP referrals. Our museums are working at that level within communities on a day-to-day basis, but they need to partner with the specialist. They are not social workers, they are not police and they are not GPs, but they could work and are going back to those partnerships and collaboration in order to bring those public value and wider benefits to community. Those are the areas that we are concentrating on, in the same terms of tackling those inequalities. Museums have a vital role in society from our largest national issues. I think that Gordon, you welcome something like 72,000 school children through your doors, which is a phenomenal resource within Scotland, as an asset. Yes, sorry, I do not have your figures to trip off there, but I am sure that they are equally impressive and equally important to community. John Scully. Just a couple of points on the library aspect to this. There are parallels across the local libraries and the local museums. I think that it is a really important point for us to understand those various shifts that are happening in funding, which are really challenging for everyone, whether it is a national institution or a public library, and that it is an opportunity as well for further partnerships and for institutions like the National Library of Scotland to be much more open and to be much more open to partnerships, to be much more open about the content that we have and how that content can be delivered through the public libraries to offer a system where it is much more joined up across Scotland. In the last 24 months or so, there was a piece of software that was available around quite a lot of public libraries for sharing information on inquiries. The Scotland-wide ones were eventually picked up by the National Library of Scotland. It was a conversation that happened. There was no transfer of money, but it saved a lot of those libraries, the software licence for that information and co-ordination. It is now done by the National Library of Scotland. There are a lot of things like that that can be done, but I think that it has been said by some of the other contributors that conversations in opening up those channels of communication with the local libraries, with the national libraries, with the slick that Pamela looks after and looking at things like explaining the role much better through things like ambition and opportunity, which is a new strategy for the public libraries. I think that all of those things give us an opportunity to really make more of the assets that we have, whether they are at national level or a local level. In the 32 local authorities, it is the decision of those local authorities about where they allocate their funding. I am not being insensitive about that, but that is something that they have to discuss at the local level on it. You mentioned earlier the bravery that is an example of your own partnership. I take it that you do not have any concerns about the safeguarding of that bravery when it is out with Edinburgh. No, but that discussion has taken place. That discussion has taken place about the security, about the conditions and all the environmental issues, but it is really about actually making it happen and making sure that we are as flexible as we can be while making sure that that really important document, which is 700 years old, is going to be looked after and cared for in the local domain. John Layton said it as well. Maybe in the past we have been far too easily falling towards that is not possible, rather than saying that this is a really great idea. So when we bought that 18 months ago, one of the first things that we said was, how can we make sure that that is seen by the people in Dumfries and Galloway, where the bravery actually originated? Thank you very much. Tavish Scott. Thank you. I wonder if I could ask a much wider question about the pursuit of knowledge and understanding more generally. Dr Scali mentioned in his earlier remarks what has happened in Syria in recent years in terms of the destruction of things we will now never see again, and our children will never be allowed to go and see because ISIS has destroyed them. Given what happened in Manchester, and it is not just because of Manchester, it is also France in the last few years, it is just about everywhere in the world, young people do not understand, given that they live in a world of apps and mobile phones, the reality of Islam and what is now happening and the difference between radicalisation of the Muslim faith as opposed to people living their normal lives in whatever faith they are in. Do you think you individually and collectively have a role to play now in bringing together the enormous assets that you have got and presenting them in a way that should allow not just the, I was going to say, my children's generation but frankly all of our generations some ability to get some sense of what is going on in the world around us at the moment. I have many times walked into Gorn's institutions and could look at Islamic art and that kind of thing and recognise the importance of those civilisations, but I think that that need is ever greater now than it has ever been and I just wonder if there is any collective work going on across the national collections to present a greater pursuit of understanding about the world that we now live in. I think that that is a really important point that Tavish Scott has raised, and I think that museums of all shapes and sizes do have a really important role to play in bringing out a better understanding between communities. In their own case, for example, we have collections from cultures a little around the world, including, as Tavish Scott has said, Middle East, so we have worked certainly in recent years, the whole range of different communities, for example, we participate in the Iranian festival that takes place in Edinburgh every year, working with local community, help bringing and bringing their culture and sharing their culture with museum visitors from very different backgrounds, so I think that the key there is actually working with communities to see how we can add value and see how we can actually use the national collections or themes arising from the national collections to bring about better dialogue and better understanding, so that's a really important point. It's not just about what museums across Scotland are discussing, it's what institutions worldwide are discussing. We now have an American president who has makes a virtue of the fact that he doesn't pick up a book and would certainly not know the inside of a museum or an institution, and what a signal that sends out across the world unto young people. We have Brexit, which I know the committee is probably a little bit tired of, which also suggests the notion of break and cultural breakage, and we live in a volatile and very difficult world, so the role of institutions, including the ones around this table, including how many partnerships across the country and the world, is to build bridges, to promote understanding. We don't have the National Gallery's Islamic Art on our collection, but we are developing a partnership with the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, and that's partly prompted by exactly that notion of how you can work together, how we can share expertise and work in those ways to promote learning about each other's cultures, and that's an interesting bridge to build and just one of many that are being developed and sustained as we speak. Within Scotland, yes, there are an increasing number of exhibitions, and just tackling exactly what you said, Tavish, there's a temporary exhibition on at summer hall at the moment from Syrian refugees, as an example, but on a global scale our expertise is actually being used to specifically build capacity in conflict areas at the moment, so culture is now seen as one of the key pillars to tackle terrorism. It is on the table because it's about identity where you come from and ISIS brings in a separate identity, so I was speaking as a keynote speaker in September in Pakistan, which had its first heritage and museums conference specifically to tackle rising terrorism threat, so culture is on that table. There is something called a cultural protection fund which has been recently launched, I'm on the advisory group for that, and that is working with 12 conflict countries specifically to deliver museums heritage projects on the ground, but in partnership often with organisations here in the UK, and there are a number of Scottish organisations, cultural and heritage organisations, who are delivering that work at the moment, so it is happening, it is active, it is quite high risk, but it puts culture firmly in the middle of these global affairs as a positive, future-locking influence. I think it was last year that Oxford English dictionary said that the word of phrase of the year was post truth, and there is a really good question, it's a good intervention reminding us that one of the roles of libraries is to be that place in museums as well, is that place where authoritative information, however you want to categorise that, is available, but I think even more than that the development of critical faculties, the development of the critical tools where you can look at an app, you can look at a source, you can look at some information, and you can question it, and you can authoritatively question it, and I think that's a really, really important role, and I think that it's a really important role for Scotland to maybe take a leadership role and given the history, we have an education and all that, because a game, what we're going through, I think is a period of disruption, where you can cut out no disrespect to anyone around the table, you can cut out politicians, you can cut out librarians, you can cut out all sorts of other figures who traditionally would be seen as authority figures to help you to understand the world in which you're operating in or in which you're living in, or a other world across the way, so I think that there's a real issue there and I think that it's a real challenge for everyone, it's a challenge for the National Library of Scotland and it's a challenge for everyone around this table. What do we do about it? It really starts with the schools, it starts with reading, I still think that reading and encountering books is one of the best and the most important way of developing those critical faculties and understanding what people are telling you and how you can evaluate that in a sensible way, so that you become a truly kind of world citizen. I think that it's a really, really important point. Thanks for the question. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. I'll just make a similar comment about... Yes, okay. If it was a similar point, perhaps we could move on. Have you finished your line of question? One further question. I get what you're all doing and I applaud it. The government, are the government asking you at the moment to coordinate that activity? I mean, I know Manchester only happened on Monday and I'm not expecting everything to drop just like that, but this is not new, the challenges we face in this area. They've been around now for some, sadly, some considerable time. I just wonder if the government's actually asking for some co-ordinated action in this area, or even just an illustration that you're drawing these things together and we can see a bit of a programme in this area, or would that be helpful, I suppose, with the other way to ask that question? It would be helpful to maybe have a sense across the national institution, the other institution, about what has actually been done and whether it's been joined up as an approach and as a demonstration of the commitment we have to do something about this and what our role might be within, but it's a very complex area, obviously, but I would suggest that that would be useful. Okay, thank you. Okay, can I move on to Ross Greer? Thank you, convener. I was going to ask about the youth experience fund, but just very briefly, I'd like to go back to the issues around digitisation, and not about storage but about receiving the content in the first place. If I was to go back to what I know and what I'm comfortable with, as political parties we're supposed to provide you with a copy of every bit of material that we print and produce to put through doors, but increasingly political parties' campaign groups are producing less printed content and more digital content, the kind of things that take you 10 minutes to put together a graphic or a video to put out there, and it's out. Are you getting the same uptake? Are you receiving the same amount of content that you were previously, or is the move to producing digital content resulting in less of a actually reaching yourselves? That's a good question, and it's one that I could answer in great detail, but I'll try and give you the headlines that, again, what in a period of transition, if there's any referendum or political election or anything like that, the folks at the National Library of Scotland activate those contacts that they've got, and that's also everyone that works at the National Library of Scotland, 330 people, they actively bring stuff in for us as well, whether it's leaflessly handed out and everything else, so right across. We basically harvest the web domain in Scotland, along with the British Library, we work with other national institutions to make sure that we archive that material, bring it in and index it. When there are important things happening, we will normally have a much more detailed harvesting of that digital content, so if it goes on the web, if it's a PDF, it's on a website, then it's likely that it will eventually come to the national institution, it will come to the national collection. Thank you, and just to move on to the broader point I'd like to make, going back to some of the stuff that's already been touched on in young people's access to cultural, to libraries, to museums etc, I was wondering if anyone would be able to provide an update on the progress that you've been making in relation to the youth experience fund or not, or any update on the work that you're doing more generally in that case to get young people specifically schools, primary school-age children, into your institutions or bringing your institutions to them, particularly with the year of young people coming up, what plans are in place there. I would actually say funnily enough that the school-age children are younger, certainly in primary school, and perhaps we don't see them as the problem because schools come and visit or we engage with schools and support teachers in the classroom or many children come with their parents. A much more challenging task for us all, I think, is to keep them engaged when they come older, but they'll live in years upwards. We've found over the years that the best way to do that is to engage with young people themselves and ask them what they want and what they'd find interested in. Working with youth groups, developing projects with them rather than trying to say, well, here's something that we've done ourselves. I think that engaging with young people is key. We've also found, certainly for those who are perhaps more 15, 17, that sort of age group, identifying how we can help them to develop skills that may be useful in the future workplace or skills in terms of giving them confidence. Through a whole host of projects, we've found that can bring real benefits. The same does with school visits. It's increasingly doing a lot of school visits, increasingly supporting the curriculum for excellence, increasingly populating in our learning zone on the website with content that is co-created rather than created by the curator in the National Library of Scotland. All of those things Gordon mentioned. A lot of things we've been working with in national galleries on skills for the future, HLF funded, so a number of young people have been coming into our, both of our institutions to develop their digital skills and digitisation, which you mentioned. There's a number of things that we've actually been doing there in internships and experience, so we're working with them. We're also working at the moment with Young Scott, where we hope this year to be able to say that every member, every young person in Scotland who has a Young Scott card, will effectively automatically become a member of the National Library of Scotland. So when they pull their information up, there'll be a button there for the National Library of Scotland and they'll get access to all of those digital resources that we are able to make available. That we are able to make available with all the restrictions that we've got. But what it will highlight is that major resource that's available to them and how they can access it. So I think that's the kind of thing we would be looking to is local visits, but also that's a digital technology that can bring young people closer to the National Library and to the other national institutions. Thank you. Pamela? Public, I'd just like to agree with everything that John and Gordon have said, but I'd just like to also say that public libraries really value the importance of books and reading with children and young people and have a number of programmes going on across the country every week, every day and every library that are involving young children. So much so that we've actually got a project on the go called Every Child a Library Member, which was piloted last year. We've had an evaluation of that pilot carried out by the Robert Gordon University and it highlighted that one of the most successful ways of engaging children and families was actually registering them for their library card at birth. So we have been working with my colleague here, Tim Ellis, and his team to actually look at rolling that out across Scotland so that Every Child in Scotland has the same chance because we know that children that are involved in libraries and their programmes at preschool actually perform much better once they get to school, so it's about equality and better chances for children. Their programmes, reading programmes, will be a way of the First Minister's reading challenge, which schools are working with public libraries on as well. There's a read-write count programme, which was rolled out across Scotland, so every single public library service has access to the read-write count programme. We're also working with Young Scot, who just recently commissioned a piece of work. Next year sees the national strategy for public libraries ambition and opportunity reach its midway point through its five-year term. We're very conscious that we want the voice of the young person to be heard in that strategy, so we're looking at a refresh of the strategy next year, and we've commissioned Young Scot to work with us in a co-design that will see young people from across Scotland working with the strategy and playing back to us what they would like to see in the strategy for the remainder of that term. We're very much wanting to see the voice of the young person in that strategy in 2018. John Lennon Ryder, to the question about it's not about the trying to attract people in young people schools. The demand is huge. There's massive demand. We could all do three times, four times, five times as much if the resource was available. The challenge is really managing that demand and also working on where your where your effort will have the most impact. It is not really a numbers game. It is about targeting resources, is it about working in partnership with schools that have attainment challenges for example or and are until getting the most number of children in at any one year. There is a balance to are be struck I am going to have one other aspect to this that John Scally quite rightly mentioned rwy'n creuwyrddiol, neu'r rhywbeth ydw i'r ystyried yma, ond, dobarth that there is no no dechrau o'r swyddfaeth cyflwyntaeth cyd-i-dweithio. Nid ynikesu o'r cwmaint o ddweudio am yr wych, rwy'n creuaf ar gyfermarnau buried perthio cyd-i-dweud, a ddwerf yn dda'r ysgolodau gwladau, ond, ond, y bydd y A wnaeth ein cwyrdd y gallwn i'n defnyddio creio iddyn nhw, isi ddechrau, isi ddechrau, isi ddechrau, isi ddechrau, isi ddechrau, isi ddechrau, isi ddechrau, allan o ymgrifrous. A'all yn diolch i ddweud yn ajnod o'n gweithgŷn problemau, ac yn agel i'w ddweud yn dweud yn cyfu y pryd ac cymeraidd. Ond rydych chi, gennym nhw, yn cyfrifio'r lleidio? Beth hwn套. Le families is a key issue in keeping with primary level and so forth, secondary as a major issue for a lot of our museums, but it also costs the museum a lot of money to deliver a school visit. The staff is committed to doing it, but they will have to stop doing something else in order to do it. because most of them do not would be, it is a cost, particularly say our industrial museums, which are quite heavily staffed. They need a lot of people out there in order to cater for a visit. I have not heard of anybody accessing the experience fund at the moment. We have been flagging it and that may be something that could be tackled as well. Also music school is being able to get out of the school and to travel and again the resource there is a major issue. Does anyone else want to contribute to that line of questioning? I'm aware that we're going to have to suspend in three minutes time, so Jackson, did you want to? I don't particularly want to start another line of questioning, we're about to suspend, so we could suspend now, if everyone's agreed. I'll bring in our evidence round table, and I'd like to invite Jackson Carlaw. Thank you, convener, good morning. Some of my questions are sort of informed of my parochial engagement with the various bodies present, but can I start with an observation that arose out of the committee that Joan McAlpine and I sat on in the last Parlement, which was the Burrell Collection Committee? It was interesting when we were exploring the opportunity for that collection to be exhibited in any temporary capacity. The issue that seemed to predominate, and it touches a bit on something John Layton said, was the suitability of venues in the modern world and the environmental protections that are associated with them. I suppose—and you can come back to it in a moment—one of my questions would be what is your assessment of the current museums and galleries estate across Scotland, particularly in many of the further afield communities that we've talked outside of the centre, and what challenges do you anticipate going forward in terms of investment that will need to be made to ensure that these remain sustainable and safe for collections in the future? My second question attaches to the kind of commercial activity surrounding a lot of what was on. Firstly, the importance of temporary exhibitions. How are temporary exhibitions determined? Is it to be a crowd pool or is it for a cultural aspect to them or is it a mixture of both? How important is a temporary exhibition? If I look at the National Museum, I've seen some fabulous exhibitions there, Catherine the Great, Mary, Queen of Scots, which is where I learned that my former colleague Lord James Douglas Hamilton had a very good claim on the throne, which I drew to his attention. I think the lack of pursuit there of is why his family head has remained on the family shoulders, one on Vikings. It's occurred to me to wonder when I visited, if you have a temporary exhibition that isn't a big crowd pool or does that have a peripheral or a fairly fundamental impact on the overall budgeting and expectation surrounding the gallery. Then I move on to catering. The National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery have actually got destination catering, as far as I'm concerned. They attract my wife and I regularly, and I imagine others too, who then will go on to visit on a regular basis the collections being displayed in the gallery themselves. If I was to be more critical of the National Museum, I would say that I find its catering incredibly pedantic and uninteresting, other than that tower where you need a second mortgage to enter. I wonder to what extent now in the modern world does that kind of social proposition, which surrounds a major gallery, have an importance? It used to just be the retail proposition in terms of the shop, but it seems to me to have moved far beyond that now in terms of the accessibility and the importance to galleries. Three questions. To start with infrastructure, I think nations tend to run their infrastructure museums and galleries rather like I run my car so that into the ground and only when it doesn't work anymore is there then an investment in a major project. One of the challenges is the ongoing maintenance that is required for whether there are grade A or grade B listed buildings or all manner of infrastructure that is required to keep our national collections and our local collections intact. There isn't a simple answer. You will find a wide variety from benign neglect through to state of the art right across the country, but I think this tension between investment that comes on a project basis and the ongoing investment that is required to keep an infrastructure going is a real issue. I think we have to pay tribute to the creativity, not just that has attracted great capital investment into cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh, but into smaller centres as well. Later this year I'll be lending an exhibition to the Borahol in Danun. That's just an example of how with immense creativity and innovation a local community has brought a facility up to world-class standards that can take, an exhibition that we are doing together with Tate in London in Danun. Others will have more to say about the infrastructure. The temporary exhibition and the programming, certainly in the case of the national galleries, the majority of our visits are to what we describe as the permanent displays. The temporary exhibition programme has the effect of raising profile, grabbing attention in the media and attracting all manner of support, including corporate support, but we regard it very much as a way of activating the permanent collection rather than a separate thing in its own right. You touch also on how those programmes are established. There isn't a single answer because we see the need to create a balanced programme across a number of years. Some of that will be world-renowned artists of blockbuster fame. Some of them will be obscure names that nobody has heard of and will attract less attention, but those more perhaps arcane subjects are often the ones that are the most revealing. That might be, for example, an exhibition that is coming up in the modern gallery, of which charts an alternative history of modern painting through realist and figurative painting, whereas everybody sees the story of modern art as being one of the journey to abstraction. This is the first exhibition of this material that has been done since the 1920s, yet we see it as a very valuable thing. It certainly won't necessarily be the same blockbuster appeal of an impressionist exhibition, but we see that it is a valuable contribution and not to just throw up the same diet, if you like, to the public. Talking of diet, you move on to catering. I think that it's a wider point about whatever else museums and galleries are. There are also visitor attractions and that we are for, if you like, a safe social space where people can gather in an era where those are becoming less and less common, an alternative, if you like, sometimes to shopping centres and shopping malls. People do expect that there should be shops, catering, and catering that you mentioned has become an important part of generating income, which keeps the whole show on the road as well as other aspects such as trading. There's a tension there as well, because I think you're comment about the National Museum, if I may say it was slightly unfair, because it touches on a tension in that our cafes and restaurants tend to, because they're put out of house, they tend to want to attract a certain kind of customer at a certain level of price, which is perhaps at odds with trying to broaden the demographic, cater for families, cater for people who are coming with many children, as opposed to having high-end lunching or dining experiences. Actually, I think the museum is a model of how you reach out to those audiences through those restaurants, and it's a tension that we feel very strongly in our catering. I'm glad that you enjoyed it. A few points. I won't repeat some of the points that John's made about. Your point about facilities is very well-made. In fact, Joanna and I have spoken about it a few times. She may want to come in in a moment. I think that there is an issue in some local authority areas and institutions around Scotland where we'd be delighted to lend material, but they haven't got the right secured display cases, the building isn't alarmed and all sorts of issues. Some of that wouldn't even take a lot of money to fix, but certainly if we were to lend anything that was considered important, we'd normally be looking for the facilities provided to meet what's known as government indemnity standards, in terms of security and so on and so forth. There's certainly work to be done to identify how some institutions can be helped to bring the facilities up to standard so that we can all do more than we perhaps do at the moment in some particular areas. It's a really important point about infrastructure. John's right. It's a bit like you run your car into the ground before you replace it. In temporary exhibitions, we are very similar to national galleries. There's a whole host of reasons for doing an exhibition. It's not at all a numbers game. There's different reasons for doing things and you certainly wouldn't run a temporary exhibition programme to make lots of money. In fact, the only time, generally speaking, we'd ever end up making money in paper terms, at least from a temporary exhibition, is if we were touring internationally and thereby the income in international tour might be essentially subsidising a showing here in Edinburgh. A whole load of different reasons. In our case, one reason for doing an exhibition might be sharing the results of some of the research of our natural scientists, for example, or picking up some potentially less popular, less well-known topics. It's not just about popular topics. We could do popular topics day in, day out, but we're not just about that. It's about a balanced programme. On catering, I'm sorry that you found our catering pedantic and uninteresting, I wrote down, so I must go back and speak to the team on that. I found that also surprising because, in fact, the museum brasarrate at the National Museum was giving a rave review in the most recent list food and drink guide. Perhaps it was an off day, but, of course, comparing apples and pears in the National Museum, for example, we've got a very, very broad audience, far, far more families in the national galleries. So what we've tried to do is offer a range of different facilities and a different offer for different visitors, and that's really what people are looking for. So there are those who, including tourists, who want the high-end experience that the tower restaurant offers, and it certainly does very well if you try and get a table there in the summer, you'll find that out. But then we offer something at the other end, which is more for the families, those who want a sandwich and a coffee or a cake or something for the kids in a balcony cafe, and that's much more about volume and how do you deal with volume and try and keep the quality up. But I'll certainly pass your comments on to my team. They were made to stimulate a bit of engagement. My children vote with their feet though. I think that Johann wants to come in a bit more of an infrastructure. Just to follow up on that point, has there been a national audit of the museums and gallery infrastructure? I think that this is particularly germane to the points that were made earlier on about the non, if you like, major facilities in the big cities and what might be required of them in the years ahead and how that's going to be funded if it has been. My last major audit was 2002, so things have changed a little bit, and it is something we're looking at, prompted by collaborations with national museums. 62% of museums and gallows are in listed buildings, so from an infrastructure perspective there are issues. Over the last, is it 25 years or 20 years, HLF have invested quite a lot, so infrastructure, but it tends to be where there's capacity to apply and it can be sporadic and project-led. But there has been, I think, undoubtedly an improvement in infrastructure through that source. There's still issues, there's still more to come, and it's, as John said, it's a constant, because a lot of my listed buildings. So in terms of spaces and where we could concentrate a potential temporary exhibitions, we could look at that, but also going back to John's point about thinking a little bit out of the box of where you might want to take exhibitions that you wouldn't normally think of and where our audiences might want to expect to see them in the future. So I think not narrowing it down too much, but going back to the basic issue of capacity and skills around temporary exhibitions, there are issues about being able to loan to not only the physical space but the capacity and skills to be able to take it and look after it for that period of time. So the event that I referred to, the collection symposium, is about a skills programme, but it's also getting the key funders, trust funders, who will be there, who can fund specifically around this in front of the museum audience. So there'll be an interested group of people there, about 60 people, looking to take that, and that will create, hopefully, a step forward. So that's at local level, but really we've got collections of international importance, so if we grow those skills here, there is potential to take that on the international stage, which you potentially looked at when you were looking at the borough. So that's around those, so there's work going on, but there's a lot more that could be done, and it's something we need to keep the pressure on. Going back to your catering, we have seen some really interesting social enterprise models starting to emerge from museums as they respond to pressured times. So catering is a core one, that people are improving their catering. We've offered a bundle of training around retailing, it's sold out straight away people, so there's an appetite to skill. But we're seeing different models like post office, cafe and particularly in the islands, coin operated laundrets are being particularly popular and generating income for the organisations. That is being in tune with the community need on the ground. People want that service, the museum is getting funding, installing it down as part of their premises, using it in that way. The community comes in, puts the washing in, does go to the museum. So some really interesting models at this moment are beginning to happen. I have two brief questions. First of all, Dr Scali and Mr Ellis spoke earlier regarding European funding and the skills and resources shortage, so I'm keen to hear some further information from yourselves regarding the points that you raised. And my second question is regarding genealogy, which I'll come back to you about, Mr Ellis. Should I just start with the skills and access to that? Increasingly, in a digital era, we are, as was done in my comments earlier, increasingly dependent on our IT and our IT systems. In the public sector, it is very difficult to find people who have the necessary skills, who are prepared to come and work for us at a rate that is affordable. That is one of the key issues. There is also a set of issues around, in the past, we have been quite siloed in our approaches. In the archival sector, for example, in the digital world, we have tended to look at a traditional archival view. Increasingly, we need to work across with data scientists and people like that who can make things happen. But data is the new gold and prices follow commensurately as well. So, again, it's back to how can we make better use of those resources. As we look ahead to Brexit, in the conservation field, we take a significant number of our conservation staff from Europe. We're already having difficulties in seeing some folk unwilling to come and work for us or moving back into Europe as a consequence of that. That worries me a little bit, certainly in the short to medium time. I can come back to your team's article question, but John may want to add further. Certainly, in terms of those technical skills and recruiting the right people to come into the institution and work and all that, that's a really important point and it's a challenge. We've just recently recruited a new head of digital from the National Library of Scotland and that was a really difficult task. It was a really difficult task to get at the right person, with the right skills and also at the right salary. In Edinburgh and Glasgow and in other places, you're competing with lots of private companies as well who can leverage much more funding and much more opportunities, but we do our absolute best in there. What we also do is we use partnerships as well, as I said earlier, with other libraries, National Library of Wales, British Library and Higher Education Libraries in Scotland. I mentioned the UDAP project that we've got at the moment at the horizon 2020 project and that's working with Edinburgh University and the National Gallery involved in that as well to develop those digital skills. I forgot the other part of the question. You mentioned European funding. Yes, European funding. For the National Library of Scotland, that's to do with partners, it's to do with the collateral impact of Brexit on us, because normally what we would be seen as a partner that could bring content, it could bring a creative thinking, it could bring various other things to a partnership project that would go in under horizon 2020. The current, the current is a £30 billion fund that's available across science, research and culture. So we have serious concerns about that, I have to say, but at the moment we're watching it and seeing how it goes. I have to say that the phone isn't ringing as much as we expected it to in terms of partnerships and people looking to us to be an active partner and some of those possible projects are coming through. I think there's a mood thing has happened here as well, that the mood possibly towards Scotland and towards United Kingdom partners is possibly cooling. You'll probably know the statistic that was released quite recently by the European Commission, which actually showed the number of European projects that were being led and directed by United Kingdom institutions. And a good portion of them are Scottish institutions, I have to say. And that's where you get the overheads for actually managing the project, not just the work packages and the outputs. And the United Kingdom was way ahead of everyone else, way ahead of Germany. I think it's 834 projects currently that the United Kingdom were actually leading on in terms of overheads. And then you get down to Germany and it's about 400, it's about half that. I have to say that that is in peril given what's happened. In fact, after Brexit, there will be no likelihood of that. And in that period running up to Brexit, I would suggest that, and again, it's anecdotal, that you'll see that beginning to reduce. I think there's major issues there in terms of developing that enterprise and creative culture through projects and through European partnerships for the national institutions and for many others. Because the national institutions would be seeing themselves partnering with other groups in Scotland, other libraries, other museums and others. So it's a real big issue for us. The Neology question is Stuart McMillan. Richard Lochhead indicated you had a supplementary but had to leave. A supplementary, though, is a different subject. Right, okay, sorry. Stuart McMillan. No, thank you. I think certainly what you've said there has been very interesting. That will give us as a committee some food for thought and further discussions. On the issue of genealogy, and I know certainly some colleagues have posed questions regarding their own particular constituencies, and I'm going to do likewise. Certainly in the Greenock and Inverclyde constituency, it's been reported that over 600,000 people left Greenock to go elsewhere in the past, and they left from the historic Custom House building. Although there are some genealogy facilities available up at the Watt Museum, but in terms of that collaborative approach and joint working, what more do you think that the registers of Scotland could undertake to help promote that issue of genealogy? Particularly because Greenock now receives over 100,000 passengers from the cruise liners every year, and a lot of the folk do actually stay within the Inverclyde area when they are here for that particular day. I think that there is a potential untapped market there to gain some further additional resource for the local economy. One of the things that we have done very successfully, as well as having our online Scotland's people website, which is very successful and where we successfully migrated 1.2 million customers from the previous site to the new one. We've seen a significant increase in sessions and income and so on. Online is definitely one of the key ways of doing that, but we can also make those resources available in local family history centres. We have done that successfully in, I think, five areas around Scotland. There is one in Kilmarwick and one in Huyck and one in Alloa, amongst other places. There is the opportunity to work with local authorities and put together a package where we can make some of that material available in a local way. It goes back to some of the conversations that we were having earlier about finding creative ways of working with local areas to make national resources available, and part of the benefit of the digital world is that we are able to do more of that. I think that that is a feasible thing to think about. As with other things, you'd need to look into the particulars, but, in principle, we are very open to the notion of there being local family history centres that can access our materials online in a particular way. Have you already had a discussion with Inverclyde Council? I'm not aware that we've had that discussion, but I can check for you. I find it interesting that you mentioned the other genealogy centres, and it is quite extraordinary, because I, a person from Inverclyde myself, that the main exit point for migrants around the world doesn't actually have a genealogical facility. It's really quite extraordinary. A number of members have asked that we had a tourism session last week, where a number of tourism stakeholders were talking about the extraordinary growth of Edinburgh in terms of numbers, to the extent that it's almost like Edinburgh was in danger of being overwhelmed by the number of people coming in. Some of the national institutions will have both contributed to that and will be benefiting from it. Perhaps a number of members have raised how that economic success can be felt in other regions of Scotland, not just Edinburgh. Did you want to come back in, Stuart? I'm hosting an event in Green Rock in a couple of weeks' time, and the chief executive of Visit Scotland is coming to speak at it, as well as two or three other individuals from the DMOs. It's one of the key aspects that I'm one of the reasons why I wanted to have this event. I did publish a paper a few months ago, because I absolutely accept Glasgow and Edinburgh will have a huge attraction for many, many people. However, in order to have that economic stability across smaller areas, I generally believe that it's really important that other areas have the opportunity to gain some of that resource when it's being generated. One of the things that this comes back to you is the issue of partnership, where we have seen some of the most successful developments in terms of the local archives. It's been where they have worked in partnership with libraries or museums. There's a slight danger that we talk about the different aspects here, but working across those local areas is important. The second is that archives and family history centres and so on tend to be very small, and it goes back to the point that John was making about needing to find the way to help build capacity at a local level to help access the funds that can help take that forward. I think that there is probably a role for us and for people like organisations like the Scottish Council on Archives who have been doing some work with TNA to work with the HLF and find ways of increasing that capacity. Capacity building in local skills to access funding is, I think, one critical part, as well as working in partnership across the piece. It's now almost half past, so I'm going to wind up the evidence session now and thank all our witnesses for coming here today. If there are any issues that you would like to draw to the committee's attention that have not been covered today, you are perfectly at liberty to submit written evidence to the committee and will be able to consider it at a later date. Thanks very much.