 Without further ado, I'm delighted to introduce Dr Nicole Meehan who's co-director and lecturer in museum and heritage studies at the University of St Andrews to talk to us about digital technology in museums and sustainability, digital technology in museums. Nicole joins St Andrews and is now the co-director of this course which focuses on digital technology in museums thinking broadly about the advantages and limitations of these and the impact of their use on diverse audiences and we're really excited and delighted to welcome Nicole to join us today. So I'm going to hand over to Nicole. Thank you so much and I'm going to stop sharing. Okay, hello everyone. Thank you firstly for the kind introduction and for inviting me to speak at today's session. I'm really delighted to be able to join you and I'm really looking forward to sharing some of my current work with you. I should start by saying that the project that I'll speak about today is very much in its early stages and so there's much still to do so what I'll share with you is some of the overarching aims of the project, some results from its initial stages which comprise a recent survey that myself and Karina Malm conducted this year before thinking through some of the necessary next steps. Okay, so my previous research has involved spending quite a lot of time asking how can we make digital museum objects and by that I mean digitised versions of collections items and born digital objects as valuable as possible to as many people as possible thinking around how they're situated in different networks and ecologies and what that means for access to these objects and when I was asking these readers questions most often I was answering them with doing more of something that might have meant meaning working more with communities and digitisation, interpretation and display efforts or amassing more information about the objects and plowing that back into content management and collection management systems and providing more interpretation around the objects when they're displayed. I should caveat this and say that the answer is not always doing more but most often that was where I ended up and that meant that most of what I was advocating for had quite the carbon cost attached to it and the speakers over the past couple of months in this series which I've had a great pleasure of attending and watching have all covered the themes that I will speak to in a number of ways so my presentation today will aim to bring together some of this thinking around digital decarbonisation, digital inclusion and sustainable development in the digital museum sphere. I am going to talk mostly about the survey that Karina and I conducted and the results of this which we did to establish somewhat of a baseline of kind of activity in the sector to think about any barriers to that activity and what the next steps might be in achieving a more environmentally sustainable digital output from museums. So in this slide I want to establish some of the context and actually the previous talks in the series have already done much of that. The context in those talks was around the kind of environmental cost of digital in libraries and archives which was discussed in a number of ways and today I'll focus mostly on museums but that context remains the same. Kate Gill and Senor Philip Session provided a really brilliant discussion of the current thinking of creating value through digitisation projects at Q Gardens so considering the accessibility of the collections and growing that research potential and Stacy Anderson's talk was really inspiring in the practical strategies needed in digital decarbonisation efforts and some of the the kind of resources she mentioned are highlighted on this slide here as well. I also think it's incredibly important to foreground the value of digital inclusion that Tina Hill and Edward Gill discussed in October and finally Professor Chowdhury's work on the value of leveraging the sustainable development goals for libraries was really instructive and particularly when thinking about how we might apply that to digital museums or the digital museum landscape so this session aims to kind of or attempts to bring together some of these strands and to consider how we might advocate for a digitally inclusive and environmentally minded approach to digital technologies and projects in the museum and so I'm sure many of you will be familiar with this JISC report published in 2022 which said that the carbon impact of digital technologies is huge and growing at an exponential rate which has been accelerated further by the rapid digitalisation forced by the COVID-19 pandemic and in Julie's Bicycle and BOP Consulting's Creative Industries in the Climate Emergency report published in the same year one of the appendices deals with digitalisation in the creative industries and we can see here some of the key considerations in that effort and I should also note that the international panel on climate change have signaled that the increasing carbon cost of digitalisation is definitely on their radar and something that is to be really considered in the future but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here so first I think it's important when considering what action to take to understand what the current state of play is so this is why Carina and I issued the survey and I just wanted to share some of the kind of headline results of that survey with you today and some of the thinking behind it so when we began this project we knew that there was lots of activity in the environmental in the sector regarding the environmental consequences of the adoption of digital technologies and we really wanted to understand that thinking and to identify any common barriers to moving the conversation forward so in this survey that we released we asked a series of questions which aimed to very gently inquire about the situation in the responders organisation at that current moment we wanted to think about how we could understand what was happening in those organisations without seeking to say that more should be happening just really to gather a contemporary picture so we gathered both quantitative data and qualitative data we wanted to be sure that we were taking a very light touch approach to the survey so none of the questions we asked were mandatory we know how busy everyone is and we were grateful to all of the people who responded to the survey it ran from the 21st of June to the 9th of August this year and in total we received 281 responses which was huge and actually quite unanticipated however we did deem that less than that amount only 97 of these responses was really worthy of analysis because there was actually quite a lot of respondents who didn't get all the way through the survey we wanted to make sure we could correlate different aspects of it so we have a sample size of 97 which is very rich for analysis in terms of in particular some of the qualitative data that we got back the respondents were international in scope and the majority came from the UK and the US but we did have others from Switzerland, Romania, Puerto Rico, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Croatia, Canada, Belgium, Barbados, Austria and Australia so this was the survey went far wider than we expected it to there is a limitation and that we only issued it in English and in the future I would hope to translate the survey and send it more widely we had institutions of all sizes and funding models respond to the survey and these included art museums, natural history museums, historical societies and archives and libraries and so the question you can see here on this slide and the chart that summarizes the responses was seeking to establish a very kind of general attention towards environmental sustainability and the level of that in different organizations and you can see here that by far the majority consider the organization prioritizes environmental sustainability sometimes or frequently in this second question we wanted to think about how the environmental impact was constituted and whether the respondent felt that their organization really fully understood this and we can see again that the majority of respondents feel that their institution understands their environmental impact to some extent so these first two questions are thinking very broadly about environmental impact and not specifying whether that's physical digital or both so it really is both although the survey header did talk about the digital impact but we wanted a comparator and then the next question is where we seek to compare this general sort of visible activity within an organization around environmental sustainability with the digital specific picture so is digital considered part of this overarching conversation and the chart shows that the picture established in the previous two slides changes somewhat and over 50% of the institutions or the people who responded noted that this occurs in their institution never or very little so we have a shift in how institutions are thinking. In the following two slides we wanted to dig into some of the detail and to think about the environmental impact of hardware and software and this specifically relates to digitization though the responses we got kind of broaden the impact out further from digitization to all of the digital technologies in the museum and I'll speak more to that in the qualitative responses in the next couple of slides so there are great variations in the answers here we can see that there's quite a lot of people who are unsure and I think that that's potentially to do with the fact that people who are responding were in a variety of different roles in their organizations and so they may not be involved in digitization or procurement the majority have said no but there are 17% who have noted that yes their institution is considering the environmental impact of the hardware manufacturing process and here we were thinking about how the production of hardware allows us to consider matters of digital colonialism that are intertwined with the climate crisis and so in that same 2022 just report that I mentioned earlier it notes that a vast majority so approximately 80% of IT's carbon footprint can be attributed to the manufacturing and distribution of the equipment itself and I'm sure a lot of us are familiar with that and we also know that the manufacturing of hardware does depend on extractive processes which are concentrated in the minority world's countries so the Coltan which comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo which contributes to issues of social injustice and so the technologies that are developed are contributing to these issues when we think about it intersectionally we also know that technologies are being developed with planned obsolescence in minds which perpetuates this process and Sightaffle is written very compellingly about that and so when we consider that the climate crisis is disproportionately affecting minority world nations we can see this divide kind of going further and further so there are human and environmental consequences to the use of these technologies or software this chart shows that slightly less have considered this with respect to software and actually more are unsure and our process is also implicated in digital colonialism and so we as well as thinking around digital colonialism we asked these questions because we felt like they had the potential to speak to the joined up approach that is needed and many of the previous speakers have highlighted with respect to environmental sustainability and we can see through some of these answers that I'll go on to discuss it this is more successful when considered across an organisation for example between digitisation teams and procurement teams if your organisation is is big enough to have teams or people in different roles so I mentioned that we we captured some qualitative data as well and we had some really really rich responses here and here I've summarised some of the main practical steps there's many many of these that people responded with but these are some of the main kind of themes and there was a really a big range of varied and robust steps taken in achieving physical and digitally focused sustainability and these are in the following slides concentrated only in relation to digital and many of them were actually already discussed by Stacy Anderson but this shows a kind of a wider picture of what's happening in the sector so we've got a number of people reducing ways to digitisation options so what format they're choosing how they're prioritising the digitisation projects the number of images that they're taking and then in digital preservation strategies so active reduction of long-term storage and nearline and offline media related obviously to that is considering the server space and the cloud space and the energy it takes to hold these large images we have people who are very purposefully purchasing sustainable materials for photography studios for digitisation we have others considering offsetting strategies and then relating to the previous question we had a good few responses here really thinking deeply about the best practice around procurement someone had done an audit of their website which revealed a large carbon footprint due to lots of audio content and we know that that's one of the big ICT issues in terms of the carbon cost so they'd replaced the video content with still images and then we had a number of kind of responses thinking around emails so deleting obsolete emails sending less emails removing images from signatures we had someone who was modernising physical plants become more energy efficient reusing old computer technology but thinking about the contractual restrictions that can actually inhibit the ability to do this email volume and then considering the impact of devices being on for a long period of time so alongside these amazing and diverse range of practical actions there was a lot of responses kind of thinking about this as a strategic decision and one which I was particularly interested by was someone who's thinking around whether the the question about a digital offering and whether it is more sustainable and an analogue one and so making these value-based judgments which I'll return to in a second and organisations that are using sustainable development goals to encourage sustainable practices within the wider community so not just within the museum itself but more broadly potential that digital access reduces travel emissions and also an argument for keeping less objects because they've been digitised and the inclusion of digitally focused staff on environmental sustainability strategic groups so ensuring that those groups take people from across the organisation in these questions also became quite clear that there were barriers to moving forward and I've grouped some of them here so there was a gap in knowledge and understanding people who wanted to act but didn't know how didn't feel like they had enough data to start with and then to make informed decisions on a changing practice from there a lack of prioritisation of environmental sustainability so some people who felt that other initiatives always were higher up on that sort of hierarchy and that environmental sustainability always kind of fell a little bit below lack of resources was a big a big issue so the lack of finances to purchase high quality equipment that would last for longer the lack of time and staff resource to really consider how to move things forward and inability to start from scratch so how can we rebuild something when we already have a vast infrastructure in place and also the need to balance financial viability and sustainability so some people might want to take you know the best course of action but it might not be financially viable for them a few also cited reticence to contend with the issue by those in positions who were senior to them the lack of budget and other resources to take meaningful action and again a lack of data to evidence this the need to take that action so in my final slide I just wanted to kind of summarise things and to return back to the idea of creating valuable and inclusive digital objects and projects so the ultimate goal that was put forth by the United Nations and their foresight briefing 027 which was published in 2021 is that digital devices are built and operated using renewable energy resources and with recyclable components such as batteries this will help to improve human health through reducing pollution and climate change which in turn leads to more sustainable reinforcement of demand for digital services so a kind of systems driven thinking approach but I would argue that such a goal cannot be achieved by the cultural sector but it can be advocated for by institutions and by sector and government level bodies and funding organisations so I think we should return to the idea that or advocate for the production of robust objects and collaboration with communities in terms of quality so that they might be future-proofed and prevent the need to create more and more objects to avoid further environmental consequences and in terms of their interpretation think about how this can be as valuable to as many people as possible and accessible by the broadest possible audience so we're returning to the idea of valuable inclusive objects and projects we're thinking about value-based judgments that are made with inclusion as a guiding principle and that can be applied strategically to digitisation projects and digital projects more widely and I think that to support museum organisations of all types we do need a strategic approach which involves advocacy work and the involvement of sector body participation from ICOM, UNESCO, government institutions and funders. Thank you very much for listening to this presentation of the early stages of this project and I'm looking forward to hearing your questions. Thanks very much Nicolle that's that's really great and kind of really thought-provoking to see the range of kind of barriers and some of the potential solutions and there's definitely a resonance there with particularly around that digitisation for us across research libraries as well that feel very timely so I'm good to open the floor to colleagues if they want to raise their hand or put any questions in the chat for Nicolle just to pick up on some of these some of these themes and if not I will I have a question so thinking about the advocacy I mean it's really interesting there about what we can do at a broader kind of strategic approach but are there are there even kind of marginal gains or small things which individual museums and libraries could be starting to bake in to start to use some agency to at least move in the move in the right direction here. I think that's a great question and I think that these these two things go hand in hand right that there is a role for the kind of sector body to lead on the conversation but there's also a role for those who are doing the work who know that the ins and outs of the process you can who know exactly what those kind of marginal gains are to advocate for that together and I think that there you know the practical steps that many people have said in the survey that they're doing are something that lots of organisations can be considering in terms of the the hardware and the software that they're using their digitisation practices how they're considering storing their objects and I think for me as well in terms of museums it is considering very closely whether a digital project is really necessary what's the the data that you're underpinning that project with what's the kind of visitor studies are the audience facing side of them and is it do we know and it's it's almost an impossible question to answer right do we know that this is going to create value for diverse groups and if not is there another way of doing it that perhaps is not as environmentally costly and I'm not I'm by no means advocating for stopping doing digital in any way shape or form I think it's more about how we bake this approach into creating objects and projects that makes us think a little bit more about the consequences of it so that's a very long-winded way of saying that I can't concretely answer your question but I think that these two things come together in a nice way. No thank you so much and I think yeah I think that's always an interesting you know first question to ask you know whether it's a library or it's a museum around is this digital project really necessary and also that that value that quote that value question without kind of taking away from that we've had a question in the chat which was just asking if there were any of the organizations in the survey that talked about how using digital tools to communicate sustainability could offset the environmental impact of digitization? I think that's a great question there actually were a lot of people who talked about public programming as part of their responsibility and in wider kind of thinking around sustainability so having exhibitions and they talked about those exhibitions much more so in the physical museum space but not so much in the digital museum space and I think that there is a role for transparency around digital projects in terms of their environmental cost that we're saying museums bring in much more for physical exhibitions so for example we might see exhibitions that talk about using recycled material or less toxic chemicals but we might also be able to build that into online exhibitions to say that we've purposely chosen to reduce the number of videos that we're using in this exhibition for example and so using that as a tool to communicate some of the the thinking around the environmental cost of digital that is not so much kind of telling people what to do but thinking around how organizations can say what they are doing and informing that practice. I should say that we didn't directly ask a question about that so it may be that this is happening it's just not been communicated to us in the survey.