 Thank you David for that introduction and thank you for the invitation to give the opening talk at this DC conference. When I was invited to deliver the opening keynote to the conference I was asked to explore the key arguments that emerged from the project that David has just referred to. My HRC cultural value project which reported last year. The arguments of that report pose fundamental questions for any attempts to think about the value of arts and culture. I hope that what I have to say will have implications for your specific consideration of the cultural value of collections and collections-based institutions. I've tried to draw in my talk where appropriate on examples relating to the cultural value of collections. But I realised that this is an area on which you're the experts rather than me. yn y gallu gwasanaeth. Mae ymdraeth arweinfaith arbennig yn ymdraeth ar gyfer y Llyfrgell ac yn yn ymdraeth ar gyfer y ddweud. Ond yn y jub 25 yma, ymarfer yn ymdraeth y mynd i gyfer y lluniau fydd yn ymgrifoedd ymdraeth yn Brytynol a'r dynulludd yng Nghymru. Mae'r adwyganiad wedi'i gwirio, ymdraeth, ymdraeth, ymdraeth, ysgolwyddau a'r cyfan hyfforddau yma ar gyfer y mynd i gyfer y mynd i gynnig. Although there's been dissatisfaction with the narrowness of these as indicators of the value of arts and culture and attempts have been made to broaden what was captured by economic approaches, the claims about economic impact have repeatedly been made and they keep being made. It's unusual to find a week in which some cultural organisation does not claim that its impact vastly outweighs the investment in it. Ieid oedd Robert Peston, fel y byddol iawn yn bbc economiaeth, efallai, ond byddoch chi'n tyfu'r cynnwys i'r ffordd o grannu economiaeth ar gyfer yng nghymru, yn ddweud i gael brunio gyda'r cynghwylol o'r llawer o'r ysgrifennu. Ond oherwydd, y ffordd y cyfrifodau mae'n ddegwyddiad i'r hyn ymwysig, yn ymgylch iawn, ymlaesol, y byddai mynd gynhyrch felno i jagi ar gyfer ymylch gwybodaeth mewn ei gwaith, gallwch i'r rhannu atmarcau ar gyfer ar gyfer y bydd. setzen! Dynion gwneud yn rhywbeth, lle mae'n ysgolwyd y maen yn y rywbeth o gweithio'r ddrak. Mae'n dynamu'r cyfrifiadauCybhydd, cadwn jyfnodau Gallwch yn yi'r ffordd ers. Fe chi'n rhan oedd eich cyfrifiadau a'r rhan o'i cysybhydd ym awdurdod ymweld y Llywodraeth i gael eich cyfrifiadau am y ddod, a gofyn llawer y fawr fawr gwirionedd hynny ac pan gweithio gweithio fawr ar Casgr certhoedd y fawr arweithiaid y ddefnyddio, ac yn dod o'r cyflwyno'r bwysig, o wir gael cyflym gael ei fod yma. Y fawr yw yw godiw mewn 1970au o gwobl, ac yn gweithio'r cyfrifiadau o gwwar i hwnnw. Mae'n gweithio gweithio'r gweithio'r grwpiau'r cyfrifiadau erbyn i'r cwrsnychio'r patrwysiau a pwysig i ddweud y gwbryd llachos o gychwynogi. Fellyニ上面 sy'n golygu iawn o'r bwysig ti'n rhoi ac i waith ysgolfa. Wrth yng Nghymru, felly i gael ymlaen Ch mem ar gyfer y ll Suturdбethau. Mae mam rhai yma, â tbwys pan rhan o'r projectau 0.9 roi. Nid yw'r newid hwn i ar gyfer ardi, mae'r crwydd yn y pryd ei gwerth peolawr ar y llwyd. ar y cymdeithas, iawn i ddweud o gyda i'r cymdeithas a gweithio. Mae'n gyntaf o gyflwydoedd y cysylltu'r cyfweld ddyna i ni'w gweithio ar y cymdeithas. Fy fydddoedd Drawfydd yn nhw'n meddwl gyda bod y cymdeithas yng Nghym�, a nhw'n meddwl i ddweud o ymwneud o dd sectorsiol. Fy llwydoedd y cysyllt ymddwn nhw'n meddwl ar y cymdeithas, ac mae'n tymni bellrwch yn cyfrwyno ar ei gynhyrch. 1. Ych chi oedd y gael, ac nes fydd. Second, what is the phenomenon whose value we are trying to understand? Third, are we looking in the right places in our search for value? And fourth, by what methods should we find and evidence that value? Now, in the time available to me this morning, I can do no more than sketch the importance of each. But before doing so, let me highlight a key theme of the report, and that is personal experience. Personal experience has generally been neglected in Britain as a source of the value of culture. What happens when we visit a museum, watch a play, read a novel, join a community arts event, make a quilt, play a video game? The report argues that personal experience, as an individual or as part of a group, is the root of much cultural value. Its neglect has weakened our understanding of the difference that arts and culture makes. Personal experience matters because cultural value does not reside in an artefact, a performance or an event. Cultural value resides in the way those are engaged with, by people, by audiences, by communities. Cultural value is to be found in processes, not in objects. And this observation has particular resonance for thinking about collections, implying that a collection itself doesn't have value other than perhaps its legacy value as in the models of cultural economics. The conflicting priorities of custodianship for the future and use in the present engage all those who manage collections of whatever kind. One response is the depot planned for the Boymans Van Burnigan Museum in Rotterdam, which will enable the whole collection to be viewable by the public at any one time. But institutions becoming more audience focused, institutions becoming more audience than collection focused, is a broader response that will have led you, I'm sure many of you, to ask how much risk to existing collections is acceptable. Michael Comforte argues for the much wider circulation of works in collections, while pointing to the challenges over legal ownership, trusteeship and risk that stand in the way of that happening. And Neil MacGregor evoked the 1850s debate about whether the National Gallery's collections should be placed in the heavily polluted Trafalgar Square. And a high court judge told the 1857 Commission on the National Gallery that this collection existed to provide for the, quote, ennobling enjoyment of the public. And if the dirt and environment of Trafalgar Square led the paintings to deteriorate, then so be it, he said. They're there for a purpose, he argued, one that isn't primarily to keep and conserve them. For Neil, we've lost sight of this radical notion. And conservation, he argues, should not be the paramount objective. Now asking where in lies the cultural value of an object immediately poses these questions. As chair of the Crafts Council, which has a collection of 2,000 works that chart the development of contemporary craft, it may be think about the fact that we have a handling collection, as all museums have. Our contemporary craft collection has also a handling collection alongside it. Having a set of works that can be handled implies that not being able to handle an artifact changes, maybe reduces the value of the experience. When young people examined a 2008 work by Stephen Johnson from the Crafts Council's handling collection, they said that only by handling it were they able to appreciate the individual parts of the piece that some have been cast from cheaper plastic figurines and that feeling its weight helped them to appreciate the process of making it. And there is, of course, the work of Helen Chatterjee and others on museum object handling that looks at the relationship between touch, multi-sensory experiences, and psychological and physiological states. Now embedding cultural value in experience and processes, that opens up many questions. But let me now return to my four questions. And the first one is who wants to know and why. This matters because all questions derive from a context. In many countries, value is shaped to secure government funding for the arts, and those making the case in Britain do so in terms they believe governments want to hear, which mostly means talking about the economy. The new Labour government added other objectives, not just the impact of arts and culture on the economy, but also the positive benefits for urban regeneration, social inclusion, community cohesion and health. It provoked the incisive response by Grayson Perry. This pot will reduce crime by 29%. The instrumental case for the arts was mostly about objectives that could be achieved by other means, and the case rarely compared outcomes with other ways of obtaining the same objectives. An alternative approach that begins with what arts and culture can irreducibly do was rarely taken, and the cultural sector vacated the territory on which such an argument could be built. Instead, it made the case for public funding in terms governments wanted to hear, with bold claims and quantitative evidence. But there is more than one reason to seek evidence about the difference that engaging with arts and culture makes. There is research carried out by academics better to understand the phenomenon. There's evaluation carried out for cultural organisations for accountability to their funders. And there's reflective practice with cultural practitioners and organisations reflecting critically on what they've been doing in order to improve their practice. Those three categories obviously overlap even if their objectives differ. Cultural practitioners and organisations are the most neglected of those three. Surely they should want to know whether the cultural and social objectives that they have are being met. But evaluation has come to be essentially seen as something that's done to meet the accountability requirements of funders, or as advocacy for future funding. The museum sector has in fact been particularly engaged with summative evaluation over recent years, I'm pleased to say, though some have asked how far it has fed back into genuine organisational learning. So, to my second question, what is the phenomenon whose value we want to understand? The fact that in Britain the debate about value has focused on provision subsidised by government means that debate about arts and culture neglects commercially provided culture. Third sector organisations and amateur arts, which together constitute the great majority of cultural experience. Enlarging the focus to include these requires us to ask different questions and to look in different places for evidence of value. Virtually all film, literature, music and games are provided commercially. And amateur engagement vastly exceeds professional as ordinary people make textiles or paint in their leisure time, join drama and music groups, or make digital content online. There is an ecosystem where the boundaries between government funded, commercial, third sector and amateur turn out to be very permeable. And looking at other forms of cultural provision such as this also forces us to ask more about the digital transformation of cultural experience, not just access to commercial culture through streaming and downloads, important as that is, but also co-creation of content as digital platforms, social networks, online niche communities shift the way culture is produced, performed and experienced. A challenge for large collections based institutions is posed by this spread of digital, network and niche cultures. Research for the cultural value project questioned the broadcast model of one to many transmission that characterises the digital strategy of many cultural institutions. They are analog institutions trying to live in a digital world. Recent Arts Council England reports suggest that this is becoming more, not less of a problem, but it's encouraging, I felt, that panels at this conference are hearing about more innovative initiatives than simply the broadcasting of material online to audiences. Now enlarging our focus in this way immediately opens to view the diverse locations where people engage with culture. Yes, major galleries and museums, concert halls, theatres, but also small scale spaces such as live music venues, institutions such as care homes and prisons, as well as while travelling at home and through the virtual space of the internet. The home frames most cultural engagement. In Britain, 94% of all film is watched at home, while the great majority of music is listened to at home or while travelling. Film, music, television, craft, literature, video games, as well as digital online cultural activities, are mostly experienced at home, virtually all of it, commercial or amateur. Only by exploring the value of all cultural engagement can we understand why it's important. As researchers and as cultural practitioners, we must understand the difference that culture makes. Before we ask the secondary, albeit important, question about why some of it should be funded from taxation. Publicly funded culture then assumes a much more interesting role embedded in an ecology in which the commercial and the publicly funded and the amateur support each other with public subsidy enabling key parts of that ecology to function. Enlarging the range of cultural experience we explore also changes the way we think about access, challenging the deficit model that defines the approach to arts participation. The deficit model asks who is absent from publicly subsidised provision without asking about the cultural activities that those people, often from disadvantaged or minority social groups, are actually engaging with. A broader focus captures streamed film, music on YouTube, television, crafting at home, sharing photos on Flickr, singing in a church choir, and a great deal more. Inequalities of access, resources and infrastructure are certainly important, but we must still ask what cultural activity people are involved in, and this means valorising other than elite and publicly funded culture. It also, incidentally, means valorising libraries because the taking part surveys, their DCMS taking part surveys show that amongst cultural activities it is only libraries which see those from BAME groups more engaged than those from white groups. But libraries don't fit the deficit narrative, something that's uncomfortable at a time of significant decline in their public funding and provision. My third question asks whether we're looking in the right places when we look for value. Giving priority to data on economic and social policy objectives distorts our understanding of value, and even in conventional areas such as the economy, cities and education, it leads us to focus on the wrong things. The report has six separate chapters on each of what we call the components of cultural value. Two of these, which we call the reflective individual and the engaged citizen, are discussed first because they are often neglected, and the other four components may be more expected, the economy, cities, health and education, but in each of these we start where possible with personal experience of arts and culture. Personal experience as an individual or in social settings may be harder to capture with quantitative indicators, but it's often a key to understanding. I could deliver a 45 minute lecture on each of these components of cultural value alone, so what I'm going to say will be very compressed, but it will give you a taste of what we think is important and how it might reconfigure our approach to the value of culture. Let me start with the most innovative of our themes, the reflective individual and the engaged citizen. A long chapter explores how arts and culture help to shape reflective individuals, facilitating greater understanding of themselves and their lives, increased empathy with respect to others, and an appreciation of the diversity of human experience, cultures and people. The report draws on research on very diverse topics. For example, the journey undertaken by offenders in prison, a journey prompted by arts and cultural activities which open up a sense of uncertainty and options in a prison world where only narrow certainty exists. If it doesn't in itself stop re-offending, it starts the process of persistence by which offenders see themselves differently as people with choices. A different example is Oscar Wilde's parable, The Doer of Good, where a figure walks through a city and sees the ambivalent results of all his previous good deeds. Discussing that text led doctors to confront their assumptions about what it means to try to do good and the difficult behaviours to which that can lead them, and they ended up talking about order hay. They'd not have had such an open conversation had they confronted the theme directly. There are other psychological studies that demonstrate people becoming more empathetic through reading literature, or how reading literature allowed to each other in small groups enables vulnerable people with little history of reading to reflect on their own experience and think about their own identity. There's the way museums have sought to present stereotyped peoples in rounded and human ways, whether it's the British Museum's exhibitions on Iraq and Afghanistan, or on a more modest scale the Horniman Museum's exhibitions of photos of Romanian residents of London and of Romanian clothing, aimed at re-humanising people and countries represented narrowly in current political discourse. If the ambitions of these exhibitions were clear, without formal evaluations of visitor responses, we can't actually know how far those ambitions were achieved. But serious evaluations were embedded in the project on disability representation in museums and galleries a few years ago, which saw nine partner museums develop new approaches to the presentation of disabled people's lives, concluding that the various displays and re-displays had shifted both understanding and attitudes in relation to people with disabilities. They had challenged stereotypes, though the evaluation showed they did it by repositioning rather than entirely removing the stereotypes. The project on disability history in UK archives reported on in this conference looked interesting in precisely that context. These many examples showed the power of cultural engagement to help both reflection and empathy, and the key to this is what is known as aesthetic distance, which helps consideration of difficult dimensions of one's own life and experiences, aesthetic difference. This is not real, but it feels like reality. A related component that we talk about considers how arts and culture help produce engaged citizens, promoting civic behaviours such as voting, joining civil society organisations and volunteering. It also helps articulate a broader and often critical political imagination. A workshop that we organised, brought together arts organisations which work with communities on climate change, concluding that if art was used not didactically to tell people what to do, but rather as a stimulus for reflection and debate on the subject, it could significantly influence people's willingness to change their behaviours. Cultural engagement helps translate abstract ideas into narratives on a human scale, and by doing so in an open and non-didactic way forces us to reimagine our assumptions. This has been much deployed to help communities traumatised by war and civil conflict to build post-conflict reconciliation. Cultural projects to build bridges between communities are more common than those that work within a traumatised community to help its own understanding, perhaps because bridge-building offers a higher profile for potential funders. While some simply brought communities together, as in Artichoke's huge light shows at Dairy London Dairy City of Culture, others use cultural engagement to explore division and trauma as in Theatre of Witness in Northern Ireland. The alternative approach sees work primarily inside a community, such as Caboch Theatre's remarkable plays provoking difficult discussions in Belfast and Northern Ireland communities that could only take place in that safe way within their own community. Local museums have similarly worked in Northern Ireland to enable people to rethink their sense of the past within the security of their own community, and projects by mid-anchoring museum service, for example, engage local people to explore multiple traditions as a way of allowing plural voices and histories so that identities and painful past might be set within a far more complex sense of what identity is. In her work on the memorialisation that followed peace in the states that emerged from the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia, the Estonian anthropologist Christine Kutma concluded that the narratives constructed in museums, archives and heritage sites mostly served to construct and fix exclusive national and ethnic memories. On the other hand, artists and theatre groups in these new countries often challenged official memorialisation, opening up spaces for reflection and questioning. Is this a problem that will always confront permanent collection-based institutions in comparison with ephemeral cultural forms, even without such specific post-conflict tensions? Moving forward after war and conflict is an example of something that is becoming ever more important, and that is the building of collections and archives as a way to assert identities in the public sphere. From the work of archive and university in Leeds to help traveller communities give substance and coherence to their cultural materials, on the one hand, to the exhibition I saw at the Rio Art Museum in Brazil, where people with indigenous tribes origins collected documents, stories, videos and interviews as part of pressure to create an indigenous cultural centre, in a world where those without an archive of stories and collections were seen as marginalised and inferior. After considering the reflective individual and the engaged citizen, let me turn much more briefly to some of the other components of cultural value where the claims made have often looked for the value in the wrong place, or too often in places where simple numbers could be found and presented as evidence. With respect to the economy, we must look beyond the economic impact where methodologies and results are open to serious criticism and concentrate on other benefits. These more relevant benefits might include the way a vibrant cultural environment supports the creative industries, recognising that all too often advocates assume a connection between the two, between art and culture and the creative industries, without seeking to understand how that connection actually works. Collections as collections are often overlooked in such a limited consideration as is given to the issue. The array of contemporary textiles in the Significance Exhibition were explicitly responding to historic embroideries in the Gorthrop Textiles Collection. Alice Kettles' Last Lim is beneath the late 1930s applique sample. While collections as an archive for creative outputs and processes are frequent with artists using collections in order to stimulate their imagination, such has been drawn upon by Charlotte Hoads for her remarkable art inspired by 18th century works in the Wallace Collection. There are countless but only anecdotal examples of practitioners in the commercial creative industries using collections as sources of ideas and stimulation because so many in the creative industries situate themselves in relation to a cultural and creative past. The songwriter Will Taylor of the Funk Indie Band Flight wanders the V&A National Gallery in British Library to fuel his ideas and imagination. While Rachel Kelley's printed textiles and wallpaper designs that draw on some of the unfinished work that draw on the sense of the unfinished are inspired by incomplete works she finds in textile archives, the distinction that some draw between museums, galleries and archives maintaining past knowledge while the creative industries develop and adopt new knowledge is in my view entirely unhelpful. This relationship between arts and culture on the one hand and creative industries on the other has countless dimensions of which the use of collections is but one. And another example of the relationship to the economy invites us to see art and culture as part of a wider innovation system shaping a population that is challenging and creative generating spillover mechanisms that link arts and culture, the creative industries and other parts of the economy. Or there's the part played by a lively cultural environment in creating the conditions that attract talent and investment to a city. It's all seemed much more important for the economy than the economic impact assessments that dominate discussion of the economic importance of arts and culture. A broader vision is also needed for towns where too much attention has been given to regeneration on the one hand through new creative and cultural quarters or on the other through large infrastructural investment in concert halls and galleries or new city libraries such as that now planned for Dublin's Parnell Square. A major led urban regeneration is usually accompanied by gentrification as more prosperous residents are attracted in and also by the experience economy where outsiders come for the buzz and the cafes and the shopping. A corollary is the disruption and exclusion of communities as those who live there and those who produce there including most involved in creative production are forced out by rising property values. Major cultural led regeneration projects where the big new buildings or creative quarters may improve a place but they rarely improve a community. In contrast, smaller scale cultural assets seem to have a more positive effect on neighbourhoods. The social impact of the arts project in the United States has shown how small commercial community and participatory arts such as design studios, small music venues, community arts groups are associated with more sustainable social benefits and may constitute a more balanced and organic path to culture led regeneration. When it comes to the benefits of arts and culture for health governments tend to focus on financial savings from clinical arts therapies such as those at speed recovery from physical conditions. These are important but they will never yield savings on the scale needed to show the importance of the arts to health. The interest in cultural commissioning by trusts and GPs is welcome including museums on prescription which is the subject of a paper at this conference but initiatives often have to show savings to feed into cost benefit analysis frameworks when this is unhelpful as our such approaches in public health. We need to focus instead on the use of cultural engagement to deal with mental health problems including the depression that often inhibits recovery from physical conditions or the use of art and design for better healthcare environments where both patients and staff feel ownership and empowerment and the substantial evidence of how community arts interventions can improve social inclusion and mental health and there are of course the benefits of cultural engagement for older people as well as for those living with dementia. None of these benefits are susceptible to the control of variables and experiences that can generate precise financial or other outcomes though there is extensive other evidence of their importance. Now, as I've ranged across the various ways that arts and cultural engagement may produce benefits to individuals and society, one issue has kept coming up and that is that simple quantitative indicators can narrow and distort our understanding. Let me make it clear that quantitative methods are very important in areas where they provide appropriate evidence but they are not in themselves more rigorous or more appropriate than other forms of evidence and that is why my fourth question is so important by what methods should we find and evidence that value. If we're interested in methodology we must start with my first three questions that I've already discussed because only in that way can we see how context and purpose determine the character of our investigation. Only in that way can we see the complexity of the variables involved and how they interact and only in that way can we see how we must capture and why we must capture the personal dimensions of engagement. Only when these first three issues have been considered can we ask whether we're posing the right questions and using the right methods to answer them. The search for measurable indicators of value derides from a wish to start with what can be counted rather than to ask what we're interested in and how best to evidence it. And herein lies the seductive attraction of using simple quantitative indicators. The success of art in prisons is tested by re-offending rates. Effects on the economy are tested through economic impact studies. Arts education in schools by narrowly defined standardised attainment tests. Where the real benefits in all those areas are known to be much more complex and much more interesting. If we're trying to capture the wider value of culture we must be open to a much broader range of methods and of evidence. We must also question the hierarchy of evidence and methodologies. One that privileges quantitative data, the experimental method and randomised control trials. Understanding the difference that arts and culture makes to individuals and society may involve establishing causal relationships. But linear models of cause and effect can only be found in very precise situations to answer very precise questions. Most research on arts and culture can only show an association between variables. And yet the experimental method and the randomised control trial are seen as the gold standard for evidence in areas for which they were not devised. And it's not only for arts and culture that we need to move from a linear approach to one that embraces complexity, but it's particularly necessary there. Oversimplifying a question is not a way to improve understanding. The equal validity of methods from other disciplines, not least those in the arts humanities and qualitative social sciences, is to recognise if we are to make progress in research and evaluation in these areas. Broadening our questions in such ways requires a wider range of methods. We need to recognise the rigor and the relevance of qualitative approaches, such as those from ethnography, hermeneutics, linguistics, history or arts-based methods and many others. The arts and humanities contribute fundamental elements to the mix of methods. They introduce analysis of meanings and representations, exploration of historical parallels and experiences and close reading of texts, language, images and performance. Without these and other arts and humanities approaches, a great deal will never be understood. They enable us to capture benefits such as reflectiveness, empathy, citizenship, community cohesion, mental health, educational motivation, creativity, resistance from offending and much, much else. Methodological rigor is just as present in those disciplines as in the sciences, but it's a different rigorous approach, better suited to the complexity of activities and responses that characterize art and culture and it will often combine qualitative and quantitative evidence. Let me just mention a few examples from research we funded through the cultural value project. The reader organization brings together in small groups people who have had lives damaged by abuse, drugs and mental health problems. By reading aloud to each other from works of literature, people with little background in reading start talking about their own lives and experiences. This is researched by meticulous reading of transcripts from the discussions using methodological approaches from literature and linguistics. There is the use of focus groups to learn how people value public art in an English coastal town, Ilkrakwm, with visual images providing a non-verbal stimulus to discussion. Or the value of digital archives in the Coman Echry, the historical societies in the Outer Hebrides, were explored by ethnographic methods using fieldwork, participant observation and semi-structured interviews, augmented by digital data responses. Another project compared discourses on four museums in Manchester from the second half of the 19th century and the late 20th century using historical methods to help understand the public good rationale for promoting and supporting these institutions over time. It highlighted the continuing tension in both periods between public rhetoric and institutional practice, as well as the uncertain relationship between aesthetic qualities and moral benefits in the discourses of both periods. A final example took a war memorial to Sikhs who had died fighting for Britain, and used historical and literary analysis to understand the different layers of meaning and value attached to it by participants at its annual ceremonies just outside Brighton. Now, none of these understandings of value could have been achieved without the methods of the arts and humanities. Nor could there have been research without case studies. The depth provided by case studies must be compared with the breadth provided by large-scale data capture. Each brings something different to our understanding. Rigorous case studies are one of the great strengths of what arts and humanities bring to society's knowledge and understanding, and they might be the first step towards creating both sensible and scalable evaluation methods, enabling us better to understand the underlying processes and how they are shared across different contexts. In calling for the valorisation of arts and humanities methods, I am certainly not decrying those of science or of quantitative social science. There is no hierarchy, and one approach should not be privileged over others. Nor am I decrying the use of econometric methods on which we funded important work using contingent valuation methodology and subjective wellbeing valuations with respect to Tate Liverpool and the Natural History Museum in London. What matters is that methods be appropriate for the understanding that is being sought. Indeed, if we are looking for the value associated with specific cultural organisations, initiatives or programmes, we must often turn to multi-criteria analysis that brings together findings from various approaches. One such tool is the balance scorecard, devised for business to monitor performance against different strategic goals but now use much more widely. The balance scorecard exists to bring together different criteria without losing their separate meanings, presenting qualitative and quantitative results in a report that allows us to balance the different outcomes. Although not widely used by the cultural sector, Boston Consulting devised an approach for the Banachee Museum in Athens, and it was also used for long-term evaluation of the HLF's Townscape Heritage Initiative scheme. Social return on investment is a multi-criteria approach being used by public and third sector organisations. It has many good features, but it's a multi-criteria approach that generates a single numerical result. There are six pounds of social value for every £1 of cost. You can only get that by generating proxy financial values for non-financial outcomes, such as confidence, resilience, reflectiveness or social capital. That's a serious problem for cultural value when most of the outcomes are not financial. The great benefit of multi-criteria evaluation is surely that it allows us to capture and report outcomes for different criteria. We often confuse discussion about evaluation methods with discussion about reporting methods. The leaner and more precise the reporting on outcomes, the more scientific it is thought to be. My argument points away from that, towards reporting on a range of outcomes associated with different criteria for value, allowing judgement to re-enter the evaluation process. The problem with much discussion of the value of culture lies in our failure properly to address my first three questions. As far as my fourth question is concerned, an acceptance of existing discourses about evidence and methods. There is no single measure of cultural value, but a complexity of experiences and benefits to individuals and society that we must try to capture. Let's abandon the hope that a continuous refining of methods will give us secure answers. We must develop our methods certainly with clarity and imagination, and we must certainly insist on rigorous application of the methods we use, but we should abandon the search for the holy grail for a simple measure or set of measures of cultural value. If we want to understand what is going on in cultural engagement and the value that derives from it, then we must use a diversity of methods and diverse sources of evidence. This is because value lies in engagement and process, not objects and performance. What we are mostly exploring is complex interventions and complex experiences in a complex world. This talk has focused on the arguments of the cultural value project. Although I have used examples and reflected a little on the value of collections, it is for you to decide the ways in which the report helps your own discussions at this conference and beyond. Let me conclude with a final thought. In our work to understand and value culture, we must keep in mind my very first question. Why do we want to know? The answer is to evidence and report for a variety of purposes. I say this because one of the dangers inherent in sophisticated measures of value is that they become the target to be achieved by an organisation, an initiative or an investment, especially one dependent on public funding. Once the sophisticated measures become targets and KPIs, we will have lost the risk and uncertainty that is at the heart of cultural practice and cultural experience, whether for a museum, a theatre company or community arts organisation. Creating spaces for uncertainty and change is what makes arts and culture so essential to our societies. My report was written before the rise in Europe and the USA of a new type of popular politics resting on slogans and certainties rather than questions and reflection. The capacity of arts and cultures to engender nuance and questioning is surely even more needed today. Thank you.