Data

A cyber attack linked to Russian hackers that took place more than a year ago is continuing to prevent a museum from accessing its artefact database.

The BBC reports that benefit payments, planning applications and house sales were all delayed when Gloucester City Council was hit by hackers in December 2021.

A new council report has revealed that the Museum of Gloucester is still being affected by the cyber incident.

"It is very worrying that in a council report it was mentioned that the museum services had not had access to its collections database, hindering important investigation into the city's historic monuments," Jeremy Hilton, Leader of the opposition Liberal Democrat group at the council, said.

"I hope this important information isn't lost forever or that officers will not have to spend their valuable time inputting data all over again."

Andy Lewis, Portfolio holder for Culture and Leisure at the council, said he believed no records had been lost.

The number of people visiting DCMS-sponsored institutions from outside the UK showed slow signs of recovery last year, according to new figures released by the department.

Between April 2021 and March 2022, there were an estimated 1.3m overseas visitors to DCMS-sponsored museums and galleries.

The number is nearly 23 times higher than the previous year, when there were just 54,000 visits from people living outside the UK, largely due to lockdown restrictions.

But the number of overseas visitors remains 94% down on the last financial year unaffected by the pandemic, when 22.7m visited DCMS-sponsored sites in 2018/19. 

Museums and galleries supported by DCMS include the British Museum, Imperial War Museums, National Museums Liverpool, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum Group and the Tate Gallery Group.

The department says the current trend largely mirrors the decrease in overseas visitors to the UK since the pandemic.

A project collating the diversity of arts and humanities research infrastructure in the UK is underway.

The Mapping the Arts and Humanities Project is being conducted by the School of Advanced Study, a postgraduate institution of the University of London.

It plans to capture the institutes, centres and networks supporting arts and humanities research across the country, to produce an interactive tool that will allow researchers to connect with potential collaborators outside of their existing networks.

The project teams also hopes the interactive tool will be used by policymakers to locate where policy-relevant expertise is concentrated, and external organisations to identify academic partners.

Dean of the School of Advanced Study and Chair of the Mapping the Arts and Humanities project board, Professor Jo Fox, said that despite having access to more information than ever before, research networks in the arts and humanities can still be hard to find.

“Our new map will provide a consolidated source of information that will help us all to find and connect with research activity more easily, and boost visibility for research infrastructure across the country.”

The project team have already collected hundreds of pieces of research infrastructure across the country but say they “have only just scratched the surface”. 

The final map is expected to launch in November this year, with the project team planning to share interim findings and insights from the mapping process on the project’s blog. 

A new archive project will see thousands of music recordings dating back to 1973 digitised and made publicly available online.

The Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) in Manchester will be delving into its vast archive of recordings for its Throwing Open the Concert Doors project.

The RNCM plans to conserve and digitise performances spanning a 50-year period, including everything from student recitals to full-scale opera productions.

As well as being available online, there are also plans to install a public listening booth at the college’s Oxford Road site.

Heather Roberts, RNCM Archivist, said: “The RNCM’s story is of great significance to Manchester’s cultural heritage, but it is ultimately a ‘hidden gem’ in terms of public awareness.”

She added that many of the older recordings are in danger of being lost due their deterioration over time.

“Due to the ravages of time, these [older recordings] are steadily and irreversibly degrading and, without conservation and digitations, will soon be lost forever.

Throwing Open the Concert Doors is supported by a £206,000 grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

It will be delivered in partnership with Manchester Digital Music Archive – a volunteer-run online community archive – and Manchester Central Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage initiative.

A UK-wide Museum Data Service is to be established to pool records on millions of objects so they can be shared for research and public use.

The initiative, a three-way partnership between Art UK, Collections Trust and the University of Leicester is scheduled to launch in autumn 2023.

Art UK, which already brings more than 300,000 artworks, from 3,400 collections, to an online audience of more than 4.5 million people each year, said the new data service will allow it to scale up its operation adding millions more artworks over time.

The work, funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, will also involve the creation of a new state-of-the-art e-commerce platform which it is hoped will support Art UK collection partners to substantially grow commercial income from their image assets.

Andrew Ellis, Director of Art UK, said: “The benefits to our audiences and participating collections will be significant in terms of the growth in artworks joining Art UK and the growth in commercial income. 

"But the real excitement here is to be working with Collections Trust and the University of Leicester on such a transformational initiative for the wider sector, one that will do so much to reduce silos and grow knowledge sharing”.