The cultural and memory institutions Essay Example for Free

The cultural and memory institutions Essay There has been a radical change for the cultural and memory institutions across United Kingdom and these changes are moreover due to the changing facet of technology and the growing feature of user demands. The modern trends influence the purpose of the traditional as well as modern culture preservation and its management. The new technology has brought about rapid changes with its ways to preserve culture in its conventional form by scholarly studies and development of supporting strategies. In this regard, the possible ways, UK’s cultural institutions should probably approach is discussed here in this report. The objective of this study is provide recommendations and options so as to make visible the country’s cultural institutions and actors. It is hopeful that the study will help to improve the way UK’s cultural actors organize for the predictable changes that will take place in the next five years. This report aims to converge the three main trends discussed in the report – technology, culture, their interaction in order to increase the social participation and how new emerging web technology and online services can help to increase the public participation in culture. Definitely, internet technology or more profoundly, digitization has changes the scenario to a large extent and has created demands for on-demand, continuously available, personal access to products. Almost every library, archives and museums in UK have become digital by now and have changed their roles from the customary bodies to hybrid organizations that know how to take care of all the various cultural resources. The adaptation of the cultural contents to the digital form of content has presented a new dimension to the society to access their cultural heritage in ways that were unbelievable about a decade ago. According to Paul Fiander, Chief of BBC Information and records, UK, â€Å"The dividend from investment into going digital is substantial. † With the increasing levels of knowledge in the society, there will always be an increasing demand for quality and rich content and the Cultural institutions can cater to this need of learning services that are needed at all levels of the society. The modern internet technologies can play a major role in enhancing and delivering new content about culture heritage of the society. With this addition of innovative internet technologies, users will be able to enjoy easier access to their cultural lives and will be able top actively participate in events and cultural communities world wide. Users will be able to locate their areas of interest, visit virtual museums, and libraries to search for information they would have to toil hard to obtain. According to David Bearman,AMICO, â€Å"Offering highly interactive and rich environments will become a competitive factor within the cultural heritage community. In the future, we will expect that you can manipulate digital images in many ways, turn them around, look at the bottom, etc. Those resources that you cannot manipulate will be perceived as second rate. Moreover, the museums they come from will be perceived as second rate. † Displays, narrations and visuals combined with studies or information are learnt to have more positive effect on any student or end user. Latest advancements can provide a more effective and interactive learning environment for the users to add value to their studies and research works based on cultural heritage. Nevertheless, technology cannot alone boost the growing needs to reinforce a cultural scenario within the British society or anywhere else in the world, for that matter, but it also requires the understanding and the intellectual â€Å"capital† to create and develop new and rich cultural content material. This will help the cultural institutions to unlock the rich cultural heritage to the masses. Meanwhile the private sector has already started its efforts in the direction to re-invent the cultural content online. Amazon, BBC, Wikipedia, Second Life and MySpace have out in considerable efforts in this field and have changes the content landscape on the internet within a short period of time. These companies have done revolutionary digitization changes with the existing online content and have improved it beyond imagination. The truth is that they are inevitably assimilating. However, the next big question is that, what are most suitable policies that can meet the desired aims to merge technology and culture at the same time and what will the opportunities that online cultural opportunities can bring forward in a fast changing world. This paper throws some light in these issues and what can be the roles that the different organizations can play to achieve this aim.