Is collaborating in difficult economic times a risk or a necessity?

In deciding to form the Balboa Park Online Collaborative on December 19, the Directors of seventeen of the largest museums and performing arts organizations in San Diego have taken an historic step that others should definitely watch closely and quite possibly imitate.

These participants aren’t new to collaboration; they are all members of the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership which has sponsored a range of collective business operations including shared credit card processing (to reduce fees charged to individual institutions), green partnerships (to research and implement energy savings throughout the park), and the Balboa Park Learning Institute, recently funded by IMLS to provide in-service training in a wide variety of shared responsibilities. One member of the BPCP maintains on-site visitor services and has created a Website that is a portal to the sites of the individual members, but the institutions in the Park had not tried previously to collaborate online.

Some of the low hanging fruit in the Online Collaborative –cost savings from shared telecommunications links, server hosting and storage for instance – are classic collective business operations, not different in concept from sharing payroll processing (a project being considered now as well). Others are simple adoptions of capabilities created for one institution; because we are implementing an Intranet to support BPCP committees and BPOC working groups, the Intranet functionality is available for individual institutions. If this functionality is adopted by BPOC members for themselves it can be used for internal news, job postings, calendar coordination, group document editing, in-house blogs and the like.

But even simple shared functions like the Intranet can become programmatically important. Most of the members realize the greater benefit will come when they offer Intranet accounts to groups within the community that share their interests, whether these be local automobile clubs for the Automotive Museum, sports clubs for the Hall of Champions Sports Museum, or the like. By cooperatively investigating e-commerce solutions, digitization and collections management, online course offerings, multimedia data archiving and many other applications they share, the institutions can build collective expertise and save money even if they do not, in the end, always adopt the same solutions.

Sometimes, a shared solution to part of a problem is a given – as in sharing an interface to online collections if the object is to build a view of the holdings of the institutions in the Park – but it does not imply all parts of the application are shared – in this case while they may seek collections management software together, the institutions might chose different packages in the end. Similarly, the institutions are investigating conversion from analog media together, but due to differences in the copyright status of some of their holdings, not all of them will elect to make the digitized content public. Since the Internet Archive has volunteered to provide permanent storage for items that can be made publicly available, other arrangements will need to be made to backup and store the copyright protected holdings. Nevertheless, the common conversion facilities can serve everyone.

I was astonished this fall as we began to explore the potential of collaboration how many projects already in formative stages in one part of the Park, and unknown to others, could contribute to mutually beneficial solutions. For example, the CalIT2 program at UCSD was planning to implement a wireless network in Balboa Park for a day in April in conjunction with a Science Fair – we were planning to implement such a wireless network as a permanent attraction in the Park. The Museum of Man was planning to set up a facility to digitize their entire collection (and permit the public to watch as the artifacts were uncrated, cleaned, photographed, and documented) –we were seeking a way to enable institutions with small collections to capture high quality digital images at a low cost. The Old Globe theatre at one end of the major Park axis was planning to upgrade its multiple T1 lines while the Natural History Museum at another end had T3 connections in place – in between a dozen members of BPOC lease partial DSL services from AT&T! Many similar examples of obvious synergies came to light as we talked.

This experience reaffirmed my view that collaboration between cultural institutions in other cities is not only possible, but highly desirable. While many institutions are probably thinking that this is not a time to do something new and are hunkering down, I can think of no more obvious time to start. If in stringent times we can both find savings by working together, and achieve some progress at reduced costs, we should certainly try.