3. The Tate's Assets

3.1 Assets and Content

In common usage, assets are objects and qualities that enhance our value. In legal and business terms, they are those things which we own. They may be material goods or immaterial, intellectual property. In multimedia production, assets are taken to mean the constituent, "raw" sounds, image and text elements, before they are melded together via an interface.

According to all of these definitions, the Tate owns, controls and originates a huge number of assets, and is set to expand more. The picture painted in the "digital landscape" section of this paper indicates that a way forward in digital media for the Tate involves re-thinking those assets as potential content. To be useful in both old and new media distribution systems, that content needs to be held in a usable format, and to be accessible via coherent and integrated catalogue and database systems.

There are two sets of challenges in the long term: to create coherent databases from existing assets and catalogues, and to ensure that those systems are consistently updated as new content flows into the system.

Once this is achieved, the content must be available for re-use across different media platforms, with just enough editorial input to ensure the transformation of those assets into usable material, whether text or audio-visual.

If the Tate is to begin to envision itself as a "content producer" and "content owner", then its first job is to identify which resources it has, whether already in digital from, analogue media, or not yet in any reproducible media, which is potential content for distribution.

It then has to determine how to collect that content in re-usable form, how to organise it and how to distribute it, whether by itself or in partnership with other organisations.

Not surprisingly, this section refers to many initiatives already underway at the Tate. It is well recognised that the approach outlined here is one of creating coherence and suggesting enhancements, so as to make the best use of current potential, rather than proposing a whole new programme of work.




Table 3.2 is a listing of the Tate's potential assets

Diagram 3.3 shows diagramatically how those potential assets currently inter-relate and are distributed.

Diagram 3.4 is an ideal scenario, showing the structure of full integration of assets, databases and distribution systems.



3.5 Current Assets

The diagram of the current and planned situation at the Tate Gallery regarding asset creation, cataloguing and exploitation (diagram 3.3) shows that, in the immediate and short term, the cataloguing and exploitation of assets at the Tate is fragmented.

Several image libraries and databases run in parallel, unintegrated. The visual and audio-visual assets are currently focussed on internal use only. A whole host of potentially distributable activity within the Tate is currently unexploited.

Meanwhile, archivable and re-usable content that relates to the Tate's collection and activities is being created and copyrighted by outside agencies. A good example are the Turner Prize films made by Illuminations TV.

The dotted lines show activity planned for the short term. The diagram shows how important these will be in setting up new forms of public access to the Tate's resources.


3.6 New Assets and Asset Management

The diagrams also show that the Tate is awash with potential assets. With few exceptions, the point is not to create wholly new assets, but to document activity in digital form and enable this to be exploited as media content, by the Tate and by other producers.

In the same way that text-based documentation produced for interpretation and marketing purposes is currently re-used for the website, audio-visual material can also be re-used. If linked to other parts of the site (mainly the core database, i.e.. the collection management system), then a resource that is dynamic and cumulative (if randomly so) emerges.

The key assets that are currently under-exploited are listed below. Over the next 5 years, these are the key assets which should be documented and archived in digital form.

"Behind the Scenes" processes in the Gallery, especially preparatory work in the gallery by well-known contemporary artists.
Professional expertise of Gallery staff and occasional visitors

Connected clusters of information: audio, video and text, need to be accumulated and catalogued. Technologies change apace: and while at the moment audio and video streaming seems to hold interesting possibilities for this form of documentation/distribution, it is foreseeable that in the future this might progress to, for instance, downloadable multimedia packages or videoclips that are hyperlinked and searchable according to criteria such as artist or author/speaker.

3.7 Immediate opportunities

The Tate has a firm basis on which to start this work in an incremental way.



3.8 Immediate Barriers

Two sets of barriers need to be surmounted to allow successful and innovative developments in digital media for the Tate: institutional culture and resources.

All collections-based museums suffer from divided priorities: between their work as "conservators", with a primary responsibility for the care of the precious objects in their charge, and a duty to respect the integrity of the artistic intentions behind them, and their work as access points to the public to these works and the discussions that surround them. Digital media, like many other activities, challenges this divide, and launches into a number of grey areas. Access to the digital images can create demands on the originals: to be loaned, displayed, photographed, or simply viewed. Clearly legal frameworks such as copyright must be respected and likewise artistic integrity, however, distribution using low-bandwidth digital media, especially video streaming, means that the image quality at the receiver's end is always unpredictable. If resources about an artwork are to be published on the internet and made widely available, and if programmes of talks, lectures and events begin to contribute to the resource, then everybody, gallery staff and audiences alike, will need to see the value of a randomly accumulating resource of many points of view, rather than a single authored, planned and comprehensive voice. The point about network media is its interlinkage, leading to open, dynamic, diverse, distributed, de-centralised and transparent forms of knowledge and action.

The institution must respond positively to these changes, and adopt new sets of pre-suppositions about artistic knowledge and practice in order to promote new forms of access. And in the meantime, staff must be encouraged to become electronic authors, to let their voices find a valuable place in the increased noise.

The second set of barriers relate to resources. There are no doubts that any digital media developments of coherence and with a long-term potential are labour intensive, have revenue implications and capital, start-up cost implications. Its not realistic in the short term to see such a strategy as a revenue generating area, though in the medium and longer term it is hoped that a venture into content ownership and production can lead to valuable cross-media partnerships and/or sponsorships.

However, the success of a the kind of directions indicated here require active and expert involvement in the development of tools and processes. For these areas of research and development, some funds are available and, with patience and the right partnerships in place, can provide resources for real innovations at the level needed of making new tools.

Potential resources include:




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