Academic Research into Sustainability of the UK Cultural Sector.

May 28th, 11am - 4pm, London.

This year the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) is exploring the capacity of our sectors to innovate and develop new business and funding models.   The results of this work will be used to help the MLA understand how to best support the development of more sustainable models across the sectors. 

As part of this work, MLA has identified the need to work more closely with academia.   There is an apparent gap of applied research on organisational development, economics, and interdisciplinary approaches to deal with issues of sustainability in the cultural sector.  Whilst there has been a great deal of work trying to capture the “value” of the sector (e.g., economic impact),  so far, this work is mostly disconnected from the rest of the architecture of the cultural sector (e.g., communications & development strategies, policy and, in particular, business and income models). 

MLA will be hosting a series of academic seminars to discuss stronger collaborations between the sector and academia and how we can support and encourage further academic work in this.

Presentations and discussions will come from academics in the field (e.g., Professor Diego Méndez-Carbajo, Eleonora Belfiore, Andrew Newman).  There will also be discussion of the (raw) datasets the MLA has available for sharing with academics for further research and analysis.