Hello and welcome to the Digital Snapshot, bringing you all the latest digital news, inspiration, tips and guidance for the arts, culture, museums and heritage world.
As promised, the title image of this month's issue is a picture from near the top of Cadair Idris. I say near because it was beautifully clear the whole way up and then, about 50 meters from the summit (Penygader), a cloud rolled over and we couldn't see a thing. I did make friends with a sheep at the peak, though, so not all was lost. Overall, 10/10 would hike again. We also found Eryri National Park's secret waterfall - but it's important for the locals that the location remains a secret, so I won't be sharing pictures. You can give it a Google if I've caught your interest, though, and it isn't too hard to find with the right gear.
Out of nature and back into digital - a lot has happened since last month's issue and it's all below.
📰 Latest news
- Entries for the 2025 Digital Culture Awards are open, closing on Wednesday 23 October. There's still time to submit something to the awards across a number of categories.
- The BBC has expanded their free to use sound archive to over 33,000 sounds - that's a lot of sounds, some recorded as early as 1920. If you're looking for some audio content for a project, check it out.
- Google has now introduced video search through the Google Lens app. I.e. if you spotted a bird you couldn't identify on a walk and you could grab a video of it, using the Google Lens app you can use that video to search Google for the answer.
- Cristiano Ronaldo (he does the football) has become the first person to reach one billion social media followers, totalled across his various platforms. How many of those people are duplicates and bots, who knows - but he seems happy about it at least.
- The internet has now replaced TV as the UK's most popular news source, for the first time. Surprised that it's taken this long, to be honest.
🤓 Useful / shareable
- Elizabeth Llabres (Collections Manager at Bradford Museums & Galleries) put me on to the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, which is a non-profit collaboration who run interesting talks and webinars around different aspects of digital in the sector. This one on AI was particularly good.
- Oonagh Murphy has published '10 ideas for purpose-driven digital leadership in museums'. It's incredibly useful and it's relevant for other sector leaders (or aspiring leaders) too.
- Here's another insightful update from Trish Thomas (Head of Digital Innovation at London Museum). This one focuses on long tail SEO strategy.
- The Tank Museum was recently recruiting for a YouTube Strategist, with their marketing / engagement team growing thanks to their success in the Creator Economy. Very interesting move and I can't say that I've heard of many YouTube strategists in the sector. Unsurprising, though, as it'll be a great way for them to build on their YouTube success.
💥 Distracting / entertaining / inspiring
- The Royal Armouries have been producing some cracking social content of late. I've loved their 'Gen Z writes the script' series, which has been popping up all over the place, like Reddit and Twitter (X) and they've recently done their own excellent take on the 'get ready with me' trend.
- Meet Olivia Swarthout, the person behind 'Weird Medieval Guys' on Twitter (X).
- Adam Koszary (once editor of this very newsletter) has started his own newsletter series called 'Content of the Week', where he shares a couple of interesting examples of content that he's found from the sector alongside his thoughts. Great stuff.
👍 Something good
- It was great to hear the National Library of Scotland get a mention on one of my favourite podcasts (After Dark), in their recent episode on Burke and Hare.
- Here's an interesting look at how Friday afternoon email etiquette can help to cut weekend workloads.
And that’s all for this edition.
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You can find all past editions of the Digital Snapshot here.
