Without returning to the cynicism of my latter days in the sector (!), I think the technical skills you mention are _not_widely distributed enough in the sector to make the sector ‘push itself’. They do exist of course, but many I’ve spoken to over the years are far to busy running round madly just keeping what they have online going and either do not have the time or are not given the remit to experiment.

Are you advocating some form of R&D time for museum tech staff? Not even at the NHM did we have the luxury of that (outside of our own time). Maybe some form of UKMW SIG would be an idea?

BTW I totally agree about NOF. I remember giving a talk on CMS to them in the early days of the program and distinctly rememeber covering metadata and interoperability. Trouble is it never seemed to be a deliverable / KPI and therefore was not done. We (NHM) did create an xml content feed that allows us to interoperate at the species level with the ARKive site.