I was at the V&A during some of this work and got a glimpse of the herculean effort required to build the infrastructure (policy, digitisation etc), so it’s great to see it in action but I also get that ‘what is this for?’ feeling, and I think it comes down to the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality that attaches itself to this kind of project. Creative spaces is a tool without a community at present – the gamble is whether or not the tool is enough in and of itself to generate the community virtually or whether greater investment is needed to develop the site as a core strand of offline engagement activities (during and post-event etc). I agree with Angela’s comment above – short-termism is a key issue – these platforms stand to fail spectacularly without investment in advocacy post-release, so I’m interested to see how the partners will develop the space themselves.

Incidentally – I love the webquests. The cross-collection focus is fantastic and the results are interesting and engaging. The interface is a bit clunky – pulling in full sites to displaying object data is a bit jarring, but the purpose is clear and the content is robust.

As a tabula rasa Creative spaces is less immediate, but it provides a good foundation for building activity. Will the project extend into harnessing the resources needed to develop it fully? With adequate attention to community building, and some fine-tuning, both the platform itself, and the partnership created to develop it, have enormous potential.