No sooner have Beatriz Garcia’s feet touched the (Liverpool) ground again, but she’s off again to another presentation, this time in Italy. The Impacts 08 Director has been invited to take part in the Ravello Lab 09 culture and development forum, contributing in particular to a session titled ‘The European Capitals of Culture: cities like cultural industries?’ Next week things calm down a little, thankfully.

Dr Beatriz García, Director of the Impacts 08, was at the new Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum yesterday for the launch of the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS)’s Science & Research Advisory Committee. She’s one of the few university-based experts appointed to the SRAC, which has been set up to advise on developments in science and technology and their implications for DCMS policies and priorities. Dr García’s expertise on culture-led regeneration and the impacts of major cultural events will be invaluable in helping the DCMS in finding ways to develop its scientific evidence base. The plan is for the committee to meet twice a year to cover high level cross-cutting issues, give an annual presentation to the DCMS Advisory Board, and present a report on science, technology and engineering issues to the Secretary of State every three years. A set of subject-specific, temporary working groups will also be set up to address the key issues identified by the SRAC.

Don’t let anyone convince you that academia is a boring, humdrum life of lectures and marking, punctuated by the odd faculty meeting. For Impacts 08 Director Beatriz Garcia is whooshing off to Brussels on the train at this very moment to take part in a TV debate on European Capitals of Culture. Up for discussion is how the whole project works, how cities are selected, and some of the critical aspects of hosting the title. The debate will be broadcast on the European Parliament’s online TV channel.

Now that we have a French speaker in the Impacts 08 office, I can finally get to the bottom of what ‘grand rapporteur’ Bernard Foccroulle was talking about at the end of the European Culture Forum in Brussels recently. Beatriz Garcia had told me that M Foccroulle had name-checked her presentation about Impacts 08, but though I found the French version of his closing remarks, I haven’t been able to get a translation. Into the breach stepped our multi-lingual new staff member Matti, on whose good authority we have it that M Foccroulle said:

‘Beatriz Garcia from Liverpool observed that ever since the European Capitals of Culture, those cultural operators who have the strongest medium and long-term impacts are those which are operating on a small scale. On the scale of cultural policy and enterprise policy, is this not a possible orientation: counting on a large number of small projects with a strong and innovative value and not merely spectacular projects?’

Well that’s a relief. Impacts 08 is an exemplar of developing a strong evidence base, and it’s not always the big cultural show-stoppers that make the most difference. Now I can sleep at night.

Matti Allam has joined the Impacts 08 team as our International Research Liaison Officer. She’ll be adapting our Liverpool Model into an international framework for use by future European Capitals of Culture, as well as other cities assessing the impact of major cultural initiatives. You can get in touch with Matti by emailing mallam@liverpool.ac.uk. Or find out more about what she’ll be working on here. And we’ll be posting a nice picture of her on our website soon…

Impacts 08 Director Beatriz García is making a keynote presentation at Revitalising Built Environments: Requalifying Old Places for New Uses, an event taking place in Istanbul from 12th-16th October. She’ll be discussing the long-term legacy of hosting the European City of Culture title in Glasgow 1990 and comparing the experience with that of Liverpool, European Capital of Culture in 2008. The presentation will examine the progression in culture-led regeneration narratives and strategies over three decades of UK-based cultural policy.

This year’s Cultural Trends one day conference is themed around: ‘Centre/Periphery: Devolution/Federalism – New Trends in Cultural Policy’, and takes place at City University in London on Friday 16th October. Impacts 08 friends Steven Miles and David O’Brien will be presenting on ‘Cultural policy as rhetoric and reality: a comparative analysis of policy-making in the peripheral north’. If you’re interested in attending (it’s free!), there are further details here, and you can contact shelley.allen@tandf.co.uk. Availability is on a first come, first served basis.

As promised, our newly restructured website is now live. It doesn’t look radically different (that’s institutional house styles for you), but hopefully you’ll find it easier to locate and digest information, and check out what we’re up to. And if you’re really curious, there are some smiling pictures of the Impacts 08 team too.

Arts Council England has just published the findings from the first three years of its Taking Part survey – and the north west is the only region which has bucked fairly static national trends. Unsurprisingly, report authors Anni Oskala and Catherine Bunting put our substantial increases in both arts attendance and participation between 2006/7 and 2007/08 at least in part down to the Liverpool Capital of Culture year.

You can find out more and download the report from the Northwest Culture Observatory.

Over the last few weeks we’ve been busy making changes to our main website. You won’t be able to see any of them until we go live (hopefully in a week or so) I’m afraid, but the idea is to make all our reports, and information about our seminars, events and special projects, much easier to find – and a bit nicer to read. We’ll be looking forward to hearing what you think too. For now though, it’s back to the metadata…

We’re holding a research seminar – Rhetoric and reality: The role of cultural policy in place and space – on 16th September to discuss findings emerging from our AHRC / ESRC Impact Fellowship in Cultural Policy and Regeneration. Attendance is very limited and therefore by invitation only.

The main objective of the Fellowship has been to advance the case for the development of a more ‘culturally sensitive’ cultural policy that can be informed by appropriate impact research methodologies. The ambition of this seminar is to begin a process in which academics, policymakers and stakeholders can develop a dialogue around notions of ‘cultural value’ founded in place. We’re aiming to highlight the contrast between rhetorical and actual notions of culture-led regeneration, using emerging data as a means of beginning to chart a way forward for a more reflexive cultural policy.

For further information check out our main site. We’ll also be adding updates here as we get closer.

When I heard that the fabulous Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, seventy in November, had just signed up to Twitter, I felt my last resistance crumbling. So at Impacts 08 we’ve finally given in and started some fledgling tweeting of our own. But now we need some friends. Please follow us at http://twitter.com/Impacts08.

Sound the trumpets! Applications are now open for our brand new post of International Research Liaison Officer. You can now download the full details, and feel free to pass them on to anyone you think might be interested. The closing date is 4th September, and interviews will take place on 18th September. Spread the word!

Following our successful bid to the European Commission’s Culture programme, we’re about to open applications for the brand new position of International Research Liaison Officer. The postholder will be helping to develop the international legacy of the Impacts 08 programme, co-ordinating knowledge transfer workshops with future European Capital of Culture host cities and contributing to reporting for the European Commission. They’ll be charged with the adaptation of the Impacts 08 research framework into an international model for research that can be replicated by future European Capitals of Culture, as well as other cities aspiring to assess the impact of large-scale cultural policy initiatives. This ten month post will be advertised next week in The Guardian, ArtsJobs and via the University of Liverpool and Jobs.ac.uk (among others), so keep your eyes peeled – and do pass on to anyone who might be interested.

The Liverpool Culture Company has wrapped up by handing over its final report on the Capital of Culture year to Liverpool City Council. The report looks at some of the benefits and successes of the year, and looks forward to the final report to be produced by Impacts 08 in 2010…

Find out more.

Our Measuring Cultural Engagement workshop, the last in a series of impact workshops funded by the AHRC and Arts Council England, took place on Monday and was a great success. Over forty arts practitioners, academics, researchers and policymakers attended the event at Liverpool’s Foresight Centre, the highlight of which was some pretty intense discussion during the afternoon. Delegates broke into three groups and discussed issues around measuring audiences, measuring the cultural experience itself, and the thorny old problem of ‘excellence’. You can check out the programme, see who was there, and have a look at the presentations made on the day over on our workshops website, and there’s also a space to keep the conversation going. We’ll be adding feedback from delegates, and a report on the event as a whole, over the coming days…