Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture in Scotland launches £500,000 call for entries

The fund, a partnership of Nesta, Creative Scotland, and The Arts and Humanities Research Council, has already supported six Scottish organisations in a first round of funding earlier this year.

The programme connects arts organisations with technology providers and supports research and development projects that use digital technologies to increase audience reach, explore new business models and find new ways of working with the arts.

This is the second call for entries to the scheme which has a new £500,000 fund to assign. A first round of funding has already helped six organisations including Dundee Contemporary Arts, Glasgow Film Theatre and The National Galleries of Scotland. 

Now Scottish arts and culture organisations are again being encouraged to bid for the opportunity to connect with technology providers.

 A Nesta spokesman says, ‘An academic researcher will be assigned to each successful project to assist them to define their R&D propositions, consider development and delivery activities and support them with monitoring and evaluation of the project.

‘This research will also help Nesta to build a body of rich research evidence, data and case studies that can be shared with the wider arts and cultural sector.’

Applications to the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture in Scotland are invited from ‘all sizes of arts and cultural organisation based in Scotland,’ according to Nesta, which has delineated grants of below £25,000 or between £25,000 – £100,000.

One of the criteria states, ‘Your proposal must involve a collaborative partnership between yourself as an arts and cultural organisation and a technology provider (by which we mean any creative, media or technology company including other arts and cultural organisations with relevant technology know-how) that can provide technology services to arts and cultural organisations.’

 To be eligible, organisations must be either predominately publically funded and/or registered charities and want to work with digital technologies. Entry closes on 1 February 2013.

Meanwhile arts organisations in England still have the chance to bid for the affiliate Digital R&D Fund for the Arts programme. This programme has £7m to assign.