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Source: Labor
Advocate Online http://www.kclabor.org |
When
you pick up your iPad to take in the morning news one
thing is clear. The media have become the medium.
Newspapers have embedded video clips. Journalists write
their words in the morning press before appearing on
television to talk about what they have written. “For
more information, go to the website,” the TV anchor
says, “and add your comments.”
Galleries, libraries,
archives and museums have also been navigating the
transformative digital environment. Online Currents
reflected on the situation in 2009, when the Collections
Council of Australia was preparing the GLAM sector for a
collaborative digital future. [1] At the beginning of
the year, we reported speculation by high profile
commentators that the era of letting a thousand flowers
bloom may be over. Effective concerted action may have
become a necessity. [2] What is driving these thoughts?
How real is the imperative? And what is needed in
Australia for future GLAM sector success?
COLLABORATIVE ECONOMIES
As technology continues to drive
changes, economic forces will draw new formations out of
old silos. After decades of talk about incubation of
information, knowledge and digital economies, the new
phrase is the collaborative economy.
The World Economic Forum, with the
help of the Boston Consulting Group, has thought about
infrastructure needs. The digital economy, which in 2010
contributed US$2.3 trillion to GDP in the G20 countries,
is expected to reach US$6.6 trillion a year by 2020.
Long-term solutions will
involve, among other things, the development of
comprehensive country-level digital agendas. [3]
Deloitte Access Economics has put a value of A$46
billion on the Australian collaborative economy.
Companies that actively encourage collaboration, it
claims, are twice as likely to be profitable. [4]
Academics Leith Campbell and
Sascha Suessspeck estimate the rollout
of the
National
Broadband
Network
alone
will
boost Australia's GDP by 2%.[5]
The raw figures are counter-balanced
by cautionary notes. The UK research organisation Nesta
says we need to look at evidence on the collaborative
economy before jumping to conclusions. Little is known
about the effect it will actually have. A
triple bottom
line is needed to simultaneously measure
economic, environmental and social impact. Good
intentions don’t necessarily make for positive outcomes.
[6]
There are competing views about the
nature of the collaborative economy, one centred on
technology, the other on people. [7] Alex Hern thinks
the “sharing economy” is a meaningless term coined
because of the tech industry’s desire to pretend
everything it does is new and groundbreaking. [8] Nick
Milton reminds us that the innovation spectrum consists
of negative and positive elements, including meddling,
re-inventing, tinkering, innovating and improving.
Innovation in the wrong context is "re-inventing the
wheel". Re-using knowledge in the wrong context is
"flogging a dead horse". [9]
Craig Thomler suggests that, while
transformational innovation calls for radical thinking
and a shake-up, incremental innovation is valuable.[10]
Dion Hinchcliffe says
we are still in the crawling stages of collaboration,
which is a messy and sometimes frustrating activity.
Collaboration is not synonymous with communication; the
process of transformation is stymied by piecemeal
approaches. [11]
Clay Shirky adds
punch by asserting good collaboration is a matter of
structured fighting: good results depend on how the
fighting is structured. [12]
Rhett
Allain, in Wired, shows how inertia can affect the
result if
you apply the same force to two
different objects. [13]
THE
AUSTRALIAN GLAM SECTOR
The Australian GLAM sector, as NSW
State Librarian Alex Byrne observed in 2010, operates
within a federal system of governments and is supported
by low levels of government and philanthropic support
compared with some other countries. The national
institutions have lacked the authority to direct state
and local institutions. The Australian Bibliographic
Network, established in 1981, exemplified the
inclination of Australian libraries for collaboration.
Australian’s libraries, archives and museums have gained
an international reputation as early adopters and
innovators. At the beginning of the 21st
century, he wrote, competitiveness inherent in a federal
system of governments had been largely replaced by
cooperation and degree of convergence, as expressed
through the organisations such as the Collections
Council of Australia. [14]
The Collections Council of Australia
(CCA) in 2004 had emerged from the Keating Government’s
Creative Nation policy and subsequent government
attempts to stimulate GLAM sector collaboration. [15]
The CCA pursued worthwhile initiatives, including a
collections hub pilot in regional Australia and the
development of an Australian Framework for Digital
Heritage Collections to guide future developments across
the domains. Although the CCA had the right
representatives on its board, it had limited funding and
authority. When the Rudd Government without explanation
removed its funding in 2009, the board opted to close it
down in 2010. In hindsight, the decision of the Climate
Commission -- which continued as the Climate Council
after the Abbott government withdrew funding for the
Commission in 2013 – may have been a wiser course.
After the perplexing decision of the
Rudd Government turned into hide-and-seek games under
the Abbott Government, things are changing again under
Malcolm Turnbull. The arts and collections portfolio is
once again linked to the Department of Communications,
which has responsibility for broadband infrastructure
and the digital economy.
The coordinating body for
inter-government arts portfolios, the Cultural Ministers
Council, closed down by the Rudd Government, in 2011
emerged phoenix-like in the form of the Meeting of
Cultural Ministers (http://mcm. arts.gov.au). A National
Arts and Culture Accord Working Group is developing
policies on regional arts, digital technologies,
cultural infrastructure, and indigenous arts and
culture. [16] A report on a GLAM sector digital
technology strategy, published in May 2015, makes 15
wide-ranging recommendations without settling on a quick
fix. [17]
The agendas of the GLAM sector silos
are being advanced by various professional bodies,
particularly those with control over most of the money.
National and State Libraries
Australasia (http://www.nsla.org.au/) is the most active
and visible. One report, Faster Access to Archival
Collections in NSLA Libraries by Mary-Louise Ayres
in 2010, still resonates on disparities within NSLA
libraries. Sorcerer’s apprentice pressures in managing
analogue and digital material carry productivity
questions calling for answers. [18] The Council of
Australian University Librarians (http://www.caul.edu.au/)
focuses its collaborative efforts on programs to assist
its field of vision, higher education research and
learning.
The collaborative centrepiece of the
Council of Australasian Archives and Records Authorities
(CAARA,
http://www.caara.org.au/) has been the Australasian
Digital Recordkeeping Initiative, which may be under
review. The Council of Australasian Museum Directors (CAMD,
http://camd.org.au/)
has been involved in two online collaborative efforts.
The Atlas of Living Australia (http://www.ala.org.au/)
is the Australian node of the Global Biodiversity
Information Facility. The Museum Metadata Exchange
project (http://museumex.org/),
with substantial funding from the Australian National
Data Service and in partnership with Museums Australia (http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au),
brought into a single space over 1,000 museum collection
descriptions. But it ran out of steam after the funding
ran out. Addressing museum data management and system
problems awaits another day.
Three other museum sector
collaborations are worth mentioning. The Field Guides to
Australian Fauna apps (http://museumvictoria.com.au/national-apps),
released in 2014, involved a collaboration of 7 museums
and over 180 people. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (http://biodiversitylibrary.org/)
is a global network of country nodes operating in ways
that suit local circumstances. [19] A collaborative
enterprise that no longer exists is the Collections
Australia Network (http://www.collectionsaustralia.net.au/),
which also had its funding removed without explanation
under the Rudd Government. Its web pages and information
resources have been archived or adopted by other
organisations, but the status of its most important
element, a database of collection holdings, is unclear.
It may be another example of how lack of government
funding is sometimes accompanied by lack of GLAM sector
willpower or wherewithal.
Trove is the flagship Australian
platform. Online Currents mentioned three papers
at the ALIA Information Online 2015 conference
highlighting its limited funding, imperfections and
capacity to harvest data from types of contributors who
were once excluded. [20] Mary-Louise Ayres, in her
conference paper, compared Trove with the governance and
funding arrangements for its overseas counterparts,
Europeana, Digital Public Library of America and
DigitalNZ. “Only time will tell whether the next five
years brings further convergence, or further divergence
– and whether new players will change the aggregator
environment in ways not yet imaginable.” [21]
The state of Victoria has an enviable
record of seizing opportunities.
Under the leadership of Arts
Victoria, five institutions -- the Arts Centre
Melbourne, Australian Centre for the Moving Image,
Museum Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, and State
Library of Victoria -- joined up in 2003 to develop the
Culture Victoria Network website (http://www.cv.vic.gov.au)
and improve access to Victoria’s major cultural
collections. The project has links to the Victorian
schools intranet (VicSmart) and Australia’s Academic and
Research Network (AARNet) and now supports Victorian
Collections, a project that manages a portal and
services to smaller collections across Victoria.
Victorian Collections (http://victoriancollections.net.au/),
also now has a partnership with the National Library of
Australia for its records to be harvested by Trove.
According to Eleanor Whitworth, the Culture Victoria
initiative has led to strategic benefits and
efficiencies and has placed the cross-domain partners in
a position to take advantage of future collaborative
opportunities. [22]
The State Library of Queensland’s
Distributed Collection of Queensland Memory (http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/about-us/projects-and-partnerships/distributed-collection-of-queensland-memory)
is another example of a state-based project that
encourages contributions from diverse organisations.
In 2014, CSIRO produced the GLAM
Innovation Study, which examined opportunities and
challenges for the sector created by broadband and
digital services. According to the report, the GLAM
sector in Australia spends approximately $2.5 billion,
around 80% of which is provided by local, state and
federal governments. Initiatives tend to be isolated,
episodic and difficult to sustain in the long term. Only
a few Australian organisations, it claims, have made
fundamental changes to their planning, structures and
operations to place innovation and digital services at
the centre of their activities.
The sector, it suggests, should
consider creating a charitable foundation to support
cross-sector strategic initiatives along the lines of
Europeana, the Public Catalogue Foundation of the UK and
the Digital Public Library of America. Despite solid
collaboration within each domain, there was no formal
gathering of leaders or practitioners across the GLAM
sector. It made 3 recommendations aimed at “deep
transformation”, involving among other things, the
establishment of a national framework for collaboration
to improve access to Australia’s distributed national
collection, and setting up a national leadership and
collaboration forum. [23]
Following its release, two GLAM
sector digital access meetings were held in tandem with
NSLA meetings in June and July 2015. A third meeting was
held at the National Library of Australia in October
2015.
CHANGE
AGENTS AND PLATFORMS
If
there is more to do, what can we learn by looking
elsewhere?
Major
international professional bodies promote ideas and
facilitate collaboration, but they have limited impact on
developments. The International Federation of Library
Associations and Institutions (IFLA) hosts a group
called Libraries, Archives, Museums, Monuments and Sites
(LAMMS) to intensify cooperation between IFLA,
International Council of Archives (ICA), International
Council of Museums (ICOM), (International Council of
Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and the Coordinating
Council of Audio-visual Archives Associations (CCAAA)).
LAMMS supports the ENUMERATE project, which works to
gather cultural heritage statistics. IFLA has published
a report on GLAM sector collaboration and cooperation
and urges the sector to find new ways to defying
physical boundaries, delivering information,
collaborating over heritage information, and pursuing
new joint-use facilities. [24]
More
can be learnt from the way countries invest in agents of
change and online platforms.
The
United States has built its efforts on the National
Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation
Program (NDIIPP), established in 2000 and led by the
Library of Congress. Its experience underscored issues
for the unwary. Relationship between public and private
enterprises were not always interoperable. Even within
the same domain, there were barriers to collaboration.
Metadata in an institutional context were not easily
transferable to a larger context. Long term preservation
had more to do with managing data than developing
systems. A single tool may not be the answer. [25] The
program continues as the Digital Preservation Program (http://www.digitalpreservation.gov).
The Library of Congress has launched a National Digital
Stewardship Alliance (http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/)
to extend the work of the NDIIPP.
The
major government-funded agent of change in the United
States is
the
Institute of Museum and Library Studies
(IMLS,
http://www.imls.gov).
With a staff of 65 it serves a population of 320
million. Out of a budget of US$228 million in 2015, less
than 10 percent is earmarked for administration and
research and the rest is distributed in the form of
grants to support a range of projects including
cross-sectoral collaboration. These figures are
important when you reach the end of the article.
A
recipient of IMLS grants is the Digital Public Library
of American (DPLA http://dp.la),
launched in 2013. In 2014, the DPLA received nearly US$1
million to expand the DPLA infrastructure of hubs to
provide services in professional development,
digitisation, metadata creation or aggregation across
the United States. [26] Based in Boston, the DPLA is
also supported financially by a long list of other
foundations and government agencies.
Following a GLAM sector workshop in April 2015, IMLS has
also allocated funds to establish the National Digital
Platform for Libraries and Museums. The workshop of GLAM
sector leaders had concluded that, although major
strides had been made to form a decentralized ecosystem
of memory institutions, the components were diffuse and
largely disconnected. There was an urgent need to make
the connections, harness local initiative, develop
plug-in mechanisms and provide a portfolio of
organisations to deliver services. There was a need for
easy-to-use tools to enable batch processing, support
crowd-sourced data, allow integration with existing
systems, encourage contributions by third-party
developers and advance work on linked data and
computational solutions. Solutions must stimulate
radical collaborations involving state libraries as
administrative agencies. IMLS awarded a number of grants
for the project in 2015. An increase in targeted funding
of nearly US$9 million is anticipated in 2016. After
more than twenty years of incremental advancement, a
report on the project says “the time for radical,
systemic collaboration has finally arrived. [27]
Other
bodies in the United States have played sheep dog roles
in leading sectors into collaborative online
possibilities. OCLC, the manager of WorldCat, has been
prominent among them, as indicated by the well-known
reports Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration
Among Libraries, Archives and Museums and Single
Search: The Quest for the Holy Grail. [28] A recent
report, Stewardship of the Evolving Scholarly Record,
on a cross-Atlantic collaboration with Research
Libraries UK, focuses on the higher education landscape,
but its subtitle, From the Invisible Hand to
Conscious Coordination, points to an idea gaining
wider currency. [29] The Coalition of Networked
Information has also been important in leading its
members to the water over the past 25 years.
In the
United Kingdom, the cross-sectoral change agent was the
Museums Libraries Archives Council. Although it
experienced the same fate as the Collections Council in
Australia, at least its responsibilities in 2010 were
transferred to the Arts Council England (ACE,
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/). At ACE, the
interests of museums and libraries are bundled in with
the arts and culture, but responsibility for archives
has been transferred to the National Archives (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector).
Other change agents and platform providers in narrower
fields include Jisc (https://www.jisc.ac.uk)
and Research Libraries UK (RLUK,
http://www.rluk.ac.uk/).
RLUK in a recent report characterised today’s
environment as a “perfect storm” that requires a
reappraisal of investment and innovation needs. [30] The
Digital Preservation Coalition (http://www.dpconline.org/)
works toward more productive collaboration within and
beyond the high profile members of the Coalition.
The
Europeana portal (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/),
with funding from the European Commission, was launched
in 2008 and now acts as an interface to material in more
than 2,000 institutions across Europe. Digital objects
are not stored on a central computer, but remain with
the cultural institutions. Different types of
cataloguing records are mapped to a single common
standard, the Europeana Semantic Elements, which takes a
lowest common denominator approach in representing
different types of digital content. Based in the
national library of the Netherlands, a great number of
digital projects are
run by different institutions -- digitising
archaeological monuments and buildings in 3D,
aggregation of museum content, digitising contemporary
art, the performing arts, digitising photographs from
news agencies, projects relating to the First World War,
royal manuscripts, travel and tourism, television
material, social history, Jewish cultural heritage,
linked data, musical instruments, natural history, and
aggregation from national libraries to name just a few.
Europeana has released a new report which looks at how
partners’ motivation, technical requirements and content
affect overall metadata quality. [31]
MERGERS
AND ATTITUDES
Some
countries have tackled the idea of merging national and
regional institutions.
Canada took the bull by the horns in 2004 when it merged
two national institutions to form Library and Archives
Canada. In 2008 Greg Bac and Pam Armstrong were upbeat
about progress. A federated search system had been
launched and the development of a Trusted Digital
Repository was underway to ingest, preserve, and
disseminate services for archives and library
collections. The move had created synergies between the
two services, led to efficiencies and satisfied user
demands for seamless access to all holdings. [32] In
2015, the Canadian Auditor General reported
shortcomings, particularly in relation to the management
of public records. LAC had spent over US$15 million on a
digital repository that was never used. There were cries
of "total mismanagement." [33] Mismanagement, if that is
what it was, does not of course disapprove the case for
institutional mergers.
Across
the sea in Ireland, a government proposal in 2012 to
appoint a single council to manage the National Library,
National Museum, and National Archives met with
protestations. The move would affect arm’s length
governance of the institutions. It would impair their
ability to raise funds and their ability to deliver on
their statutory obligations. There was a case for
investigating savings from shared services such as HR,
finance, storage, security and support services, but the
rationale for a merger met with scepticism from those
working in the institutions. Although the Minister, Mr
Deenihan, wasn’t convinced by the arguments opposing the
move, the plan was put into the too-hard basket. [34]
At a
meeting on convergence by the Australian Society of
Archivists NSW Branch in February 2013, the Director
General of the National Library of Australia Anne-Marie
Schwirtlich said she had not been persuaded by the
arguments to merge major institutions, based on the
experiences of Canada, Singapore, the Netherlands,
Tasmania, and Ireland. Although joint digital strategies
are justified, other strategies are flawed. Separate
missions, she said are not an impediment to
effectiveness, but politicians with an interest in
budget savings will always need to be persuaded. We need
to work together more successfully. Speaking from the
floor, Chris Hurley argued for a need to unpack
libraries and archives, to look at functions not
buildings.
Others
who have looked at the question of mergers have come to
the conclusion that success is more likely at local
government level. Lise Summers in 2014, reflecting on a
possible merger of the State Records and State Library
in South Australia, pointed to a 1994 Commission on
Government review in Western Australia, which was not
convinced by a proposed merger of the library and
records management institutions in that state. [35]
Leith Robinson, in a PhD thesis, came to the same
conclusion: physical convergence is particularly
appropriate at the local level, with libraries as the
anchor of a community hub. [36]
Within
the minds of GLAM sector practitioners, there is
sometimes confusion about what convergence actually
means. The question of merging institutions is lumped in
with the need to simplify ways of finding information.
Possibilities for information engineering on a grand
scale are sometimes overlooked. Ways of doing things in
the silos are treated as rocket science that no one else
is capable of grasping.
Language helps and hinders the muddy debates.
The term
‘memory institution’ has been used to create the
semblance of compatibility across their activities, but
it obscures and oversimplifies fundamental differences
in the way libraries, archives and museums acquire,
record and interpret their collections. [37]
The convergence debate “has been awash in
business-influenced jargon”; people at the coal face
must “oppose corporatized convergence and build an
alternative model based on the very principles espoused
by our professions” [38]
Tina
Amirtha reminds us in her piece The Trouble with
Digitizing History that ideas about digitisation
could lead us in the wrong direction. Allocating lots of
funds on mass digitisation projects may not be money
well spent. Giant leaps of innovation will come from
refining the methods used for preserving born digital
files as the media memory spills increasingly outside
traditional repositories. [39]
Fears
need to be assuaged, as the UK Collections Trust was
compelled to do to ease concerns from museum bodies
about an amendment to the European Commission's
directive encouraging public sector bodies to make their
digital content openly available. [40]
Jennifer Trant has written that emerging similarities in
on-line activities are not yet evident in the education
of professionals who work in libraries, archives and
museums. New interdisciplinary training needs to be
developed across the sector in a way that respects the
distinct histories, cultural roles and responsibilities
of libraries, archives and museums. [41]
THE CRUX
OF THE MATTER
Paul Marty gets to the point about transcending
traditional boundaries. Digital
convergence
does not necessarily
mean institutions are becoming the same thing or that
there is a need to physically merge their collections
and their professional responsibilities. Cultural
heritage professionals need to maintain key distinctions
at the back end, while making information access more
universal and more transparent at the front end. We need
to stop wasting time, set aside minor differences and
work together. [42]
There
has been a tendency to ignore strategic information
approaches to overcome feudal data management practices
within institutions and in at least some GLAM sector
standards.
The
point is underscored by Mike Jones in his article
Artefacts and Archives: Considering Cross-Collection
Knowledge Networks in Museums. He writes about the
disconnection of museum collection management systems
and records management systems within and across
museums, drawing on the experience of Museum Victoria,
the Smithsonian, the Donald Thomson collection, the
Spencer & Gillen project, and the American Museum of
Natural History. Where archival and museum systems are
brought together, as with the Smithsonian, the effect is
comparable to interleaved catalogues for separate
collections. Uncovering relationships between them is left
up to the user. Moving from theory to practice will be a
significant task and the development of a conceptual
model to ensure the whole does not become an
unmanageable tangle of data. [43]
David
Henry and Eric Brown have tackled much the same issue at
the Missouri History Museum, where experiments with
semantic web technologies and standards -- Resource
Description Framework (RDF), the SPARQL Protocol and RDF
Query Language (SPARQL), and an XML mapping language --
have been used to support cross-collection searching.
However, searching at
http://collections.mohistory.org/search/ still has
its limitations. The biggest challenge of future work
will be to provide an interface that allows users to
make meaningful connections without overwhelming the
user with too much information and too much complexity.
Although some argue the semantic web is still a long way
off, there is value in RDF as a leveraging mechanism.
[44] Thomas Baker, from Dublin Core, explores RDF for
compatibility with linked data approaches by defining
constraints as a way of not compromising underlying
vocabularies in the wider linked data environment. [45]
The
British Museum’s Dominic Oldman and European colleagues
say the system is broken and we need to start again. In
Realizing Lessons of the Last 20 Years: A Manifesto
for Data Provisioning and Aggregation Services for the
Digital Humanities, they look at data management
based on experience with the CIDOC Conceptual Reference
Model (CIDOC CRM), an international standard for
controlling the exchange of cultural heritage
information. The standard was developed by ICOM’s
International Committee for Documentation and, while it
solves the problem of delivering semantically rich data
integration, the achievement can be undermined by a lack
of properly managed processes and working relationships
between data providers and aggregators. Ambitious
aggregation projects have failed to provide
infrastructures onto which GLAM sector communities can
build. [46]
They
flesh out a picture of dysfunctional elements. New
projects seem intent on replicating flawed approaches
and repeating the mistakes of the past. Museums spend
vast amounts for intensive handcrafted content on their
websites at the expense of other needs. Digital
representation of cultural heritage information is
determined by those who understand it least. All current
mapping tools basically fail in one way or another to
support industrial level integration.
They
assert the cultural heritage linked data movement
provides new examples of this damaging situation. Far
from providing meaningful linking of data, the lack of a
properly designed model has thwarted progress.
The
history of digital humanities, they say, is now littered
by hundreds of projects that are "bursts of optimism".
We need to change the emphasis from the inconsistent
'bursts' and instead focus on the underlying structures.
The provision of data for integrated systems must be
based on a distributed system of processes in which data
providers are an integral part, not a simple and
mechanical view of information system aggregation,
regardless of the complexity of data models. We need a
more coherent and robust vision. We need a new
architecture and reference model called Synergy. [47]
The
American librarian and consultant Karen Coyle points to
the need for fresh thinking in reflections on the
development and adoption of the Functional Requirements
for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). Although technology
solutions can and have been developed around the FRBR
conceptual model, no technology solution is presented in
the FRBR Final Report. Interoperability needs to take
place around the information and meaning carried in the
bibliographic description, not in the structure that
carries the data. [48]
Meanwhile, the work on linked data continues. Brighid
Gonzales touches on the BIBFRAME Initiative as the
possible framework to link library resources with the
web, while noting theories behind linked data and the
Semantic Web are still in the process of being drawn
out. [49]
OCLC in
September 2015 announced that it is
working with seven
major libraries, including the Library of Congress, on
the Person Entity Lookup Pilot, to learn more about how
linked data will influence library workflows and reduce
redundant data by linking related sets of person
identifiers and authorities. [50]
Roy Tennant reports
that OCLC is working with W3C Community Group to extend
the vocabulary of Schema.org for use within the library
world. “Rather than being a metadata backwater as we
have been since time immemorial, where no one but
librarians understand our metadata, we are now
embedding our descriptions of cultural heritage
resources directly into the web itself.” [51]
DigitalNZ, as an experiment, has released a linked data
API which focuses on linking people and their works from
National Library of New Zealand, Alexander Turnbull
Library, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa,
Auckland Art Gallery and Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New
Zealand. [52]
THREE
LOCAL POSSIBILITIES
Three
commentators provide final notes of wisdom.
The
former director of the Institute of Museum and Library
Studies, Robert Martin: “Networked digital information
technology has simply lifted the veil that has obscured
the basic fact that the silos into which libraries,
museums, archives, broadcasters, and other developers
and purveyors of learning resources and
opportunities have been relegated are ghettos of our
own making.” [53]
American CIO and academic Jerry Campbell, in a paper
about portals to the Association of Research Libraries:
“Letting a thousand flowers bloom, it turns out has
always been easier than cultivating a garden”. [54]
David
Bearman, in an article awarded the W Kaye Lamb Prize for
its exceptional combination of research, reflection, and
writing: “the future will be about agreed objectives
rather than ideologically correct premises” [55]
The
idea of silos is partly a myth. Galleries aren’t just
galleries. Libraries aren’t just libraries. Archives
aren’t just archives. And museums aren’t just museums.
The oldest museum in the world was the library of
Alexandria. Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist asserts that in
the twenty-first century “the architectural and artistic
contributions that are going to endure are not only the
ones with a built and physical form.” [56]
Merging institutions, like merging companies, will
always depend on a business case which either makes the
case or doesn’t. Taking the GLAM sector into the future
will require leadership as well as participation. The
old patchwork may stand them in good stead.
Three
possibilities may be worth considering.
First,
resurrect the Collections Council. Corral its funding
from the arts and cultural pool, where the GLAM sector
is sometimes drowned. Use the IMLS example of a dollar
per head of population as the basis of a $20 million
budget from the Australian Government. Get rid of the
strategic clutter. Distribute 90 percent of the funding
on the basis of identified strategic imperatives and the
merits of grant applications from GLAM sector bidders.
A move
in this direction was triggered by decisions in the 2015
Federal budget when the government shaved more than $100
million from the Australia Council’s budget and moved it
to the National Excellence in the Arts Program within
the Ministry for the Arts. The ensuing rhetoric in the
debate underscored the difficulties of making sense of
cultural heritage spending in an arts pool. In November
2015, the new minister for the Arts announced a new name
–Catalyst -- for the NEAP, the retention of $12 million
to be dispersed under the program and the return of a
substantial portion to the Australia Council.
Museums Australia, in a media release, welcomed the
changes because it opened up the possibility of funding
to small and medium museums and galleries, which had
previously been excluded from Australia Council funding.
It remains to be seen whether government policy on this
front will turn out to be a catalyst or a whirlpool.
Second, make the most of Trove (as one of several
important platforms). Allocate additional funds from the
Collections Council pot. Establish new governance
arrangements with state libraries. Leverage the existing
responsibilities of state libraries for public libraries
across their state. Make sure training is factored in.
Third,
persuade individual institutions, including volunteer
organisations, to include in their budgets or priorities
an allowance for spending on converged necessities in
the same way that future capital expenditure and
infrastructure renewal is factored in as company
depreciation.
Allow
for depreciation as a way of preparing for a converging
future.
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