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Catching lightning in a bucket: Archiving the performing arts in the digital
age
by
Paul Bentley
Article originally published in Online Currents April 2013 and reprinted with kind permission
of
Thomson Reuters.
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| Carnegie Hall.
Image www.nycgo.com |
In its August 2012 issue, Online Currents
explored how arts organisations and artists were
employing digital pathways to promote and distribute
their work.[1]
Material cited in that article has now been joined to a
Pew Research Centre report which found that technology
use now permeates arts organisations in the United
States, their marketing and education efforts, and their
performance offerings.[2]
Using technology to reach new audiences is one thing.
Using it to capture the performing arts for posterity is
another.
Carnegie Hall decided to establish an archive only after
it emerged in 1986 that a significant portion of its
documented history had not been captured. With its
centenary looming in 1991, the archive was established
to round up the scattered evidence of its luminous
history.
The Pew Center, in its recent opinion-based survey of
selected organisations, reports that 27% of arts
organisations say that digital technology is “very
important for improving arts cataloguing and collections
management.” It is a statement about an issue that
receives little attention in the report. And it is a
statement that flags a problem in the way governments
and arts organisations conceptualise and prioritise
archival strategies.
Online Currents last looked at online information
strategies by performing arts companies in 2005. [3]
Now that digitisation has become more widespread, what
are the Carnegie Halls of the world doing to make sure
that the record of their work can be found in the
future?
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS
New York’s famous concert hall (http://www.carnegiehall.org/)
has continued to build on its 1986 decision. A history
page and links to its archive and museum are prominent
on its website. A digital archive project began in 2012.
There are still gaps in its documented history, but the
cavalier practice of the past has been turned around.
A company that graced Carnegie Hall for much of the 20th
century has adopted a similar approach. After receiving
a grant of US$2.4 million from the Leon Levy Foundation,
the New York Philharmonic is digitising the orchestra’s
entire archival collection of eight million pages of
documents and 7,000 hours of audio-visual material
(http://archives.nyphil.org/). Every program from 1842
onwards has been described in great detail using an
Inmagic DB/Textworks database and a metadata scheme
tailored to the specialised needs of the business. Other
systems, including the Alfresco Enterprise content
management system, have been employed to open up the
archive and assist searching. [4]
One of the oldest performing arts centres in the United
States has also received financial support for
digitisation from the Leon Levy Foundation. The Brooklyn
Academy of Music (http://www.bam.org/) established its
archive in 1995 to address concerns about the way its
information resources were being managed. With US$1
million from the Levy Foundation over four years, the
Academy is creating a new digital archive to be launched
online in 2015. [5]
In England, the National Theatre (NT, http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/)
gives prominence to its archive and related digital
activities. When the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan was
appointed Literary Manager of the newly established
theatre 50 years ago, The Stage newspaper on 15 August
1963 expressed the hope that his appointment would lead
to the establishment of an archive:
"Few theatres in this country bother about keeping
records. It is no one's specific job and consequently no
one bothers about it. A number of leading West End
theatres recently celebrated their jubilee, but
journalists who wished to write features on these events
found it very difficult to get material...Managements
come and go without leaving a trace behind them."
But it was not until 1993 that the archive was set up by
concerned members of staff who drew together material in
various departments of the theatre. It is a story that
will resonate throughout the rest of this article.
The famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin (http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/)
has struck a partnership with a university to create its
digital archive. With the help of the National
University Ireland, Galway, the Abbey has begun
digitising two million items in its archive with a view
to making them more widely available online. [6]
The Royal Opera House (http://www.roh.org.uk) is outward
looking in dealing with its information resources. Ellen
West and Jamie Tetlow, at a recent conference in London,
described their work in transforming its old website,
with “incoherent connections between bits of
information” and “a bloated content management system”,
into a new site with more potential for exposing its
information more effectively on the internet.[7]
Libraries and museums are playing their part. Two
libraries in the United States stand out. The Library of
Congress highlights its substantial performing arts
holdings in the form of an encyclopedia at http://www.loc.gov/performingarts/.
The New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at
Lincoln Center capitalises on its innovative online work
over more than four decades at http://www.nypl.org/locations/lpa.
The Library’s Theatre on Film and Tape Archive has
recorded and preserved live theatrical productions since
the 1970s. Its Dance Oral History Channel takes you to
the voices and ideas of performers, choreographers, and
others working in all areas of dance over more than half
a century.
The British Library’s work on its Malcolm Sargent
collection is indicative of the work of one major United
Kingdom library in exposing performing arts archival
material in its possession. [8]
The National Archives, in partnership with Arts Council
England, has a program called Archiving the Arts. In
launching the program, it observed that “the arts is a
complex area to archive because arts organisations’ and
artists’ heritage is more than their documents and
records: to capture the essence of an art form for
posterity, a variety of audio and visual media are often
needed, and objects can be a crucial part of the
heritage too.” The first stage of the program involves a
survey of funders, collecting archives and arts
practitioners to identify the capacity of those involved
and gather views on other issues to be addressed.[9]
The theatre and performance collection of the Victoria
and Albert Museum (V&A, http://www.vam.ac.uk/) traces
its origins back to the 1920s. Between 1987 and 2007 it
housed part of the collection in the now defunct Theatre
Museum, its branch at Covent Garden. New galleries
devoted to the performing arts opened at the V&A, South
Kensington, in 2009. Its National Video Archive of
Performance, launched in 1992, has a collection of 280
recordings of stage shows made by the V&A's video
unit.
Prompted by discussions at a seminar of the
International Association of Music Libraries, Archives
and Documentation Centres in 1981, and after a gestation
of more than 20 years, Cardiff University and the Royal
College of Music, with funding from the Arts and
Humanities Research Council, have developed the Concert
Programmes Project (http://www.concertprogrammes.org.uk/),
which describes collections in the United Kingdom and
Ireland. In a recent article about the project, Rupert
Ridgewell comments on the myriad problems of describing
programs by libraries and performing arts organisations.
In the future, he anticipates wider access to
collections through the development and use of optical
character recognition technology. [10]
The spelling of programs as programmes in the United
Kingdom and its spelling as programs in Australia and
the United States are indicative of many issues to be
addressed in linking performing arts data
internationally.
A number of other associations and consortia coordinate
projects and influence strategies. These include SIBMAS,
the International Association of Museums and Libraries
of the Performing Arts (http://www.sibmas.org/), the
Arts and Humanities Data Services (http://www.ahds.ac.uk/)
and the Theatre Library Association (http://www.tla-online.org/).
The European Collected Library of Artistic Performance
(http://www.eclap.eu) is an online archive for the
performing arts in Europe.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services recently
provided funds to the University of Minnesota Libraries
Performing Arts Archives and partners for a project that
looked at archival practices by theatres in the United
States. A nationwide survey attracted 300 responses.
This revealed that the majority of theatres, especially
those with the greatest financial pressures, lack a
coherent records management plan. Nearly 60% of theatres
have made an effort to establish an accessible archive.
Thirty percent – mainly those with budgets of US$5
million and above - place their material in a library or
university. Ten percent primarily store things
electronically. The project aims to develop a framework
for providing improved archival support for theatres. [11]
Relationships between overseas government agencies and
broadcasters is demonstrated in the pilot project The
Space (http://thespace.org/ ), a partnership between
Arts Council England and the British Broadcasting
Corporation to capture and broadcast the work of
performing arts companies and cultural institutions in
the United Kingdom. [12]
The National Endowment for the Humanities in the United
States has launched a digital projects grant program to
encourage the integration of new digital technologies in
traditional humanities spaces such as museums and
historic sites.[13]
Clarifying stakeholder roles and finding the right
concepts to drive overarching government policies are
constant challenges for those shaping future directions.
The needs of the so-called creative industries, the arts
and cultural heritage organisations are often lumped
together. Solutions for one are frequently assumed to be
the solutions for another. Newspaper columnist Ian Bell,
for example, commenting about the replacement of the
Scottish Arts Council with a new organisation, Creative
Scotland, says the decision that was accompanied by
“hideous jargon masquerading as coherent speech.”
Creative Scotland is “a body dreamed up by people who
see no problem in bureaucrat-sanctioned art.” The new
agency, he says, has no clear purpose and has failed to
understand the questions it is supposed to address. [14]
THE AUSTRALIAN SCENE
In Australia, the development of archival strategies for
the performing arts over the past 20 years has been a
drawn out, patchwork effort by governments, performing
arts organisations and other bodies.
Government policies and research
Broad government policies in a number of areas are
important contexts when considering questions about
archiving the performing arts because a large proportion
of government funds is allocated to publicly-funded
cultural institutions.
Recent developments in cultural policy from 1994 to the
present day were sketched out in the August 2012 issue
of Online Currents. [15] In a recent essay, arts bureaucrat Leigh Tabrett
concluded that government policy is shambolic:
“we do not have a system of arts and cultural funding in
Australia – rather we have a series of programs and
interventions that lack a coherent logic and lack of
resonance and acceptance across government, in the
sector itself, and in the broad Australian community.” [16]
In an attempt to address the shambles, the federal
government in March 2013 launched its national cultural
policy, Creative Australia (http://creativeaustralia.arts.gov.au).
Heralded as the first comprehensive policy since Paul
Keating’s 1994 Creative Nation, it provides funding of
A$235 million to support a number of initiatives. These
include the restructuring of the Australia Council, the
development of the amalgamated Australian Business Arts
Foundation and Artsupport as Creative Partnerships
Australia, and programs for education and training,
Indigenous culture, and the film industry.
Like Creative Nation it is a worthy set of ideas that
has attracted widespread support. Like Creative Nation
it will be at the mercy of federal and state political
dynamics. Creative Nation was followed by a plethora of
reports and strategies by successive governments. [17]
Soon after Labor came to power in 2007, it closed down
the Cultural Ministers Council, the Collections Council
of Australia and the Collections Australia Network. To
address the challenges of Australia’s federal system, it
is now promoting inter-governmental national arts and
cultural accords, a National Local Government Cultural
Forum, and investments through a Regional Development
Fund. It has earmarked additional funds of nearly A$40
million over four years for the national collecting
institutions. And it has promised the establishment of a
national network for museum and galleries - presumably
to make up for closing down the Collections Australia
Network.
At the very least the next ten years will have the
benefit of lessons learned from the experiments – the
successes and failures – of the previous ten.
Enterprises were closed down rather than simply
modified. The cultural heritage sector is in need of an
overarching force to fully develop its online potential.
Some of the responsibility for future success will
depend on the way the so-called creative sector responds
to new opportunities. Creativity can sometimes be
pursued at the expense of common sense.
Government policies about information and communications
technology over the past decade were outlined by Online
Currents in February 2009. [18]
The federal government has focused on stimulating
digital economies, whereas state governments have
concentrated on information management practices within
and across government agencies. In NSW, the O’Farrell
government has introduced a new ICT strategy and an
accompanying draft Digital Economy Industry Action Plan,
which according to one commentator will simply end up
illustrating the gap between government rhetoric and
effective action.
[19]
Government recordkeeping policies and action have met
with mixed success. Several audits of public
recordkeeping practices during the past decade have
reported deficiencies in the performance of public
institutions. According to the recently retired director
of State Records NSW, Alan Ventress, public
recordkeeping is in a parlous state in Australia’s most
populous jurisdiction. There are grave shortfalls in the
provision of reasonable resources to carry out the tasks
mandated by the government. The budget of State Records
NSW is a third of the size of the equivalent services in
Victoria and a quarter of the funds allocated by the
Queensland Government for its State archives. Recently
State Records closed its city facilities following
substantial budget cuts. [20]
Archiving the arts has now received special attention in
a new report by the Australia Council. Archives in the
Digital Era and related documents set out to “illustrate
the existing landscape of artistic and cultural
collections, the impact of the digital realm, and how
this is currently being addressed by Australian arts,
cultural and memory sector as a whole.”
[21]
After a substantial section on how to set up a digital
archive, it provides thumbnail assessments of a wide
range of issues. Arts organisations, the report says,
have little capacity for archiving. Many are not up to
speed on the issues at stake and the technical skill
required. Many don’t realise they have an archive: they
view the evidence of their work as “stuff in boxes‟.
Many consider their website as their main archival and
documentation platform. Small-to-medium arts
organisations are not well served by software solutions.
Their descriptions of material are often rudimentary.
Variable data management practices make it difficult to
share information. Intellectual property is not well
managed. Frequent staff turnover and the use of IT
contractors lead to loss of knowledge within
organisations.
It concludes there is potential for Australian arts
organisations to improve the way they manage digital
content. Collaboration is difficult to sustain because
of different business drivers and budgetary
considerations. Marshalling the knowledge of smaller
specialist organisations and larger institutions,
including libraries and museums, is vital.
The Council planned a similar study in 1999, but did not
follow through with the exercise possibly because it
realised the terms of reference focused more on the use
of technology than on how arts organisations were
managing their information. Its latest endeavour
describes itself as a scoping report, a starting point
to assist artists and arts organisation to gain a better
understanding of the “challenging and complex topic.” A
large number of issues are excluded. Although it
acknowledges that a focus on technology may be bowing to
a false god, it gives little attention to the essential
underpinnings of information management and
recordkeeping. It suggests there is a need for funds to
sustain efforts without considering the possibility that
recordkeeping may be a legitimate priority without extra
funds in today’s digital environment. The foundations,
it says, need to be put in place but it does not
recommend how the foundations are to be laid.
Practices within institutions
A quick review of past and present practices in
individual organisations will flesh out some of the
points made in the Australia Council report.
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| Evolving building, evolving
history. Photo: Paul Bentley |
Australia’s cultural icon, the Sydney Opera House
(http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/) did the opposite of
Carnegie Hall. After setting up an archive when it
opened in 1973, it discarded part of it in 1997. During
the first 15 years of its operation, managing
information at the Opera House was an experimental
affair. It established the Dennis Wolanski Library and
Archives of the Performing Arts. Recordkeeping
responsibilities were shared by several units including
the library, administration, venues, marketing and
engineering departments. The arrival of standalone PCs
in the mid-1980s created a feudal IT environment and
black holes in its records.
The Dennis Wolanski Library became a prime mover of
improvements in information management practices. A new
enterprise-wide strategic information management plan in
1991 put the finger on fragmented responsibilities,
duplicated effort and levels of data redundancy. New
information management governance regimes were
introduced. A major events management system was
purchased as the institution’s hub for managing events.
New records management plans were developed to address
black holes. The library created pseudo-bibliographic
MARC records in its library management system to index
events. It invested in a digital asset management system
and started to digitise programs, photographs, press
clippings and other material.
To capitalise on the value of its documented history,
the library was responsible for several trailblazing
exhibitions about the house. It gained the support of
the Minister for the Arts to develop a A$7.1 million
hi-tech performing arts museum, with a projected income
of $2 million a year, centring on the story of the Opera
House. In partnership with the National Institute of
Dramatic Art, Opera Australia, the Australian Ballet and
the University of Wollongong, it contributed to Stage
Struck, an Australia on CD Project distributed to all
schools in Australia, which went on to win a British
Academy of Films and Television multimedia award in
1999. Additional multimedia projects were in the
planning stages.
After the 1995 NSW State election, new brooms arrived in
the form of a Premier, Opera House chairman and CEO. The
organisation, after two decades, was ripe for
regeneration. New brooms arrive in any organisation with
fresh ideas and the desire to make a difference but they
sometimes implement their plans with the finesse of
bulls in a china shop. The new chairman’s catch-cry was
“generational change.” The broken china included the
library. He closed it down and dispersed its collections
to 17 other organisations throughout Australia. A Sydney
Opera House oral history project ceased. Digitised
material and indexes about the house were junked or
transferred elsewhere. In the rush to implement plans in
the new CEO’s mud map, well-honed knowledge of
enterprise-wide information management issues and Opera
House history was unceremoniously dumped.
Large institutions with a guaranteed cash flow have the
means to recover from hasty decisions. After the brakes
were applied to digitisation work in the mid-1990s,
there are signs that the Opera House is now getting up
to speed with old opportunities in a more conducive
environment. The Sydney Opera House website has pages on
the history of the building. A new strategic information
management plan is being written to complement its
recordkeeping regime. A digital strategy guides work on
promoting its history and its current activities.
In partnership with the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, the Sydney Opera House Trust has produced
The Opera House Project (http://www.theoperahouseproject.com)
a new online documentary with over 24 hours of content
drawn from the archives of the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, State Library of NSW and State Records NSW.
The Opera House is also one of 10 international sites
being digitally scanned as part of the Scottish Ten
Project (http://www.scottishten.org/) with the aim of
assisting conservation, research and education programs
associated with each of the sites. The Sydney Opera
House digital education program offers an interactive
behind-the-scenes tour, live streaming of performances
and workshops delivered with the assistance of the NSW
government’s Connected Classroom program.
After dispersing the Dennis Wolanski Library in 1997,
the Opera House has now established links with the
Wolanski Foundation (http://www.twf.org.au), which was
set up in 1998 to address anomalies from the rapid
dispersal of the collection, offer a web-based
information service, and give support to other
organisations. The foundation has a rudimentary
catalogue of material transferred to other organisations
and assists researchers to navigate to information about
the Opera House and the performing arts in general. In
2011, it provided funds to the Sydney Opera House to
support digital strategies.
Between 2005 and 2008, the Wolanski Foundation, along
with other philanthropic organisations, provided funds
to support the development of archival and information
resources at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA,
http://www.nida.edu.au/). The project had begun to
address a feudal information management environment
there before a new broom arrived to dismantle emerging
plans with little explanation. In an essay for Currency
House, Chris Puplick has pilloried developments and the
attempts of NIDA to “distance itself from history” under
the rubric “creative transformation” involving the
massacre of a large number of its staff. "Some of the
longest serving, most dedicated and talented members of
staff were summarily marched off the premises and told
they were no longer of any use to the school." [22]
The Seaborn Broughton Walford Foundation (http://www.sbwfoundation.com/),
with a performing arts collection of its own housed in a
new archive annexe at NIDA, and a major sponsor of the
NIDA library and archive, set up its operations
elsewhere. Among its holdings is material transferred
from the Sydney Opera House. This includes a collection
of 3 million press clippings and ephemera - with
extensive material on performers and performances at the
Sydney Opera House 1972-1997 – and a collection of
80,000 programs. An accompanying card index has
cross-references to all plays, operas and dance
productions performed at the Sydney Opera House and
other venues in Australia, mainly in the period
1973-1996 but also covering performances back to the
19th century.
Archiving the Opera House is complicated in part because
most of its most important work is performed by other
organisations. All of the major presenters at the House
now have emerging histories on their websites. At least
two of the companies – the Sydney Theatre Company and
Australian Chamber Orchestra - have dedicated
archivists. The archive at the Sydney Theatre Company (STC,
http://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/) is the most
prominent. More than 300 performance videos dating back
to 1981 are currently being digitised. The archive is
open to the public and details of its service are
clearly indicated. The STC Pier Group and the Vincent
Fairfax Family Foundation have supported the archive
financially. Production photographs are presented as an
evolving exhibition in the long walkway leading to the
theatres.
Other major presenters at the Opera House include Opera
Australia, the Sydney Symphony, Music Viva, Sydney Dance
Company and Australian Ballet. Their websites reveal
recent interest in digital strategies and amplification
of their productions in educational programs. The
challenge will be to travel back into their deeper past
to enrich the knowledge of those experiencing their
latest performances.
Performing arts centres in most other States have
specialist archival collections. The performing arts
collection at the Victorian Arts Centre (http://artscentremelbourne.com.au/),
one of the main recipients of material from the Dennis
Wolanski Library, ironically owes its development over
the past decade to the CEO who was instrumental in
closing down the performing arts collection at the Opera
House. Other performing arts collections are located at
the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (http://www.qpac.com.au/),
the Adelaide Festival Centre (http://www.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/)
and His Majesty’s Theatre Perth (http://www.hismajestystheatre.com.au/).
Budgets among other factors influence the visibility of
services on the websites of the parent organisations and
quality of online access to their collections.
The work of the National Library of Australia, State
libraries and some other libraries are an important part
of the picture. The National Library recently revised
its online finding aids for 7000 JC Williamson programs
from a larger JC Williamson collection held by the
Library (http://www.nla.gov.au/prompt/jc-williamson-theatres).
The project added additional details and addressed
inconsistent descriptions of the productions. The
extensive performing arts collection at the State
Library of NSW was boosted in 1997 when it acquired
selected material from the Dennis Wolanski Library. A
website page devoted to the subject provides a launching
pad for further investigation. [23]
An example of work of smaller, specialist libraries can
be found at the University of Melbourne, where the
Louise Hanson-Dyer Music Library has catalogued and
digitised its Marshall-Hall concert programs.[24]>
Sector-wide initiatives
Three portals, involving collaborations between academia
and cultural heritage organisations, illustrate
developments in sector-wide aggregation.
AusStage (http://www.ausstage.edu.au) has been developed
over the past decade by a consortium of universities,
government agencies, industry organisations and
collecting institutions with funding from the Australian
Research Council. Illustrating the benefits of links
with academia, its database currently has information on
more than 66,500 productions, nearly 100,000 people,
over 50,000 information objects, and 18,000 venues and
companies. Efforts are being made to facilitate links to
individual items - such as programs, posters, and
photographs, collection descriptions and finding aids -
and hosting item-level cataloguing for smaller
collections.
A number of other AusStage digitisation projects are
also underway. These include support for cataloguing a
theatre and music program collection at Barr Smith
Library, University of Adelaide, work by Macquarie
University on a history of Sidetrack Performance Group,
and the development of standards and strategies for a
collection of video resources at University of Sydney’s
Department of Performance Studies. Monash University is
working with AusStage on the BlackStage Project relating
to contemporary Indigenous Australian theatre. The Stage
on Screen Project takes in two research collections -
theatre related videos held by the University of New
England from the archives of ABC Television and Channel
9 and work by Deakin University on the multimedia Dance
and Physical Melbourne Workers Theatre. The Ballets
Russes Project, involving the Australian Ballet,
National Library of Australia, and University of
Adelaide involves cataloguing the Ballets Russes
collection in the Special Collections of the University
of Adelaide Library and linking digitised objects at the
National Library of Australia to AusStage records. [25]
AustLit (http://www.austlit.edu.au/) is a subscription
service in the broader field of Australian literature,
involving funds from the Australian Research Council and
a network of contributors from Australian universities
and the National Library of Australia.
The National Library’s discovery service Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/)
is a lynchpin for future development. Based on more than
half a century of disciplined work by libraries in
describing and aggregating their holdings, it has now
integrated the national bibliographic database with
specialist performing arts initiatives – such as Music
Australia – and services such as PictureAustralia and
the Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts both
of which point to important original performing arts
research material. The availability of digitised
versions of newspapers from 1803 to 1954 – in which the
imperfections of scanning are corrected by the public –
has made significant differences to those digging up the
past. Its strategy of encouraging the inclusion of data
from organisations and systems outside libraries brings
challenges in balancing the need for disciplined with
the need for flexibility, This work will no doubt lead
in the long term to increased sector-wide efficiency in
the way information on the performing arts is captured
and made available.
In 2008, the Wolanski Foundation assisted University of
Technology Sydney student Stephanie Volkens to undertake
a select survey of performing arts programs and press
clippings in national and state libraries, collecting
institutions and online services. She reported on
inconsistent cataloguing approaches in part driven by
different business drivers, outlooks, priorities,
resources, and capabilities. Libraries typically used
library management systems and standards such as the
AACR and MARC, whereas specialist performing arts
collections have been inclined to adopt their own
cataloguing methods and other kinds of systems. Most
collections described programs and press clippings at
collection level rather than item level. There was still
a large quantity of uncatalogued material in collections
of programs and press clippings. [26]
SUMMING UP
The histories of the performing arts in Australia will
rely on the way cultural centres, performing arts
organisations and others manage their records. Keeping
records in performing arts organisations involves
standard recordkeeping practices, but it also calls for
approaches that go beyond simply keeping the evidence of
business transactions. It is highly desirable that
digital and non-digital records be managed in tandem as
part of day-to-day business.
Writing histories will depend on how well the authors
are able to unravel the natural tendency of
organisations to treat their achievements as public
relations exercises. The new official online documentary
about the Sydney Opera House offers a refreshing
consolidation of competing facts about the construction
of the building between 1954 and 1973. Some important
details are left out. Other loose threads need to be
tidied up. As our understanding of these central years
continues to evolve, interpretations will depend on a
deeper exploration and more open explanation of the
story before 1954 and after 1973. Digging deeper will
partly depend on the nature of the archives at the
Sydney Opera House and on the documented views of the
participants.
The widespread use of technology and emerging
digitisation activities are generating a stronger
appreciation of the value of more effective archiving of
the performing arts.
Use of technology is dependent on information
engineering principles. The performing arts, like Asia,
is composed of diverse parts. Theatre, dance, music and
opera have different histories and dynamics that call
upon variations in the way they are described. The
movies, popular forms of entertainment, radio and
television broadcasting, all of which have not been
touched on in this article, all carry their own
peculiarities.
But, as Elings and Waibel noted in 2007, there is a need
for a more homogenous practice in describing
like-materials in different institutions. [27] These assumptions are constantly tested by new
developments in standards, linked open data, optical
character recognition technology and discovery tools.
Government cultural and ICT policies are vital contexts.
However, government rhetoric in Australia is often
followed by start-stop confusion. After the Howard
government established the Collections Council of
Australia in 2004, the Rudd government closed it down in
2009 without explanation. A Collections Council proposal
for regional hubs has reappeared in a different guise as
part of the National Broadband Network programs.
Collaboration is difficult, but needs to be encouraged.
Professional associations and consortia, sometimes with
a dependency on project-based funding, usually lack
authority and capacity but they make a difference. The
National Library of Australia and other major cultural
institutions are crucial in guiding and sustaining
future strategies.
The views of those who run institutions and companies
are paramount. In Australia the work of visionaries is
sometimes undone by journeymen.
At the 2012 national conference of Museums Australia
Performing Arts Heritage Network, Rob Brookman, CEO of
the State Theatre Company of South Australia, in his
opening address, Catching Lightning in a Bucket: Why
Theatre Folk Love Archivists, recalled his instrumental
role in establishing the Sydney Theatre Company archives
to help capture the “evanescent moment of live
performances.”
In 1996, the new chairman at the Opera House, Joe
Skrzynski, closed down a library and archive because he
thought everything inside an organisation could be found
using a search engine such as Isys and anything
elsewhere could be found on the internet. He was seduced
by the invention of Sir Tim Berners-Lee without giving
much thought to what was needed to be part of it.
Set up the bucket to catch the lightning - but watch out
for the bulls in the china shop.
Endnotes
[1]
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[2]
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[3]
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14
[4]
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[5]
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[6]
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[7]
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[8]
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[9]
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[10]
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history, progress and future directions (Fontis
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[11]
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archives and the documentation of a legacy.
UpNext (30 August 2012) http://blog.imls.gov/?p=1739
[12]
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[13]
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[14]
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[15]
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(2012) 26 OLC 171
[16]
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[17]
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[18]
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[19]
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and Moses, A. A heavy fog on information
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Sydney Morning Herald 12 June 2012
[20]
Ventress, A. Support by the NSW
Government for the Archives Authority of New
South Wales 1960-1998 and State Records New
South Wales 1999-2012. Archives and Manuscripts
(forthcoming 2013)
[21]
Australia Council. Archives in
the digital era, 2012 http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/digitalarchives
[22]
Puplick, C. Changing times at
NIDA (Platform Papers no 33, October 2012) and
Crittendon, S. Panned: Is NIDA critique
plain-speaking or villainous betrayal? The
Global Mail (21 September 2012) http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/panned-is-nida-critique-plain-speaking-or-villainous-betrayal/389/.
[23]
http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about/cdp/documenting/arts/performingarts.html
[24]
http://library.unimelb.edu.au/digitalcollections/cultural_and_special_collections
[25]
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[26]
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