After a much longer than anticipated wait Minister Simon
Crean announced the release
of the Australian National Cultural Policy on 13-3-13, the week of Canberra
The question that Australian libraries, archives, museums
and galleries will be asking is “Does the National Cultural Policy deliver all that
we hoped it would for GLAM’s, and how far will it help or drive forward the
challenges surrounding the digital agenda?”
Back in January 2012 I wrote a post explaining what the purpose of the National Cultural Policy was intended to be,
and summarised the feedback that the National Cultural Institutions had
provided against the Draft Policy in October 2011. I also followed this post
with another which explained in more detail the Digital Deluge Challenges that GLAM’s
had raised in their feedback, with possible resolutions that they would like
addressed in the National Cultural Policy.
It was widely hoped by National Cultural Institutions such as the
National Library of Australia, the National Archives of Australia, and the National Film and Sound Archives that
the Policy would provide extra or contestable funding to help with the
challenges of digitising, collecting born digital, and delivering collections
digitally, and the legislation that surrounded that. At that point Simon Crean
had indicated the Policy would be released in March 2012 and would have
considerable funding associated with it.
However due to constraints in Government funding the release was delayed
since Crean said there was no point in releasing a policy which did not have
the funding to back it up. This further
fuelled the expectations of the GLAM sector that the policy may release significant
extra funding to them.
So does the National Cultural Policy help GLAM’s deal with
the digital challenges? The answer in a
nutshell is “not really”. The Policy is much more focused on fostering the creation
of new digital cultural and artistic content rather than collecting or curating
it. However there are a few exceptions which I will highlight below.
As Crean had hinted the Policy comes with considerable
funding - $235 million to be exact. However the lion’s share of this (over $75
million) goes to reforming the Australia Council. Crean says:
"The Australian Government will immediately implement
structural reforms to the Australia Council. These are the most significant
since its creation 40 years ago at a time when the arts were only beginning to
realise their potential. I will be introducing new legislation into Parliament
next week, which will be backed by an investment of $75.3 million in new
funding for the Australia Council over four years. The Australia Council will
be a more responsive funding body with a clear mandate to support and promote a
vibrant and distinctively Australian creative arts practice, and have a new
emphasis on independent peer-assessed grants to recognise and build artistic
excellence.”
A summary breakdown of the funding as given in Crean’s press
release is below:
The Policy has five goals and the funding is intended to be
targeted to attain the goals.
Goal 1: Recognise, respect and celebrate the centrality of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures to the uniqueness of Australian
identity.
Goal 2: Ensure that government support reflects the
diversity of Australia
Goal 3: Support excellence and the special role of artists
and their creative collaborators as the source of original work and ideas,
including telling Australian stories.
Goal 4: Strengthen the capacity of the cultural sector to
contribute to national life, community wellbeing and the economy.
Goal 5: Ensure Australian creativity thrives here and abroad
in the digitally enabled 21st century, by supporting innovation, the development
of new creative content, knowledge and creative industries.
The relevant parts of the National Cultural Policy for GLAM
are:
Digitising collections:
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Studies (AIATSIS) finally gets a good chunk of money. They’ve been
given $12.8 million for the
digitisation of their indigenous collections. This potentially can go a long
way if they set up mass digitisation processes such as the National Library did. At the National Library $10 million digitised
50 million items. But if mass digitisation was not in place this money would
likely only cover digitisation of up to 1 million paper items, less if it was
AV.
Collecting born digital:
The Cultural Policy signals the intent of the Government to
finally change the 1968 Copyright Act which would give the National Library of
Australia the right to collect digital as well as hard copy published items. This is known as legal deposit. Digital legal
deposit would cover content on Australian websites as well as e-books and
blogs. The National Library has been
campaigning for years without success to change legal deposit to include
digital, so this statement of intent is a positive step forward. There is still no timeframe around the legal
change and it’s likely to take some time. The Australian Law Reform Commission
is reviewing copyright exceptions for the digital environment. The copyright
Inquiry is being led by Professor Jill McKeough. An issues paper was released
in August 2012. A discussion paper is likely to be released later in 2013 with
another call for responses from interested parties such as publishers, content
developers and collecting institutions who commented last time round.
Crean has also stated:
"We will also work to develop a new legal deposit scheme for the
National Film and Sound Archive of Australia to collect and preserve Australian
audio-visual material."
This is all good but raises some questions on the specific
roles and potential overlap of functions of the National Archives of Australia, the
National Library of Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive. The
National Library has been collecting Government websites for some time now, but
this is actually a core role of the National Archives. The National Film and Sound Archives collect
commercial and non-commercial AV content, whilst the National Archives collect
material from Government broadcasters such as the ABC. Interestingly although the National Library,
and National Film and Sound Archive get several mentions in the policy the
National Archives hardly does. This may be due to the much stronger, detailed
responses the NLA and NFSA sent in to the draft policy.
Dealing with the Digital Deluge vs. Physical:
The Cultural collecting sector clearly stated that they were
appreciative of the money given to them by Government each year to build,
manage and maintain their collections. The
Policy states, as the draft policy did how much this is for 2012/2013:
- National Archives of Australia $62.6 million
- National Library of Australia $59.6 million
- National Gallery of
- National Film and Sound Archive $26.9 million
“The Australian Government remains committed to ensuring the
National Collecting Institutions can continue to facilitate access to their
collections and programs. The Government also remains committed to the
digitisation of the collections to preserve them for future generations and
provide access to a range of culturally significant material”.
However although the money sounds considerable much more is
required to address the digital challenges.
The analogue/physical collections are not decreasing or requiring less
management but the digital is exponentially increasing. Collecting institutions
do not have the infrastructure they need to deal with it and make it
accessible. The Policy does not address
this issue at all, though it acknowledges in the Appendices that collecting
institutions raised it.
The Policy actually helps to significantly increase the amount
of digital cultural artefacts that will be created and therefore require
collecting, particularly in audio-visual broadcasting. Large sums of money will
target creation of more audio-visual content from Screen Australia
Searching and engaging with collections and content:
The Policy waxes lyrical about Trove the search and
user engagement service developed by the National Library of Australia
(co-incidentally that I managed from 2008-2012) even going as far as calling it
a “golden moment for the cultural economy, as the historic obstacles of
distance and the size of the local market disappear.” This is all very nice and
good patting on the back stuff, but no money is provided to ensure that the
‘moment’ can be sustained and the collaborative service can continue or be
developed. I’m not sure if the Minister was aware that the development work on
the service all but ceased in 2011 when the National Library made a decision to
divert its priorities elsewhere.
National Collaboration and Networks:
An action in the policy is to “Establish a national network
for museums and galleries to be managed in partnership between the National Museum
of Australia Australia
I’m not quite sure what the intent of this is, whether is it
a collaborative network between museums, a digital network, a shared discovery
service like Trove, or simply a replacement for Collections Australia Network
(CAN)
,which has had its funding entirely pulled on more than one occasion.
The expectation was that GLAM’s would be required to work
more closely and collaboratively with each other to achieve their aims and pool
resources, particularly for digitisation and digital discovery/access but this
is not mentioned in the Policy. There
has not been a natural propensity for Australian GLAM’s to communicate, collaborate,
or share openly in a formal or informal way before, so although it could be
done without a policy, there was an expectation that a Policy would drive
it. Within each specific sector there
are good networks, especially for libraries, but cross sector there is still
some resistance to focusing on similarities rather than differences.
Leverage:
Only time will tell if the National Cultural Policy can be
used as leverage to assist the work of GLAM’s, or whether it is just another
document/file to be put in the ‘recycle bin’. Its intended life span is 10
years, and most of the initial funding covers a 3-4 year time period. With a government election taking place this
year and bets being placed on a change of government we will have to wait and
see whether it can hold its own in the years ahead.
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