Vale Chris Winter: GLAM Friend and Champion

It was with great sadness that I heard of the passing of the legendary Chris Winter on Monday 10 June 2019. Chris was well known by many Australians for his long career at the ABC initially as music presenter on Double J and later as digital innovation and technology advocate. His familiar and distinctive deep voice graced the airwaves for a whole generation of baby boomers, and for several years brought instant satisfaction to ABC callers who got through to his recorded voice on the ABC switchboard. A lesser known aspect of Chris’s interesting career is that over the last ten years he became a passionate friend, champion, supporter and influencer of collecting institutions: galleries, libraries, archives and museums (known as GLAM’s). He brought his focus very firmly to an area that held immense interest for him. He took great delight in connecting with a whole new set of people and learning all about the operations and aspirations of librarians, archivists, curators, and conservators managing collections. He used his influence, knowledge and networking skills to help many of us take steps towards making our collections more accessible, usable and available in a digital age. He did this by encouraging and also challenging us to collaborate and innovate together, use new technologies, expand our horizons and share new ideas. He was instrumental in enabling ABC content to be shared in Trove. His own very user centric view of services constantly reminded us to keep the user experience centre stage, and that collections are nothing if they are not accessible, and preferably easily so.

Chris was a creative ideas person, who did not like to be constrained by boundaries, bureaucracy, barriers or banal people. He liked collaboration, connections and freedom of ideas. He constantly sought out new experiences, novelty and challenge and particularly loved exploring digital technology, ideas and learning new things. He was always completely focused on the user experience and kept this at the centre of his thinking. He often asked really simple questions to our senior leaders to challenge their in-actions or question their dismissal of new ideas. “Why not?” was his favourite question, nicely put. Chris had unbridled enthusiasm and passion for the opportunities which lay ahead for libraries. He delighted in connecting people he thought could learn from each other or work on collaborative projects together and would send lovely ‘blind date style’ introduction emails to people e.g. “I think you should meet x because you would be interested in their y”, or “you have this in common with each other- why not meet to discuss it!”. He particularly encouraged the leaders of our national and state collecting institutions to meet with and collaboratively work with each other. He could not understand why this did not naturally occur when museums, galleries, archives and libraries have so much in common, and in Canberra we are on each other’s doorsteps. 

For over ten years Chris hopefully and congenially brought a fresh and simple perspective to GLAM practitioners and leaders about the way in which things could sensibly be done, that only a highly respected person, external to the profession can. He was always willing and very generous in sharing his time with anyone he met at any level of an organization.  When he arrived for a meeting with us at a museum, gallery or library he was often like a mystery shopper, already having chatted to other visitors outside, in the lobby and lift, the security guards, and the coffee barista, bringing an interesting visitor perspective and local news to start a conversation off with. This could be mighty praise, or gentle suggestions for improvement about the visitor experience so far.

I first met Chris almost exactly ten years ago in 2009 when I was the Manager of Trove, the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program, Resource Sharing, Collaboration, and Innovation at the National Library of Australia. Chris was then the Manager of Innovation and New Media at the ABC. I emailed him to ask if the ABC would be interested in contributing their content to reach new audiences as part of a pioneering new collaborative online service ‘Trove’ I was leading. The Troveportal gave free access to millions of digitised historic newspapers as well as digital and physical resources held in Australian Libraries, Museums and Archives. Much to my surprise the next day Chris turned up in person to discuss this idea. He was immediately very keen and supportive for ABC content to be included in the Trove service and he got Mark Scott’s approval for this the very next day. We decided to start with some key Radio National programs. Over a very rushed ten minutes as we waited on the National Library steps for a taxi to the airport Chris told me that in 2008 he had worked on a project called Sydney Sidetracks, a unique showcase of historic audio, film, text and images in a mobile interactive map app. This was a collaboration between the ABC archives, the National Film and Sound Archive, the Powerhouse Museum, the State Library of NSW, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Dictionary of Sydney and the City of Sydney. This had fired up his interest in the cultural heritage sector; working on joint collaborative projects and the joy of revealing new stories through collection content. He was also dabbling with public involvement via social media in community news reporting through a service called ABC Open and called this the social media revolution. I explained to him about my ideas and work to engage thousands of online volunteers to improve the searchability of historic newspaper text through a crowdsourcing program I had instigated and how controversial and confronting this was in the library world.

We developed a great collaborative working relationship and friendship. Chris asked me all sorts of questions about how libraries and archives operated, where we were going, what technology we were using, what we needed and what ideas I had for the future. He always bought a sense of urgency and excitement to our visionary conversations which energised us both to go out and do more. We were both particularly interested in how the content of the ABC could be preserved and accessed effectively over time. After a while I convinced him that his experiences and passion as both a keen museum, library and archive visitor and a digital innovator where of great use to our sector and with a little encouragement he quickly became an amazing advocate and champion for Trove, the National Library of Australia, libraries in general and then the whole GLAM sector.   

Although being a brilliant and confident radio presenter Chris had terrible nerves before speaking to a public audience and felt slightly out of his depth in this new world of libraries. But I convinced him to join me as a keynote speaker at the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) Online Conference in 2011 to talk about the potential of crowdsourcing for libraries, social media and his experience with Trove as a user and contributor. He was cautious and unconvinced that librarians could learn anything from him.  It was very unfortunate that I had a terrible accident and was unable to be at the conference to speak with him. However, as I predicted, the audience of predominantly older female librarians were captivated with his passion, perspective and ideas, and they energetically tweeted how much they loved his velvety, treacly, sexy voice as well which greatly amused him!  This gave him the confidence to springboard more fully into the GLAM sector and then give the Thomas Rome Lecture at the NFSA. About the same time he made a rather reluctant decision to retire from the ABC after a move from Sydney to Canberra to support his partner’s new role.  For someone like Chris who was so passionate and committed to work at the ABC, and with such an active social life in Sydney this could have been a difficult transition, but he saw it as another opportunity to get more involved both as a user and an advocate for the National Library of Australia, the National Film and Sound Archive, and the other cultural institutions that he loved so much in Canberra.

He had many discussions with the national collecting institution leaders (NLA, NFSA, NAA, AWM) challenging them to set up a national group to collaborate on funding, services, training, digitisation, digital preservation, and access. He suggested a simple model like that of the National Digital Forum in New Zealand, set up ten years before in 2001 and which he had visited on my suggestion.

Then suddenly all development work on Trove, including some of our incubation ideas for ABC content were halted in 2011. Chris and I were torn with disappointment as were the Trove team, other collaborating institutions and the 6 million users.  The National Library had decided to focus its energy on other services and to put Trove on ice for three years, making no commitment to the ongoing resourcing of Trove as a national service. I therefore began a project role at the National Archives of Australia, Sydney to implement a digital preservation and access system that would enable the ABC to digitally deposit their recently created programs for archiving, and the public to access historic digitised ABC TV and radio programs back to 1934.

Meanwhile Chris found the project he needed to fill the ‘Trove void’ which was a CSIRO funded project researching Innovation in the GLAM sector. Over two years Chris was able to consult with Australian and international leaders in galleries, libraries, archives and museums, discuss key questions with them and learn about their online services and collections. He travelled a bit and was greatly enamoured with the Google Art Project, Tony Ageh’s work on digitising the BBC Archive, the Atlas of Living Australia and the Rijks Studio. Chris was greatly impressed by the lovely people he met in libraries, archives, museums and galleries and the passion, dedication and knowledge of curators, librarians, and archivists. He was very happy that in the course of his research he began to see and experience more of the often hidden physical collection treasures. He was so excited to see and touch (with white gloves) the 1510 Hunt-Lennox Globe in the New York Public Library, and kept thinking of this experience with delight weeks later and telling all his friends.

His conversations with me about his discoveries were full of words like ‘marvellous’, ‘mesmerising’, ‘energising’, ‘enthralling’, ‘enraptured’, ‘compelling’, ‘amazing’, ‘brilliant’, 'clever', and his excitement was palpable and contagious. He made Curator’s feel good about themselves and their collections. He was an avid reader loving to share his recommendations. On his trip to New York he read Linda Fairstein’s Lethal Legacy and said to me “You must read it! It’s about a conservator of rare books and maps in New York in a murder case”.  Chris always arrived cheerful, listening to the latest music on his i-phone, bristling with new apps he wanted to show me, and often in red shoes with brightly coloured shirts. He was very good at packing a lot into his days and balancing his family life, health and by now largely voluntary ‘labour of love’ work into a day.

The purpose of the GLAM project for Chris, aside from learning new things, meeting new people, discussing ideas and having fun, was that he could continue to prompt, encourage, and expect all of us in working in GLAM’s  to want to move forward and address our long standing issues of collaboration, funding, mass digitisation and preservation. If we were able to do this without getting lost on the way then we could deliver on our key objective of increasing access to our wonderful collections and meeting the digital, global expectations of our users (keeping the user experience centre). There was a big transition at this time in libraries around the world, largely led by the invention of Trove, crowdsourcing and social media apps. Primary producers and collectors of content such as the ABC and the National Library were no longer do things for users but with users, thus shifting the power balance and enabling users to create, edit, repurpose and engage with content and collections in new ways. Europeana and the DigitalPublic Library of America were created, based on Trove.

The outcome of the GLAM Innovation study that Chris was working on was an 86 page report, “Innovation Study: Challenges andOpportunities for Australia’s Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums”, presented to the GLAM sector in September 2014. The report captures the activities and thinking of the GLAM sector at the time and most of the conversations that Chris had with people and the services and readings that inspired him. The report is Chris Winter’s legacy to us. If you haven’t read it, you should. Some of the recommendations are those that Chris was passionate about: make the public part of what we do; become central to the community well being; go beyond digitisation into creative re-use, develop funding for national strategic initiatives; develop a national framework for collaboration on digitisation, digital preservation, and rights management; and create a National Digital Forum for GLAM.

After this Chris visited me at work at UNSW Canberra Special Collections. After six years he had just come off the board from Metro Screen, which was soon to close down and wanted to learn how to do ‘hands on’ arrangement, description, and preservation of the Metro Screen archives.  As usual learning something new and doing something meaningful filled him with excitement. He said he had remembered that I had told him that the donors/creators of archives were always the best people to understand the context and original order so wanted to do this archival task himself. He sensed the great importance of capturing and preserving Australia's social, cultural and political history, as he increasingly witnessed the disappearance around him of so much carefully created digital content. One of his favourite quotes to end meetings and presentations with archivists and librarians was this serious thought and challenge: 

 "One of the great ironies of the information age is that, while the late twentieth century will undoubtedly have recorded more data than any other period in history, it will also almost certainly have lost more information than any previous era.” 

Alexander Stille, American author, journalist, and Professor of Journalism at Columbia University.

Chris’s life and career were a rich tapestry of the people, ideas, and experiences he felt strongly and passionately about. Most aspects and connections were extensive, inter-related, entwined, and built upon over time: music, the ABC, digital technology, culture, collections, family, and friends. He was a very creative, forward thinking person and as he said himself gifted to be born with a wonderful voice and head of hair, and then to have had so much more in his life than he expected. His passion, knowledge, ideas and reflections shall be missed by many friends and colleagues. His championship of galleries, libraries, archives and museums, and his encouragement and praise for those of us doing our best to create and manage collections and content during a digital and social media revolution will not be forgotten. Our thoughts and kind wishes are with his partner Oona Nielssen, his two sons Otto Winter and Jacob Henwood and his very close family and friends. 

Quotes from Chris Winter:

“I thought I was going to become an engineer but I got side-tracked through reading poetry by Jazz groups and became a DJ. I never completed my engineering degree".

“I’ve been in love with music all my life, and secondly I’ve also been in love with technology”.

“Just to background my own interest in the world of collections – in 2008 while I was still at the ABC, we were approached by the National Library seeking access to the ABC’s archival metadata which they were keen to add to the datasets already searchable through TROVE.

The happy outcome – thanks to clever staff at the Library - to what began as a difficult project is that the NLA is now able to automatically harvest and index a large number of weekly Radio National programs -  and all current programs are available for search through Trove within 24 hours of broadcast. Some 79 Radio National programs are now available, both current and historic, including AM, PM, the World Today and Correspondents Report. Four Corners is also indexed each week, with historic records going back to 2000. Trove is an extraordinary resource”. 

"I was very successfully distracted by an invitation to work on a study of the GLAM sector in Australia, commissioned and funded by the CSIRO".

" I have been overwhelmed by the number of clever people I have met".

Thank you Chris for everything you have done for us!

Postscript:    

                                                                                         

I am reflecting this morning on Chris Winter and the social changes he influenced, and I wondered if any of us in the GLAM sector or ABC thought to try and capture the wonderful historical knowledge he had in his head of the ABC, Double J history, and the transitioning of broadcasting to digital? What a wonderful oral history that would have made. NFSA? NLA- did you do it? I notice also that there is not yet a Wikipedia page for Chris Winter, therefore I lay down the challenge to Wikipedian’s to create one. I list below some useful resources about Chris Winter’s engagement with the GLAM sector which may help.

Resources and Link’s on or by Chris Winter for or about Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museum’s

1. ABC Alex Sloan interviews Chris Winter on his official retirement from the ABC. Audio file and transcript. Canberra Close Up: Chris Winter Music Fan and social media expert. 19 September 2012. https://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2012/09/19/3593458.htm
2. ABC Alex Sloan interviews Chris Winter about his lecture tomorrow at the NFSA 27 September 2011. Piracy and publicity: new media innovations and the music industry. audio file http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2011/09/27/3326834.htm?site=source=rss
3. Chris Winter Thomas Rome Lecture 2011 at NFSA. ‘A life in sound’. Audio file https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/thomas-rome-lecture 27 September 2011
4. Chris Winter talks on ABC Innovation and New Media. Amsterdam, November 2009. X-Media-Lab. Video https://vimeo.com/8967944
5. Chris Winter’s Website: https://about.me/winterchris Has his bio and is a lovely insight into Chris’s learning and understanding of the Australian GLAM sector, the networks and connections. He lists the peak bodies and organisations he visited and met with, the conferences he attended, the things he read from 2014-2016.
6. The GLAM Innovation Study that Chris worked on for 2 years: Mansfield, T., Winter, C., Griffith, C., Dockerty, A., Brown, T. (2014) Innovation Study: Challenges and Opportunities for Australia’s Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation, CSIRO and Smart Services Co-operative Research Centre, August 2014. https://mgnsw.org.au/sector/resources/online-resources/research/challenges-and-opportunities-australias-glams/ (Also downloadable from Chris Winter’s own website).
7. Chris Winter’s presentation on the GLAM Innovation Study. To the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) NSW Group 16 September 2015. Report by Chris Winter and Barbara Hoffman, ASA NSW Newsletter, October 2015 https://www.archivists.org.au/documents/item/674. Chris explains how he got into GLAM and collections and his work on the GLAM Innovation Study. Embedded into this document is a link to his full presentation transcript. 
8. Summary of Chris Winter’s presentation at the Australian Library and Information (ALIA) Information Online Conference 2011 by Paul Bentley Part 1 https://www.twf.org.au/research/Online2011pt1.html and Part 2 https://www.twf.org.au/research/Online2011pt2.html#_edn14 (video and slides not available)
9. Vale Chris Winter: ‘ground-breaking music guru’ Double-J https://www.abc.net.au/doublej/music-reads/music-news/chris-winter-double-j-died-obit-triple-j-room-to-move/11198662
10. Vale Chris Winter: https://radioinfo.com.au/news/vale-chris-winter