Accessing Australia: The Challenges of Digitisation

Senator Lundy gave a speech at the “HASS on the Hill” conference as part of a session on Accessing Australia: the challenges of digitisation. HASS on the Hill is an event coordinated by the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) for the humanities, arts and social sciences sector to communicate with government and policy makers.

Senator Lundy spoke at the event on behalf of Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, and the speech below was a collaborative effort between our offices.

Speech Notes

It was not so long ago, in December 2008, that the newest national cultural institution – the National Portrait Gallery – opened its doors.
From the very start it was a resounding success, with visitor numbers far exceeding initial projections.

The eagerness with which Australians embraced this cultural institution says a great deal about the importance we place on our cultural collections and our access to them.

The new National Portrait Gallery sits within Canberra’s cultural precinct. As much as I would like to encourage as many visitors to Canberra as possible, realistically, not everyone is going to have that opportunity.

That opportunity lies elsewhere. That opportunity lies in the digitisation of our national treasures.

Digitisation of national cultural collections

Australians celebrate their history and cultural identity through the diverse collections held by our national institutions. These collections impress us, move us and make us reflect on our nation’s journey.

Without question, our national institutions also play a vital role in our cultural life by supporting the preservation of, and providing access to, Australia’s rich cultural heritage.

They hold an amazing range of items – from Phar Lap’s heart to Sidney Nolan’s iconic Ned Kelly paintings to recordings of Dame Nellie Melba’s voice.

While the resources of our national institutions are already well utilised and much loved by people who visit the buildings, the growing expectation is that these artefacts, for which we are custodians, will be made available online.

Fundamentally, people now demand their information when and where they want it. They want information ‘on call’.

Consistent with the Australian Government’s response to the  Gov 2.0 report about encouraging greater use of web based tools, we support efforts by the national collecting institutions to preserve and make their collections more accessible online through digitisation.

This helps to safeguard our national collections for the future; manage collection storage issues; and allows greater access, no matter where we live.

Many digitisation projects have been undertaken by our national collecting institutions, and people here today will be more than a little familiar with projects such as:

• The National Library of Australia’s Trove, which provides access to 90 million items about Australia from more than 1,000 libraries and cultural and educational institutions.
• The National Museum of Australia’s online National Historical Collection, with more than 200,000 objects representing Australia’s history and cultural heritage.
• The National Gallery of Australia’s ongoing project to digitise its vast collection for online viewing.
• The National Film and Sound Archive’s australianscreen online website provides access to more than 1,300 film titles.
• The Australian National Maritime Museum’s eMuseum project which has digitised more than 3,000 items to date.
• Screen Australia’s Digital Learning websites and Digital Resource Finder, which is one of Australia’s largest online resources available to the educational sector and specifically tailored to the school curriculum.

There are also many projects happening in Australia and around the world as a result of community collaboration, and cultural institutions everywhere are choosing to engage with and facilitate community efforts to digitise and make more accessible cultural assets.

I believe this engaging of the community presents not only a great opportunity to offset the immense resources required to digitise our cultural collections, but a great opportunity to encourage the general public to access, engage with and contribute to our historical and future artefacts.

A few cutting edge examples of this include:

• The National Archives of Australia ran the “Mapping our ANZACs” initiative, where they published the personnel records of our diggers, and the facilitated the general public to contribute stories, photos and other historical information to complement the official archive. This was a great example of how government can be a platform for innovation and capturing our history as a society.
• The Powerhouse Museum has done a lot of innovative work, and I’ll leave Seb to discuss most of this, but I wanted to briefly mention OPAC, their online collection database, where the general public are encouraged to tag items, which helps searchability of artefacts as well as the cultural context of items to the community, which is invaluable to the historical archival of public knowledge.
• StreetARt – an initiative to find and share public art on peoples phones, using the rapidly growing and immersive Augmented Reality.
• The Digitising the Dawn project, a small community driven initiative to digitise the The Dawn: a Journal for Australian Women conceived and published by Louisa Lawson from 1888 to 1905.
• The GLAM WIKI conference run a few years ago brought together the GLAM sector with Wikipedia Australia and other open knowledge communities and still provides a good resource of talks and discussions for people in the sector looking at digitisation and opening access to cultural assets digitally.
• Finally, the Wikipedian in Residence initiative – several cultural institutions around the world including the British Museum, Versaille and the National Archives of America have brought in house wikipedians as voluntary guests to look at how they could better engage with the wikipedia community. This has resulted in a lot of updated articles on Wikipedia around cultural assets housed by those institutions, greater opening up of digitised cultural assets which creates public interest in the artefacts and the institutes, and finally has resulted public metadata practices around artefacts.

These are just a few examples of what is happening, and I look forward to hearing more about these and other projects today.

Of course none of this work could happen without the Internet.

National Broadband Network

High-speed Internet has transformed how creative content and services are developed and delivered. And the Australian Government’s National Broadband Network will take this to an entirely new level.

The NBN will have the capacity to deliver innovative, engaging and diverse content to audiences across the country, allowing more Australians to have access to an ever-increasing amount of our national cultural collections online.

It will almost certainly provide the capacity for real-time walkthrough experiences of actual collections and exhibitions.  The Google Art project is a fine example of this.

The NBN will also have the capacity to deliver live performances and online real-time collaboration in ways most of us have not yet experienced.

Performances from the major capital city venues could be streamed live in high-definition vision and sound—even in 3D—to cinemas and living rooms right around the country.

Performers, for instance, could take part in master classes held in any part of the world through new technologies such as ‘telepresence’, so that students actually feel like they are in the room with the teacher.

We are really only just starting to imagine the possibilities for the cultural experiences which the NBN will be able to deliver.

Educational opportunities

The NBN, the Computers in Schools Program and the inclusion of arts on the National Curriculum offer our collecting institutions a new way to work with schools and local communities around the country.

The tremendous work done by each of our cultural institutions in the education space encourages students and visitors to better understand the power of creativity and imagination, to improve observation skills, to participate in discussions and to learn from creative professionals.

These are the sorts of skills that are needed in all walks of life.

These are the skills that no business or organisation can do without. And the power of these skills cannot be underestimated.

The economic benefits of improving access for all Australians

Digitisation of the national collections will also enable our national galleries, libraries, archives and museums to maximise the benefits of broadband resulting in a substantial increase in public access to the collections, particularly for Australians in regional and remote locations.

Internationally, digitisation is being linked to future economic growth and competitiveness, with significant investments being made to fund digitisation activities.

National Cultural Policy

The Government is also committed to the development of Australia’s first national cultural policy in almost two decades.
Improving community engagement and access to the arts will be a key area in the cultural policy framework, particularly for regional Australia.

For example, the Government is looking at the ways in which the NBN can support increased access to and interaction with the collections of our national arts institutions.

The Minister will be keen to hear more about the challenges and opportunities of digitisation in this context, and the national cultural insttutions will be included in consultation as discussions on Australia’s future National Cultural Policy develop.

Challenges

Together the NBN and the National Cultural Policy will provide a framework for change. And as with all change we can expect bumps along the road but also the freedom to find a new way ahead.

I am well aware that digitisation brings with it considerable technical, cost and resourcing issues.

And while the Government can provide the framework, the quality content and creative know how has to come from the cultural sector. The challenge will be for the institutions that are not already fully engaged and planning for a digital future to act now.

Institutions that understand that the task of digitising their collections is too big to be done in isolation will be on the front foot.

To ensure cultural artefacts are published in a way to best facilitate public access and innovation, particularly older artefacts that are well out of copyright, it is important that cultural institutions consider permissive copyright strategies and good technical principles such as open standards and APIs as part of their digitisation strategies, as well as how they can best engage the broader community in digitising, using, tagging and innovating with our cultural assets.

Conclusion

Our national cultural institutions play an important role in helping us to understand ourselves, our communities, our nation and our place in the world.

Digitisation of the collections represents an investment in the future as we preserve and protect our country’s history and heritage.

Combined with the NBN, it also offers opportunities for greater accessibility to a much wider range of material to enrich and educate more Australians – no matter where we live.

Ongoing and effective collaboration between the national collecting institutions and the broader community will ensure they make the best use of scarce resources to maximise the potential of digitisation.

We owe it to future generations of Australians to digitise and provide access to our rich culture through our national collections of art, heritage, books, film and archives, and the Australian Government is committed to making this happen.

This conference is a great opportunity to exchange ideas and to broaden networks.

It is an opportunity to look hard at your available resources and how you can share your considerable expertise and collaborate on projects.

I have no doubt that with the relationships you build and the ideas you share the possibilities will grow.

Thank you