Why Talk Now about the Future of Museum Collections?

Australia's vast collections of biological, natural history, ethnographic, and social-historical materials remain largely disconnected from each other and from the public. Connecting these distributed collections, currently dispersed in local, state, national, and global locales, is critically important to generate new knowledge for national and global benefit. The vision of making these collections accessible at scale, alongside innovative methodologies, and technologies of connection, has been the subject of discussion since the 1980s but has been hampered by institutional, geographic, and disciplinary silos and under-resourcing. In this article, we make an argument for a national research program that could enable the type of knowledge generation needed for a likely tumultuous twenty-first century. The Australian Museum and Galleries Association (AMAGA) report A New Conversation about Museum Research (Malde et al. 2023) has already begun to develop an argument for reimagining research collaborations so that they are aligned to shared public values. We argue that innovations in scholarship, often produced in close partnership with industry professionals, already point the way forward. What is needed now is to scale up these advancements in ways that can adequately transform the sector more broadly.

Within Australia, libraries and certain sectors of natural science collections have made significant advances through collaboration and national coordination; however, these developments are not connected to broader collecting domains. Museums, and the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector more generally, have grappled with significant financial and social challenges over the last 20 years. Historically, museums have a long history of engaging with social and ecological issues and acting as mediators between “the public, government, media, policy-makers, and professionals” (Witcomb 2003). In more recent years, the sector has been influenced by the politics and theory of decoloniality and Indigenization (Beltz 2021), the realities of environmental disaster (Emmerling et al. 2021) and the ethics and politics of collecting (Knell 2004; Thomas 2016). Indigenous peoples in Australia have challenged museums to address their colonial legacies, demanding greater engagement, repatriation of certain objects and a central place in management of Indigenous collections, including engaging Indigenous knowledge frameworks. Tighter financial circumstances (Silberberg and Lord 2013) and the rise of artificial intelligence and an increasing reliance on the digital (Winesmith and Anderson 2020) have added further pressures to a collecting sector in need of modernization and renewal. There are many examples of new physical infrastructure for museums being built in recent decades, especially for more exhibition space; however, investment in collections infrastructure (digital and physical) lags behind. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has also reminded many of the need for national coordinated policies and approaches both to respond to global and national challenges and to track national well-being.

Recognizing these issues, and the opportunities to better engage with new technologies and work with Indigenous models of care and stewardship, scholars at Deakin University and the University of Western Australia convened a meeting of museum industry professionals and academics titled “Researching the Future of Museum Collections” held at Deakin University in Melbourne, 22–24 November 2023. The organizers of the workshop (including the authors of this article) have lengthy experience working across museum collections both in Australia and internationally, and across the disciplines of museology, anthropology, history, and archaeology. We sent out invitations to professional contacts and were overwhelmed with acceptances for the event. Many others wished to attend but unfortunately could not due to limited space.

Across the three days, 55 workshop participants attended, including representatives from the academic fields of museology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, art history, anthropology, conservation, natural science, social history, and library and information technology. They were museum curators, collection managers, and professionals from most of the major state and national institutions, as well as representatives from key government funding agencies, learned academies, and industry associations. Timing of the meeting was designed to allow the participation of international researchers from Aotearoa New Zealand and from the major United Kingdom initiative Towards a National Collection (TANC). These international guests were able to share knowledge and experience from similar research and projects designed to harness national collections for public benefit in their respective national contexts.

The intention of the workshop was to begin a nationwide conversation about the future use of museum collections and their potential transformation from being currently perceived as a costly storage problem to becoming a valued national asset. Key messages arising from the workshop were that, first, changed practices were needed to overcome institutional and state silos and, second, if a national approach was not developed, museum collections and practice would stagnate, being unable to adapt to the hyper-connected social, cultural, and ecological worlds, and social needs of the twenty-first century. There was also a commonly expressed need from Australian Indigenous colleagues, and others, for the sector to go beyond current calls for “decolonization” of museums and collections to focus on the generation and application of new frameworks and practices that build upon distinctively Australian advancements influenced by Indigenous ontologies. As expressed by Yuwaalaraay museum anthropologist Jilda Andrews (Andrews 2024: 13), “we are in position to re-frame museums, from sites of ongoing colonization and dispossession to sites of cultural strength with the potential to shape and inform stronger, intercultural futures.” John Carty from the South Australian Museum similarly argued for a transformed sector that celebrated and built upon the unique ontologies of Indigenous Australia.

The principal research question addressed by the workshop participants and discussed in this article is, therefore, “How can Australia's collections be used to help prepare for Australia's future in a rapidly changing era?” Further, how can we change current disciplinary knowledge-management systems to permit new cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural understandings of collections? How can the public harness the images, audio-visual materials, manuscripts, and objects held in collections for personal and community benefit? And how can digital technologies and artificial intelligence be directed to help connect dispersed collections for national benefit?

Australia's Collections

Australia's collections are vast, distributed, and diverse. They include works of art; botanical, faunal, geological, and paleontological specimens; First Nations ethnographic materials; archaeological items; photographs, social history objects, and all their related collection documentation and associated archives. They also include cultural materials from neighboring Oceanic countries such as Papua New Guinea and Fiji, and Asian countries such as Indonesia and India, as well as from North and South America, Africa, and Europe.

Held in local, state, national, and international settings, both private and public, these collections reflect who we are, our history, environment, and our distinct place in the world. Taken together these collections form what we have tentatively termed our “national knowledge estate,” having the potential to contribute to a more informed society, new scientific and other knowledge, and our collective identity as Australians. These collections also have the potential to enable new research to tackle global concerns, such as the legacies of colonialism, biodiversity loss, and the impacts of climate change.

Having their intellectual and ideological roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Australian museum collections bring with them practices and technologies that have undergone significant challenge. The collection of Australian Indigenous ethnographic materials, for example, was initially positioned within the formation of natural history collecting, with its own foundations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the corresponding global expansion of European hegemony. The collections generated were therefore shaped by theoretical perspectives, including hierarchies of race and technologies of taxonomic classification, that largely echoed Western European understandings of the world but which have since been thoroughly critiqued and largely rejected.

This legacy has nonetheless continued to influence contemporary museum practice. As cogently described by Hannah Turner in her Cataloguing Culture Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation (2020) the generic practices of classification, as well as the technologies of collection organizations such as the ledger, the card catalog, the punch card, and eventually the database, have each carried with them particular ways of understanding the world. Practice that frames objects as part of compartmentalized and fragmentary worldviews has been disrupted by decades of scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities (Byrne et al. 2011; Ingold 2011), as well as in ecology (Chambers and Gillespie 2000). The workshop participants recognized the need to introduce new approaches to collections that break down disciplinary silos and, as one participant commented, “introduce new approaches that challenge the orthodoxies grounded in 200–300 years of enlightenment history.”

The Problem

The Australian Government's National Research Infrastructure Roadmap (2021) recently identified collections as being critically important. Two national collection aggregators, the Atlas of Living Australia, managed through the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and Trove, run by the National Library of Australia, have each attracted significant government funding. However, across the nation existing investment has been fragmented, and funding so far has tended to support science collections rather than collections associated with the humanities and technology. This has largely maintained institutional and disciplinary silos and left collections practices unchallenged. Within each institution, disciplinary boundaries and separate departmental databases continue to prevent discoverability across natural and cultural collections. Key archival and contextual information held in institutional archives and across institutions is also not easily connected to objects or made discoverable. In addition, state and federal institutions continue to operate independently, while local collections are largely left to museum industry networks to support, with some state government assistance.

Despite growing recognition of the importance of transdisciplinary work between science and the humanities, and arts and social sciences, and recognition of Indigenous ontologies, Australia's collections remain trapped in silos. Access is also a problem: despite collections being in the public realm, most Australians—from the research community to Indigenous communities and the wider public—cannot easily access them. Databases rarely connect across institutions and only in rare instances are they wholly accessible to the public through online platforms. Where online collections exist, they often contain only the barest of information or a curated subset. Additionally, there are thousands of objects and specimens for which we have little information on their provenance—hence they remain invisible, understudied, and languishing in museum collection stores. All this means that the nation does not know what data resources it has in its collections.

We are at a critical moment in a post-pandemic society facing unprecedented social, ecological, and digital challenges and opportunities, such as the use of artificial intelligence. Collections contain essential resources to help Australians address these challenges, given they contain critical and trusted data essential to understanding our environment, climate, society, and history. To prepare these collections for the future, fundamental research is urgently required, to lay the foundation for investment in people and collections to implement a national, coordinated, and strategic approach to collections for future generations.

There is a risk that Australia will fail to realize this opportunity. While Australia has the potential to provide international leadership, we currently lag behind other countries in terms of cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional approaches to collections. If addressed at scale, with a national coordinated approach, Australia could be a global leader in how collections are made findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (the FAIR principles) in this period of digital transformation (Wilkinson et al. 2016). A key aspect of this in a settler-colonial society like Australia is positioning First Nations knowledge at the forefront of approaches to understanding, managing, and using collections. The National Research Infrastructure Roadmap has been criticized for failing to “elevate the need for a NRI strategy that recognises the value of Indigenous knowledge and engagement to a formal recommendation” (Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering 2021: 2). This means applying this knowledge across collections in Australia and influencing how museums around the world that hold Indigenous collections can reconnect these materials to communities in Australia. This would exemplify principles of ethical stewardship and appropriate governance and demonstrate innovative models of care for collections both in communities and institutions (see Decker 2015). In summary, there is an urgent need for university researchers, collecting institutions, and communities across Australia to collaborate to overhaul the ways Australia's collections are managed and make them accessible to enable their use by all.

Relational Approaches

The conceptual approach needed to guide the development of future research in this domain is already emergent in the form of relational approaches. We define this relational approach as an understanding that collections arise “out of a dialectical entwining of the social and the material, as well as personal and professional relationships” (Bell 2017) and that knowledge is generated via relations rather than relatum alone. A central premise of relational models is that entities (both objects and people) emerge from and thus acquire substance, meaning, and value through the relations in which they are enmeshed. Coming to similar conclusions about the best use of data, information technology and digital humanities, scholars have been moving toward these relational, connected approaches to collections, archives, and their documentation for some time now. This work has also reconceptualized collections as field sites for knowledge discovery and generation via an understanding of their expansive relationships, rather than as simple repositories of knowledge. Similar findings from the United Kingdom's TANC project The Congruence Engine emphasize that collections are social machines, hence a national collection cannot be created by technological infrastructure alone—rather, resources are needed for “staff, training and long-term skills development” (Boon 2022: 37–38).

In Australia, Indigenous scholarship and activism—buoyed by postcolonial and decolonial approaches to collections—have persistently challenged the categories used by museums and questioned their assumed authority. This important work has drawn attention to the tendency toward relational ontologies among First Nations (and Indigenous communities more generally) and has influenced the formation of new appreciations within anthropological and archaeological materials (Glass 2014; Porr 2018). This work has shown how knowledge exists within a set of relationships involving human, nonhuman, and other entities, and is rooted in and responsible to Country (environment/homeland). The aim, as Palawa scholar Lauren Tynan (2021) explains, is to build a stronger relationality between entities, “focusing on the relationships, rather than the objects.” Research among Australian Aboriginal communities has therefore presented a major rethinking of how museum collections might be classified, used, and cared for into the future (Andrews 2022; Carty 2019; Gibson 2020). This has led to further experimentations in new “models of care” with potential to inform real-world changes in practices of conservation, access, storage, and responsibility across the sector (Gibson 2019; Hamilton 2017; Price 2023).

This work has also drawn attention to the need to support the often demanding work of reconnecting (often patchily documented) collections with present-day people and communities. Writing about contemporary Native American engagements with museum objects across multiple North American institutions, Abenaki scholar Margaret Bruchac (2018) has described the importance of allowing communities and the public to “cross-walk” through archives and collections and “to track objects and their related stories (even the false or fishy stories)” through the locales and cultural groups represented in collections (Bruchac 2018: 183). The hope of this methodology is that new knowledge might be generated through a questioning of distributed collections and archives and through an enabling of people to discuss, research, and ponder novel relationships between objects, people, and places.

Research of this type can only occur, however, if collections data from multiple institutions is shared with public interest communities, who are then enabled to make sense of the linkages using their highly specialized cultural expertise. As recent work on Australian collections held in the United Kingdom (Nugent and Sculthorpe 2018; Sculthorpe et al. 2021) has shown, input from these communities can resolve mysteries surrounding object provenance, provide further information on an item's historical meaning, and help us think through a changing social and ecological context (Andrews 2021; Smith 2022).

The logistics of linking and interrogating this all-encompassing data held in disparate catalogs presents significant challenges that are not solved by the proliferation of digitization and online projects alone. These initiatives have not, as M. Jones (2021) shows, alleviated the disconnection of distributed collections knowledge. Separate documentation systems have developed, managed by distinct and professionalized staff who continue to work within institutional and disciplinary silos. It is recognized by those working in both the digital and nondigital domains that there is a need to rethink current practice, focus less on individual objects or institutional collections and more on the rich stories and interconnected resources that lie at the heart of contemporary, plural, participatory, relational museums. Experimental ethnographies through digital and nondigital means are demonstrating that collections are profoundly relational, and this new relational perspective is helping to chart new directions for work in museums and the wider discipline: to realize the generative power of a connected, national knowledge estate that traverses boundaries and is polyvocal. Replicating this at scale, however, remains a significant challenge.

The Digital Reality

In 2023, the reality in Australia is that—except for sectors of natural sciences collections—few museums have systematically provided online access to the totality of their collections. Art museums, usually with smaller collections, at state and national levels have provided access to basic data about their collections but even these lack the detailed provenance and historical information that facilitates research. Some state museums, however, have no online catalogs, providing only smaller curated collections of selected objects under themes or object types. University museums generally do better, such as the Chau Chak Wing Museum (University of Sydney), which has its inventory data available with selected images, as does the Anthropology Museum at the University of Queensland. The University of Melbourne is currently building major new infrastructure across its collections. Digital transparency of and accessibility to Australia's collections therefore remain significant concerns.

Earlier investment and interest in building Australia's collections presence online in the early 2000s seems to have waned somewhat in the past decade. As M. Jones and A. Piper (2024) demonstrate in their review essay on the state of digital history in Australia, tools and projects initiated by museum digitization projects before 2015 remain dominant. This reliance on systems and technologies close to a decade old suggests a “lack of growth . . . and a loss of momentum” in the sector. Moreover, they argue that “technological change, continued reliance on short-term funding, and a lack of mature preservation infrastructure” indicate that the sector has taken a “backwards step” in realizing the nation's collections’ potential (Jones and Piper 2024: 202). Aging technologies, a lack of supporting infrastructure, and limited teaching and training opportunities also mean that much of the digital materials produced in the last two decades are now at risk.

In 2016, GLAM Peak obtained government funding and engaged consultants to prepare a report on digital access to collections (Jones and Peterson 2016). Their report recommended support for national aggregated platforms, the formation of regional and sector collaborative models, increased support for smaller organizations, and “examples of excellence in digital access to be identified and promoted and used to refine national standards” (Jones and Petersen 2016: 2). More recently, in 2022, AMAGA's submission to the Australian government's National Cultural Policy emphasized the need to enable the telling of First Nations stories using First Nations’ ways of working, cultivating relationships not just audiences, the need for historical “truth-telling and repatriation, and enhancing digital capabilities” (AMAGA 2022). This work remains to be done.

Collecting and preserving digital technologies such as digital media, including new digital media art, in collections faces specific problems—and solutions have proved challenging to find. As another workshop participant, Melanie Swalwell (2022), has commented, a key impediment has been “an attitudinal problem”—the belief of many that preservation of these materials seems insurmountable—and “disciplinary insularity has not helped.” Her work, funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, has shown that “forming a consortium of researchers and GLAM professionals has been an extremely effective way to approach the collection, preservation, and emulation of this at-risk media arts heritage” (Swalwell 2022: 159). These multidisciplinary teams are needed to address “wicked problems.” Swalwell has also made moves to establish a major national facility, the Australian Emulation Network, comprising 15 university and GLAM organizations from across Australia, at the sites where these digital creative and cultural collections are held. Their aim is to discover best-practice ways of preserving digital collections.

Collections are far more than “data,” but their future engagement is likely to be mediated by the digital realm. The future accessibility and discoverability of Australia's collections will be directly tied to developments in these technologies. But, as much as digitization and digital infrastructure are key to the future of collections, focusing on these alone will not be enough. New tools are being experimented with and there is considerable focus on the semantic web, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, but there is clearly a need for a new research agenda to help chart a path forward for these technological innovations. Researching a plan for Australia's collections, as one participant noted, would be “a natural prerequisite and needed before a national approach to collections coordination is attempted. It would help lay out the arguments for a national approach, why it is needed, design the guiding principles and practices for the twenty-first century and explain the benefits of a national approach.”

Collections as Research Infrastructure

Within Australia, the concept of collections as research infrastructure is not new, but its promotion has had a mixed history. The Collections Council of Australia, a national collections sector industry council, was set up and supported by the Cultural Ministers Council from 2004. The intention of the Collections Council of Australia was to work toward strategic, coordinated action and funding for museum collections. However, funding for this initiative was discontinued in 2010. Over a decade later, the National Research Infrastructure Roadmap identified that collections continued to be:

critical for advancing research discovery, developing new industries, enriching education, connecting communities to nature and science, preserving biological and cultural heritage as well as managing biosecurity and other risks for Australia . . . collections are used by researchers to investigate our natural world, society and history and increasingly offer powerful insights into threats such as climate change and natural disasters. (Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering 2021: 100)

Despite this acknowledged potential, the Roadmap also noted that Australia's collections are “currently uncoordinated at the national scale and their potential is unrealised” (Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering 2021: 100). To indicate how “uncoordinated” things are at the national level, research collections, such as at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), are funded through arrangements of state and national governments, university research grants are funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs funds collections held by the Australian War Memorial, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), which has significant Indigenous collections, is funded by the National Indigenous Australians Agency, and the major national collecting museums—such as the National Museum of Australia and the National Gallery of Australia—are funded by the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts in the federal government in Canberra.

The Australian Academy of Humanities has been working with the Australian Academy of Sciences and the Australian Academy of Social Sciences to scope the potential for a national approach to collections for the federal Department of Education. Since the demise of the Collections Council of Australia in 2010, industry leadership has failed to develop a national collections strategy (save for the science elements discussed above). National funding decisions in 2023 to further develop the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) Data Commons and the Indigenous Research Data Commons (RDC) are welcome but insufficient to address pressing needs. New mechanisms need to be explored to overcome the current barriers that prevent local, state, and national collections from being considered holistically.

All this work has identified that there are several fundamental problems that need to be addressed before the sector can work on implementing a coordinated national approach to the development of digital and nondigital infrastructure that will make Australia's collections researchable, and not just searchable, to all. Collections research infrastructure that could be either learned from or expanded upon includes numerous major initiatives at the national (table 1) and state (table 2) levels. As hugely significant as these achievements have been, fruitful cross-fertilization and coordination across these domains have so far remained elusive.

The nation's most advanced and well-known aggregator, Trove, harvests data on museum objects (such as from the National Museum of Australia), however, to date it does not give the level of provenance information or other data necessary for researching museum collections. Although Trove is a critical resource for Australian researchers generally, it does not provide the level of detail, history of collecting, and linked archival correspondence for engagement with collections that are essential for museum research purposes. Trove is also subject to the vagaries of funding, requiring costs to be covered for both essential maintenance and for developing its content further. It is required to argue its case to government regularly, rather than being considered a core business component of the library's work that requires permanent funding as part of core business.

In addition to these initiatives there have been several research projects funded by the ARC to digitally reconnect domestically and globally distributed collections of Australian First Nations material. The “Spencer & Gillen: A Journey through Aboriginal Australia” public website was developed by the Australian National University and Museums Victoria between 2009 and 2012 and digitally reassembled thousands of dispersed objects, manuscripts, images, and audio-visual materials held across Australian and international collections (Batty and Gibson 2014).¹ The Return, Renew, and Reconcile project at the Australian National University has collated data on Ancestral (human) Remains held in global museum collections and the AIATSIS Return of Cultural Property project has created its own database of collection data it has obtained from international museums. However, both of these research databases remain inaccessible to the public and offer very limited access to communities, despite public funding. Providing greater access to Indigenous collections has been impeded by a concern for Indigenous cultural property rights—when gaining explicit permissions from specific Indigenous authorities has proven difficult, holding institutions have tended to close off access. This practice has been described recently by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars as a type of “new protectionism” (Thieberger et al. 2023) that has ironically obstructed Indigenous and wider community benefits.

International Developments

Of course, Australia is not alone in its attempts to create a more networked and coordinated approach to national collections and there is a great deal the country can learn from the attempts in comparable nations. Our workshop was fortunate to hear, for example, from the TANC initiative in the United Kingdom, which was funded in 2020 with an initial investment of £18.9 million over five years to develop a major collection infrastructure project. A principal aim of TANC is “to create a unified national collection of the UK's museums, libraries, galleries, and archives to maintain global leadership in the digital humanities.” One of TANC's key partners, the British Museum, has already made headway in terms of making its collections transparent with an online collection database that provides extensive information about its holdings, allowing the global public to search via many fields (donor, collector, material, region, and more). This facility also has the capability to allow users to download search results into a spreadsheet for future reference and use. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge, two large university-based museums, have also committed to ongoing improvements to accessing collection data through systematic online databases that include images of objects.

Other important initiatives in the United Kingdom include Art UK, a cultural education charity, which brings together images and data relating to works of paintings and sculptures in United Kingdom public collections and tools for interrogating the works. Work has also been done by The Collections Trust (working with the Open Data Institute) toward data aggregation of collections. In 2021, Matt Locke, Director of Storythings and creator of the Public Media Stack pointed out, “The big mistake we've made in our public institutions over the last 10 to 15 years, as digital has gone mainstream, is we have not understood that the strategy needs to be about the health of ecosystems rather than individual products and platforms (personal communication).”

In Aotearoa New Zealand, as outlined by Conal McCarthy at the workshop, despite the highly centralized GLAM sector and initiatives such as the National Digital Forum, attempts some years ago at creating a national distributed collection system failed to realize their potential. This was due to several factors including available technology, inability to collaborate as “convergence of institutions was beyond the pale” and—since museums were funded at local, city, and national levels—extreme difficulty in justifying overall coordination as there was “no funding mechanism across the country to contribute to the greater good.” More recently, Digital New Zealand has been developed. It is a data aggregator that harnesses data from over 242 partner organizations, now holding over 30 million records relating to Aotearoa New Zealand. It includes some museum object data and enables individuals to upload personal data and create their own stories. The platform is run by the National Library of New Zealand and is funded by the New Zealand government with a focus on New Zealand-related content. It works with an application data interface that provides links to museum collections. Sources come from cultural organizations, education providers, and governments within New Zealand.

In the Netherlands, the Rijks Museum is committed to putting its collection data and images online. In January 2024, this included over 749,000 works of art (with images in high definition). Working across nation-states, the Europeana system has demonstrated an impressive coordination of collections data across state borders. As a data harvester, Europeana shares and promotes “Europe's digital cultural heritage” so that it can be “used and enjoyed by everyone for learning, for work, or just for fun.” Using a network of aggregators, it draws on collections from over 2,000 institutions and re-presents items and their related data. Moreover, this data is checked and enriched with additional information, including geo-locations, and links to other related material or datasets through associated people, places, subjects, or topics.

Initiatives in the United States include the American Art Collaborative's Linked Open Data Initiative that covers/covered 14 art museums to establish linked open data on the semantic web. Perhaps the most advanced example of an aggregated collections data system is a global approach for natural history museum collections that maps 1 billion objects from the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and the Natural History Museum in London.² Recognizing that the “historic concentration of large museums in North America and Europe can be a barrier to knowledge-sharing and perpetuates power imbalances rooted in the colonial history of museum science, there is an interest in creating a ‘global collection’ that reflects and support museums elsewhere in the world” (Johnson and Owens 2023). It seems that, like the Australian experience, mass museum closures during the COVID-19 pandemic have led many in the United States to rethink how collections can be repurposed and presented in ways that help the public.³

Developing a National Approach to Collections Knowledge

Before a national approach to collections can be formulated it will be necessary for teams of researchers across many fields of inquiry to collaboratively work with GLAM institutions and communities to co-design appropriate ways forward. Guided by the aims of (1) connecting Australia's distributed collections, from local, state, national, and global, (2) enabling all Australians to discover and use collections to change understandings of our history and Country, and (3) realizing the significant research potential of Australia's collections at a global scale, such a research initiative would set the needed prerequisites for development of a national approach. If done correctly, this foundational work could unlock the value of this vast national knowledge estate and initiate new forms of productivity in the GLAM sector for the twenty-first century.

By bringing people together to work collaboratively at scale and across institutions, common outcomes could be achieved. In essence, this work could better connect Australia's distributed collections; enable all Australians to discover, use, and reimagine these collections to change understandings of ourselves and our place in the world; and realize the potential of Australia's collections as cultural and research assets. Many workshop participants also indicated that there was a need to build bridges between different “ways of knowing.” The foundational binaries of nature/culture and European/other were identified as being particularly unhelpful ways of categorizing collections if global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, social justice and cohesion, wellness, threats to “truth” and knowledge regimes were to be met head on. While Australians generally trust their cultural institutions as sources of reliable information, in this “post-truth” era of generative content, information saturation, and misinformation, museum collections were discussed as trustworthy bodies of information that can help connect people to their place and community.

Participants at the Deakin and UWA workshop generally agreed that an ARC Centre of Excellence for Australia's Collections as National Infrastructure could help address these challenges. Through the development of innovative and collaborative methods in collections research, and working at national scale in partnership with collecting institutions and communities, it was argued that such a center could support research, develop new forms of training, and develop policies to:

The workshop participants also identified the following key areas as needing development: (1) democratization of access to collections and associated information, (2) transformation of the uses of collections, and the coordination of this information in globally distributed collections, and (3) enabling collections to be used as a national knowledge estate for researchers, communities, and global audiences. Questions driving the center's research would be:

• How can disciplinary knowledge systems be challenged to form new cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural understandings of collections for the twenty-first century and beyond?

• How can everyday Australians across the nation harness images, objects, and knowledge in collections for personal and community benefit?

• How can digital technologies and artificial intelligence help us connect dispersed collections?

By operating at a national scale, the center could provide the much-needed training pathways for GLAM professionals, PhD scholars, early career researchers, and community-based workers. Grounded in clearly articulated research objectives co-developed with industry, the center could make headway in developing a newly skilled workforce for the sector's future.

Conclusion

The finds that continue to be made accidentally or by design in museum collections elicit significant interest by the public as well as by researchers and Indigenous community members. In Queensland, diary entries of an ornithologist from 1922 held in the Queensland Museum Library helped track down the original location of the buff-breasted buffon-quail, last seen in 1924. No species of the bird had ever been photographed in the wild.⁴ In 2022, the remains of arguably the last thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) were found in a cupboard in the education department of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, after researchers found a clue in an unpublished museum report (Linnard and Sleightholme 2023; Paddle and Medlock 2023). In 2019, following the finding of a drawing in the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester, the only surviving Tasmanian kelp water container collected in 1792 on the voyage of Bruni D'Entrecasteaux was found mislabeled in a French museum as an unprovenanced object misplaced in its African collection (Leclerc-Caffarel and Servain-Riviale 2021). These examples highlight the urgent need to reconnect objects with scattered documentation within and across institutions, both within Australia and internationally.

Since the workshop in November 2023, we have continued meeting with key national and state collecting institutions toward developing a project for funding the research required to implement a national approach to collections. There is common agreement that there is an urgent need to redress the imbalance in funding that has seen national collection infrastructure for the natural sciences be supported, such as for the Atlas of Living Australia, but which has not yet provided the same level of support for collections of social history, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collections, or world cultures collections.

While individual states and museums in Australia have taken steps to make collections discoverable, and states such as Victoria and Western Australia have “collection explorers” for regional and local collections, the absence of national coordination and planning in this area means that it is urgent that we find means to overcome silos and harness collections from across the country. Without this, culturally significant collections will remain undiscoverable and unusable, disciplinary silos between “natural science” and “cultural” collections will remain, and Australia's internationally distributed cultural heritage will remain inaccessible. Collections will remain a financial liability rather than a critical national asset that the community can use to better understand their sense of place, their past, and their environment, and to use knowledge from collections to address critical problems that society now faces.

Where once Australia was a world leader in museums and technology, we have been slow to invest in collections development. A nationally coordinated path forward could provide the evidence and ideas for the transformation of collections into a large, united, public asset. Research investment is, however, urgently required to develop models that can lead toward a national digital collections infrastructure to generate innovative practices aimed at making collections transparent and discoverable—locally, nationally, and globally. This would provide, for example, increased connections between Aboriginal communities and state, national, and international collections; training of a technologically savvy new cohort of Indigenous and other museum practitioners and researchers who can work in a transdisciplinary and global manner; new understandings of the significance of Australia's collections and how they can be used as research assets, and would create new international collaborations with leading researchers around the world and between our GLAM sector and overseas institutions.

The workshop identified and repeatedly emphasized the need to work collectively and at scale to address these issues. Continuing to work in a piecemeal fashion within separate institutions was regarded as an inefficient approach that pitted organizations against each other. It was also recognized that for museum staff to devote scant current resources to new digital endeavors would require hard decisions in each institution as to what current activities should be curtailed to enable more strategic initiatives to be developed. For Australia, collections infrastructure today needs to serve distinctly different needs to that seen developing in the United Kingdom (TANC and Museum Data Service) and in Europe (Europeana). The ambition is to reconceptualize knowledge frameworks using Indigenous ontologies that enable new perspectives on all collections and provide new platforms for individuals, communities, and institutions to address truth-telling about Australia's colonial past and frame new ways of being and understanding our world in the future.