Cultural institutions warned: go digital or perish
An event taking place at Parliament House next week hosted by The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia and ABC Arts will warn the country’s cultural institutions that they must go digital “or perish”.
Katrina Sedgwick of ABC
The event, entitled Digitise or Perish will be led by NFSA CEO Michael Loebenstein, ABC Television Head of Arts Katrina Sedgwick, and two international guests: Rick Prelinger (San Francisco, USA), curator, director and cofounder of the Prelinger Library and The Internet Archive (archive.org); and former Director of the BBC’s Creative Archive project Paula Le Dieu (London, UK), Digital Director at Mozilla.
“For many years our national collective memory, preserved in archive, museum and library collections, has largely been unavailable to the public through its fragility and sheer volume. Now the digital economy promises the unlocking of these treasures,” a statement announcing the event said.
Mr Prelinger said: “Archives used to be quiet places whose reading rooms hosted few visitors beyond the occasional scholar and media researcher. But all of this has changed; empowered by online availability of historical images, sounds and documents, emergent generations and communities are interpreting history on their own terms for themselves and for society at large.
“Powerful digital tools and networks are now at our disposal — our challenge is to use them thoughtfully and towards useful ends. I find this a tremendously exciting time to be an archivist and public historian.”
Paula Le Dieu added: “The internet offers us the chance to make our public cultural institutions genuinely public. We can throw open the digital doors and allow the public to access, curate and re-use their cultural heritage to inform, shape and inspire their own cultural expression and value creation.”
ABC’s Katrina Sedgwick said the conversation is vital at a time when new models and ways to work together are being explored.
“The possibility for new kinds of collaboration and conversation between audience and institution is opening up so tantalisingly with digital technology – but how we can use these tools to create meaningful experiences and a different kind of access are still up for grabs,” she said.
The event takes place on 12 August.