New support is about producing and preserving arts content
Increasingly, artists are developing work that will end up on a screen of some kind. This may require them to learn new skills and move between new and old publishing and presentation formats – books, web, live performance and mobile phones.
Digital technology is also causing us to review how we preserve and extend the life and reach of arts content through promoting access to digital archives.
We understand that existing support infrastructure needs to evolve in line with new practice, both to encourage artists to learn from and collaborate with the broader digital content industries, and also to ensure the preservation of arts content in digital form.
Here are a few of the ways we can help:
An artwork can have a life beyond its venue or moment. Recording and sharing the experience with online communities should be encouraged, not forbidden. By giving a new audience a taste for your work they are more likely to want to attend it in real life.
Partnerships with broadcasters and distributors are brokering relationships where live performance can be screened on Television, in Cinemas, on the internet and on mobile. New attitudes to Copyright are resulting in more recordings of live performances and old archives being unlocked for broader distribution and even remixing.
We are talking to a variety of agencies and organisations who are seeking to unlock archives to use on digital platforms. A common standard and shared resources could be a solution, but the biggest barrier is copyright.
National Library Australia are working on a variety of archival initiatives, aggregating collections which are stored digitally with partners elsewhere. This makes it easier to open access to collections without negotiating individual rights.
Opening Australia's Archives is a project stemming from the Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom conference (with Keynote by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University Law School, founder of Creative Commons and the Free Culture Movement). So far two national and five state capital meetings have been held to:
* identify the benefits and disadvantages of providing open access to cultural collections;
* document models of access currently being used by Australia’s collecting institutions;
* identify barriers to providing broader access to collections;
* gauge the level of interest in a coordinated sector-wide approach to access policies and practices; and
* develop a plan for improving government policy on access to cultural material.
Collections Australia are running a forum and masterclass with ANAT in December.
Further updates will be made as available.
Image: "Mitchell Whitelaw: Visible Archive Series Browser" 2009
