Videos

Session 6C from Day 1 stream 3 'The accumulation of collections-based knowledge' By Mike Jones. Mike Jones has been involved in the GLAM sector for over a decade. In 2018 he is working on finishing his PhD at the University of Melbourne, and holds a Research Associate position at Museums Victoria, while continuing to work as an archivist, researcher, and freelance collections consultant. From Batty's image of attack ships on fire to the spider Rachael 'remembers' living outside her window, Blade Runner is replete with memory. But the vision presented is individual and anthropomorphic, limiting our conception of what is possible. At the other extreme, Star Trek's Borg are a hive mind, assimilating cultures and technologies into their collective consciousness. Here there is no privacy, no tacit knowledge, no personal expertise, nothing that is not shared. Knowledge associated with archives and museum collections is neither individualistic, nor truly collective. It accumulates over time, coalescing and accreting around things (documents, artefacts, specimens) as contexts and competing perspectives develop and change. The metaphor used by theorists from Alfred Kroeber to Donna Haraway is the coral reef, moving away from the organismic toward the ecological to better capture the complexity and heterogeneity of the world. This paper highlights the socio-cultural knowledge that accumulates around and between archives and museum collections, drawing on ethnographic and anthropological artefacts held by institutions around the world. Using the metaphor of the reef, it will argue that we need to be more aware of the relational, interconnected, community-specific nature of collections-based knowledge. The alternative, in our rapidly-changing digital world, will be the loss of key context, like bleaching on the reef, or tears in rain. Recorded by Alan Milne in Astral 3, Crown Perth, Burswood WA, on Wednesday 26 September 2018 as part of ASA 2018 'Archives in a Blade Runner Age- Identity & Memory, Evidence & Accountability'