Catherine McDermott talks to Nick Richardson, Head of Collections and Preservation at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Australia’s national museum of film, TV, video games, digital culture and art.
Thank you so much for talking to us Nick. Will you tell ICOM UK members something about your museum?
Unique in the museum landscape in Australia, ACMI celebrates the past, present and future of the moving image and its profound impact as it transports, challenges and entertains people of all ages and backgrounds, right across the globe.
Established by the State Government in 2002, and situated in the heart of Melbourne in Federation Square, it plays a vital part in establishing Melbourne as a global cultural destination driven by creativity and innovation. ACMI is the most successful museum of its kind in the world attracting over 1.5m visitors to its site in 17/18 and nearly 500,000 visitors to its touring exhibitions nationally and internationally. The collection holds 250,000 items dating back to 1896 and is the second largest audio visual archive in Australia.
How have you and your institution been dealing with lockdown in Melbourne?
ACMI, as a museum, was actually closed to the public for redevelopment and renewal at the time of the imposition of the lockdown in Melbourne. Prior to lockdown, the re-opening was scheduled for mid-2020 but we are now obviously delayed. Construction on-site has continued and the organisation is now looking at how the museum will operate as restrictions begin to ease
ACMI moved quickly to provide an online public and education offer including a programme of virtual screenings, online resources for parents and teachers, skills workshops led by industry professionals, talks, retrospectives and more.
For the collections team, we have taken this opportunity to clear some backlogs and consolidate and refine descriptive and technical data within the collection management system. While onsite and offsite digitisation halted, at the time of initial lockdown we had a backlog of 500 digital assets awaiting quality control and a number of digital preservation projects about to commence which required scoping and project plans. We have used this time to clear the backlog and establish projects plans and procedures for the preservation of key 1990s Australian videogames and the early history of Australian video art.
In recent weeks we have also commenced the move of 40,000 collection items from one storage facility to another using external contractors. This has required the observance of all necessary physical distancing protocols but has been assisted by the relatively low level of activity across the whole site.
The collection team has engaged with regional and metropolitan TV and radio broadcasters to promote nostalgic titles from the collection recently digitised. This has proven to be extremely popular (especially those titles showing holiday activities and travel) with over 300,000 social media connections in the space of several weeks.
How is your practice continuing to develop through this situation? Any good practice to share with ICOM UK? Any things that did work so well?
The organisation’s ICT deserve the highest of accolades for seamlessly moving a staff of over 130 to a working from home environment with almost no disruption to services. This has enabled the vast majority of the organisation to continue to function both across internal business units and with external stakeholders. Redeployment of some front-of-house staff has enabled activities like the clearing of QC backlogs to be completed and online training portals have provided an opportunity to upskill.
The organisation’s Executive and Human Resource’s teams have supported and informed the staff at all times and we have experienced relatively little staff loss.
For me, the big take-away is the improvements in meeting procedures. Online meetings are laser focussed around the clarification and resolution of issues and a great sense of comradery prevails. This pause in exhibition install has also provided an opportunity to fine tune exhibition delivery platforms, most notably our ambitious museum operating system (XOS) which will provide visitors with an unprecedented level of interaction with the exhibition.
For the collection team specifically, it has provided an opportunity for research and procedural improvement often hard to find time to undertake in the course of a normal working week. We have also been able to quantify the resources required to clear backlogs which will be useful in forward planning for resourcing.
I think post COVID19 we will see that the combination of face-to-face office work and remote work will be integrated into the regular practice of the organisation. It is likely all meetings will have a “dial-in” component and flexibility around remote work integrated
Have things been moving online or changing shape?
One of the cornerstones of ACMI’s vision is to make our collection as publicly accessible as possible. We see preservation activities as a way to create access; for too long archives have seen access outcomes as the secondary consideration. We want our archive to be a living archive used and re-used by academics, artists, students and the general public. Clearly an online portal to our content is vital to realising this endeavour and we have been actively pushing content online. But we also want to provide context to this material, what is the provenance, why have we collected it, what is the story behind the object. Aside from online access the biggest change recently has been in the way we are cataloguing our holdings. We are continuing to provide a descriptive narrative to the item and using Library of Congress subject headings but we are also providing sequence lists for much of our film holdings to make scenes within films more discoverable. This has seen the collection rapidly evolve from just an educational resource to a collection with much broader appeal.
After the pandemic is under control what changes are you/museum planning/ hoping for?
During the re-development of our permanent exhibition, considerable thought has gone into the pre- and post-visit online offer ACMI can provide. I think the pandemic has made us even more closely examine the potential of our virtual presence and I believe our online offers with be strengthened as a result of this period. I am hopeful that the relaxation of copyright restrictions for online content during this period will demonstrate to government and rightsholders that sensible, risk assessed online offers can continue without commercial or intellectual harm and that this, in turn, might see further changes to legislation.
I think as an organisation we have learnt to work effectively and collaboratively even while doing so remotely. I am hopeful we will take these lessons on board when we return to our offices and continue to finesse and improve what is already an amazingly supportive work environment. Finally, I believe we will examine what role museums and art institutions can play in times of community crisis, what we did well and how we should improve and prepare for future challenges
Thank you, Nick, for sharing your experiences and ICOM UK sends you all our best wishes.
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