Regulating Communities: Strategies for an Open Museum Sector

Questions of (non-physical) opening and closing in the sector of galleries, libraries, archives and museums (the so-called GLAM sector) have become increasingly fraught. Framed – and inflamed – by competing discourses of cosmopolitanism, preservation and post-colonial exploitation, the relative merits of openness and closure are the subject of often-heated debate. At the same time, the practice of digitizing the holdings of the GLAM sector has blurred the very distinction between what is open and what is closed. The idea of digitizing tangible items held in GLAM institutions seems to have commenced with the concern for the preservation of fragile items. But it has now taken on a life of its own, driven by a diverse range of motives, including conservation, documentation of GLAM sector holdings, broadening access and the wish on the part of this generally cash-strapped sector to raise revenue by controlling the intellectual property rights to reproduce digital versions of their holdings. Another increasingly important driver for the digitization of holdings, especially by museums, has been the rising number of claims from parts of the post-colonial world for the return of cultural items relocated to the museums of the imperial powers during the colonial period. This has prompted a practice of returning tangible items while retaining an intangible digitized version. This disputed practice brings together debates around the legitimacy and the meaning of openness and closure in the GLAM sector. Is it legitimate to treat all holdings of the GLAM sector as open to all? Does the process of digitization, and its implicit creation of intellectual rights over the digitized artefact, open museums or close them?