It's that time of year when councils and state governments start to think about saving money, and inevitably they look at their GLAM services (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), and wonder if they can make some cost savings
which these days that usually means letting people go, which inevitably means a loss of expertise locally, and you can't just replace that expertise with a succession of interns.
Sure, they may be good technically, and some are very good, but they don't have the experience or indeed the social network that your now down sized archivist or conservator has built up over the years.
And when you complain you inevitably get comments along the lines of 'you can get it all on YouTube nowadays' or 'who needs libraries, Amazon provides a better service', comments that reveal complete ignorance on the part of our local legislators of what the GLAM services deliver.
I've worked in universities, I've worked in cultural institutions, and for ten years after I retired I volunteered with the National Trust on a collections documentation project, and now, because I like messing about with old documents, artefacts and computers, I'm cataloguing the historic book collection at Stanley Athenaeum, as well as the usual bits and pieces - first level IT support mostly - on the side.
The Athenaeum functions as a family history resource for the area and we get visitors from across Australia and New Zealand trying to trace how their forebears ended up where they did.
We're all volunteers. Quite a few of us won't see seventy again.
And inevitably, as we all get older, some of us will give up due to ill health, or just getting too old to do it any more - we have a continual struggle to attract and retain committed volunteers.
Some of us know about local and family history, and can coax valuable information out of both Ancestry and the Public Records office with ease, some of us have a some sort of a heritage cum museum background and bring those skill to the table, and some of us are just interested. We're all experts in our own way, but we'd all admit that we have gaps in our skills and our knowledge.
And this is where having access to a funded resource like our local museums is invaluable, often to simply talk to one of the professional archivists or conservators.
Yes, it's true sometimes I use YouTube to find out how best to do something, but then we all do that, these days - even my GP does it, like when she says in the midst of a consultation "I'm not sure, I'll just check Google".
And as heritage services become more and more attenuated, and increasingly shift to a volunteer based model, local professional core institutions become more and more valuable for the support role they provide as a local centre of expertise and the specialist facilities they can provide, and indeed for providing continuity, given the inevitable churn among the volunteer community (and the loss of skills that goes with the churn).
And that's something you can't just get from a YouTube video...
