Connecting Collections : Transforming Access to Museum Collections at Scale for Knowledge Generation in Australia

Australia's vast collections of biological, natural history, ethnographic, and social-historical materials remain largely disconnected from each other and from the public. Connecting these distributed collections, currently dispersed in local, state, national, and global locales, is critically important to generate new knowledge for national and global benefit. The vision of making these collections accessible at scale, alongside innovative methodologies, and technologies of connection, has been the subject of discussion since the 1980s but has been hampered by institutional, geographic, and disciplinary silos and under-resourcing. In this article, we make an argument for a national research program that could enable the type of knowledge generation needed for a likely tumultuous twenty-first century. The Australian Museum and Galleries Association (AMAGA) report A New Conversation about Museum Research (Malde et al. 2023) has already begun to develop an argument for reimagining research collaborations so that they are aligned to shared public values. We argue that innovations in scholarship, often produced in close partnership with industry professionals, already point the way forward. What is needed now is to scale up these advancements in ways that can adequately transform the sector more broadly.