Why do we need GLAM Labs? – Paula Bray

What does an innovation "lab" look like inside a library – and why do other cultural institutions like galleries, archives and museums need them now?

On 1 May 2025, on the cusp of launching SLV LAB, Ana Tiquia and Paula Bray unpacked how labs help galleries, libraries, archives and museums keep pace with fast-moving technologies, by creating space for curiosity, experimentation and shared learning.

Paula reflects on lessons from early digital work at the Powerhouse Museum and six years leading the State Library of NSW’s DX Lab – where inviting technologists and artists in, documenting experiments, and publishing openly helped ideas travel beyond one organisation.

Transcript

0:00:00 - 0:00:03
Ana Tiquia
So I just thought we could have a chat about GLAM Labs.0:00:03 - 0:00:05
Paula Bray
I love chatting about labs.0:00:05 - 0:00:23
Ana Tiquia
I thought you might [laughs]. So it's the 1st of April and we are getting very close to launching SLV LAB, which is the new prototyping and innovation lab for the State Library [Victoria]. And I just wanted to check in and ask how you're feeling about this.0:00:23 - 0:00:40
Paula Bray
I'm super excited. You know, this is a moment in time for the library. But it's also... labs are a special thing. They're a privilege. And, you know, you really need to be celebrating if you're working in a sort of lab environment.0:00:40 - 0:00:46
Ana Tiquia
I guess I wanted to start by asking, what is a GLAM lab and why does a State Library need one?0:00:46 - 0:02:00
Paula Bray
Good question. Advanced and emerging technologies, as we know, are moving so fast, and cultural heritage institutions aren't necessarily quick to adapt and move quickly. You know, we've got centuries of history behind us. We have structures that are very predetermined. And with the advanced technologies that are impacting the world, we need to be at the cusp of understanding them.We need to be using them. We need to be providing access to information for our audiences about them. Because where are you going to go to in this world to find out information from a trusted organisation? You know, that's the role of a library, to provide access to information, to gain new knowledge. So I think we have a responsibility to be at least understanding these technologies.But even better, if we can allow our staff to have space to explore how they could benefit audiences, libraries, collections and access.0:02:00 - 0:02:13
Ana Tiquia
You have a really rich history in GLAM and innovation labs in the cultural sector. So wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how you came to that and what those labs looked like?0:02:13 - 0:04:04
Paula Bray
I think it really did start back at the Powerhouse Museum. You know, we had a really forward thinking team. We were under the leadership of Seb Chan, Director & CEO of ACMI now. But we were willing to try things. We weren't necessarily calling the work that we did under the moniker of a lab, but we realised that with digitisation, you can do all the stuff, you can get all the assets, you can put all the metadata in your systems.But what if the people can't get access to them? You know, it's about what happens next. And we were sort of at the cusp of the web 2.0 era, you know, making collections accessible. So we were quick to try things. And I think that established a bit of a practice for me. I think the other thing that was really important back then was the importance of sharing the knowledge behind the work that you undertake within a cultural heritage institution.So we published a lot and we shared a lot of information at conferences about the role of existing and emerging technologies and what's possible. You know, that's a privilege to be working in that way. And from there, I was lucky enough to get the role of DX Lab leader at the State Library of New South Wales, which was Australia's first dedicated team in a cultural heritage institution to set up a lab.And again, absolute privilege to be working in an experimental space for six years. Small team. There was three of us, but it was actually a library wide team. Even though we had our own sort of team and brand. Many of the staff were involved in DX lab experiments.0:04:04 - 0:04:27
Ana Tiquia
Now, I know that SLV Lab is going to be a bit different to DX lab in a few different ways. But I guess when we talk about GLAM Labs, people imagine certain things. So they might be thinking, is it a makerspace or is it a fab lab or something like that? Could you explain what, in your experience, GLAM labs, in libraries or in other museums or collecting organisations, look like and do?0:04:27 - 0:05:22
Paula Bray
Oh, look, I think each lab is different, and that's based on the organisation and its needs, which is great. You know, you wouldn't want them to all be exactly the same. So I think that's important to note that labs might be a process for an institution, or they might actually be a dedicated team. It might just be a way of thinking. No two labs are the same, which is good.In the practice that we're bringing to State Library Victoria, slightly different to DX lab in that it's actually going to be a library wide initiative, bringing people together to look at new ways of doing things through new processes and then publishing them. They're the main three things that we are interested in here at the library. I think that brings around new skills, new ways of doing things, but really showing what's possible.0:05:22 - 0:05:48
Ana Tiquia
One of the things I really loved about your work at DX lab was that you brought not only staff from across your teams to engage in experimentation, but you did a lot of inviting in. I know that you had a really well-established, visiting technologist program, and you had a number of artists as well as data visualisation specialists or designers or engineers that came and worked with you.Could you share a little bit more about that and what you felt the library gained from that?0:05:48 - 0:08:27
Paula Bray
Yeah, sure. You know, when we were setting up the lab, we acknowledged that we wouldn't always have the answers or necessarily all the skills, you know, in using new existing and advanced technologies. So we felt that the lab was a privilege, but we needed to explore how others would use the library and its assets. So it was really important that we brought people in to work with us and to actually learn from them as well, to gain skills, because, you know, things move fast and people bring these fabulous skills that you wouldn't necessarily have access to.And other staff from outside of digital can learn from those skills as well. We sort of had a range of different levels of programs. We had a bigger fellowship and I started researching fellowships, innovation fellowships in Australian cultural heritage institutions. I think this was potentially around 2014 and I couldn't find many. I found lots of fellowships from cultural heritage institutions, but I couldn't find a specific innovation fellowship.So I thought, well, there's a gap there and we can change that. So we were lucky enough to get funding from the foundation at the library, and we set up, I think, it was the first digital innovation fellowship in a cultural heritage institution called the DX Lab Fellowship, creative title there. And that was a sort of yearly to 18 month program.We've seen through that program some pretty great initiatives. We had locals, we had internationals. The first fellowship team that we worked with was Elissa Lee and Adam Hinshaw, who explored search in the catalog and developed a product that is called Unstacked. And to this day, what are we, you know, 11 years later, they're still going with that product and they've put it in a lot of cultural heritage, institution and university libraries.So, you know, for me, that is success, right? From allowing people to explore with a collection through to today. If you'd said to me at the time, the first fellowship you're going to allow to happen at the library is going to end up with a product that's still going in 2025. I wouldn't have believed you.0:08:27 - 0:08:33
Ana Tiquia
That's true Unstacked really has traveled, hasn't it? We've had it here at State Library. Yeah, I saw it last year at...0:08:33 - 0:08:35
Paula Bray
State Library of Queensland.0:08:35 - 0:08:58
Ana Tiquia
State Library of South Australia. Yep. Yeah. Amazing project. In terms of showing what's possible, one of the things I've always really admired about your practice is what comes across is a real love and passion for both the experimental but also the practice of experimentation in cultural organisations. How would you describe your relationship to experimentation?0:08:58 - 0:10:41
Paula Bray
Look, I've been thinking about that a lot. I didn't necessarily finish art school with my photography degree and go, oh, I know I'm going to run labs. It just... I've been very privileged and lucky to be in situations where that has evolved. But when I look back on even my photographic passions, practice, I'm drawn to the experimentation.So even when I was at art school, I was really curious about, you know, the chemicals and how they would work. And I wanted to challenge, you know, the normal process involved. So, you know, I used to be spraying, develop a painting, trying every sort of thing I could. So I think inherently, I've been really drawn to photographers that really push the boundaries with the technology.A lot of, you know... I've bought some photography from global artists, and they're all... when I look back on them, they're very experimental. So I think it's something that I'm quite comfortable with. And I acknowledge that not everyone is. It's actually a skill you either become used to through practice or you're sort of curious.And I think for me, it's the curiosity that's driven part of my work within cultural heritage. It's like, well, that technology that does that, but what if it could do this? And so I think, I think having that, that value of curiosity is actually really important in terms of a practice.0:10:41 - 0:11:08
Ana Tiquia
I feel like in GLAM organisations we're often talking about curiosity being one of those kind of key values for our audiences and for our visitors or patrons, the sense of inspiring curiosity and wonder. But it's interesting tohear you talk about curiosity being such a key value for yourself as a practitioner in this space. And it does make me wonder how often we invite curiosity in as staff in these organiaations too.0:11:08 - 0:12:12
Paula Bray
Look I think, you know it's hard. Everyone, you know, wants to get more resources and more funding and therefore you sort of practice of what people call business as usual drives a bit of churn, right? You've got to deliver all this stuff and that's you've got to keep the lights on, you've got to open the doors. And that's well known,And understood, right? But because society is moving so fast with technology, we have to... we can't just do that. We can't just open the doors. We've got to be looking at how our audiences want to get access to things, to use our spaces. Search our collections. So we may not know the answers to all of these questions.So we have to allow a little bit of space to speak to them, ask them, be curious about them. So we sort of need to embed that curiosity in our work.0:12:13 - 0:12:24
Ana Tiquia
What would you say we lose as cultural heritage organisations if we're not actively experimenting or supporting experimentation?0:12:24 - 0:12:35
Paula Bray
It's again, "what if?" If you're not allowing some sort of form of space to explore what your users want, how would you know what you're missing?0:12:35 - 0:12:56
Ana Tiquia
What have you found has really enabled people tofeel safe, to experiment. I was just talking to a colleague the other day about the fact that collecting organisations are typically quite conservative. You know,conservative and sometimes for good reason. We are custodians of something very important, very valuable.0:12:56 - 0:12:57
Paula Bray
Absolutely.0:12:57 - 0:13:20
Ana Tiquia
State or national collections. Collective memory archives. Considering the kind of the weight of what we often, you know, are caretakers of or have to preserve or conserve, what have you found helps people to feel like they can experiment ins afer or kind of, more playful ways.0:13:20 - 0:14:46
Paula Bray
Yeah. Look, I think you've touched on it there. It's a playful space, but it's got to be sort of a less hierarchical thing when people come together. It has to be that everyone feels comfortable to put forward an idea and that that idea is valuable to be explored. So I think creating sort of a neutral, less hierarchical space for people to come together and allowing that time. We used to say to staff at DX lab, I'm really sorry, but we're going to have to take your whole day to start ideating for this thing.And even the fact that we had to apologise, that we would expect them to take a whole day to spend with us, was challenging, but sort of flipping that mindset of the more time that you spend together in the beginning, exploring all the ideas in a you a very neutral, safe space is really important because that ends up with the best results because everyone feels that they've had a part of that journey.And I think that's part of the practice that we've put in here, too, particularly around the initiative Code Club, which was an idea from a staff member which has gone on to be very successful for a range of different reasons here. But that's a very neutral space. Everyone feels comfortable to add something to the dialog.0:14:46 - 0:15:24
Ana Tiquia
When I think about Code Club, I think one of the reasons it works so well is it's peer-to-peer, It's a peer led, self-organising entity in a way. You know, it's been staff initiated, it's staff run. And thinking about your reflections on hierarchies, well, I feel like those peer-to -peer environments allow you to also build stronger levels of relation, stronger levels of trust in ways that perhaps the kind of the top down structures that we often kind of inhabit in our organisations don't necessarily sometimes allow for the same behaviours or trust building.0:15:24 - 0:15:56
Paula Bray
Yeah. Well, I mean, they're not new ways of working. There's been labs around forever, right? But I think in cultural heritage institutions, allowing a little bit of that space to occur is maybe a little bit new. It's very much that peer-to-peer, as you say, and, and looking at the benefits that come from that. It's not a huge amount of time.It's also that time to come together to enjoy a bit of freedom. But the benefits that you get from that are really valuable.0:15:57 - 0:16:07
Ana Tiquia
For those who are less familiar with labs like GLAM Labs or labs as a whole. I was wondering if you could share any favourite labs that you might have?0:16:07 - 0:17:36
Paula Bray
Absolutely. So top of the list, you can't go past New York Public Library Labs who sadly, are no longer with us. But, you know, they were at the forefront of some really innovative work. And they led the way, really, with the British Library labs, too. They were the sort of benchmark for DX Lab. You know, we really admired the work that that they did.They shared, you know, there's still products out there today that are using New York Public Library Labs code. What an amazing gift. You know, access to information to gain new knowledge, new forms of knowledge so that audiences benefit from access to the collections. Look, I did some research back in 2024 to look at which labs still exist.From the work we did in 2019 for the book Open a GLAM Lab, and look, I was pretty pleased to see them. A lot of them are still going. But then I started thinking, well, does it mean you're not successful if you don't exist? And I'm not sure that is true. I think labs are there at certain moments in time to do things.So I think the fact that New York Public Library Labs doesn't exist anymore, yes, it's a shame. But, you know, they did incredible work during that time to transform how others could think about access to knowledge.0:17:36 - 0:17:44
Ana Tiquia
And as you mentioned, you know, being built upon open source or a knowledge sharing kind of ethos, we're all still building on that work today.0:17:44 - 0:19:45
Paula Bray
Exactly. You know, it's not too far removed from the work that I did back then to the same kind of structure and the way in which we kind of work today in labs. You know, you do more experiments, fewer sort of longer term initiatives. And hopefully just one really big year-long initiative. So, you know, the number of experiments you can pump through the better.But not losing sight of 'can that scale?', 'How do we implement that?', 'How can we what we found here is going to really change the way that audiences get access to our collections. How do we implement that into the system? I recently had to do a presentation for a program that I was part of, and I looked back at all of the sort of successful digital innovations, experiments, products and services and I wondered why they were successful.And there was a pattern emerging from this research I did on that practice, which was some things we thought were amazing, didn't necessarily scale or become as good as we thought they would. Some things which were potentially less exciting, but important, really hit the mark, right? So never assume is one thing I've learned, but also having really good leadership, trust and support to actually embrace this way of working is actually the thing that was equal across all those successful, pieces of work. Working in digital and cultural heritage.You know, there has to be that leadership for digital production, but there has to be that trust and support to allow the teams the space to actually be curious and to learn.0:19:45 - 0:19:47
Ana Tiquia
I have a future question for you.0:19:47 - 0:19:51
Paula Bray
I love the future.0:19:51 - 0:20:09
Ana Tiquia
I guess at this sort of moment, at this cusp of launching a new lab here at the library, what are you looking forward to in terms of having a new lab here? Are there any things that are getting you particularly excited, that you can see on the horizon, perhaps?0:20:09 - 0:21:43
Paula Bray
I'm just going to give you a quote from Dan Cohen from the US who said, "some of the most innovative digital library work anywhere comes from labs", and I think that's true. I'm really excited about the potential of what we're going to discover. I'm excited about this being a collective process. So I think there are certain champions within organisations who really embrace this way of working and they gain skills and you can see them really grow, you know, and I think that's really special because we want to share our knowledge around what we do in this lab.I'm really excited about watching all of the corpus of knowledge sharing through the publishing side of the platform, because I think no matter what point in time, you can still go back to that and learn from that. I'm always looking back at the DX Lab website to find out, oh, how do we do that thing again? And, you know, I think it's a great legacy that we put so much energy into documenting every single experiment we did and sharing that, sharing the code.I'm really excited to find new forms of research that might come, whether it's through us or through externals. And that might not be immediately. That might be in years to come. Anything's possible. And I'm really, really excited to have the lab launched.0:21:43 - 0:21:52
Ana Tiquia
Look, it's been so good to chat. Is there really is there anything else you'd love to say? Before we kind of, I guess, wrap up the interview.0:21:52 - 0:22:19
Paula Bray
You know, pleasure always to talk about labs. One of my favourite topics. Thank you for the invitation. You know, labs don't have to be a, you know, a separate team or dedicated people. It can purely be a philosophy and a practice. If some organisations could allow a little bit of that to happen within their structures, I think they would definitely see many benefits from from doing work this way.0:22:19 - 0:22:37
Ana Tiquia
So for anyone who might be listening, listening to your reading this who's interested in GLAM Labs, setting up a love of their own. There's a ton of resources out there, and I did want to point to the fact that you've been involved in writing one of those, which is 'Open up a GLAM Lab'. Yep. Can you share a bit more about your publication?0:22:37 - 0:23:31
Paula Bray
Look, you know, amazing to get 16 international peers working in GLAM labs together in one week to write a book. And it was based purely on everyone's individual knowledge. And I think when we set out to do that, we wanted to ensure that the work that we did together was practical and that it had some sort of ongoing, useful outcome.And I think we achieved that. I still flick back through some chapters. It's the kind of book that you can pick up and just look at one chapter and go, oh, okay, I can do that. Or how did they do this? What does this mean? What is a lab? So I think it's useful still today. So yeah, I encourage everyone to sort of have a look at it.It's available freely online.0:23:31 - 0:23:37
Ana Tiquia
I will share a link to that. That's fantastic. Thanks so much for chatting labs with me today, Paula.0:23:38 - 0:23:40
Paula Bray
You're very welcome. Thank you for having me.