Generosity in practice: Tim Sherratt on open access, reuse and collaboration

From the dial‑up days of 1993 to today’s data‑rich cultural landscape, historian and technologist Tim Sherratt has been rewiring how we see public collections. In this SLV Lab Conversation with State Library Victoria's Chief Digital Officer Paula Bray, Tim retraces a 30-year career so far shaped by dashboards and digitisation, political interventions and playful data experiments – a body of generous, open practice that treats interfaces, notebooks and APIs as scholarship in their own right. Along the way, he champions sector collaboration and the courage to experiment, and sharing his code and thought process so others can build on them. 

Transcript

0:00:02 - 0:00:52
Tim Sherratt
There is much that GLAM organisations can do to support digital research, but it will never be enough. Researchers, whether they be academics or family historians, will always want more. It is in the nature of research to ask new questions to head off in new directions. But rather than see this as a source of tension, I see it as an opportunity for collaboration.An opportunity to cultivate the in-between spaces where research methods, tools, and results can feed back into the contextual frameworks of GLAM collections, where GLAM organisations can share and celebrate the work that's done with their data. Where all can find inspiration, ideas, and support.0:00:52 - 0:04:00
Ana Tiquia
That was an excerpt from a speech by historian and hacker Tim Sherratt. Tim delivered this passionate call for openness and collaboration at the end of 2025, at a moment in time when commentary in the press began to circulate about the value of digital innovation in libraries. By the end of his 12 week stint with SLV LAB as its second creative technologist-in-residence, Tim had created a suite of digital tools that took millions of points a place-based, data tucked away in our collections, such as maps, directories, photos and newspapers and made them searchable and viewable by location.Now anyone – library workers, researchers, historians, genealogists and more – could search for place in Victoria and receive an array of information like answers to who lived here and when, or snapshots of buildings, suburbs and entire regions changing in character and composition across digitised maps. Even a visual history of news publications across the state. So it's safe to say that Tim answered two questions during his time with us, the first being, what can you tell me about my place?And the second? What's the point of digital innovation in libraries? And he answered both emphatically.I'm Ana Tiquia, Head of Digital Strategy, Research and Insights at State Library Victoria. And you're listening to an SLV Lab podcast, part of its Conversations series, where we discuss emerging technology, digital experimentation and library futures with artists, technologists and workers in the cultural sector.Tim Sherratt is one of Australia's leading digital historians and cultural heritage technologists. He spent more than three decades working with public collections, from the early days of the web to large scale experiments with data and digital tools that help people see collections differently. Across his career, Tim has championed open access, experimentation and generosity in practice. His work ranges from dashboards and digitisation to political interventions and playful data experiments.He's widely known for sharing not just his finished outputs, but the process, code and the thinking behind them. In this interview, Tim speaks with the Library's Chief Digital Officer, Paula Bray, about his career, the spirit of digital experimentation, the necessity of data plumbing, and why creating new ways of seeing collections matters as much as preserving them.The following conversation was recorded on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. We acknowledge the traditional lands of all the Victorian Aboriginal clans and their cultural practices and knowledge systems. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present, who have handed down these systems of practice to each new generation for millennia, and would also like to acknowledge and pay our respects to any First Nations listeners joining us for this conversation.0:04:00 - 0:04:07
Paula Bray
Tell us about the Tim Sherratt story. Where did it begin and how did you begin working with cultural heritage organisations?0:04:07 - 0:05:59
Tim Sherratt
Oh, well, it really goes back to the deep, dark days of the early web. So in 1993/94, I was working for a little organisation called the Australian Science Archives Project, based at the University of Melbourne. And our job was to, find and preserve the archives of Australian scientists and make people aware of Australia's scientific history.And, we heard about this thing called the web. And as a small organisation with no budget, basically we thought, hey, this might be a good way of getting information out to people. And so we developed what really was the, first archives website in Australia. One of the first Australian history websites. So that really was, for me, the, an important point in seeing that we could use these technologies to communicate with people about history, about, the wonderful collections available in our libraries, archives, and museums, and get them to, engage with them in different ways, take those collections out into the spaces where people are starting to congregate online.So that was that sort of starting point. And I was in an out of the GLAM sector and things for a while and a sort of another, significant point for me came when I was working at the National Archives in 2007, when I began to realize what we could do if we started to apply computational methods to collections.So not just put them online, but actually use computational methods to analyse collections in different ways, to find new entry points, to find new ways of seeing them. And, we worked on a thing called Mapping Our Anzacs which was, one of the first instances of creating a geospatial interface to archives and also had a whole lot of crowdsourcing elements to it as well.So, yeah, so those those were the two key points for me that really sort of shaped what I do now.0:05:59 - 0:06:05
Paula Bray
So if only we knew back then what we know now. Do you think that you'd be approaching things differently?0:06:05 - 0:06:56
Tim Sherratt
I don't know. I mean, I think I approach things really in a similar sort of way, and that's just seeing what, as new technologies become available, starting to play around with them, thinking about how they might be useful and what's been interesting over this period, and as you well know, is things have waxed and waned in terms of the digital and GLAM sector and, people's willingness to embrace new technologies and to experiment and to explore.I suppose the only thing I'd do would be, I know now the value of that, and I'd be, much more willing to, to push that, pursue that, to say the experimentation part is really important. And we've got to find ways of supporting that, both in terms of people's lives, careers, and also in institutional settings. So that's sort of baked into the nature of our GLAM organisations.0:06:56 - 0:07:16
Paula Bray
So the role of experimentation in the digital practice has become quite normalised in other sectors, such as finance and corporates. It's still challenging within cultural heritage organisations. Why do you think that is?0:07:16 - 0:07:18
Tim Sherratt
Um. I don't know. [Laughs]0:07:18 - 0:07:58
Paula Bray
[Laughs] All right. Leave that one. I'm going to read this quote now. Okay. So on your website, you've got this quote and I'm just going to read it. “I want a scholarly practice that has room for the angry and the weird, alongside the rigorous and detached that sees in digital technologies not just the chance to crunch huge quantities of data, but the opportunity to tinker with our preconceptions, to be playful and political, to explore emotions as well as evidence, to create bots as well as books.Tell us why you've published this on your website.0:07:58 - 0:09:28
Tim Sherratt
I suppose it tries to sort of bring together my practice, which doesn't quite fit into normal sort of boxes for academic work, or even for GLAM work, I suppose. And yeah, make that argument that and particularly, we’ve seen over my period working in this area, the development of the digital humanities, right, started really getting going around 2010 or so.And I wanted to make that argument that there needs to be that room for play and experimentation and that the outputs of what we do need not always be scholarly articles, may not always be books, that we can actually create a whole lot of different types of interfaces, different types of interventions, which enable people to, again, get into GLAM collections in a range of different ways.And so I think it's, again, important that that sort of work is recognised within the academic sector as valid work. And we encourage those sort of strong connections between academic sector and the GLAM sector to enable that sort of experimental work to take place, but also that there's that support within the academic sector for people doing digital work, recognition that digital tools or interfaces are scholarly products.And that's improved a bit over the years. But it's still very slow, and it tends to be the metrics in terms of how many articles you've published, which is important.0:09:28 - 0:09:48
Paula Bray
But I think with your practice, you have been publishing about everything as you go with your experiments, your outputs, your code. You're extremely generous with sharing information. Talk us through why this is important for you.0:09:48 - 0:11:40
Tim Sherratt
Yeah. I mean, my my default is open, right? And I like to actually share what I'm doing as I'm doing it rather than wait until there's a finished final product. And there's a number of reasons for that. One is that personally, I think the process is more interesting than the final product. And I know other people think that as well.They like to see behind the scenes. They like to to see that it's not sort of wave a magic wand and there's something here, that there is actually work that goes in to achieve that. And it gives people, again, other ways of getting into the work. Sometimes it can be hard if you see a nice sort of finished final product, to hook into it, what it's doing.And so having that sort of open practice enables people to really understand what's going on. And hopefully part of it is in trying to encourage people to do similar sorts of things. I also philosophically, the idea that these arepublic collections, this material should all be open, it should be public, that the work I'm doing, I'm a strong believer in open access, in, open licensing.So, it all just sort of, comes together as just a way of just sharing what I'm doing. And I suppose it comes back to why am I doing it in the first place? Right? In the end, I'm doing it because I think it could be useful. I'm doing it because I think we'll help people either in practical ways, in terms of getting to particular piece of information or in other ways, and just, helping sort of change their perspectives, their thinking, sort of enlarge their frame of reference.So they start to see things differently, and that gives them new ideas. So if that's my aim, then of course I want it to be out there. I want that to be public. I want people to be have that opportunity. Actually, I find that sometimes actually getting that information out, getting the message out, is much harder than actually doing the coding.0:11:40 - 0:12:40
Paula Bray
Exactly. The dedication to the publishing and communicating about that work is as important as the end product, like you say, because you're educating people around how these products are made. You're providing, reuse for other researchers. So I do think that you do have to commit to that publishing when you're doing experiments and that prototyping practice, because it helps as much with the end product as it does with the journey.Like you said.You have a number of products and experiments on your website. What have been some of your most successful initiatives – and I don't mean thousands of views or engagements – and why?0:12:40 - 0:14:41
Tim Sherratt
Well, I think the first thing I point to was a project that I worked on with my partner, Kate Bagnall, who's a historian of Chinese Australia. And it was something we did in 2011, I think. We both worked at the National Archives. Kate had done a lot of detailed research in the archives, and we were aware of the amazing collections they held around the documentation of the, White Australia policy, and in particular, a series of thousands of certificates which were required if you were deemed to be non-white in Australia at that point and you wanted to travel overseas and then basically just come back home, you had to carry specialdocumentation or you could be stopped at the port and asked to sit the dictation test. And the dictation test, despite its name, was a mechanism of exclusion. So these thousands of certificates that include people's photographs that include their handprints or thumbprints, their information. And Kate and I always thought that you could make an exhibition just by putting these on the wall.You didn't need to do anything else, really. And we never quite got that up as an exhibition at the Archives. But after we left, we started to play around with it in different ways. At that point, I'd seen some work that Paul Hagan at the National Library had done on facial detection, and I downloaded thousands of these certificates from the National Archives websites, screen scraping them, and ran the facial detection script, got 10,000 photographs of people from these certificates.Just put them up on a big scrolling wall with links back to the records. And it became, what we called The Real Face of White Australia, because it's just this seemingly endless scrolling wall of faces of people who were living under the weight of the White Australia policy. And that still gets attention and still gets referred to and has had much greater impact than we really thought it would.0:14:41 - 0:14:43
Paula Bray
Yeah, it's an incredible piece of work.0:14:43 - 0:15:15
Tim Sherratt
And there's the power of the faces, of course, and people are just moved to tears sometimes just by scrolling through the wall of the faces. And so the content, the stories, of course, behind all this, which is important, but it's also just a good example of how we can have different sorts of experiences relating to GLAM collections, and by applying different techniques to bring out certain features from those collections and presenting them in different ways.You give people, again, as I keep saying, different ways of seeing.0:15:15 - 0:15:16
Paula Bray
Different lenses.0:15:16 - 0:15:45
Tim Sherratt
Yeah, different ways of feeling about collections. And I always think perhaps one of the most revelatory things about The Real Face of White Australia was the fact that it provoked ways of feeling emotion, in a way that we hadn't really expected it to be. It did to us, but we didn't know whether that could be sort of communicated.Yeah. So that's it's probably been the thing which has had the most impact and still is something which we feel very strongly about, and we hope to get back to it, to do more work in that area in the future.0:15:45 - 0:16:08
Paula Bray
That'll be wonderful. I mean, working with large data sets, brings its own challenges. And when you set out to do a digital product, experience, prototype, sometimes you have to pivot because the data won't do what you want it to do. What have been some of the challenges for you in working with such large datasets?0:16:08 - 0:16:34
Tim Sherratt
Well, there’s the sort of familiar challenges, which is, you can spend a couple of days developing a method which zips through all the data and seems to work really well, and then you spend another few weeks after that figuring out the ‘what's going on with the 5% of things, which didn't actually work’. So there's always that sort of long tail of stuff you have to deal with.I mean, the most obvious challenge is actually just getting to the data in the first place.0:16:34 - 0:16:38
Paula Bray
Actually getting it.0:16:38 - 0:17:33
Tim Sherratt
And, again, we've had stops and starts in Australia in terms of data access. We've had APIs come and go. We've had data dumps being made available, but then never maintained or updated. Things being packaged up for hack events or whatever, but then and never being touched again. So there hasn't been that sort of continuity or that growth over time.It's really just been, I suppose, probably, relating to the passions of particular individuals that at different times within organisations. So, yeah, just getting the data in the first place is always a major challenge. And then there are those the familiar things of just getting a sense of the shape of data. But that's the fun part really.It's a challenge, but it's also the fun part when you start to do sort of various experiments and you start to do your first visualisation and you realise, oh, that's not what I expected at all.0:17:33 - 0:17:35
Paula Bray
Hence why you call it GLAM data plumbing.0:17:36 - 0:18:37
Tim Sherratt
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, quite honestly, a lot of the work I do is just actually connecting things up to each other. That you might have a dataset and you may have a particular tool over here, but they don't sort of quite connect. So doing that work to transform the data, to make it available to transport it so it can be used.And I don't want to reinvent all the sort of different tools and visualisations and stuff that's out there. So yeah, just, just doing that work to connect things up and it's going back to that thing of doing it in the open because it's not very visible to people, that sort of work. And it's really important and it's not sort of again, that work say within GLAM organisations of actually packaging up datasets so that they can be reused, for example, is not something which – or developing an API – can be difficult to mount an argument for given the sort of limited resources within an organisation.But it's really important work because of the things that flows from that.0:18:37 - 0:18:48
Paula Bray
Yeah. So the value in that work needs to be more explicit and at the forefront of thinking about collections as data as well.0:18:48 - 0:19:21
Tim Sherratt
Yeah. I mean, that's part of what I do, why I do right. So I talk about the openness as being aimed towards users, but also I hope that what I do enables organisations to mount arguments internally about why it's important. If they can say, well, this sort of stuff can happen, people can build these sorts of things.So I'm hoping that part of my body of work can be used in those sorts of, internal discussions as well.0:19:21 - 0:19:37
Paula Bray
You are State Library Victoria's second creative technologist in residence, and we're thrilled to have you here, Tim, take up this opportunity with us to explore the library's collection and data. Tell us what you set out to do within this residency.0:19:38 - 0:19:55
Tim Sherratt
So I was challenged with the idea of doing something with the library's place-based collections, not just maps, but also other things which have a sort of spatial connection. And it's funny because in a way, my residency started a few weeks before it actually did, because there was...0:19:55 - 0:19:57
Paula Bray
I’m not surprised.0:19:57 - 0:22:48
Tim Sherratt
Because there was Wiki Fest here at the State Library, and on my table was, one of the librarians who, came with a challenge, a provocation, which was that, people come to the library either in person or online, and they ask questions like, well, what can you tell me about my house?Or what can you tell me about my street? And I used that as a sort of, frame for the work that I've been doing over the last few months. So I benefited greatly from the knowledge and experience of the librarians here who are pointing me towards specific collections and telling me what sort metadata was available around those collections.So, you can see things like the parish maps, for example, had a collection of 8000 maps and quite a lot of those have geospatial coordinates. So a point that they're associated with, which gives me a starting place to start thinking about how they can be accessed in a, some sort of spatial type interface. Other ones, such as the photographs of the Committee for Urban Action, which.are an amazing collection of photographs, which were created in 1970s because people were worried about the destruction of streetscapes, both in urban areas and in rural, regional areas. And they’ve got descriptions which were created by the photographers and are now in the catalogue as ‘something street between this street and that street’.So that's sort of in the title. So in effect, it's spatial information, but the work needed to be done to relate that piece of text to a point on a map. So I had to develop a way of finding intersections between streets and identifying them with particular geospatial coordinates. That enabled me to then identify a street using a fabulous resource called OpenStreetMap, which is created by volunteers, again, openly licensed, openly available.And I couldn't have done it without that resource.. And so from that, I was basically able to connect those catalogue entries to particular streets on a map. So that again gives us a new entry point for that. So, and there were various other, collections that I worked on. There was one of the most, well-used resources is the digitised versions of the Sands and Mcdougall directories because, again, give you that sense of being able to track both people and places through time.You can just do searches and find out who was living in your house or where your parents were living at a particular time. while 24 volumes have been digitised and they're online, you can't currently search across them all. And I worked with some similar sorts of resources, in Tasmania and New South Wales.So I've basically created a new interface where you can just search across all 24 volumes at once.0:22:48 - 0:22:49
Paula Bray
Amazing.0:22:49 - 0:25:06
Tim Sherratt
By individual line too, because, well, it's interesting because we just talk about search, but the effectiveness of search varies a lot according to what you're actually indexing. So something like the directories, what you want to get to is just a line of text on a page. It's not a page. Pages have lots of lines of text and can be difficult to find what you're after.So I've indexed up by line. So it takes you to a particular line on a particular page, which is a much more effective way of getting in. So I've been assembling these sorts of material. And then what's been most fun, I suppose in a way, was again, did some data plumbing to figure out a way that people could actually, geo reference, digitised maps.So, relate digitised maps to real world geography. And that was by connecting the up to existing tool called Allmaps, which takes advantage of the fact that the library makes its images available through a standard called IIIF. So I just provided a bit of glue which connected everything up and made it possible for people to actually go in, choose a map and geo reference it, and that makes other things possible,.It's not just georeferencing for its own sake, it's because now we have that geospatial information. We can do things. So all of these bits and pieces, all these different collections, I've assembled into basically a geospatial database, which means you can do queries on it, such as, well, give me all the resources within a kilometer of this point.And then that's enabled me to create some new interfaces, which hopefully start to answer that question that I started with was somebody coming in and saying, what can you tell me about my house? So I've got a thing where you can type in an address, it'll pull out the, references in the Sands & McDougall directory so you can effectively see who's been in your house over that period of time.It pulls up, any maps which cover that area. So it sort of brings everything together. So it's all, of course, a bit hacky. But I think, again, part of the point of my residency was to show the possibilities.0:25:06 - 0:25:50
Paula Bray
And that particular collection is one of our most searched and most used. And there is no, one way of looking at data. There's no one way of looking at, time and place in the browser. But I feel some of the challenges we have is actually embedding that back into library and museum systems, which, are built for the 1 to 1 search relationship return.What do you think we should be doing about the connection between the collection item in those systems and then these systems that give you multiple different viewpoints with exactly the same data.0:25:50 - 0:29:13
Tim Sherratt
Yeah. I mean, it's always a challenge. Llibrary systems, you want to standardise things as much as possible. You don't want to have a whole lot of different things. I mean, I suppose the first thing I'd say is the interface. Basically, I've created more than the interface, some credit series of APIs to access the data, and the interfaces on top of them are just actually HTML pages.So developing, working with, reusing APIs I think is a key thing. And not just creating an API for public consumption, but actually creating APIs which are used internally in terms of the way you present stuff on the website that, we don't say ‘eating our own dog food’ anymore. We say ‘drinking our own champagne’ as a way of summing that up that you're actually creating these things and using them yourselves.And I think that's a real key because, then everybody benefits. People create stuff, but also within your own systems. I think that's a key thing. I mean, I think there are all sorts of ways where we could be enriching GLAM collections from what's happening sort of out in the world. And there's still quite distinct silos of information.This is probably a bit off the track, but the things that which always, frustrate me are, for example, that we have thousands of finding aids being developed every day, and they're called like articles in history journals or books. Because they are then sort of entry points into GLAM collections and more and more, they actually starting to include URLs and things.Academics have been bad at that in the past, and publishers hate URLs. But if we can find ways of actually bringing that world of contextual information as being created, outside into the catalogues and the systems, we get that really rich understanding of collections being embedded. That's a big challenge. But I think seeing catalogues at the center of that sort of expanded universe of information and finding ways for those different components to talk to each other, so that people can be creating new things, but you also get that enrichment coming into the collections themselves.I think is really key. But I'd also say that the GLAM sector doesn't have to do it all itself. And part of this is why I'm here, right, is that we can think of a space around GLAM institutions where there is that work of experimentation going on, and the people are creating new tools and interfaces, which may be of only use to a small segment of the population.But that's fine, that's what they doing. They know their audience, they're doing that. And so but the library itself can't meet all those quite specific needs. It's not going to happen. But by providing data, by providing APIs, by sharing what people are doing, by giving the opportunity to come in and, and work with you, as I've been doing it creates that sort of space around the collection where you can have a whole range of different resources and a whole range of different entry points, which are very much tailored to specific needs.And everybody benefits, and I just think we're missing opportunities really to create that sort of space.0:29:13 - 0:29:36
Paula Bray
With the fast pace of technology – browser-based technology – coming to us at a pace that seems to be speeding up, what do you think the future of research with collections is? Is it much different? Is it the same? You just apply different technologies in different methods. What do you think's happening over the next few years for research with collections?0:29:37 - 0:31:41
Tim Sherratt
I mean, largely I think it's more of the same. And as I was saying before, we've seen sort of peaks and troughs. So we can't assume that everything is going to continue to develop. There are all sorts of challenges which can impact on that. I'm a bit of at the moment, an AI skeptic, I suppose, in terms of waiting for the hype bubble to burst so we can actually assess the sorts of values of those technologies.But irrespective of that, there's still all that work that needs to be done actually on the data itself in terms of sharing it, working, making it available in forms that people can actually do things with. And it's too easy to overlook that work, as I was saying before. So that still needs to to carry on. And we can't get carried away with what might happen.Well, what the new technology on the block is, I suppose, when there’s still that nose to the grindstone work. I mean, I think there are ways where we can be developing that sort of space around GLAM collections where we can... because part of the challenge, too, is that people who might use your collections and do interesting things with them, don't really understand the data, don't really understand what's there.They don't necessarily have the skills which enable them to use it effectively. And the lab here is a great example where they’ve been publishing notebooks for showing particular technologies and how they can be applied to library collections. And we're seeing some of that happening. And that's something that I've been working on over a number of years, particularly through the GLAM workbench, where I've pulled together a whole lot of tools and resources, which I've been working on for a couple of decades and that's my attempt to try and fill that gap, first of all, to make researchers aware of all thatfabulous stuff which is sitting in the libraries, archives and museums. Make them aware of the possibilities, to encourage them just to start exploring some of that data, to realize that they could be something in that which will help them. And that's the first challenge, right? Because they have a whole lot of ways which they could go when they’re doing research.They don't necessarily want to sit down and learn how an API works.0:31:41 - 0:31:44
Paula Bray
But they want to use it.0:31:44 - 0:32:14
Tim Sherratt
Well, at first they may not want to use because they don't actually know what's there. Right. So the GLAM Workbench tries to provide those sorts of examples which first of all, help make people aware what's there, and secondly, give them some understanding of how they access that data and what they can do with it.And yeah, providing those sorts of examples, I think is really important and giving people the confidence to really start exploring what's available.0:32:14 - 0:32:48
Paula Bray
You're one of the most generous technologists I've had the privilege of working with. The sharing of your knowledge via multiple methods is vast. And, you know, you see that through the GLAM Workbench, through sharing your code, your stories, your blog posts, everything. What are some of the things that cultural institutions can do to enable users to get, better access to this information?What can we be doing to ensure that our collections are findable, accessible, and usable from now moving forward?0:32:48 - 0:34:15
Tim Sherratt
That sort of collections as data type work is really, really valuable because as we have said, all sorts of things flow from that. You don't necessarily know what they're going to be. And that's the challenge in terms of justifying them in the institutional sense. But things will happen, particularly if you then support that through things like the Lab, what the Lab does, what the GLAM Workbench does.I think providing spaces for experimentation. I don't necessarily mean physical spaces, of course, but just that invitation to experiment and to see that process of experimentation as collaboration. I think sometimes organisations get stuck in this mindset where providing an API, providing data is just another output which people are just taking from that, rather than seeing that as actually a connection, as, a revenue for collaboration, that people who are taking that data aren't necessarily just consuming it for their own purposes.They're also creating things which actually enable people to come back into your collections, to see that two-way exchange. And that's a mindset change. And I think that's important. And, again, obviously this is sort of part of what the Lab does here is to make people aware, bring people in, to make people aware of that two-way exchange of information.And look, I'm going to, sound like the old person shouting at clouds, but,0:34:15 - 0:34:18
Paula Bray
You can shout at clouds, Tim0:34:18 - 0:34:22
Tim Sherratt
I remember when Twitter was good.0:34:22 - 0:34:24
Paula Bray
All those years ago.0:34:24 - 0:35:47
Tim Sherratt
There was a time when, for example, when I was manager of Trove, we had the keys to the Trove Twitter account. Right. So we were directly communicating with our users all the time using that avenue. And that meant on Tuesday. Tuesday was ‘Trove Tuesday’, like bloggers used to use the hashtag #trovetuesday and we used to get really excited about that.And we used to share reshare what they were doing, amplify that, put that out through our channels. It seems like that sort of space for communication exchange has contracted since then, and I understand there's reasons for that. And the social media landscape is a lot trickier than it used to be, and all that sort of thing. But I do miss it.And I do think there are more opportunities for GLAM organisations to actually, share the stuff that people do with their collection and their data, it can be a real struggle sometimes just to get that organisation to share it in some way. It can actually be a real struggle. And it's quite disheartening, I have to say, at times.So I think if we can see this not as a threat, I think some organisations do, actually, if you're doing stuff with data, they weirdly start to think that it is a bit of a threat not to see it like that, but to see it as an opportunity, as something which is fabulous. And if that means that at the same time, people are showing the problems with your data, all the better.0:35:48 - 0:35:49
Paula Bray
Yeah.0:35:49 - 0:36:18
Tim Sherratt
That we need to have that conversation. We need to have that space and that needs to go both ways. GLAM organisations basically need to get better at sharing the stuff that people are doing. And people need to be aware of the work that goes into making that data available and show their appreciation.And that's through that process of openness and keeping stuff out there, that generosity, I think, and I think we can always use more generosity on all sides when it comes to this sort of work.0:36:18 - 0:36:39
Paula Bray
Absolutely, Tim. That's a wonderful note to finish our conversation on. On behalf of State Library Victoria, thank you so much for your amazing residency. Your prolific results are impressive and it's been such an honour to have you explore the library's data and collections with us. Many thanks.0:36:39 - 0:36:40
Tim Sherratt
Thanks, Paula.0:36:40 - 0:36:41
Paula Bray
All the best.