ABSTRACT
This chapter will share the success of research-led teaching and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) sector collaborations developed and delivered as part of the Digital Humanities (DH) teaching program at the Australian National University 2016–2023. This collaborative approach to teaching offered a shared solution to two distinct problems. First, for teaching in DH, we found that students, while fascinated by the GLAM and DH crossover space, struggled to critically evaluate the challenges and affordances of digital resources developed for collection-based research and engagement when studied in the abstract. The students were unfamiliar with the pragmatics and realities involved in working with materials from the GLAM sector as they came from diverse academic backgrounds (history, computer science, linguistics, engineering, and so on). Second, for our GLAM partners, project deadlines, organizational structures, and, most importantly, budgets constrained innovative work with digitized collections. Our pilot program ran across two courses in DH, one with the National Museum of Australia that focused on development of web-based educational resources, and one with the British Library Labs where students could develop a project focused on any of the following: Research, Artistic, Community, and, Teaching/Learning. The success of the pilot program saw it grow to become a permanent fixture of our teaching across a number of courses. It offered a productive way for us to engage with a range of GLAM institutions as partners and offered those institutions the chance to see how students could provide examples of innovative use of cultural heritage collections in the digital space, from marketing to games to advanced research projects. Meanwhile, students in DH from diverse backgrounds were shown opportunities for future employment pathways to and in GLAM, and exposed to not just the technical challenges of digital project development, but the social and institutional ones as well.
