I’ve created a new site (or in fact, renovated an old site) to aggregate news from GLAM collections (that’s galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) and help researchers using those collections. It’s called The Primary Source which is a bit of a bad history pun.

Why is is needed?

Before the nazi takeover of the old bird site, I had a list of GLAM organisation accounts which made it pretty easy to follow what was going on in Australia’s galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Things are more fragmented now and surviving social media accounts seem dominated by event promotion, cute videos, and cultural heritage clickbait. There are a few blogs (though apparently the fashion is to call them ‘stories’), but functioning RSS feeds are rare. How can researchers find out about new GLAM collections or resources across Australia? Hopefully The Primary Source can help by aggregating collection news from a variety of platforms.

At the same time, I wanted to provide a space where researchers can share their latest work using GLAM collections, and ask for help when needed. Unfortunately, GLAM social media accounts (with a few exceptions) rarely share the work of researchers outside their own fellowship and events programs. The Primary Source is built on top of the Discourse discussion platform, so anyone can create an account and contribute.

Discussion categories

At the moment there are four main categories:

• Collection news: News about recent additions or updates to Australian GLAM collections
• Useful resources: Resources that help people use and understand Australian GLAM collections – digital tools, finding aids, webinars etc.
• Help needed: If you’re having a problem using Australian GLAM collections, ask for help here. No question is too basic.
• Research updates: Share news from your own research projects.

I’m trying to keep things pretty simple, but ideas for new categories are welcome.

How to contribute

As mentioned, anyone can create an account and start contributing to The Primary Source. You can manually add posts using the Discourse interface, or you can take advantage of the site’s automated Zotero-bot. If you come across an interesting post or resource on the web, simply use Zotero to save it to the appropriate category in the Primary Source contributions Zotero group. Every 30 minutes, the Zotero-bot will check the group and add any new links to The Primary Source. If you add tags or comments to a link in Zotero, they’ll be attached to the new Discourse post. To use the Zotero-bot, all you need to do is join the Zotero group, then it’ll pop up in your list of group libraries. Once again, membership is open.

Obviously any content that is offensive or off-topic will be removed.

Staying in touch

To keep up-to-date with the latest posts from The Primary Source you can:

• Create an account at The Primary Source. Once you’ve done that, you’ll receive a weekly email with posts you might have missed. (Of course you can disable this if you don’t want more emails!)
• Add the The Primary Source RSS feed to your preferred feed reader: ozglam.chat/latest.rs…
• Follow @primarysourcebot on Mastodon. The bot checks for new posts every hour and shares them through the fediverse.

Third time lucky?

The first version of The Primary Source was created way back in 1998. Then, as now, I wanted to help researchers find and use collections from Australia’s archives and libraries. There weren’t many content management systems around back then, so I rolled my own using PHP. It was a pain to maintain, and life went elsewhere, so it didn’t survive very long. I’ve always thought the name was pretty clever though…

The pandemic made me think again about ways of supporting researchers, so I created the OzGLAM help discussion board. Even though there wasn’t much activity, I’ve always believed something like this was needed. So with a bit of remodelling and renovation, OzGLAM help has been flipped to make The Primary Source. Will it survive this time? I suppose that’s a matter of whether you find it useful and valuable. If you do, please share with your friends and colleagues!