From standardising cultural data to coordinating data cultures: the history and politics of digital heritage aggregation in Australia.

By bringing together metadata from multiple collecting institutions, digital heritage aggregators offer the potential for diverse and dispersed audiences to engage with the collective cultural collections of a nation, state, or region. For institutions and policymakers, such endeavours promise greater value for public money, increased audiences, and democratised access to cultural heritage. This article explores how these idealised promises of digital heritage aggregators run up against the actual politics and practices of their implementation. This is grounded in a history of attempts to aggregate heterogeneous and geographically distant museum collections across Australia into a single ‘distributed national collection’. Australia’s landscape of museums has long been characterised by several major public institutions, which often play a coordinating role, and thousands of small (often volunteer-run) museums. We argue that aggregating cultural collections is not just a matter of standardising metadata but coordinating different needs, capacities, and priorities, particularly the divides between major museums and community collecting organisations. In response, we suggest a shift in the study of such collaborative endeavours, from the aggregation of <italic>cultural data</italic> to the coordination of <italic>data cultures</italic>. In practice, this approach eschews a top-down approach to bringing together heterogeneous organisations in favour of resolving tensions and disparities in divergent values, resources, and priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]