GLAMMONS is an ambitious HORIZONEU-funded project that seeks novel research-informed solutions for the future of community driven Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) operating in Europe.
The outbreak of the pandemic created unprecedented challenges for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs), which were already struggling during the last years with issues of underfunding, increased maintenance and operational costs and challenges imposed by over-tourism.
COVID-19 pandemic served as a wake-up call to rethink how cultural production and consumption are organized and articulated with different sets of actors and local contexts, towards safeguarding sustainability, access and the well-being of the sector, its workforce and surrounding communities. Long before the pandemic crisis, European cultural policy already encouraged museums to embrace participatory governance and digitisation, to become more financially self-reliant and to diversify their income-generating activities.
GLAMMONS involves 8 European partners: Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Greece), leader of the project, Stichting CREARE Social (The Netherlands), Inpolis Urbanism GmbH (Germany), Technische Universität Berlin (Germany), ESC Burgundy School of Business – BSB (France), European Creative Hubs Network Network-ECHN (Greece), MAZOMOS Landscape and Heritage Consultants BVBA (Belgium), and NOVA ISKRA Kreativni Hab (Serbia).
They propose to map pre-pandemic practices across the sector, to fully account the pandemic effects on the sector and to explore novel solutions that will inform GLAMs response and adaptation to the post-pandemic era, under a new conceptual paradigm that will advance GLAMs as the agents of change.
Conceptually developed around the theories of the commons, GLAMMONS project aims to provide answers to the above challenges, advance research and inform related policy. The project will provide an in-depth analysis and evaluation of ongoing shifts (with a specific focus on both pandemic-driven transformations and digitalisation) in the field of GLAMs. It will also explore and assess practices (concerning management, finance and participation) that emerge around small-scale, community-led GLAMs and the possibility of transferring relevant knowledge to other cultural institutions to secure the sustainability of the sector.
The following three years will see the delivery of GLAMMONS; an ambitious work programme, rooted in a track record of internationally recognized research excellence and world-leading practice, allowing the development of a novel conceptual approach: the GLAMs of the commons.
In GLAMMONS, CREARE Social will bring its expertise in assessment and valorisation of processes towards understanding of the culture of GLAM commons throughout the analysis of shifts of values, stakeholders and practices that emerge in different contexts. The valuation of social and cultural values will be done through the Quality Evaluator, aiming to augment its scope to Quality Evaluator+, that will assist GLAMs communities to evaluate commoning arrangements within different and changing contexts.