For our second assignment, I studied the saveMLAK project, a collaborative project that united Japanese museums, libraries, archives, and kōminkan (community centers) after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. My source for the assignment was the 2013 article “The saveMLAK project: the Great East Japan Earthquake and new developments in museum-library-archive collaboration” written by Maki Yamamura, a Board Member of saveMLAK. saveMLAK is still an active collaboration. They have a website, savemlak.jp, which is updated frequently (the website is in Japanese, so I used the Google Translate function of my Chrome browser to translate the page).
saveMLAK was a
collaboration generated by an emergency. After the Great East Japan Earthquake
on March 11, 2011, many museums, libraries, archives, and kōminkan
were damaged, staff members were injured, and materials became
unorganized or damaged by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. In the first
days after the earthquake, three different wikis were created so that cultural
institutions could report damage and request assistance. One wiki was for
libraries, one for museums, and one for archives. Over Skype, the creators of
these separate wikis decided to combine their websites into one collaborative
wiki. Later, kōminkan (cultural centers) were
included in this initiative. The saveMLAK project officially began on April 11,
2011, one month after the earthquake.
The saveMLAK
project has been incredibly successful in many ways. One of the great successes
of the project was the coordination of skilled volunteers to assist in
institutions that were short staffed or that had suffered damage. Specialists,
including librarians, curators, and preservation specialists, registered as
volunteers on the saveMLAK website. When an institution collaborating with
saveMLAK requested assistance, a volunteer was connected with that institution
and provided services to the institution for free. Another success of the
project was the fact that it created a way for institutions to check in with
each other, just as Twitter allowed people to check in with their friends and
loved ones after the disaster. saveMLAK gave the professionals associated with
museums, libraries, archives, and kōminkan a
chance to learn which institutions had been damaged, and which were open and
functioning. In a sense, this gave professionals a way to learn the state of
the country’s cultural heritage after a national disaster. National treasures
such as Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, knowledge centers like university and
college libraries, and historical documents like microfilm collections could be
accounted for using the wiki, and if any cultural artifacts or facilities had
been damaged, trained professionals collaborating with saveMLAK could quickly
provide assistance. Yamamura noted that the work of saveMLAK supports the work
of the Committee for Salvaging Cultural Properties in the Agency for Cultural Affairs, established in March 2011.
Another success of the project is that the saveMLAK website
and organization serves as a prototype for disaster preparedness. Yamamura
writes about the September 7, 2012 Japan Consortium for International Cooperation
in Cultural Heritage. In one seminar, “[o]ne thing that was stressed as
absolutely vital…was the necessity of maintaining a state of preparedness for
disaster, even in times of normality” (Yamamaura, 2013, p. 43). saveMLAK serves
as an example of a collaborative network that can be maintained in times of
normality, and then activated when there is a disaster. When catastrophe
strikes, the caretakers of cultural heritage will not necessarily have to wait
for an action plan to be created. Ideally, members and institutions will
already be connected to the collaborative network, and action can be taken
immediately (even if that action is as simple as reporting damage on a
website). Technology makes this kind of disaster preparedness much easier: wikis
and social media facilitate the organization of members and institutions, and
people can receive updates on disasters and relief immediately. Yamamura
writes: “If we can expand, or inspire other similar networks, we will consider
that we have the foundations in place for an emergency organisation to meet the
next earthquake disaster that will occur” (Yamamura, 2013, p. 43). In the West,
we can use the saveMLAK project as a model for devising our own collaborative
networks for disaster preparedness. An American network might function
differently, because of the size of the country, but technology seems to be the
key to collaboration of this kind.
Yamamura noted a
few potential barriers to the project’s success. The first was that some
institutions did not want to report any damage after the earthquake. Some
school libraries did not report damage due to worry that the school’s
reputation would falter, and the school would not be able to attract new students.
Over 9,000 schools did end up posting to the saveMLAK site, but some libraries
did not report to saveMLAK until a year after the earthquake. School library
staff also wanted to ensure that information about damage would not be made
public (Yamamura, 2013, p. 42). Another related potential barrier was the reluctance of
religious institutions with valuable artifacts to report damage. The caretakers
of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines worried that theft could occur if
specific details about damage were reported. I also wanted to note Yamamura’s
description of jishuku, a period of
self-restraint that occurred in Japan after the earthquake. Jishuku was not necessarily a barrier to
the saveMLAK project, but it was a factor impacting museums, libraries,
archives, and kōminkan. After the disaster, the people of Japan restrained
their use of electricity to conserve energy. Jishuku was also a period of mourning, during which people eschewed
luxury in recognition of the tragedy that had occurred. Libraries, museums,
archives, and kōminkan that
could remain open did not receive many visitors because of this cultural self-restraint.
I found the
digital nature of this collaboration to be very interesting. The project began
as wikis, and the creators of the project originally collaborated over Skype.
The 25,000 institutions participating in the project reported damage or
requested assistance using the saveMLAK wiki. Digital collaboration was
essential for this project because institutions and members were spread across
a large geographic area. By September 2012, saveMLAK had 300 members who
communicated using an online discussion group and Twitter (Yamamura, 2013, p. 43). Even when
members “meet” once a month, groups of members gather in different cities, and
then all the groups communicate over Skype (to show how active the group still
is, their most recent “meet up” was on February 17, 2016). Even though members are
geographically separated and communicate using technology, Yamamura describes
the members as being very organized: at the time the article was written, the
saveMLAK project had a web team, a team in charge of funds, a publicity team, a
team managing requests and press releases, a souvenirs team, and a team who
registered volunteers to assist in institutions (Yamamura, 2013, p. 43). To me, this is the
“new” part of Yamamura’s title “new developments in museum-library-archive
collaboration.” The saveMLAK project shows that large-scale collaboration
across different kinds of institutions and across a country can be organized
and managed primarily using technology. This is revolutionary, especially when
collaboration is a national necessity, as it was for the institutions
participating in saveMLAK.
When I first set
out to do this assignment, saveMLAK was not the kind of collaboration that I
expected to study. I was expecting to read articles about museums, archives,
and libraries creating joint exhibitions or joint community events. But as I
read Yamamura’s article, I realized the importance of studying the saveMLAK
project, and using it as an example of collaboration. In class we talk about
the “silos of the LAMs,” but in a case where emergency assistance or emergency
conservation is needed, the boundaries between different kinds of institutions
need to come down fast. Yamamura even notes that the creators of saveMLAK
broadened their concept of what it means to be a library, archive, or museum.
First, saveMLAK widened their scope to include kōminkan
(community centers), showing that these centers were important
to include within the definition of cultural heritage institutions. Also, saveMLAK originally defined
“libraries” as only national, public, and specialist libraries. Later, they
decided to include university, college, and school libraries (Yamamura, 2013, p. 41-42). saveMLAK had a broader impact by
expanding their definitions of what it means to be a cultural heritage
institution, and they were able to provide more aid by doing so.
It is easy to name
the differences between Western libraries, archives, and museums, and at times
these differences are important: when it comes to cataloging, for instance, the
intellectual differences between an art museum and a public library have an effect
on how materials are organized and accessed. Yet after the Great East Japan
Earthquake, the thousands of facilities and hundreds of members that
participated in the saveMLAK project showed that the boundaries between their
institutions ultimately didn’t matter, and the most important objective was the
protection of cultural heritage and the cultural institutions. Even when we are
not dealing with the aftermath of a natural disaster, the saveMLAK project is a
reminder that all information professionals, curators, and cultural heritage
specialists are working towards the same goal: the preservation and protection
of cultural heritage, so that history and culture can be studied and
appreciated by the public.
References:
Yamamura, M. (2013). The saveMLAK project: The Great East Japan Earthquake and new developments in museum-library-archive collaboration. Art Libraries Journal, 38(2). Retrieved from: http://ezproxy.simmons.edu:2048/login?url=https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.simmons.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=90219936&site=eds-live&scope=site
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