GLAMMONS

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. The 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 encouraged museums to embrace participatory governance and digitalisation (European Commission, 2010), become more financially self-reliant and diversify their income-generating activities. It is thus vital 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. Rooted in a track record of internationally recognized research excellence and world-leading practice, GLAMMONS will deliver an ambitious work programme, mainly through a novel conceptual approach: the GLAMs of the commons. This project has received funding from the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation on Cultural Heritage and CCIs programme.