Cultural heritage is seen as the shared intersection of heritage institutions, libraries, archives and museums (LAM). The theme of linking these institutions has long been a hot topic abroad, driven by various social changes, as well as by administrative and financial trends and cultural policy decisions.
In the last ten years, discussions have become more continuous and focused, partly due to the establishment of some government mechanisms for financing and managing cultural heritage resources in the USA, Great Britain and Australia, which have significantly stimulated LAM cooperation. In Slovenia, we have no such inter-institutional connections, as each of the LAM institutions is restricted to its own separate frameworks, which is illustrated by a cursory review of the basic legislation governing each individual area. Nevertheless, a quick review of the ideas of development or the aspirations of individual LAM disciplines shows that all three reflect similar tendencies with which they respond to the perceived needs of society. Their awareness of the importance for the community comes to the forefront, as well as perhaps the fear that individual LAMs would not establish their role in society. Similar visions of development, as set by museologists, can also be found in the current theoretical principles of public libraries, which are increasingly focusing on the user and the well-being of the local community, which reflects the proactive library program in the local environment. Archives are also increasingly considering the user aspect of operating. Cultural heritage functions as one of the tools for solving the current social situation, and museums as fundamental heritage institutions (the same can be said for libraries and archives) are largely holding the role of social catalysts that shape society and democratize it. Despite increasingly similar goals, domestic LAM institutions remain completely confined to their own separate "silos", which are already being surpassed abroad under various influences and at different levels, and this in sufficiently diverse ranges that the need for a more weighty distinction between collaborative processes has arisen in theoretical discussions. With the help of the theoretical model of the cooperative continuum, a more precise distinction between many disparate aspects of cooperation (from contact, through cooperation, coordination, collaboration to convergence) is possible, since the term »cooperation« is often used in an overly vague and inconsistent way.
In this dissertation, we provided an overview of selected foreign sources and identified two main models of LAM connections, which we called the Anglo-Saxon and the European concept, and highlighted their main characteristics. The intensive merging of LAM in the manner of inter-institutional fusion in those environments abroad, where such practices have been determined at the level of cultural policies, does not necessarily have exclusively positive effects, in fact it can even lead to the curtailment of one of the professional disciplines or the impoverishment of one of the individual components of their operation. It follows from these findings that it is necessary to preserve the independent cores of individual disciplines, but in certain individual segments of their operation and organization they can consensually connect with each other or even completely unify, either in order to reduce costs, optimize personnel resources or simply offer a better service. The beneficial effects of integration can be hidden in a layer of added value that works harmoniously with existing functions, such as integrated exhibition activity, integrated digital repository and integrated service points. However, the deeper organizational layers should ideally still retain the existing collection format and institutional integrity. In the following, we gave an overview of LAM collaborations in domestic professional literature and illuminated it from several various aspects that we perceived. We highlighted the aspect of collection management, the aspect of digitization and the general aspect, we shed light on the legislation, relevant to heritage institutions, and introduced a reflection on LAM institutions in the public sphere. We introduced the organizational learning model as a theoretical framework. Within such a theoretical framework, LAMs appear as potential partners within a wider network of heritage institutions. A such they can which can exchange knowledge and experience with the help of a high absorption capacity of similar fundamental heritage knowledge, however with different specializations of each individual discipline. They also achieve this with common systemic thinking and support in dynamic competence adaptation in regards to the changes in social circumstances that have a relatively similar effect on all partners in the network. When establishing the theoretical framework, we were primarily interested in the social and organizational aspect of LAM as a public space, but not the informational aspect. Although digital technologies in many ways facilitate access to participation, they also obscure a clear overview of how LAM institutions construct and create convergences within the physical heritage environment. We followed the recommendation that it is not the technological systems that create convergences, but rather the people who converge their thinking systems and consequently organizational values.
In accordance with this assumption, within the framework of various case studies of relevant LAM entities and with the help of semi-structured in-depth interviews of competent LAM experts, we explored the potential possibilities of LAM cooperation in Slovenia. When formulating the research questions, we started from the assumption that LAMs recognize the benefit or even the necessity of greater mutual cooperation, especially in the field of cultural heritage, which in Slovenia would mean going beyond the existing frameworks as set by the legislation. Starting from the fundamental research problem, we formulated two key research questions, one corresponding to the cognitive-theoretical aspect of the dissertation, and the other to the applicative one: to analyze the current state of cooperation of LAM institutions in Slovenia in the field of cultural heritage according to the theoretically defined five-phase collaborative continuum, and to determine which are potentially the most suitable possibilities or forms of cooperation of LAM in Slovenia in the field of cultural heritage. We further defined the research work with discursive questions that support the first two questions by contributing specific, partial answers. To determine what are the potential benefits and potential disadvantages of the LAM cooperation in the field of cultural heritage in relation to the specificities of the Slovenian environment, how to take advantage of the diversity of potentials when the multidisciplinary knowledge of the experts of the LAM institutions meets in cooperation in the field of cultural heritage, where the managements of the selected institutions see the development possibilities of the converged LAM and to what extent libraries, archives and museums are willing to learn from each other.
A survey was carried out, in which the management of all three types of institutions from January to April 2022 where invited to take part in the form of a semi-structured in-depth interview. Theoretically, the survey was situated within a broader sociological model of the public sphere that allows for understanding change or resistance to change in libraries, archives and museums as public spaces, and more narrowly within the theory of organisational learning, especially in terms of learning between organisations in the manner of absorptive capacity and systems thinking, and equipped with a typology of levels of collaboration on the scale of a collaborative continuum. Of the 26 invited, 19 persons took part in the survey. In the second phase, we conducted a case study of each of the three institutions, the Ljubljana City Library, the Slovenian School Museum and the Ljubljana Historical Archive. The focus of the research was on the review of collaborative practices between institutions over the past fifteen years. The interviewees were mostly positive about their own institution's collaboration with the other two disciplines and highlighted the positive effects of such collaborations in the future. The survey showed that cooperation between libraries, archives and museums is relatively superficial and remains at the early stages of the cooperation continuum. Through the interviews and research, certain systemic and concrete barriers and untapped opportunities were highlighted, especially in the field of formal and informal organizational learning and proposals for systemic incentives for decision-makers. The survey represents an initial impulse into a relatively new research topic, which consequently raises a number of new questions, at least in the field of staff training, digital content and materials processing, which are not addressed in the present study. The possibility of collaboration between libraries, archives and museums is still relatively unknown in Slovenia, and there is no government policy support in the form of possible incentives for e.g. networking projects, which would enable initiatives for in-depth heritage activities at the level of shared libraries, archives and museums to obtain additional funding or offer other appropriate forms of support.
With this dissertation, we want to address the identified gap between domestic (albeit still in its infancy) practice and foreign theory and practice of LAM collaborations. The cross-sectional multitude of libraries, archives and museums shows, in particular, the concept of cultural heritage as a key unifying element that forms the concept of the so-called heritage institutions. Otherwise, it is a research ambition that moves through several layers within each institution and is characterized by multidisciplinarity - not only between the three LAM entities, but also more broadly, between different sciences. In Slovenian cultural space, we do not propose the loss of independence of any of the LAM institutions, as some professional areas have even gained independence relatively recently. In the legislative and organizational framework that we have built in Slovenia, such an approach would not yield positive results. However, it makes sense to reflect on other possibilities that are still open within the aforementioned collaborative continuum, as we can conclude that the related character of LAM and the cross-sectional set of collection, preservation and transmission of cultural heritage, common to all three, has in itself led to many spontaneous connections and collaborations.
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