I agree with you that museums privilege authority over findability at their peril. I think that point is absolutely critical. It also seems crazy for museums to pour their energies into authoritative interpretation in the sense that their unique content – and therefore their edge – is their primary source objects, artworks and so on – the raw material. (This point seems curiously absent from discussions of the future of museums as media outlets – eg see this article.)

Then there’s also the issue that in many cases interpretive material about collection items is authoritative for the very reason that museums have solicited input from community-members whose expertise is personal rather than professional. The wiki approach to accruing authority is completely different, and underrated in this so-called postmodern world..!

The (pleasant) difficulty we now face at the Powerhouse is how to now meet the needs of these new audiences who are keen to come to visit and see these photographs (we don’t exhibit them), as well as those who now are keen to donate their photographic collections to us because they infer that we might be a photographic museum. Even within the museum itself we are actively coming to terms with ‘re-cataloguing’ some photographic material that had been previously catalogued as ‘archives’ rather than as ‘objects’ because of this new interest in photographic materials. None of these are easy or quick changes.