From GLAM rock to GLAM institutions

Does GLAM still refer to 1970's pop singers with funny hairdos? Apparently not.

While viewing videos from the October 2011 Europeana Tech conference in Vienna, I've noticed that participants continually refer to GLAMs - meaning institutions in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums sector.



During the last ten years, English speakers would usually refer to MLA institutions- Museums, Libraries and Archives. Does this mean that galleries (which have normally been privately financed) now have closer ties to institutions that traditionally have been publicly financed? The connection must be recent, since i notice the GLAM Creative Commons page has numerous links for MLA institutions, but so far nothing for galleries.

In Norway, there has been the opposite tendency during the last few years. A national ABM utvikling (Archive, Library, Museum development organization) was established in 2003. However, the entire board of directors resigned in 2010 when the government transferred responsibility for the Library sector to the National Library. The archive and museum sectors are now being administered by Arts Council Norway.