Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library … · 2020-06-25 · Oral...

Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Kenneth Hamma

Kenneth Hamma: Antiquities and Technology at the Getty

Getty Trust Oral History Project

Interviews conducted by Amanda Tewes

in 2019

Interviews sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Trust

Copyright © 2019 by J. Paul Getty Trust

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Since 1954 the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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Copyright in the manuscript and recording is owned by the J. Paul Getty Trust, which has made the materials available under Creative Commons licenses as follows: Manuscript is licensed under CC-BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and recording is licensed under CC-BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Kenneth Hamma, “Kenneth Hamma: Antiquities and Technology at the Getty” conducted by Amanda Tewes in 2019, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, under the auspices of the J. Paul Getty Trust, 2019.

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley iii

Kenneth Hamma (second from left) and Al Gore (left) at the Getty Center, December 1997, photo by Charles Pasella

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley iv

Abstract

Kenneth Hamma is a former employee of the J. Paul Getty Trust, where he held several positions, including associate curator of Antiquities and executive director of Digital Policy and Initiatives. He attended Stanford University and Princeton University, specializing in art and archaeology. Hamma taught at the University of Southern California, and became associate curator of Antiquities at the Getty Museum in 1987. He then held several positions in information technology at the Getty from 1997 to 2008 before consulting in the same field. This interview includes discussion about: teaching at the University of Southern California; working in the Antiquities Department at the Getty Museum, including coworkers, collections, donors, acquisitions, and theatrical performances; lawsuit against Marion True and issues of provenance at the Getty; creating departments at the Getty, including Collections Information Planning, Collection Information, Information Policy, and Digital Policy and Initiatives; running departments, including staff, budget, challenges, collaboration, and projects; moving to the Getty Center in 1997; challenges concerning copyright management and public access at the Getty; working as a consultant, including with the Yale Center for British Art; and the impact of the Getty on the use of technology in cultural heritage institutions.

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Table of Contents

Interview 1: June 11, 2019

Hour 1 1

Teaching classes at University of Southern California and taking students to the Getty — Working with Jiří Frel — Writing for the Getty Journal — Working in the Antiquities Department at the Getty starting January 1987 — Summer archaeological work in Cyprus starting in 1983 — Understanding the Antiquities Collection and creating the Visiting Scholar Program — Notable visiting scholars — Background of curator Marion True — Early acquisitions process — Working with antiquities dealers — Secretive approach towards acquisitions — Antiquities market in the 1980s — Effect of the fall of the Berlin Wall on the Getty — Working with the Getty Acquisitions Committee — Conflict between academia and dealers — Installing and updating exhibitions — Resources and potential for growth at the Getty — Management of Publications Program in the Antiquities Department, including tracking physical assets and managing copyrights — Performance of The Odyssey at the Getty

Hour 2 19

Expansion of theatrical performances at the Getty — Redefining the use of technology at the Getty — Growth of the Getty’s theatrical productions — Acquisition of the Fleischmann Collection — Structure of the Antiquities Department and the Getty Trust in the 1980s — Staff structure and collaboration with departments — Required space for onsite storage — Transition to digital storage for images — Moving to the Getty Center in 1997 — Leaving the Antiquities Department and establishing the Collections Information Planning Department — Interest in role of technology for public benefit — Conflict between copyrighted images and the mission of public institutions — Frustrations with the antiquities market and decision to leave the field — Lawsuit against Marion True involving acquired Italian pieces at the Getty — Opinion of the Getty's support for Marion True — Deposition for the trial — The trial as a missed opportunity to discuss the management of cultural heritage


Hour 1 38

Turmoil at the Getty during the antiquities trial — Changes in collection practices — Role of other Western museums in acquisition conflict — Use of technology in archaeological excavations — Changing technology at the Getty, and the creation of the Getty Information Institute — Potential of technology to fulfill long-term objectives at the Getty — Building an early website for the Museum — Attitudes about technology at the Getty — Creation of the Collections Information Planning Department — Proficiency in programming — Isolation between programs at the Getty Trust — Use of technology to increase efficiency — Lack of an existing model for storing digital assets — Budget and staff for Collections Information Planning Department — Initial project to create

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educational interactive systems for the Getty Museum — Early management of collections information — Getty policies about information ownership — Collections information at Yale University — Conferences with other museums and businesses like Disney — Training Getty staff and managing a digital infrastructure

Hour 2 55

Hiring and training staff — Creating collections information systems for curatorial departments — Becoming assistant director of Collection Information in 1999 — Working relationship with Barry Munitz and support for digital initiatives — Transition to the Getty Center and impact on staff — Continued isolation between Getty programs — Combining eight separate websites into one — Reorganization of the Getty Trust — Creation of the Getty Web Team — Moving from the Museum to the Getty Trust — Program reviews under Barry Munitz — Becoming senior advisor for Information Policy — Challenges of producing a single catalog for Getty collections — Rights management and public access — Discussion of information policies with board members — Communicating information policies — Internal conflict and external collaborations


Hour 1 75

Becoming executive director of Digital Policy and Initiatives — Change in management style, conflict between programs — Open-source vs proprietary technology — The Getty's role in developing new systems for the field — Objectives and development of ResearchSpace — Changing perspectives about sharing information about art conservation — Working with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — Intellectual property and technology — Integrating technology across programs, using open-source software, and increasing accessibility — Unsuccessful projects — Institutional culture at the Getty — Budgets and staffing over the years

Hour 2 90

Discussions about creating one budget for technology — Antiquities and leadership challenges at the Getty in the mid-2000s — Changes in leadership — Leaving the Getty in 2008 and becoming a consultant — Working with the Yale Center for British Art to create a digital infrastructure — Working with the Museums of New Mexico Foundation — Change and continuity in information technology — Changes in the Getty's commitment to finding solutions for the museum community — The impact of the Getty on the museum field — UNESCO conference in Saint Petersburg in 2005 — The future of public domain and art reproductions — Greatest achievements at the Getty — Success in hiring and training staff

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Interview 1: June 11, 2019 01-00:00:05 Tewes: This is an interview with Ken Hamma for the Getty Trust Oral History

Project, in association with the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley. The interview is being conducted by Amanda Tewes in Palm Springs, California, on June 11, 2019. So, thank you so much for sitting with me today.

01-00:00:22 Hamma: My pleasure.

01-00:00:24 Tewes: You wanted to jump right into your work at the Getty. Can you tell me when

you started working there?

01-00:00:30 Hamma: Nineteen eighty-seven, January of 1987.

01-00:00:33 Tewes: That's very specific. And how did you hear about the Getty?

01-00:00:39 Hamma: Well, I'd heard about the Getty for a long time before going to Los Angeles,

but I went to USC [University of Southern California] to teach, right after graduate school in 1981. And Jiří Frel, who was the curator of Antiquities at the Getty, was part of that search committee. I think from the get-go I was teaching classes at the Getty. I would take classes from USC and teach in the Museum, and also writing for the Getty Journal.

01-00:01:07 Tewes: Who were you working with as a counterpart when you were teaching classes

at the Getty?

01-00:01:11 Hamma: Who was there? Well there was Jiří and his staff, so it was a very small

Antiquities Department.

01-00:01:24 Tewes: And what kinds of courses and—

01-00:01:27 Hamma: At first it was all—

01-00:01:28 Tewes: —interactions?

01-00:01:28 Hamma: —just USC courses, and I would say, "Introduction to Ancient Art," for

example, and we'd meet three times a week. And one of those times, maybe Friday, we'd be at the Getty or at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.


01-00:01:45 Tewes: Was this a new concept, to bring students to a museum to learn about this?

01-00:01:49 Hamma: I don't know. It was the first time I ever taught, so I just made it up as I went

along.

01-00:01:54 Tewes: Was that the way you'd been taught?

01-00:01:57 Hamma: No, no. I don't remember ever in an art history class going to a museum, I

mean in the context of the class. It was all about sitting in a dark room and looking at slides.

01-00:02:15 Tewes: And so this was something you intentionally did for your students?

01-00:02:19 Hamma: Well, they were good collections, and I thought, Why not take advantage of

it? Sure.

01-00:02:25 Tewes: You're mainly working with Jiří as a counterpart there, so you obviously knew

him from your search committee, but had maintained contact over the years. You also mentioned that you'd written for the Getty Journal?

01-00:02:40 Hamma: Mm-hmm.

01-00:02:40 Tewes: Can you tell me about that? Did they come to you, or is this something you

had proposed for them?

01-00:02:47 Hamma: I honestly don't remember, but just publishing works in the collection was all

the way part of what the Getty wanted to do, because it was a new collection, and the Publications Program always seemed to me a strong aspect of what the Getty did, for all the collections, not just Antiquities.

01-00:03:11 Tewes: So, you were the outside expert, as it were?

01-00:03:14 Hamma: Well, there were lots of outside experts, but there I was in their backyard, so I

worked on the collection as I could, yeah.

01-00:03:22 Tewes: But what were you specializing in at that time that you thought or they

thought you could bring to this particular project?


01-00:03:29 Hamma: My interest was in sort of between schools, between the Greek world and the

Roman world. My specialty leaving Princeton as a graduate student was South Italian painting and representations and storytelling in pictures in what were the Greek colonies in South Italy, that turned out to be very different in some ways from the homeland—that is, from mainland Greece—hinted strong parallels with other parts of the outer lying world of the Greek world.

01-00:04:10 Tewes: Mm-hmm. Do you remember what that article, that first article was about?

01-00:04:17 Hamma: Vaguely. Vaguely I remember writing about sculpture, probably second

century, I don't remember, and just trying to understand what the representation was. At that time, a big chunk of the Getty Collection, of the antiquities, was made up of fragments, fragments of sculpture and fragments of pots. And so it was always sort of an intellectual game trying to understand what the whole was from pieces that remained.

01-00:04:59 Tewes: I can imagine that might be frustrating, if you have pieces of something you're

not quite sure what it was.

01-00:05:04 Hamma: Well, it was frustrating but it was also, it was a challenge, it was an

intellectual game, in a way.

01-00:05:08 Tewes: The mystery.

01-00:05:09 Hamma: Yeah, exactly.

01-00:05:11 Tewes: Were there other museums in the Los Angeles area that had the same sort of

collections that worked for your interests?

01-00:05:18 Hamma: No. The County Museum had a small collection of antiquities, a little dribs

and drabs of various things all put together in—it was like a department of old stuff. Whether it was Micronesia or South America or Ancient Greece, it was all, it was old enough you're kind of, Well, that goes in that old department. But there were some interesting things there. And there were collectors in Southern California, in Los Angeles and in Santa Barbara, who left things to institutions. And so in this kind of rubble of leftovers of antiquities, there would occasionally be a very interesting and good piece.


01-00:05:58 Tewes: Huh. And so you had been teaching at USC for a few years when you became

more connected with the Getty. Can you tell me about that? How did that come about?

01-00:06:15 Hamma: I think it was partly a change in staff. The person I knew best was Marion

True, and both she and Arthur Houghton were both hired after I'd arrived in Los Angeles. By the time I went to the Getty in 1987, Arthur had left and Jiří had left, and Marion was appointed curator of the Department. And because she needed help running the Department, both because people had left, but also because it was growing, and there was a realization as early as then that the Antiquities Department would have to build a stronger collection, because at some point in the future—[in] 1987 it wasn't known when or where—a new Getty would be built, and Antiquities would be left by itself at the Villa. And so there was an incentive as early as the late eighties to start growing the collection, to become a stand-alone collection that would be worthy of filling that building in northern Santa Monica all by itself.

And, what, in 1987 I had put in six years teaching at USC and I realized I was not a teacher, and Marion eventually asked if I would work with her in the Department at the Getty. After I'd been introduced with interviews with other museum staff, I was hired and I started January 1987. That would have been mid-academic year for USC, so I continued teaching for the rest of that academic year, and started working with the Getty at the same time.

01-00:08:16 Tewes: And so did you continue working both positions just to the end of that

academic year?

01-00:08:21 Hamma: That's right, and because I was also involved since 1983 in an expedition to

Cyprus that was starting at Princeton that Willy Childs, who was my professor at Princeton, started, I think in '81, and then the permit was cancelled for a little bit and then it was reinstated. We started regular work every summer in 1983, and that continued for a while. After I'd started at the Getty, there were a number of years where I would go every summer to Cyprus, and that way of dealing with a museum job on an academic calendar, as it were—so you took June, July, and August and went out to dig holes in the ground—had precedent. That was often how people worked at other major institutions in the United States, in similar positions.

01-00:09:24 Tewes: Was that the expectation, though, that that was how it was going to work at

the Getty, or did they think they wanted to take a different approach?

01-00:09:30 Hamma: I don't know. That was my expectation, and no one told me different, so we

just ran with it until it became too much. At a certain point, it was clear it was


too difficult to be gone for three months or three-and-a-half months out of the year, and still fulfill an ongoing obligation at the Getty. It didn't operate on an academic calendar, of course, but the notion did continue of a professional staff at the Getty taking sabbaticals a month or two months at a time to do academic kind of work, research, and obligation.

01-00:10:15 Tewes: Can you tell me a little bit more about your Cyprus work? What you were

studying there?

01-00:10:22 Hamma: It was the ancient city of Marion, that people had looked for and not found,

and so we decided we would try to find it. We knew the economy of the city—kingdom, as it were—was based on copper, as was most of the ancient economy of Cyprus, and we knew where the mine was. There were tailings, that is the dreck left over after you dig the big hole in the ground and take the copper away. There's a lot of dirt and rock left over. Those tailings, we knew what those were, so we knew where the Roman site for mining was, and presumably, the same site centuries before that, but we didn't know where the town was or towns. One of the difficulties on Cyprus in finding those locations is that generally along the coast the dirt isn't very deep, and so what happens is—and this was the case with Marion—is that the current little town of Polis was built directly on top, and so we had to find the ancient city, the overburden of continuous habitation for 2,500 years. That leaves a lot of pieces of stuff, and so things that we'd find in the excavation often were not what we were looking for. Byzantinists would get extremely excited, but someone who was interested in classical antiquities, not quite so much. It still is a very interesting excavation and it continues to this day, with different staff, of course.

01-00:12:11 Tewes: So the main goal was to find the city and learn more about its past?

01-00:12:16 Hamma: Was to understand that corner—it was the northeast, the far[thest] northeast as

you could go on Cyprus—to understand that corner of the island, which focused around the city of Marion, and then the outlying towns and the outlying copper business, yeah.

01-00:12:36 Tewes: How interesting that it's still ongoing this many years later.

01-00:12:39 Hamma: It turns out there's a lot of stuff. We had our hands full once we—after two or

three years, we discovered certain guidelines about where [phone rings] those areas where—

01-00:12:54 Tewes: Would you like to pause?


01-00:12:55 Hamma: Yeah, let's turn it off and I'll just— [break in audio]

01-00:12:58 Tewes: Okay. We're just back from a break. And, Ken, you were talking about

Marion, and the large project that has continued there.

01-00:13:08 Hamma: Yes, Marion, the city on Cyprus; not Marian with an a, the person I worked

with at the Getty. That's ongoing, and that will probably keep on going for quite a while. It's a very big site, and I think when I stopped going we were just beginning to outline where religious areas were, where sacred areas were, where inhabited areas were, the extent of mining operations, as old as we could get them. But still it was something of a mystery, because it was a very, very big area, and there were areas—agricultural areas, for example—where we would find nothing. We would have only dirt for maybe one or two meters, and then suddenly ancient ruins below that level. There were other areas where ancient and Byzantine ruins were right on the surface of the ground, and so part of the current fabric of that town.

01-00:14:18 Tewes: I think it's interesting that you pointed out that this your summer gig while

you're working at the Getty, and before that while you were teaching. Can you let someone like me know, who has no clue, but what the experience is like working on a dig in the summer in Cyprus?

01-00:14:36 Hamma: It's very hot and it's very dusty. My main memory, until I realized I didn't

really have to do it, was being out in the hot sun, blinding sun, with fields of wheat as far as you could see that reflected the heat and the sun. You're dusty and hot, and you're trying to think and take notes, and you've got a crew of workmen who are digging holes in the ground with your instructions. You're trying to keep track and you're trying to understand what is coming out of the ground as it's coming out, or as it's lying there and you're cleaning it, and trying to describe as it lay what it is that you're finding. It's extremely difficult, simply because of the physical conditions. We would start at four o'clock in the morning when it was starting to get light, was still relatively cool. We'd take a break at eight o'clock for second breakfast, as it were, and then work until noon, and then break for lunch and have the rest of the day off, because it was simply too hot to be outside. Afternoons when it started to cool off a bit were spent sorting pottery fragments, the buckets of things that came out of the ground that morning, recording all of that and getting ready for the next day.

01-00:15:59 Tewes: That's quite a picture.


01-00:16:00 Hamma: Yeah, and then having a drink at night, going to sleep, and getting up, starting

all over again, day after day.

01-00:16:09 Tewes: Sounds like you really have to have an appreciation for what you're doing to

enjoy it.

01-00:16:14 Hamma: Yeah, but you're surrounded by a crew who's also smart and appreciates it,

and professional photographer, conservation staff, and so it all kind of makes sense when you're there. It's intense in the heat, and the hours don't mitigate that intensity, but it's good.

01-00:16:37 Tewes: Now you mentioned you started this project while at Princeton. Is that

common for archeological digs to be associated with a university, or more likely to be associated with a museum?

01-00:16:47 Hamma: I think now with universities. There was a time when it was not uncommon

for archeological digs to be associated with museums, and that was a little bit more or less the world that I grew up in, and so the dissonance between museums collecting and archeological excavations was not so strong in my early years. That grew stronger as time went by, and I think today, you would be hard pressed to find a museum that's involved in an archeological excavation. We went through a period where the sensitivities were quite strong about who's allowed to do what, and I think museums did not fare well. Museums did not present themselves well, present their arguments well, and kind of abdicated the research side of things largely to academia.

01-00:17:59 Tewes: And that's definitely something I want to talk about a little more later, for

sure. So when you joined the Getty in January 1987, can you tell me what kind of work you were starting to do in the Antiquities Department?

01-00:18:24 Hamma: Well, I think initially it was simply understanding the extent, the scope, and

depth of the collection. The mandate, I think, primarily that we had that Marion had and then shared with staff, was focused on the collection: building the collection, understanding the collection, making the collection known. And so building the collection really was about acquisitions; that really was a very large part of what we did, that was our job that we had to do. Understanding the collection was both our understanding the scope of the collection, but also innovating an active Visiting Scholar Program, where people for longer or shorter terms would come and stay in Los Angeles and work in the collection. Sometimes they would bring their own project with them, and it was a useful place for them to be to work on ancient ivories or vase fragments or whatever it was they were interested in. Sometimes there


were problems that we had in the collection, important objects that we did not understand well, and we would think about who could help us figure this out, and eventually invite them to come to spend a month or two or three at the Getty to work on an object or a set of objects, to help elucidate what it was that we had.

01-00:19:56 Tewes: Did any projects or visiting scholars stand out to you from those early years?

01-00:20:01 Hamma: Well, there were some scholars who would come back frequently—they liked

to be at the Getty—and so that was fun. Dietrich von Bothmer from the Metropolitan Museum [of Art] would come and work on vase fragments, and Robert Guy, who was then teaching or working for a dealer in England, would come and work on the same vase fragments. They often didn't agree and would sometimes—the history of the collection, or history of parts of the collection, were left written on little, yellow post-it notes, stuck on the bags of the objects and the drawers where they were stored. Brian Shefton, University of Newcastle on Tyne, came frequently and worked on a lot of provincial material, Greek material, early Roman material from Spain, for example, that I didn't understand, that Marion didn't understand. This was extremely useful, and they would come and they would be there as visiting scholars. Sometimes they would be there as part of a symposium on Hellenistic sculpture or some other topic.

So it was a combination of building the collection; understanding the collection with visiting scholars; and then publishing the results of that, and that was done in the Getty Journal. It was done in a series of monographs on parts of the collection or general monographs on various aspects of the collection.

01-00:21:42 Tewes: And was that technically what your position had been when you first

associated with the Getty? Would you have been technically a visiting scholar?

01-00:21:49 Hamma: No. No, I was just in town, and I was just there. I would just show up on

Sundays and ask to be let into the storeroom to work on things. It was very casual in the early days, I think, much more so than one might imagine, especially for people who were known quantities. It was a bit of a fuzzy line between staff and outside people.

01-00:22:20 Tewes: Do you have a sense of when or why that changed?

01-00:22:25 Hamma: I don't know that it has. I think when I left the Getty, when I left the

Antiquities Department, it still was very much open, and the expectation that


friends of the collection, visiting scholars, other people would come and work alongside the staff in the storerooms, and I think that's—I hope that's still the case, actually. It was a very healthy thing.

01-00:22:49 We went through a period, which I suppose we'll want to talk about more, when the focus was really on the downside of acquisitions for a museum like the Getty, and how museums like the Getty or the Metropolitan or the British Museum reacted to those problems of countries of origin and provenance. And there were problems, I think, in all directions. It wasn't just the Getty's problem, it was everybody's problem. Because I think we were going through a period—looking back on it—a pretty swift period of redefining the roles and expectations of collecting institutions, and I think that snuck up on everybody in a way. There were those who were opportunistic in that environment and those who weren't, and those who suffered and those who made careers out of it.

01-00:23:59 Tewes: Yes, that's definitely something I want to explore more. As you were talking

about visiting scholars coming and bringing their expertise to the collection, and your own personal background was in academia, I was thinking, I don't know what Marion's background was. Did she come to antiquities from a similar place?

01-00:24:24 Hamma: I'm not remembering the details, so I'm not going to go into this very much,

but I don't think Marion ever worked in an academic institution. She had worked for various dealers. Her expertise was in Greek vase painting. She'd studied with Dietrich von Bothmer at the Met, and she came at a time when the Getty had acquired the collection of Molly and Walter Bareiss, which was a very large number of really well-preserved and very interesting black-figure and red-figure Greek vases. I think Marion's first big project was working on that collection. And I'm going to get this wrong, but I think there was some overlap between her dissertation for NYU and that collection, and her working at the Getty. That all seems to meld together in some way that I don't quite recall, but made perfectly good sense at the time.

01-00:25:39 Tewes: Well, in that she knew how to work with dealers, I assume that means she had

a good understanding of the market for antiquities?

01-00:25:48 Hamma: Yeah.

01-00:25:49 Tewes: Was that something you understood before working at the Getty?


01-00:25:52 Hamma: Not so much, no. If I roll time back a little bit, there was a time not so long

ago, thirty years ago, where the divide between academia and dealers and museums was not as strong as it is today, not as strong as it became quite quickly in the late eighties and the nineties. Even going to academic conferences, one would meet dealers frequently, and being involved in other museums, especially if the museum happened to be in Switzerland, for example, there were dealers who—and private collectors—and sometimes the difference between a dealer and a private collector was not always quite clear. They were closely involved with the museums. It was a much more fluid environment than it became. But personally, I didn't know the market well. My learning curve when I first started working at the Getty was both learning the collection, but also learning the market and understanding dealers and the relationships that existed in that market.

01-00:27:19 Tewes: Can you give me an example of maybe some of your first acquisitions work?

01-00:27:26 Hamma: I wouldn't say my acquisitions. In those early years, I never traveled to visit

dealers on my own. Marion and I would travel together, and we would often take trips that would be three or four weeks long, visiting dealers mainly in Europe and looking at objects, understanding what would be good for the collection, sorting through what we found—what we liked, what we didn't like, what we trusted, what we didn't trust—and then proposing acquisitions to the board of trustees. And the Acquisitions Committee actually made the acquisitions. There was a certain dollar level below which the director of the Museum could act unilaterally without consulting the Acquisitions Committee. But almost all acquisitions at that time were above that dollar level, because they were either very important objects or because it wasn't just a single object but a group of 500 fragments of Greek vases, for example. The relationships I think that I realized were important were relationships among private collectors and dealers, and who was interested in what and who liked what. And also the relationships among dealers, I mean the various levels of dealers. There were some dealers who were closer to moving objects from Turkey to Switzerland, and other dealers who were closer to moving objects from London to New York.

01-00:29:13 Tewes: Did you have preferred dealers, or people with whom you were working

during these years?

01-00:29:21 Hamma: There were preferred dealers, I think because they had good objects. There

were dealers who had better buys than other dealers and could see quality. There were dealers who were better funded than other dealers and who could get objects that were really good. In those early days, we would meet with anybody who seemed like they had something that might be of interest.


01-00:29:49 There was one time I remember—and this is, I think, an extreme example of this kind of activity—a dealer from Lyon that we didn't know, that was persistent in sending letters with photographs of things that he had, and would we please meet with him when we were in Paris. We finally said yes. After a lot of persistent inquiry, we finally said, "Okay, fine, we'll meet with you," and he was going to show up at our hotel and take us to the Tour d'Argent restaurant for dinner. Marion and I are sitting in the lobby of the hotel waiting for this guy to show up, and these three guys walk by outside. It's probably not true, but I remember it as one guy in a raccoon coat, one guy in a mustard-colored suit with an electric blue shirt and tie, and I just looked at Marion and I said, "I bet those are the guys." Sure enough, they finally came back to the hotel and said, "Yes, yes, we are."

And so we went to dinner at Tour d'Argent, which, you enter, it's on the ground floor, but you have dinner way upstairs. We got there and we're waiting and there's no reservation under the name of this man from Lyon, who, typical for the whole event, made a reservation at a different restaurant named Tour d'Argent, which was at a truck stop outside of Paris. And so, he finally admitted he'd made a mistake, and we all piled into taxis and went to another restaurant where he'd made [another] reservation. Then it was a perfectly fine dinner, but I remember afterwards looking at Marion and saying, "We could have been kidnapped in those taxis. You were in one; I was in another one." We didn't really know who these guys were, but we would talk to anybody who had something that we felt might add to the collection, because that was our primary job, building the collection, in those days.

01-00:32:04 Tewes: Was this particular instance a private collector?

01-00:32:08 Hamma: No, he was just a dealer from Lyon. It turned out he didn't really have much of

interest. But I think the Getty, as an acquiring institution, was as interesting to them as a good dealer was to us, because they could say to other clients, "Well, I sold such and such to the Getty on May seventeenth last year."

01-00:32:37 Tewes: So that I'm understanding fully the acquisitions market, were you also

working with curators at other museums to see what they had collected already that you didn't want to replicate, or was that even a concern?

01-00:32:50 Hamma: No, that wasn't a concern at all. I think in some ways, we were very open to

working with curators at other museums, recognizing them also as scholars and people who would be useful to us, and us useful to them in understanding our collections. Everybody has a specialty, and everybody has their blinkers and their blind spots, and it's putting together as many people in the room, smart people in the room, as you can to achieve your goal. We were


completely open to that. But in terms of the market in the acquisitions, it's all, of course, very secret, and you don't want other people to know what you're doing, nor who you're talking to about what. And because of that, that leads to a lot of gossip and an entire aspect of the market that some people live for, which is just: who said what about somebody else or something that somebody else bought. It was all very kind of full of intrigue, but we were in many ways so focused on building the collection, that part of it just was on the periphery and really not of much interest, but it meant that you were kind of on your own. When you're out there, you're representing the Getty, you're on your own with the dealers that you meet, yeah.

01-00:34:28 Tewes: I'm curious, in these early years when the Getty is still relatively new on the

scene and had come into its Trust fully, what the reputation was—should phrase this differently—how that impacted your work in the market. For instance, going to auctions, was there any concern that you might be gouged price-wise or others might see you differently?

01-00:34:57 Hamma: Yes and no. I think the Getty probably, in those years, I think we overpaid for

things a bit. But again, because the mandate was to grow the collection, and the purse strings were pretty loose. We tried to be careful, but sometimes it was kind of impossible. There was a spectrum of, because the Getty had lots of money and was relatively new to the game, dealers would assume we were idiots and try to sell us stuff that we would just probably not talk to them again; to the other end where a very large and important work would show up at a dealer in Surrey or London, and the question then is, because there's been nothing like that at auction or there's no public record, prices for things like that, what's it worth? And so, you sit and talk about what it's worth. Sometimes then you're sucking in a breath and, "Oh, that's a big number," and sometimes a number that just seems exceedingly modest.

There was one sculpture that we bought, I remember seeing it in London with Marion for the first time and then sitting with the dealer and talking about it, that just seemed to me unbelievably priced and completely out of line with what one would expect, that one might have expected that dealer to have paid whomever he bought it from. And there were other times when a wonderful object would show up. Marion and I were out to dinner one night at a little restaurant, Italian restaurant in Zurich and with a group of dealers. One of them pulled out of his pocket a little thing about that tall wrapped in tissue paper, and unwrapped it. Marion said, "Is that for us?" He said, "Yes." And, "What's the price?" It was maybe $50,000 less than a very similar object that had recently sold at a public auction. So, one never knew quite what to expect.

01-00:37:38 Tewes: That's really interesting. Your last comment made me wonder if you were

having to scour previous auctions to compare prices often, and doing research that way.


01-00:37:50 Hamma: We would do as much as we could. I think in 1987, 1988, 1989, none of this

stuff was available, unless you had the auction catalogs, and so none of it was digitized, none of it was indexed, and so it really meant knowing the market. I think that was a big part of the learning curve. Now, you could go to Sotheby's and all their auction catalogs are online for the last 5,000 years, and you just had just something like this, what did somebody pay for it, and you get eighty examples over the last decade what that kind of an object went for at a public auction. It was much more difficult than it is today to understand the market. I think that difficulty of understanding history of the market, along with the way it worked and with the secretness of it, was—it was a very nontransparent market, and so it was very difficult to know what else was going on in the market, which was one of the reasons that we would travel frequently to Europe to meet with dealers, just to keep current. "What have you got now? What's coming through your hands? What are you asking?" That sort of thing.

01-00:39:13 Tewes: Well speaking of travel, you're starting this in the late eighties, and the fall of

the Berlin Wall happens, '89? Yes. And then Germany starts to open up. How did that change the antiquities market, if at all?

01-00:39:31 Hamma: Not much, but it did increase our scope of visiting scholars. And so, people

who were from what was then East Germany could travel much more easily, and we looked at that as an opportunity. It opened up the ability to visit collections that were in that part of Germany much more easily, and I think it eventually opened up for the Getty—for the Conservation Departments in the Museum, but also for the Getty Conservation Institute—the ability to work more easily in what was then East Germany or other parts of Eastern Europe. There was a kind of opening of intellectual curiosity, but also of physical collections. But impact on the market, not so much.

01-00:40:24 Tewes: Ah, because the dealers are mainly based in Zurich and London and Paris?

01-00:40:30 Hamma: Yeah, there weren't dealers in—yeah, yeah.

01-00:40:34 Tewes: Got it. But, about a decade before that happened, you'd been studying in

Germany for a bit, I think. Did that affect you personally, thinking about the way Germany had changed over those years, politically and culturally?

01-00:40:52 Hamma: A bit. But it was actually much more interesting for me not at the beginning

but later as Germany began to reintegrate itself, and to revisit Berlin, for example, and understand what was going on, and see, after ten years of heavy investment by the German government at reintegrating the country, what had succeeded but also what was yet to be done, which was 80 percent of it. It


made for much more interesting Germany to visit because of the collections, but also because of the number of people that we could talk to.

01-00:41:38 Tewes: That's very interesting. One more question about acquisitions. You mentioned

that there was an Acquisitions Committee that you were working with. Were you privy to any of the conversations they were having about which pieces to acquire and which to let go? Because you were doing the research and the legwork to bring it to them, but they weren't necessarily always following your advice, I presume.

01-00:42:07 Hamma: Almost always, almost always did. I can't remember anything that seemed

important to us in the Department that we proposed as an acquisition that was turned down at that level, at the trustee level. Things would come back. The process was, we would write up acquisitions reports and document why it was needed in the collection; and similar objects, and what the market was like for these sorts of objects to justify the price; and all that sort of thing. These would be reviewed in the Museum by the senior administration and by the director, and there was some pushback. We would get some pushback then and rewrite and rethink, but I don't think ever—I don't remember anything that we thought was important to add to the collection that we didn't in the end acquire. I didn't go to the trustee meeting, to Acquisitions meetings, but Marion would be there. I don't remember her ever coming back and saying, "Those guys, they turned us down." The stories that I remember, it was much more something like a statue that we wanted to buy for the collection that was way north of $10 million, and the Acquisitions Committee, the board, somebody like Franklin Murphy would say, "Oh, let's go for the gold, let's buy it." This would frequently require allocation of funds then, but they would go ahead and they would do it and write the check, and, yeah.

01-00:44:02 Tewes: Is there anything you want to add about acquisitions in general or that part of

your job?

01-00:44:09 Hamma: No, but just that it changed, it changed very quickly over time. Because I had

one head in this excavation for so long, I remember before I began to consciously think about the difference, people in academia sending me letters and saying, "How could you possibly work at an institution that would acquire x or y?" Or dealers looking at me and saying, "And how can you possibly go off and excavate with those people for three months out of the year when you really should be at the museum?" It started hitting me that way before I began realizing myself how much the world was changing out from underneath us, and how quickly, if attitudes weren't changing, how quickly they were ossifying and becoming brittle and very defensive.


01-00:45:14 Tewes: That's an interesting observation. Well some of your other work you

mentioned was keeping the galleries installed and up-to-date, and interpreting some of the pieces there. Does anything stand out to you in terms of that early work you were doing?

01-00:45:40 Hamma: No, but that actually was, I found, extremely interesting and engaging. When I

started at the Getty, the galleries were installed as Jiří Frel would have installed them. Not much had changed in terms of how the galleries were installed. And so, unbelievably, there were sculptures that were installed outside, and this is a climate where fog and mist and saltwater was just a few hundred yards away. There was a kind of casual attitude towards the collection under Jiří, I would say, that became much more in the years, in my first years at the Getty, began to change very quickly. We installed then the galleries in ways that were more thoughtful of the long-term life of the objects and protecting them, both from atmospheric conditions but also from earthquakes. Working with Jerry Podany in the Conservation Department to develop isolator bases for sculptures so they wouldn't be so easily harmed in case of an earthquake, and exactly the same sort of things that built-ins are built now in California underneath important sculptures. But also rethinking the collection, and reinstalling as the collection got richer and began to fill out and we could dedicate galleries to certain topics that before had been filled with even just a giant floor mosaic, because that's all the Getty had, a mosaic that in the end wasn't all that interesting.

It was interesting to sort of see that activity of installing and reinstalling the galleries as a parallel activity to growing the collections and them becoming more interesting and more sustainable for certain topics, but it was also interesting just to stand around in the galleries and listen to visitors look at each other and say, "Mm, 450 BC, how long ago do you think that was?"; or, "450 BC, it can't possibly be that old"; or, because the first floor was all antiquities, the paintings were upstairs, "Well, I think maybe we should go upstairs and look at the art."

01-00:48:08 Tewes: Oh, that is interesting.

01-00:48:08 Hamma: So it was interesting, it was an interesting experience. That puts a public-

facing aspect at the museum. Yeah.

01-00:48:19 Tewes: Did you see that attitude change as you started acquiring more collections?

01-00:48:25 Hamma: I think it began to change only because the Getty Museum, after a certain

while, had been around long enough. I think even when I started there in the late eighties, people would come to the Getty thinking it was going to be a


museum about oil technology. They just really had no idea, and the Museum was very slow about defining itself, having a strong public face.

01-00:49:01 Tewes: Oil technology, sure. [laughs] When you mentioned that this was particularly

interesting to you, installing galleries and interpreting the work, was that something you had done previously before working at the Getty?

01-00:49:19 Hamma: No, and I think that's why it was interesting. It was new. Working with a team

of people from the Department, from the Curatorial Department, but also from—and mainly, I should say—from Conservation, moving objects around; the Preparations Department, who would do all the heavy lifting, help with lighting, do the lighting. It was a team of really good and interesting people and I think, as I think back on it, that was probably one of the key motivators for working at the Getty. One, when I went there in the late eighties, if you were a seasoned museum professional, you probably wouldn't think of the Getty as your first choice because the collections were so weak, and so, What am I going to do there? But in the end, I discovered, as I think everybody who worked there was, one of the big reasons to work at the Getty was you had a team of people throughout the institution that were really, really good to work with.

01-00:50:25 Tewes: I'm wondering also if you saw an opportunity to grow with the Museum, since

it was still in its infancy when you started.

01-00:50:32 Hamma: I think that was true at the Getty across the board. In the beginning it was just

the Museum, and then out of it grew other programs, as you know, when Nancy Englander and Harold Williams realized the scope of resources that the Getty would have, and tried to figure out how to spend those wisely. Spending was important because there was a rule about how much money the Getty had to spend, based on its income. It couldn't just throw all that money into acquisitions; it would have been way too much. It would have not made any sense. And so, other programs starting, but also other programs growing out of the Museum. The [Research] Library, which is at the core of the GRI [Getty Research Institute], used to just be the Museum library, for example, and it grew out and became something else. It was both an institution that was changing a lot, but an institution that had money, and it was true for acquisitions, but I think it was true for a lot of other things. If you had a really good idea and you were smart and persistent, you could probably do something that you might not have been able to do in another institution.

The Getty, in those early days, was not as risk averse as it became and it was open to doing things, and so that was a huge draw and a huge interest, not just for myself but I think for everybody who worked there. I think that combination of that, being able to get things done, formulate projects and see


them through from one end to the other, and know that you had a good group of people to work with both in the Museum but also at the other institutes, and in—so the infrastructure departments at the Getty Trust, really, it was a very exciting time.

01-00:52:47 Tewes: I also want to talk about your work with the Publications Program. Can you

tell me what that entailed?

01-00:52:56 Hamma: The Publications Program was very strong. It had very good production

people, very good editors, very good designers, and it was really about publishing the collection and making it available beyond the walls of the Museum. The monographs, journals, collections of symposium papers—there were a variety, six or seven different types of publications that we focused on. My job early on working with Marion was to corral and make sure the publications for the Antiquities Department kept moving forward: keeping authors on deadline; making sure people had what they needed; doing reproduction rights in research for images; and sometimes, when push came to shove, doing the writing myself and pretending the author who was supposed to be doing it actually was doing it and things were moving along. There were some publications that we wanted to get done, but would just take forever. Some that were in early stages when I started in 1987 would sputter along, and they were only finished long after I left the Getty. It was just a project that would take time, and some of these things just took their own good time, but the goal was to provide everyone—other museums, the academic world—with publications so they could see the scope of the collections.

01-00:54:44 Tewes: There is a foreshadowing to your later work. I imagine, in an era before digital

sharing of files and information, that that was especially important.

01-00:54:54 Hamma: It was especially important, and it involved a lot of—that anybody who's

doing it today—it involved a lot of tracking of physical assets. When we would do black and white photography of works in the collection to document the collection, we would get seven copies of every black and white photograph, and there might be twenty-seven different views of the sculpture. So you'd wind up with like 154 black and white photographs and boxes and boxes of these things. I remember the Curatorial Offices at the Museum were just filled with filing cabinets, full of these black and white photographs that we would send out when somebody wanted them, and color transparencies and slides, and just on and on and on. The rights management through the Registrar's Office, through Sally Hibbard, would manage rights and all those images that the Getty declared it had copyright interest in, all these black and white images and color transparencies of all this ancient stuff, in which there is no copyright inherent anymore, hasn't been for a long time. The whole


process in Publications was made much more difficult by both the physical assets, but also by managing rights.

01-00:56:28 Tewes: And how does the theatrical performance play into Publications?

01-00:56:33 Hamma: That just started as Publications, I think. It's a good question, and I'm not

going to remember exactly who or what or when. But I remember Oliver Taplin from Oxford was at the Getty as a visiting scholar, and we were talking about, he was interested in doing a new translation of The Odyssey, which he did. But while he was there, we would talk sometimes, and not thinking really about theater, but we would talk about The Odyssey as originally conceived as an oral presentation, never written down, and what it must have been like to sit and listen to someone tell the story for a long period of time, and to bring in those storytelling sessions, to bring food because you knew it was going to last for hours, lighting bonfires because it—they'd get cold at night. I remember specifically with Oliver talking, "What would it be like to have a recitation, two hours or three hours of Odyssey, of some choice bit of storytelling, on the beach below the museum, in the evening around a bonfire—you'd look at the people—" and we really began to seriously think about then doing a reading of The Odyssey that slowly evolved into the first theatrical performance at the Getty.

Rush Rehm from Stanford was the director. We worked with the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. We helped with production and with all of the contracts for actors. It was a steep learning curve about who gets paid what, and who's allowed to do what, and what you can film and what you can't, and all that stuff. In the end, we put together—I think it was, but I'll be biased here—I think it was a very successful performance of a chunk of The Odyssey that lasted longer than a normal theater production, and so there was a break in the middle of it for people to have dinner, which we provided as part of the whole experience. The audience sat around the Inner Peristyle, the old Getty Museum in northern Santa Monica. There was very simple music, percussive, triangle, that kind of stuff, to accompany the actors who played the parts. Some actors played multiple parts in doing this recitation of The Odyssey in a semi-performative way—costumes—but it wasn't all dramatic. It was more like a dramatic reading, with a few other things around the side to make it a little more believable. But it was good, I think.

01-00:59:40 There was one night—and there's a part of The Odyssey where Odysseus lands on an island and he's been shipwrecked and he's washed up on the shore, and so he's completely naked. He knows there's a town there and he has to go and get help, and Athena shows up and she said, "Don't worry, I'll wrap you in a cloud of fog and no one will notice, and we'll go and you'll get clothed and you'll get bathed," and all that sort of thing. And as Athena is in the performance at the Museum talking about this, right on cue, as though


Hollywood was producing it, a fog came rolling over the roof, into the Inner Peristyle from the Pacific Ocean.

01-01:00:18 So it was that kind of serendipitous stuff that we really enjoyed, and I think it was all on a wing and a prayer. The Museum was not set up to do theater. They wanted to have torches. The fire department wouldn't let us have torches, but after some negotiation, "Yeah, well, maybe okay, you can have torches." So it was that kind of by-the-seat-of-our-pants production.

01-01:00:50 Tewes: What kind of support did you have from either the Department or the Museum

as a whole?

01-01:00:54 Hamma: Well Marion was really interested in it. In those days, it was all in the

Antiquities Department. Eventually, there was a person at the Getty who was in charge of theatrical performances and it all became kind of professional. But we really saw it as an outgrowth of the scholarly research that the Department was responsible for. This was another way of understanding the collections and understanding what we've inherited from the ancient world. It wasn't just for the sake of doing a theatrical performance. And so, it was very supported. I don't know, but I would guess that the deputy director and the director were really worried that it was going to be a great disaster, but it wasn't. And so that was fun.

01-01:01:43 Tewes: Did you see this as a one-time performance?

01-01:01:46 Hamma: At the beginning, it was a one-time thing, yeah. I remember thinking

afterwards, So, what do we do now, or do we just stop doing this? I had a friend named Sam Paul, who worked for the public TV station in Los Angeles, and who knew a man named Franco Zeffirelli. Franco Zeffirelli was in town, and Sam Paul said, "Why don't we have lunch?" I said, "Okay, fine." I remember one day having lunch at the Museum with Sam Paul; Franco Zeffirelli; the Stassinopoulos sisters from Santa Barbara, Agapi and Arianna—Arianna now Arianna Huffington. We were sitting around having lunch, and we all got very excited about the idea of doing theater and what that could mean, especially in a nontraditional space like the Getty Museum; how to involve maybe more of the collections; how to take advantage of that weird reproduction of the Roman villa; why would we do this; what would we be doing that other institutions couldn't do. That, I think, actually began in the Museum some thinking about, Well, maybe we should do this as an ongoing aspect of programming at the Museum. And in fits and starts, we did, and that eventually evolved into a whole program. Now, as you probably know, that other entrance that used to go out to the old tea room, to the Getty Museum, which has been turned into the main entrance but where it's the side entrance,


has now being refashioned into a Roman theater with the façade of the Museum as the backdrop. So it's become much more, what, institutionalized, I guess.

01-01:03:50 Tewes: And that started out of this one play.

01-01:03:53 Hamma: Yeah. I think that that's almost like a little encapsulation of my career at the

Getty. It started out as, I wonder if we can do this, and, God, we can do this. That was, in some sense, true for building the collections. We all were amazed at what we were able to accomplish, but it was also true for other aspects of the institution. I think by the time I left the Getty, my sense was that it was no longer an institution of, Boy, I think we can do this; it was much more risk averse, stuck in the tracks that it had set for itself, and that was that.

01-01:04:42 Tewes: When you mentioned having these early conversations about, What is it that

we as the Getty can do that no one else could do, what was the answer to that?

01-01:04:52 Hamma: Sometimes there wasn't an answer, but it was—the answer was what we did. I

think in terms for the Museum, for the Museum departments, it was—and for many still is—all about building the collection. But in terms of my own career at the Getty, it was about, Well, maybe we can do theater, or, What would it look like if we actually tried to do that? And then, not long after that, it was, as you mentioned earlier, it began to be about technology. There are opportunities here that are actually extremely interesting from the point of view of mission of the Getty.

In the early days, technology was more like the fax machine. And even when it became much more interesting, when you realized—I remember in the early nineties building a website for the Getty and showing it to John Walsh and other people, and them looking at it like, Wow, we don't know what this is, why would we ever do this? It became something in that sense that was much more, at least in my mind, was much more—or should be—much more mission driven than IT driven. In the early days, it was, Oh, let the IT [Information Technology] Department figure that out. I would often think, No, we should be figuring out what it is that we want to do with the technology, as opposed to figuring out what technology we get, and then living in that box.

01-01:06:35 And so that became kind of a driving motivation in my later work at the Getty, both in terms of, how do we make the technology work for us, how do we define what it is that we want to do that takes advantage of the opportunities that technology has out there; but also, what it is, how do we redefine what we do in terms of rights management, for example, when you're suddenly living


in a world where good quality images of everything in the collection can be instantly available to everybody on the planet? What do you do? Do you lock it all down with deferring copyright and images of 5,000-year-old works of art? Or do you say, "No, we could actually do something interesting here?" That was a bigger battle for the theater. [laughs]

01-01:07:33 Tewes: But I can see how it often feels like the same challenge of working against the

system. It sounds like you were finding innovative ways to move through it.

01-01:07:43 Hamma: Yes, I think in retrospect I probably did that, and I think, in retrospect, other

people noticed and thought, What an asshole, what a jerk, why is he doing that?

01-01:08:00 Tewes: But, there were some results at the end.

01-01:08:02 Hamma: It took a long time. Yeah, there were results, and I think in the process, one of

the things I realized was, if you keep saying the same thing over and over again, eventually you'll hear people repeating it back to you as though they had the idea, and then, you know, ah, okay, we got someplace. And so you just get out of the way, let them take credit for it, and move on.

01-01:08:34 Tewes: That's very clever. I wanted to finish up with theatrical performances. I know

there was another one I believe you worked on in '94, The Woman from Samos and Plautus' Casina. Am I saying any of that correctly?

01-01:08:52 Hamma: Yeah, it was two comedies. That was a production where I think we were

beginning—it was all beginning to transition from, I wonder what we can do here, to something that felt much more, We need to do this, we need to do that, we need to do this with other staff being involved—oversee production, doing other sorts of things—and becoming—it feeling much more like a semi-professional theater group as opposed to a museum that's interested in doing this. Because it helps elucidate what we know about the collections and what we know about the ancient world that we've got in our hands here.

I remember one of the most interesting things was, we had acquired works from the Fleischman Collection at about the same time. Barbara and Larry [Fleischman] were both interested in theater, and so they're interested in seeing this whole thing move forward. We were around a lot, because we were in the process of acquiring their collection—partly by gift, partly by purchase—and they were at the Museum a lot when these productions were being done. The thing that I remember most about them was, from their collection, the Getty acquired a little bronze figurine that was crouching down, had two fingers in its mouth like this, and whose butt was particularly


prominent. We didn't know what it was, and it turned out to be, we discovered, through a man named Jesse Dukeminier, who was a professor at UCLA Law School and my neighbor, who saw this and said, "Oh, I know what that is." He said, "In the Early Medieval Europe, a serf could earn his freedom at the end of the year, after Christmas celebrations and New Year celebrations, by doing a performance for his master, and if he did the performance successfully, he was allowed to go free. The performance was to simultaneously do a leap, a whistle, and a fart." And that's exactly what this little guy was doing, and that became a common character in commedia dell'arte. It has a long tradition, but this was about as far back, I think, as we could push it, into the ancient world, where this notion of performance having significant impact on rights and property, and—but that was like a footnote for this whole production, because it became all about the production, and the theater, and the awe. I was, Okay, fine.

01-01:12:08 Tewes: Were you still heavily involved with the production side of that?

01-01:12:12 Hamma: Not as much, but the production side kind of outgrew the scope of the

Museum to be able to contain it. People were more ambitious in their thoughts and what they wanted to get done. Some of it was a bit—it was fine. It was, in my mind, a bit of a train wreck, but it was okay.

01-01:12:34 Tewes: Well, is there anything else you want to discuss about the performances?

01-01:12:39 Hamma: No.

01-01:12:40 Tewes: Covered that well?

01-01:12:41 Hamma: Yeah, yeah, done.

01-01:12:43 Tewes: I am interested in speaking a little more about the Fleischman donation,

because that was, I think, the largest acquisition you'd made at that point. Am I misremembering?

01-01:12:55 Hamma: In some way, yes. I don't remember, probably in terms of money, too; not for

the Museum, but for the Antiquities Department. We never could match the Paintings Department for what we would pay for a single object, but I think in terms of funds transfer and also in terms of what the Museum acquired—the number and quality of objects—probably was the largest single acquisition that we made. And complicated, because it was bumping up against this new world where we were much more concerned about provenance, and we knew the world would be concerned about provenance, coming from private


collectors who largely have much more leeway in terms of thinking about provenance than public institutions. But we loved Barbara and Larry, and we didn't want to hurt them in any way. It was a lot of work holding the various pieces that wanted to move in different directions together, to bring that to the Museum; and then, almost simultaneously, do an exhibition of that collection to introduce it to the public and to begin to see how we could integrate it with the rest of the collection. So it was a big deal, yeah.

01-01:14:27 Tewes: I don't remember. Were they giving anything to other departments at the

Getty, or were they concentrating on Antiquities?

01-01:14:34 Hamma: I don't know if they did or not. I don't remember. I wouldn't be surprised, but

it was really a concentration on Antiquities, that's what they collected. In their home in New York, it was antiquities, yeah.

01-01:14:51 Tewes: Were you in contact with them, and Marion, about which pieces to bring to

the Getty, or as you said, it was complicated and you felt like you needed to take more than you anticipated?

01-01:15:04 Hamma: No, I think the understanding at the beginning was simply that it would be

virtually the entire collection. I think some things were held back because they were loved too much, but it was virtually the entire collection. It was more along the lines of how we would present them, the deal about what percentage would be acquired by money—and what we paid them was above my pay grade. I remember going with Christine Steiner to a meeting with Larry on Wall Street to actually call the Northern Trust and have the funds transferred and do the whole formal thing, but that's all. I was there just as a representative of the Department. All that somebody took care of. But when the collection was acquired, we did an acquisition proposal for each object, the same we would do—the same proposal for any other object. And so, researching provenance, researching market value, doing comparables and the collection comparables of other collections, that kind of stuff.

01-01:16:18 Tewes: And how did this new collection impact the Antiquities Department as a

whole when you had actually acquired it?

01-01:16:33 Hamma: That's a good question. I think with the other acquisitions that the Department

had been doing all along, I think suddenly, we realized that the scope of the collection was big. Storage was no longer a place where we simply put stuff that we thought was hideous. There were good things in storage. There were collections in storage. Even though I think at the time I don't know that any of us sensed this, but I think looking back, it was a kind of inflection point in terms of how the collection was managed, and the expectation of how the


collection would fill the building once it was just Antiquities, and everything else went to Brentwood.

01-01:17:25 Tewes: You mentioned that that was already a goal when you came on in the eighties,

was to make the Villa the main home of [the] Antiquities [Department].

01-01:17:32 Hamma: It was vaguely there. I don't remember anything specific, but I do remember

thinking that we're building this collection to fill this building, to be a reasonable destination, and both for scholars but also for the visiting public, for creating a new home of antiquities.

01-01:18:00 Tewes: Is there anything else you'd like to add to the Fleischman acquisition?

01-01:18:17 Hamma: No, I don't think so.

01-01:18:19 Tewes: Okay. I think we should take a quick break.

01-01:18:21 Hamma: Okay. [break in audio]

01-01:18:24 Tewes: Okay, we are back from a break. Ken, we just finished discussing a bit about

the Fleischman Collection at the Getty, and I wanted to speak a little bit more about where the Antiquities Department fits within the larger Getty system in these early years you were working there.

01-01:18:44 Hamma: How do you mean? I don't know. How do you mean? Curatorially, I think

Getty's strong collections, where he collected well, relatively speaking, were French decorative arts and antiquities. His paintings were terrible, that he bought. And so, the Paintings Collection, they were running as fast as they could to deaccession stuff and buy good stuff. The Department of Prints and Drawings was founded by George Goldner as kind of an offshoot of the Paintings Department, a year or two years or three years before I got to the Getty. The Department of Manuscripts, similarly, was started as an offshoot of the Paintings Department when Thom [Thomas] Kren made a major purchase of manuscripts, and then established a separate department for manuscripts. Dec-Arts just poked along constantly. And the Antiquities Collection, what Getty bought wasn't terrible. In the paintings world what he bought was pretty much terrible, but it needed to become a stronger collection. I think we were pretty much left on our own because if you know about antiquities, you know about antiquities. If you know about paintings or manuscripts or prints and drawings, you kind of don't know about antiquities. So they could all talk with each other, but they didn't talk to us much. I mean, that's not true, but in terms of professional overlap, not so much.


01-01:20:27 Tewes: That makes sense; it's a very specialized field.

01-01:20:31 Hamma: Right, yeah.

01-01:20:35 Tewes: I'm also curious about who the Department reported to. Was it nestled under

the Museum at that point?

01-01:20:45 Hamma: Yeah, everybody reported to the director of the Museum. All of the curatorial

departments reported to the director, so it was all very even-handed. I mean, in terms of acquisitions, for example, there were pre-acquisition meetings where each curator would run through their presentation of the work they wanted to acquire before they were presented to the trustees, and so everybody got to see everybody else's, what it was they were going to present. At the beginning, that was all very jolly. It wasn't a situation as it is in some museums where some curator in a department will look at another and say, "What, we're going to buy that piece of crap? Over my dead body." But it was all very collegial, and I think everybody—I think we all thought we were doing a really good job, and thought the other departments were doing a good job, too.

01-01:21:39 Tewes: Well, I'm wondering what kind of relationship, working relationship, you had

with other departments at that time, in terms of conservation or anything of that sort.

01-01:21:50 Hamma: Again, because antiquities were so special, the Conservation Department for

the Antiquities Department was separate. There was a conservation lab for objects that Brian Considine ran. It was culture and other works of art, but objects. I think there was a lot of back and forth between those departments, because they would run across similar problems, same kinds of material—what do you do with this, what do you do about that—same kinds of display issues—how do you isolate a statue from an earthquake that might happen underneath it. The Paintings Department was always a very strong conservation department, and entirely separate. And as other departments came online—works on paper and Manuscripts, for example—they had their own conservation lab. In the early days, it was in the same sort of office space as the curatorial departments, but when those departments all moved to the Getty Center, they had their own, much larger conservation and subtleties for Paper and for Photographs. But it never felt to me much like there was a lot of competition or enmity or any other bad feeling among the curatorial departments or conservation departments.

01-01:23:25 Tewes: Did you have a sense that other museums were slightly different, in that

respect?


01-01:23:32 Hamma: Yes. I think the difference at the Getty was, at least in the early days there was

enough money to buy almost anything that the curatorial departments wanted to buy. That sounds ridiculous, but we lived within a budget, but we weren't fighting over acquisition funds, as can happen in other museums, and where those fights can become really kind of bitter. The other difference at the Getty was, there was only one source of money, and that was the endowment. At least in those early days, the notion of fundraising or having individuals fund acquisitions didn't exist, and so it was kind of a world unto itself and isolated in a way, isolated by the money. That kind of insulated all those activities, but also made them possible.

01-01:24:38 Tewes: I have never thought about what that might mean, having one source of money

and not fighting over trying to acquire more money on the year-to-end basis. That's interesting. I also want to know if you remember any other people working on staff with you at the time, besides Marion.

01-01:25:01 Hamma: In that department—

01-01:25:01 Tewes: Yes.

01-01:25:01 Hamma: —in the Antiquities Department? Yeah, Marit Jentoft-Nilsen was there. She

was working for Jiří when I first showed up in Los Angeles. She had been a Latin teacher, a high school Latin teacher, and wound up here working for Jiří. Karol Wight, Karen Manchester were the key people in the Department when I went there, and continued right on through. Karen has wound up at the Art Institute of Chicago. Karol is at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York. Other people were hired along the way, but other hires happened more or less as I was moving out of the Department and thinking of doing other things, so it had less of an impact. But it was a good group of people. We all kind of had a core of things that we were responsible for, but we all played in each other's messes all the time, too, and that was fine.

01-01:26:16 Tewes: You were an associate curator. About how many curators were there working?

Were all of them curators?

01-01:26:26 Hamma: Each department had a curator, a chief curator, if you will, and then other

staff: deputies and secretarial help and other people. So there were, what, Paintings; Drawings; Manuscripts; Antiquities; Decorative Arts; Photographs, eventually. So six departments, six curators.

01-01:26:53 Tewes: Was there any occasion to work with curators at another department, or were

you kept pretty separate in terms of your own projects?


01-01:27:02 Hamma: Oh, golly. I'm sure we did. I'm hard pressed at the moment to think of

anything. Because we were in the building in Malibu—or actually, on the edge of Malibu in Santa Monica—we were really constrained by the space. And so the notion of doing special exhibitions that would cut across collections, we didn't go there, there was no place to do it. By the time that the new Getty Center opened, I'd already been a year out of the Department, and so, what people were thinking about then, I don't know. I don't remember any exhibition at the Getty that really focused across collections at the Getty.

01-01:27:50 Tewes: That actually leads me to some questions about facilities. You mentioned

storage a little while ago. Where were you storing art: onsite or offsite?

01-01:28:03 Hamma: I think it was all onsite, everything, as long as we were in the old building. I

could be wrong. Sally Hibbard would know. I don't know what other departments did, but I think it was all onsite. I think the Paper Collections were stored in those offices. The Paper Department's Manuscripts and other works on paper—Prints and Drawings—had their one-sided museum, the basement of the Museum; and conservation, storage, and the curatorial departments were all in the same space. We had two large storerooms in the basement at the old Getty, and I'm sure—I don't have the mental picture where the paintings were, but I'm sure they were also there.

01-01:29:01 Tewes: You had mentioned that you were a bit overrun by photographs and

paperwork and such. Was this something you were thinking about as you were ramping up to move to the Getty Center, about the kinds of offices you would need and the spaces you would require?

01-01:29:22 Hamma: They overlapped. I remember they overlapped a bit. Every department had to

define exactly what it was that they needed at the new Getty Center, how many offices, how many inches of desk space, how many feet of file cabinets in the hall, that kind of stuff. It was happening at the same time when I was beginning to imagine, We don't need to have all those—I mean, it was literally miles of filing cabinets to store photographs for all the collections put together. We don't need to do that. It took a while longer after moving to the Getty Center that we finally got over that, but it was, thinking about it, that, in a way, was a sea change for the institution to give up that safety blanket of black and white photographs, and to rely on things digital, at a time when nobody was quite sure that they knew what it was or that it would last. But the impact on storage was enormous for that sort of thing. How that's played out, I have no idea, but we were in the early stages of just getting rid of all of that, of thinking about how to get rid of that, and how to transition everything, all of the transactions that the Museum wouldn't transact based upon physical photographs or transparencies into a digital realm. That was a one step


forward, two steps back kind of deal because everybody on the outside of the world had to say, "Yeah, a digital file is fine. I don't need a black and white photograph," and that really took a long time.

01-01:31:08 Tewes: Do you feel like those sorts of interactions, or the realization that digital was

required or in some ways easier, happened on a department-by-department basis?

01-01:31:21 Hamma: It was kind of department by department. But before I left the Museum, when

I was head of Collections Information Planning, one of the departments that reported to me was Photography, and there was a man named Charles Pasella, who was head of Photography forever and ever, I remember, and really, really good, and hired people like Ellen Rosenberry, who were really good photographers. Charles happened to retire at a very convenient time, in thinking about the change to digital workflow in photography, and digital fulfillment as opposed to paper and film. I was able to hire a new head of Photography who was very, very smart, and also a very good photographer, and helped us think through all of the things that we needed to do and helped think through the sequence in which best to do them, what's going to be easiest to get rid of, or where are the changes that it'd be easy first.

And one of the things that always problematic for the Museum were color transparencies. We would make color transparencies, four-by-five pieces of film in color that were very susceptible to the environment, and so we had to build cold storage for these things, and that had to be maintained and everything had to be in there, and that was a real pain. We decided, Well, let's tackle that first, before we do black and white images. Let everybody keep those. We'll just transfer four-by-five color transparencies to digital, and we will internally base workflow on only digital files. If somebody in the outside world has to have a four-by-five color transparency, we'll make one from the digital file, instead of storing ten copies of that transparency in case somebody asks for one. I think the impact on the budget of Photo Services was so enormous, everybody was worried. "Oh, it's going to cost so much money to print a physical transparency from the digital file every time somebody wants one." The costs were miniscule compared to making ten copies to begin with and storing them and protecting them—of everything in the institution—and so that, the light bulbs started going off, saying, "Oh, I get it. We can print a black and white photograph from a digital file if somebody really needs to have one. Yes, we can do that."

01-01:34:14 And so one kind of cost went down enormously, in terms of making and managing the physical stuff, and building storage, whether it's filing cabinets or cold storage, and another kind of cost—that is, acquiring the technology to do digital production—went up. In the end, it was probably a wash. It may be more expensive to do digital, but I think in the long run, in terms of providing


good quality images and documentation of collections, it was a big win for the Museum.

01-01:34:53 Tewes: Was this something you spearheaded under Collections Information Planning?

01-01:34:56 Hamma: Mm-hmm.

01-01:34:56 Tewes: Okay. Well we'll get back to that in the future. But thinking again about the

move from the Villa to the Getty Center, you mentioned needing to know specs on how much storage space, et cetera you needed there. Do you remember what the priorities were for your department?

01-01:35:19 Hamma: Well, when I moved to the Getty Center, I was also transitioning out of the

department, and so the priorities for all the curatorial departments were: replicate what we've got now and give us 10 percent more. We probably should have said, "Give us what we've got now, and give us 25 percent more," because moving to the Getty Center also meant there were spaces for temporary exhibitions; there were specific spaces for rotating the Photography Collection every two months or however frequently photography rotates; and so the workload on the staff went up enormously, particularly for departments like the Preparations Department, which served all the curatorial departments. Suddenly, it wasn't just getting things in and out of the Museum because we were making acquisitions; they were also moving a lot of stuff for exhibitions. It was enormous, and I don't think anybody in the Museum would have thought through the implications fully of that, in terms of staff resources.

But I was starting a new department then, to build educational interactive systems for the Museum. I remember sitting in the old museum. A woman named Kris Kelly helped me, and we hired a staff of about twenty-five people in two weeks. There was only one really serious mistake in the hiring, and they all turned out to be really, really good people. And so, my requirement moving to the Getty Center was, "Hey, we're a whole new department that you didn't think of until right now. Where are we going to go?"

01-01:37:02 And so we were down—it was called L2, which was one of the basement levels of the Museum, of the old institution. We were down on L2, and there was a big room that nobody had decided what was going to happen there. And Exhibition Design, because now we were having exhibitions constantly, suddenly became a big new entity. And so, my department in Exhibitions design ate this whole big space, and we were moving in and trying to get to work and install computers and all that sort of stuff. At the same time, the building was being finished, and there were days when they would apply some floor sealant on the second floor of the Museum, and we all had to


evacuate because it was highly toxic, but it was basically staff members. And I said, "I need space to put twenty people." So, it was a bit of this and a bit of that.

01-01:38:12 But it was also the end, it was also in the end, the end of my days dealing with Antiquities, both because of where my career was going, but also because when our offices, the Antiquities offices were loaded on a moving truck one morning and everything boxed up, labeled where it was supposed to go in the new building, and the driver of this particular—and my office was the last one to be loaded onto the truck, and the driver of this truck forgot to lock the back door. And about thirty or forty boxes of papers and books from my office fell out onto the Santa Monica Freeway during rush hour. I remember, Barbara Whitney called me that afternoon and said—I remember it was a Friday—and she said, "Well, let's meet as soon as you get to work on Monday. I've got something to tell you." So I get to work on Monday, meeting with Barbara, and in my office is a plywood bin, four feet by four feet by eight feet, with stuff that'd been scooped up off the freeway: papers and just books ripped to shreds. It was terrible, but it couldn't have happened at a better time, because it was like somebody else saying, "Okay, the antiquities world is over."

01-01:39:38 Tewes: And had you already been thinking about a transition at that point?

01-01:39:41 Hamma: Yeah, because I really was much more interested in the potential of

technology, educational potential, but also the potential of technology to change how the Getty achieved some parts of its mission. One of the things that I thought about for a very long time—it stuck with me—was this notion of: we're here as a public institution, we're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity. There's certain obligations that go with having that tax status, and one is that the institution is there for public benefit. There's no question about that. It's like number one. It's not for lining the pockets of private individuals, it's not for making money for shareholders; it's for public benefit. It seemed to me that making the collections as accessible as possible was fulfilling public benefit. And one of the ways that technology would let us do that would be to make those systems as fluid as possible and take out as much friction as we possibly could. In those days, the rights management was the biggest piece of friction that we would intentionally insert into sharing information.

01-01:41:12 Tewes: I'm wondering if your interest in sharing collections came out of specific

experiences or frustrations you had working in Antiquities.

01-01:41:22 Hamma: It came out of the whole working with publications for the Antiquities

Department for a long time, because getting rights for images was hugely costly, both in terms of paying fees—I remember The Queen's Collection in


London would charge the most exorbitant fees for a onetime reproduction in a single language, of any institution in the world, for fifteenth-century, sixteenth-century paintings that no one owned copyright in that work, but they would insert copyright in the picture that they had made of it. It wasn't just the museum world. There was also a pretty—at least in our world—a high profile case of Corel, which was software for drawing and image manipulation early on that used some images without permission from an institution called the Bridgeman Art Library in London. And Bridgeman sued. I don't remember how it was settled or if it was settled, but it raised, in a very kind of obvious way, all of the issues of, how can an institution declare copyright interest in a work that for which copyright has lapsed so long, and then, oh, let's split hairs. It's got where the interest's only in the image of the work, not in the work itself.

01-01:42:58 And so, we had this picture, and this whole notion of managing copyright that way, and making money off of it and establishing a revenue stream has led to some really peculiar things. Like if you visit the Sistine Chapel today, you're not allowed to take photographs of the ceiling, because the Japanese company that paid for the conservation owns copyright in images of the Sistine Chapel, and so they're eager to prevent anyone else from making images. It's that sort of thing, which seems to me counter to the mission of public institutions like the Getty. Especially at the Getty—and I think it's true for most institutions—the revenue stream from copyright management is really miniscule, compared to the overall budget. But for the Getty, it was ridiculous. It was ridiculous, but, because that's the way things had always been done, that's the way they continued to be done, until a year or two after I left and someone else had the idea, yeah. But that's where you say, "Okay, fine." You talk about it long enough and someone else comes back to you and, that's okay, fine.

01-01:44:19 Tewes: I think you're on to something there. [laughs]

01-01:44:21 Hamma: Exactly.

01-01:44:26 Tewes: Well, is there anything else you'd like to discuss in terms of rounding out your

time with Antiquities?

01-01:44:35 Hamma: Not really. I mean, Marion tried and worked really hard to deal with the

question of provenance, and how does an acquiring institution deal with that, but times had changed around us and around her more quickly than I realized, and more quickly than she realized. She held on to it, and continued to try to make it work. I just thought, This is not fun anymore and it's also not interesting. Because I think that legitimately, a lot of issues were raised with how the market worked that I think I probably knew about but I didn't think


about. I began to think about and I began to realize that there was so much money sloshing around in the antiquities market, and so many layers of actors, some of which, when you really get down to it, the bottom feeders, real thugs who were not above anything to be able to control whatever sector of the market they thought they had cornered. I just thought, This is not good, this is not a world I want to live in. And because transparency was just not existent, unless you were in that market up to your eyeballs, you really didn't have any sense of how things were going. I just thought, This is a disaster.

01-01:46:14 The major event that happened after I left the Department, that was that the European Union had changed their laws so that the Italian Carabinieri could raid the office of an antiquities dealer in Zurich. It was a union. And that's how the files of a man named Bob Hecht, who kept deep, detailed records of what he bought—who he bought it from, and how much he'd paid for it, who he sold it to, dates, amounts of money exchanged, addresses, phones numbers—really detailed records, fell into the hands of the Carabinieri, who, that was their roadmap. They could have gone after everybody and anybody, but they went after the Getty because it was a very high-profile target. In Italy itself, this was, I think, less a legal question than a political question. There were lots of people who could make their careers off of a very high-profile case, and who did make their careers off of the very high-profile case of Italy suing the Getty and Bob Hecht—not the Getty, but suing Marion and Bob Hecht. In some ways, all of the actors, there are no good actors in this story. It didn't have to turn out the way it did.

I remember long after I left the Department, Marion and I talked about my coming back to work to the Department, instead of continuing at the Trust where I was then. She showed me a work that she had at the Getty Museum then, thinking about its acquisition. I looked at her and I said, "What are you thinking? If you've got a wit about you, you will call Sally [Hibbard] right now, put that back in the box, and send it right back where it came from. What are you thinking?" I mean, the Italian Carabinieri, for all I know, were sitting over in the next office building, because they were around interviewing people then. It was like, really? Isn't this like a little blind spot, where, I looked at Marion and I thought, You know, this can't be happening; she's too smart. But it was.

01-01:48:44 All around, it was a kind of a Greek tragedy that I really didn't want to be part of. The story I told you earlier about meeting those dealers from Lyon and Paris, worse things happened after that, and I think they're not much for calling here, but it was not a market that any reasonable person would say, "I want to be part of this," unless you were so keyed on that work and, "I need to have that for the collection." That just was so strong it drowned out all of the other noise around you that all the rest of the world saw, but you somehow didn't see. I don't know what was happening, but I am sure there was a good


reason for it in Marion's mind, and it just continued. But in my mind, this was not my future.

01-01:49:42 Tewes: And was that a major part of your decision not to continue in Antiquities?

01-01:49:49 Hamma: Yes, I think it was fifty-fifty. For an acquiring institution like the Getty,

there's no future here. This can't continue. It will all change. It will all become much more academic, and in some ways much less interesting for that. But also I think that the potential for digital technology, not just with the rights issues, but all sorts of other issues that the Getty had for a long time been dealing with for the Getty Information Institute: data standards, vocabularies, and all that sort of thing were much more interesting in trying to figure out the future of a good use of technology to make research more efficient. Which I think probably is almost exactly the same formulation that Nancy Englander had twenty years earlier when she and Harold were trying to think about, How do we spend the Getty money, how can we look at technology—and in those days, they were looking at Betamax tapes and that kind of stuff as technology—but they were thinking, rightly, How can we use this new technology to make the work of research in our history better and more efficient?

01-01:51:13 Tewes: Since we started talking about the legal ramifications of Antiquities, I think

we might as well finish that up this morning. Do you have a sense of why the Italian authorities went after Marion individually, and not necessarily the Getty as an institution?

01-01:51:31 Hamma: Good question. I think partly being how the Getty worked. I mean, I think

they literally thought Marion wrote the check—I wouldn't be surprised—but they also needed to personalize it in a way. I think that has less to do with anything legal, that's about politics in Italy: "We need to have a head to hang up on the gallows to say, 'We got it.'" Unfortunately, that overtook a lot of other good conversations that could have happened, but it has nothing to do with any of the issues at hand in terms of management of cultural attachment, all of which was swept under the rug in favor of this kind of personal animus toward Marion. But I think also in the process, when they did it, they realized after a certain amount of time, that it really was just Marion on her own. I think they had figured out that she didn't write the check, but I also think they figured out that the Getty wasn't going to do a lot to help her.

01-01:52:43 Tewes: I just want to quickly say that these trials start in 2005, so after you'd left the

Department for about ten years, nine years?

01-01:52:51 Hamma: Yeah, about almost ten, probably.


01-01:52:57 Tewes: I'm wondering how you felt about the idea that Marion was on her own for

much of this, considering you worked with her, you knew her well.

01-01:53:08 Hamma: Well the Trust, there was an arrangement for legal fees and all of that sort of

thing, and I don't know the details of it, but, I mean to say—I take that back. To say that she was completely on her own was not true, but I don't remember ever—and if someone can show me where it happened, it would be great—I don't remember ever anyone above Marion's head—the deputy director, the director of the Museum, the president of the Trust, anybody on the board—except for Barbara Fleischman, who spoke up in her favor, and I think the reason, in talking with board members and with—I remember a conversation with the new director of the Museum who came in after Deborah [Gribbon] left, talking about the issue of antiquities. It really was a kind of—hmm.

I think no one fully appreciated the depth of the conversation that could have been had, and so it was always kept at this kind of legal level, of, Italy wants these seventeen objects back. How many of them do we have to give back to avoid legal jeopardy? All of them, or fourteen or eleven or—and it was a lot of that sort of stuff going on. I thought, This is ridiculous. These people don't—A, they don't know what's going on, and which was not surprising for the board, which never got down into the weeds very much at the Getty. But also, I realized then that they were concerned about the institution in a way that was fully outside of anything that I was interested in. They were worried about the institution's reputation and trying to figure out a way to, like, get out from under that, when in fact, up to that point, I would have said that the institution's reputation rested on its staff, pure and simple.

01-01:55:21 Tewes: So do you think that represented a shift in thinking there, or a realization—

01-01:55:25 Hamma: I don't think it was a—

01-01:55:25 Tewes: —you came to?

01-01:55:26 Hamma: I don't think it was a conscious shift in thinking, but they basically abandoned

the staff at that point and said, "No, we're worried about the institution." and that, I think, going forward from 2005, 2006, really became apparent both in the president's office, the board, a real kind of risk aversion: We just want to be a normal institution here. Let's take all this stuff away, let's not be doing that. That manifested itself in a lot of different ways, but I think anybody who had been at the Getty for a very long time and who went through that period of, if you think about it, and you can put a project together and you've got lots of smart people, you can actually do things, it was no longer that kind of an institution.


01-01:56:22 Tewes: I'm wondering if, as a staff member who'd worked closely with Marion, you

were deposed by the Carabinieri?

01-01:56:30 Hamma: Yeah.

01-01:56:31 Tewes: What do you remember about that process?

01-01:56:38 Hamma: Hmm. In a strange way, it was very uninteresting, because they weren't smart

enough to ask the right questions. The Getty's own legal team really was on a strong learning curve to try to figure out, So, what was this antiquities market all about, how did that work, who knew who, who do you know? It was just a big, great mess. I stopped participating in that very early on. It was just not interesting. And it became clear at a certain point—because it was complicated, and there were secrets that no one was ever going to find out—if you weren't there in 1990, you're never going to know—that the whole inquiry became much more shallow, and it was almost a show trial with Marion True and Bob Hecht for spiriting antiquities out of Italy, somehow, ignoring everybody else who was doing exactly the same thing—private collectors who continued to do it. It was almost like a parenthetical history: let's take this thing aside and we'll put it over here and examine it in an Italian court for years and years and not come to a resolution. Then that's the end of it. It's like, why? Why bother? Except, a lot of objects went back from the Getty to Italy, so, so what?

01-01:58:52 Tewes: Well I'm interested if, while you'd still been in Antiquities, or during the trial

or beyond, if you had been thinking about ways that you could shift not only the Getty's approach, but the field's approach to acquisitions and provenance. I'm thinking, like, the Indiana Jones moment where he's like, "This object belongs in a museum!" But does it belong in a museum, or does it belong to the people whose land it was found on?

01-01:59:25 Hamma: I think it depends on what times you're living in and who has the strongest

voice, and I think that will always be true. But I think there was a moment at the Getty, early in the whole process with Marion, where all the conversations were about, what's the policy, what's the procedure? You have this object, but we know it came from this excavation, and so that object has to go back to Italy but not these other seventeen—which are probably all sort of the same place but because we don't have pictures, we can't prove it—you can keep those. Things happened quickly, but I think there was a moment where the Getty had enough friends in Italy still, and the Antiquities Department, mainly—and it might have gone nowhere—but I think we had a moment where we could have had a conversation about, How do we manage cultural heritage, broadly speaking? If we're going to rearrange the chairs on the deck,


and rethink roles in that, let's sit down and do it, but let's do it together. But I think everybody was so—I don't know about Italy, but at the Getty everybody else in terms of senior management was so concerned about legal ramifications, and what do we do now, and how do we make this go away, it was a nonstarter.

01-02:01:03 Tewes: Do you feel like the field has come up with answers since then?

01-02:01:09 Hamma: I think it's slowly feeling its way back, but I think the whole episode was so

disruptive, it's going to take longer than has passed since 2005. I think there's no reason that there couldn't be better feelings and a better arrangement of what's happening, but I think part of it has to do with people who are very righteous about this topic kind of backing down a little bit. I think it has to do with, if there's going to be a market, that the market is more open and transparent and it's really clear what's going on. But the way things are still operating, it's still very opaque, and still very difficult. I mean, if you saw a painting you wanted to acquire, for example, from a nineteenth-century artist, and you wanted to know what other price was recently paid for that, you're going to have a very hard time getting that information. Or, you found a painting by an artist who's still living and you want to know what are the prices that have been paid, it's dense and opaque.

And so I think there are lots of things that need to change, but I think there could be—if we ask the question about cultural heritage management in a way that's not just about, Don't bomb those statues, or about, Let's not have a fire in that cathedral—but really it's the bigger issue of, This stuff all is made by people, and we're all people here who manage it. What can we do? The Getty Bronze [Statue of a Victorious Youth], for example, which has been back in the news again recently, it was a bronze that was made in Greece. It was being shipped to Italy, to Rome, under what circumstances? I mean, did they have a clean bill of sale? Probably not. The ship sinks. Italy now says, "Oh, that's ours." Based on what? The whole thing is just, it doesn't bear any reason.

01-02:03:34 Tewes: So you mentioned that, as the trial wears on, not much seems to be resolved

legally, at least. Do you think there was any substantive change at the Getty itself, and approach to collecting, or—yeah, collecting and acquisitions?

01-02:03:54 Hamma: Oh, I stopped paying attention. There was one event, though, that made me

think, Oh, you know, no, not really. When a new curator of Antiquities was needed, the current director of the Museum hired a man who was presented to the public as having had academic credentials, having been a professor at University of Arizona or something like that—I don't remember what it was—and maybe he was an adjunct professor for a half a semester there, but he was a dealer. When I was in the Antiquities Department, he worked for Lazard


Frères [and Company] and dealt in coins and gems. I thought, that signals a big change. There were only two—but, you know, I think not. All the press from the Getty said, "Oh no, this guy is an academic," and I thought, Well, okay fine.

01-02:05:01 Tewes: Well as we wrap up this morning, is there anything else you'd like to add

about this early part of your career at the Getty, or about the trial in particular?

01-02:05:10 Hamma: Not about the trial; I think that is also completely opaque to me. I just did not,

at a certain point, did not pay attention. The Antiquities Department went on, reinstalled itself at the Villa, and seems to be operating fine, as far as I can tell from the outside. So, I don't think so.

01-02:05:37 Tewes: Okay. Well, thank you so much for your time this morning.

01-02:05:39 Hamma: You're welcome, yeah.


Interview 2: June 12, 2019 02-00:00:02 Tewes: This is a second interview with Ken Hamma for the Getty Trust Oral History

Project, in association with the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley. The interview is being conducted by Amanda Tewes in Palm Springs, California, on June 12, 2019. So thank you for meeting with me again, Ken.

02-00:00:19 Hamma: Okay.

02-00:00:20 Tewes: You wanted to pick up from where we left off yesterday and talk a little bit

more about Marion True.

02-00:00:24 Hamma: Yeah, I think it wasn't about Marion then; about that moment, because I think

there was a lot of—which was unusual, I think, for the Museum staff, which had been pretty close and very collegial—but there was at that time a lot of mistrust and a lot of questions going on and, obviously, then a lot of gossip and a lot of misinformation, partly stemming from Barry [Munitz]'s management of the Trust, and conflict between the Trust and the Museum, at that point, with Deborah Gribbon. In that context was also all the mess about Antiquities and Marion. I think it all got conflated and confused in a way.

I think I wanted to return to this for a second, because trying to understand one's own motivation at times like that is difficult enough, let alone understanding someone else's. You said something yesterday that made me think. I don't think Marion had a mean spirit in her body. I don't think she intentionally did anything wrong or tried to deceive anybody, but it struck me, thinking about this again last night, that her actions, which I found sometimes inexplicable, might have come out of a misunderstanding of where the role was at that moment.

I mean, it changed quickly, attitudes towards antiquities and collecting changed quickly, and we lived through that and I think it was very difficult to keep up with that. It might have been easier for me because I had an outside base as an archeologist and had a different cohort talking to me about how the world perceived Getty's acquisitions and antiquities at that time. Marion may have too, but she also was very stuck in a years-long routine of writing and rewriting the policy of collecting antiquities at the Getty with Deborah Gribbon and John Walsh and legal staff. I'm just guessing now, but I can imagine that built a kind of world view that solidified around Marion trying to find—and using that avenue to try to find—the answer to Getty's acquisition of antiquities, and not going down an alternative fork that would have said, "Okay, we just don't buy antiquities anymore. What we've done in the past, we just don't do it anymore," but trying to think through policy that would allow


the Getty to continue to do that in a way that other players in the arena, including Italy and Greece, would find acceptable.

02-00:03:26 I think one can underestimate how strong that was, and how deeply embedded and committed Marion seemed to be to finding the solution, genuinely trying to find a solution for the Getty and for American collecting institutions altogether when it came up as part of other discussions of associations and directors of art museums, for example. I think that may have been so strong a world view for Marion, at that point, that it was really difficult for her to see—I mean, we all missed how much things had changed around us and how different things were, but I think there might have been a particular difficulty for Marion to have been objective outside of the world that the Getty had built around antiquities collecting at that time.

And so I think it was then easy for people who didn't have a clue of the history of writing that policy or the history of Getty staff working with collecting antiquities and what that meant, people who didn't have a clue—like Barry and like most of the members of the Board of Trustees—to really kind of flail out and say, "Oh no, we just have to stop this, and just try to excise it as something bad. We're just not going to do this anymore." I think Marion was deeply mistreated and a lot of people were mistreated as that process played out.

02-00:05:16 Tewes: You mentioned that she was working to fix this thinking in American

museums. Was this something globally that other, like Western museums in particular, were discussing? Can you tell?

02-00:05:29 Hamma: I think not so much. I think it seemed, because the focus was so much on the

Getty—and there were a couple of big cases with the Metropolitan Museum, and probably others that I'm not remembering—but it seemed like an American problem at the time, because American museums were as acquisitive. But as the conversation grew and extended, it naturally involved lots of other museums, museums of natural history, for example, in Paris and London. It'd be that returning the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum just became part of this bigger picture, and it just went on and on and it continued and it continues to this day, obviously. It doesn't feel as severe and as antagonistic, but it's still there.

02-00:06:20 Tewes: Is there anything else you'd like to say on that particular topic?

02-00:06:22 Hamma: No, because I think at a certain point, it's just speculation of people's

motivations and—


02-00:06:30 Tewes: It's hard to tell.

02-00:06:31 Hamma: Yeah.

02-00:06:31 Tewes: Okay. Well I'm going to ask for a short break here. [break in audio] Okay, we

are back from a short break, and, Ken, yesterday you were talking a lot about your step away from the Antiquities Department and your move towards the Collections Information Planning Department. Can you tell me how your interest developed into information technology from antiquities?

02-00:06:56 Hamma: I don't find them antithetical in any way. I think I always had an interest in

mathematics and information technology. We used what was then relatively advanced information technology on the excavation, with computer-controlled laser theodolites for geolocation of things in the excavation and built databases to track everything, which is going to sound to anybody who's doing archeology today, Well, what's the big deal? But in the mid-eighties, it was a big deal. It was a steep learning curve, and it was interesting and exciting.

I think we at the Museum, we went from, in 1987, using IBM Displaywriters—and probably no one now even knows what those things were, but they were the size of an executive desk: this big IBM machine with diskettes that were a foot in diameter, floppy diskettes in these giant envelopes and you put it in and it'd make a lot of noise—to transitioning to an IBM personal computer on desktops. And then the Museum and the entire Trust going through a process of trying to decide who gets one, and not everybody should need one, because we didn't really understand what they were for, except as a transition from these old IBM Displaywriters. They were just fancy typewriters, as far as anybody knew, and that kind of stuck around for quite a while—I think longer than it should have. And long discussions about what kind of word processing software would you want, and the Museum opting initially for something called Nota Bene, for reasons I don't understand, but an outlier not supported by any major technology company at the time.

02-00:08:57 And so, it was one of those things where it was like the Wild West in terms of, here's this new technology. What do we do with it? It was happening at a time where the potential for those new technologies were being built and becoming available, something called World Wide Web, which no one had ever heard of before, and trying to hold together the various threads of kind of cutting-edge technology at that time that were becoming available to consumers like institutions or individuals. I think it was at a time where it was clear to some people that there were huge potentials there, but to realize those or even to move in that direction, institutions like the Museum or like the Getty Trust would have to make commitments of funding in that direction, and that felt at


the time very much like kind of venture capital commitments: let's try this and see what happens. I think it was best embodied in the Trust, Harold Williams and Nancy Englander setting up the Getty Information Institute—the Art History Information Program, as it was known before that—which I think most of the other directors and other people who worked at the Getty at the time looked at and thought, What is this, and why are we doing that? I think there was a certain level of that all the way through, and it was one of those things where the institution simply had to say, "We think there is potential here someplace down the road, we don't know what it is." I think when it was described as the goal was to make research more efficient. It was impossible to say what exactly that meant, but I think there was an inkling that there was something here. I remember the Art History Information Program was all over the map in terms of perception, data standards, vocabulary standards, all those sorts of things. And eventually, it was transformed into the Getty Information Institute. The original director parted ways with the Getty, because I think there was a—well, it was a bit out there, and it was a bit uncomfortable for the Getty, for the trustees, to continue to support that.

02-00:11:41 But that environment at the Getty made me think that, in an institution like the Museum, we should also be thinking about, What are the mission objectives for technology, and what could they be, what direction should we go in? How should we be thinking about this, not from the point of view of what software package do you buy, or how do you install servers, or how do you be most efficient in the deployment of technology—cheaper, faster, better, but cheaper—but the other side of it: how do we think about requests for a technology budget in terms of the Museum's objectives in research and education and managing the collection? And no one was asking that, and I saw an opportunity.

02-00:12:41 Well, it was partly opportunity, but it was also, Gee, why isn't anybody asking about this? Why are we spending money on technology, and the objective is simply to put a PC on everybody's desktop? What? That's, like, a stupid goal. What's the Museum going to get out of this? At the same time, I wasn't alone. There were other people at the Museum, particularly in Conservation, who were thinking about uses of technology to measure, to mitigate, to do things that before had been done mechanically or with standalone instruments that would monitor the relative humidity in the galleries, for example. But thinking about, How you take that and put it into an environment that gives us a long-term management objective for works of art in the collection that is both safest for the objects, but also the least expensive in terms of how to maintain that? That eventually became, How do we build a green museum; how do we build a museum that is as energy efficient as possible but still realizes the objectives of maintaining objects in the collection and preserving them?


02-00:14:03 And so, there were things like that that I began to think about and other people began to think about. And at the time, information technology was all centered in the Trust, which was the right way to do it. The more one can leverage technology across multiple programs and goals, but relying on the same technical infrastructure, the cheaper it is per bit of output—whatever one wants to think of production of an institution like the Getty. It seemed to me, there should be someone in the Museum who was thinking more critically about, Where do we want to go, what do we want to do with this?

I remember one day in the Antiquities Department sitting there, and I grabbed a handbook of the collection and spent the weekend using a scanner, scanning images and building basically a website for the Getty Museum: for the collection and for basic information like where are we, when are we open, how do you get here, how do you get in, that sort of thing. I spent a couple weekends doing that and what I came up with was pretty simple. I mean, HTML, that protocol for writing that stuff was very straightforward. It wasn't as complicated as it's become today. And so I built this little website and showed it to people in the Museum, and they all looked at me like, What is that, what is that?

02-00:15:42 And that, some level of that kind of attitude, that discomfort and distance from technology, continued forever at the Getty. When I left, Jim Wood was the president in the Trust at that time. I remember Jim Wood giving me a lecture once about the limits, severe limits of technology, and I should just go out and ride a bike on the weekend instead of playing with this stuff. But it was what it was. I'm sure that there were people at the Trust in positions of authority who didn't use email, that had their staff assistant or their secretary print out email and do everything on paper for them.

So it was kind of a strange time. I think there was no reason that the Getty should have been any different than any other institution with respect to technology. There's no reason that should have been important, I think, for the Getty, except that the Trust, early on with Nancy Englander, defined it as important and laid out a possible agenda for the Getty. And that, coupled with the amount of money the Getty had to spend, suggested to me that the Getty—and others at the Getty—that the Getty had a responsibility to define a leadership role in the community, and had a responsibility because it had the ability to spend money in this area that didn't really impact the bottom line. There was enough money sloshing around in the budget that a few venture projects wouldn't hurt anybody.

02-00:17:43 And so it was that context. and then eventually, projects appeared and piled up and turned into a job, essentially, but we had to make it up as we went along. There was no model to look at to say, "Okay, if one wants to think about, strategically, in the budget and in the mission about technology, how do we


staff for that? What does the organizational chart look like?" We had to make it up from whole cloth. There was nothing to look at and say, "Oh, and we'll do that." So we did. And so, we embedded this office for Collections Information, because it was, early on, mainly about documenting the collection, absorbing some of the work that the registrar had traditionally done, but doing it with computers, both the cataloging, the public information side of it, but also all of the imaging.

02-00:18:56 Tewes: So like the photography imaging that you mentioned yesterday.

02-00:19:00 Hamma: Yeah, and it was all incremental. It took years. The traditional photography

stayed for a long, long time. And making a digital repository of images, we relied on four-by-five color transparencies from the Photography Department to scan those. We didn't have the ability, at that time, we didn't have cameras that could capture the quality that we wanted to do, and so we just didn't go there. But as technology developed, it changed the goals and the structure of that department to become more and more inclusive and more things were managed on a technical infrastructure, rather than on physical infrastructure, in film, for example.

02-00:20:01 Tewes: Made a lot of great points in there, so I want to go back to some of them. First,

you mentioned you were making this early website in, what, the mid-nineties?

02-00:20:10 Hamma: Probably late eighties, early nineties.

02-00:20:13 Tewes: Wow. And how did you learn how to work with HTML?

02-00:20:18 Hamma: I think I just went online and figured it out.

02-00:20:23 Tewes: So you had enough proficiency through the technology you had been working

with before to figure it out?

02-00:20:28 Hamma: Well, I had a sense of how computers worked when I was in high school. I

had an advanced class in Fortran, which was a computer language, coding language, then. I don't think anybody still uses it. We spent a year writing useless programs, but things, nevertheless, that taught us how to think binary, as computers do, and how do you express that in languages that humans can partially understand but then work in machines, too?

02-00:21:01 Tewes: That's amazing. It would have been, like, the sixties?


02-00:21:04 Hamma: Yeah, late sixties.

02-00:21:07 Tewes: Wow. And so as you're showing this website to people who don't quite get it,

did you get a sense that no one else had that proficiency with technology or interest?

02-00:21:18 Hamma: People in the IT Department at the Trust did, and so they got it, and they said,

"This is really fun, I don't know why nobody else is doing this." But there was a disconnect. They didn't have a voice in meetings where the programs at the Getty talked about what they wanted to do. They were simply that department over there that kept the fax machine running, or kept email up and running, and dealt with the servers. I eventually realized that one of the key roles for a person like myself was to be able to speak IT, but also to be able to speak art history and museum, and try to bridge that gap.

02-00:22:10 Tewes: It's definitely something I want to get into a little more later, but is there

anything you can say at this moment about why they felt you were a good person to bring on into this new position?

02-00:22:22 Hamma: I'm not sure that they ever felt that. I think I pushed it and pushed it and

pushed it until people said, "Okay, fine." I never got a sense from the Museum administration, even through the time that the Getty had moved to the Getty Center, so into pushing the end of that century, that anybody at the Museum really understood that or appreciated that.

02-00:23:00 Tewes: But it sounds like you had a sense that that would be important moving

forward, even then.

02-00:23:04 Hamma: Yes, very much. It put me in touch with other programs at the Getty, staffing

other programs like the Getty Information Institute then at that time, trying to bring the standards and quality standards that they had developed into the Getty Museum. I mean, you're here; you've got a program at the Getty, the Getty Information Institute, that is proposing data management standards and vocabulary standards and that sort of thing, that not even the Getty Museum or the Getty Research Institute was taking advantage of. And so it was, again, kind of bringing that level of technology back to, What are we doing, how do we plug this into the real world?

02-00:23:57 Tewes: A word I've heard used to describe the various organizations within the Trust

itself is "siloed." Do you think that, A, applies, but, B, makes sense considering what your challenges were with IT?


02-00:24:12 Hamma: Yeah, it does very much. I think there were certain staff who were able to

jump across those silos and find value. But I think, generally speaking, each program at the Getty was looking out for itself and its own budget and its own goals. I think that came from the Trust all the way down, through the directors. Everybody had signed on to that agenda, more or less. I know there were moments where I was thought to be somewhat traitorous in carousing with people from other programs. For the Museum especially, I think it was difficult, because acquisitions had played such a large role. And when the Getty Center opened, the cost of running the Getty Center and other costs and just building the Getty Center had an impact on the amount of acquisition funding that was available, or could be made available outside of the budget for the Museum. I think the curatorial departments felt that very strongly and became very defensive about being able to continue acquisitions at the pace they thought was appropriate, and that was a big chunk of money.

02-00:25:49 Tewes: Something else that really sparked an interest for me is: you discussed

building a greener museum, and that's not something I had heard of, in terms of the Getty's—

02-00:26:00 Hamma: Yeah, that's ahistorical. Talking about building a greener museum actually

came along much, much, much later. When I think back on it, we didn't use those terms then, we didn't think that way. But certainly, it was always part of my thinking, How do we make this project or these processes more efficient? I think probably in the minds of conservation staff at the Getty, at the Museum. Even though they didn't talk about a greener museum, there certainly was at least a beginning of that as a goal in the way they thought about what they were doing, making the museum environment, the display, the galleries, and the storage environment safer for objects, but becoming more efficient at doing that.

02-00:27:05 Tewes: And a very low-stakes way, I suppose, using less paper and more digital,

contributes to that?

02-00:27:14 Hamma: I think it does. I think, especially when the quantity of paper was huge, and

the black and white photographs that the Getty Museum used to store was just enormous, unbelievable, and largely a waste.

02-00:27:41 Tewes: You mentioned that Collections Information Planning was under the Trust,

and—

02-00:27:48 Hamma: No, it was just the Museum, initially.


02-00:27:50 Tewes: —in the Museum initially. About how long?

02-00:27:53 Hamma: Oh, I don't remember exactly, five years, six years, seven years.

02-00:27:58 Tewes: Okay. And what was the reporting structure there? Were you reporting to the

director of the Museum?

02-00:28:05 Hamma: No, deputy director, yeah.

02-00:28:11 Tewes: I'm just thinking that that might allow you to have more authority in offering

suggestions for the Museum with the rest of the Trust if you're reporting higher?

02-00:28:23 Hamma: It grew in that direction, absolutely. I think it would be exaggerating to say

there was an instantaneous change from the siloed institutions that the Getty had been, but we began to think about ways of moving forward that would be more cooperative, and take better advantage of other things the Trust had to offer in other programs.

02-00:28:57 Tewes: You also mentioned there really wasn't a model for you to work off of how to

proceed with this program. Was that industry-wide, museums, or just at the Getty?

02-00:29:10 Hamma: I'm thinking it was industry-wide—and it wasn't even just at museums. I

remember having conversations with people at Disney, for example, about, How do you organize for managing digital assets? I remember in the early days interviewing vendors of asset management systems, systems that would manage digital still images, digital video, digital audio; and sometimes interviewing vendors with people from Disney at the same time, because we had essentially the same problem: how do we transition from big boxes of film and audio tapes to a digital world? How does this work, both technically—what machines, what standards, what quality should we be aiming for? There was always a tradeoff between high-quality images, which implied vast storage at rate costs early on, and now storage is almost negligible in terms of costs and so you can store whatever you want to. But in the early days, it was really, Do we store a ten-megabyte image or do we store what do we think is high quality? It was the same question for everybody who was managing those kinds of assets, regardless of industry.

02-00:30:39 Tewes: I'm curious what Disney said, in particular, about how you might move

forward.


02-00:30:45 Hamma: Because they were so much better funded than we were, they just moved

forward. They made mistakes. We all made mistakes. They made bigger mistakes and it didn't matter as much, so yeah.

02-00:31:02 Tewes: That's an interesting point. [laughs]

02-00:31:03 Hamma: Yeah, well—

02-00:31:04 Tewes: The money can be a hindrance.

02-00:31:06 Hamma: Yeah, and I think we thought a lot about the tradeoff between quality of

product and the amount of money it would take to store and manage it over time—largely because that never was part of the Getty budget. The Getty Museum did not spend money on technology, at least not the way it does now. And so, there was a whole transition in terms of not just the org chart, but where does the budget go?

02-00:31:41 Tewes: Yeah. So where were you getting your budget in those early days?

02-00:31:45 Hamma: Well, we would try to manage budget through from old processes and old

requirements into new ones. That didn't always work. For example, in Photo Services, if we said, "We no longer need to have cold storage and a room about this size at the museum, cold storage for color transparencies and film, so we can do away with that. We will save x tens of thousands of dollars if we do that, and we get space, so it can be somebody's office." So we try to quantify that and say, "Now, we'd like to carry that money over into acquiring a digital scanner for some purpose." We would obviously be facing other interests at the Museum who would say, "Oh, we're going to save that money? Let's buy a manuscript," or, "We're going to save that money? Let's plant some trees," or whatever anybody else's project was. It was years and years of going through that process iteratively, and trying to reconfigure budgets. It was not sitting down one day and saying, "Okay, we're going to need $3 million for this in FY '89; where are we going to get it?"

02-00:33:22 Tewes: That's interesting.

02-00:33:23 Hamma: It was all incremental.

02-00:33:27 Tewes: So there was a lot of negotiating your own budget, your own policies, then.


02-00:33:35 Hamma: Budget, policies, staffing, everything was new and without a roadmap. So we

just made it up. And what was interesting—I think I said yesterday—it's always nice to hear, after you've been proposing something long enough, someone coming back and saying, "Oh yeah, I had this great idea. We should do that." You know, fuck, great. Suddenly, in the nineties, other museums started showing up at meetings, community groups like the Museum Computer Network, for example. Other museums started showing up with a staff member from Department of Collections Information Planning. It was like, Oh yeah, oh, good, you've got one of those now, too. And we learned from other institutions, as well. It wasn't one direction from the Getty out, but in all directions. We were making this up as we went along, but I think, at least in the early days, the Getty was a step or two ahead of other people, because we had that history that Harold and Nancy had put in the Getty early on, much earlier than anyplace else.

02-00:35:00 Tewes: You mentioned yesterday in your move to the Getty Center that you were

finding space for this new department in the basement. About how many people were working with you at that point?

02-00:35:10 Hamma: I don't remember, but I think we hired I think about twenty-two people. Those

people were initially all employed on a project to have educational interactive systems at the Getty Museum, the new Getty Museum when it opened. And so these would be dispersed among the galleries: computer display terminals, touch screens that would allow people to explore collections further, explore topics in the collections; and for issues like things that they couldn't see: introducing the visiting museum population to topics like conservation and other things that were otherwise completely invisible to them.

And so we were focused for several years on building that system from the ground up. There were two projects that we could look to: the Micro Gallery at the National Gallery in London, and also the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which were similar, and served as models for us to say, "Okay, if they can do that, what can we do?" We looked at those and worked with a design company in San Francisco to come up with this interactive system that would be public facing in the Museum, and that was the original goal. That was it: just terminals in the Museum that would allow people to, on their own, interact with the collection in a digital way, to ask questions and find out things that they couldn't—that weren't otherwise presented. Because in this digital system, you could have huge blocks of information that you couldn't do in printed information because it's just—and so finding multiple ways in for people to ask the kinds of questions, or proposing topics for them: "Well what about female artists in the collection, how many are those?" You think of Old Master paintings and the stuff that the Getty had, and one doesn't naturally think of—I mean, you think of men. You think of Rembrandt and Rubens, so on. Putting those kinds of things out there for visitors to the Museum. Once


that was done and up and running, the goal became: how do we take the assets that we have built that underlie this system—all the information, all the images, all the intellectual connections that we've made across a huge amount of information, across the collections, how do we make that available online? How do we take the same data and simply push it out through a different funnel to a website?

02-00:38:05 Tewes: Was that easier at that point?

02-00:38:07 Hamma: It was not easy at all, no. The technologies that had grown up for the various

things that we were dealing with had grown up in their own silos, because they represented the needs of different kinds of companies. And so we had to look for, or wait for to be invented, ways to do that. That eventually happened. What we had finally realized was a goal of being hugely efficient managing underlying assets one place, and having them populate different menus, interactive systems at the Museum, the Museum's website, available to publications, all that sort of thing.

02-00:38:54 Tewes: Hmm. Now this initial educational project, was this something you proposed?

02-00:39:01 Hamma: It was kind of proposed in the Museum. Because it was interactive and it was

in the galleries and it was educational, it was handed to the Education Department, who for a year, I would say, unsuccessfully flailed around trying to figure out what to do. When it became clear that even though they had budget and they had some staff, they didn't have a clue where to go with it, I raised my hand and said, "I can help." That was a big part of the initial Collections Information in the Museum, because it was information about the collections, how to make that public. And even though the goal, I think, from the Museum's point of view, was simply the educational output, the thing in the galleries, that was the goal—the bigger goal for all of us who were part of the project was to be efficient in creating models for managing data, and employing in that project vocabulary and data standards that were being developed elsewhere at the Getty, like the Getty Information Institute. Probably nobody else in the Museum cared or even knew what was going on over there. We were in active contact with them, having them help with our project.

Even though we didn't realize it, everything—by the time the Museum opened, it still was a goal to move in that direction. I remember after the new Getty opened to the public, the director then of the Getty Information Institute would come and sit down with me and say, "I've got this idea for a universal database of museum artifacts." It was a slightly naïve idea, based on simply imposing a certain number of standards on every museum, and then suddenly it would all be available. She would look at me and say, "Why doesn't the


Getty Museum have its entire collection online? Why don't you just, like, scan some images and put them up there?" I said, "Well, because the goal is to do this in a way that makes sense and is sustainable over time, by having a logical progression from managing data, creating images in Photo Services, and having systems in place in management, processes in place that will allow that to flow naturally through without anybody having to do subsequent hands-on, to be available on the website or in our interactive systems in the Museum. So when the museum, for example, acquired a new object, working with the Registrar's Office to make sure that the information about that object was entered in data systems in the way that was agreeable to all of the outward facing applications that would rely on that information." So it wasn't just the Registrar's Office anymore. It was educational systems. It was the website, and probably other things that would want to look at that same data, and have it be useful and sensible for them. So in a sense, the information about the collections, which was initially handled completely in the Registrar's Office, became an infrastructure project that was much broader than the Registrar's Office.

02-00:42:39 Tewes: Was that something you had initially proposed, or something you developed

over time?

02-00:42:45 Hamma: It developed in my own time, in my own mind, also over time. This was not

born at one time like Athena from the thigh of Zeus—boom, there it is—but it developed over time, and it was also an iterative process. We made mistakes. Technology developed at the same time very quickly, and so what was impossible one year was possible the next. We changed our mind and say, "Okay, well we're going to do this, we're not going to do that," even though we thought that was a good idea at the time. It went back and forth.

In the very early days, I would say, when I was still in the Antiquities Department, the Registrar's Office would host discussions with the curatorial departments about imaging, and what kind of technology do we want for imaging—what should be digital, what should remain physical film, what kind of machine should we use—and it was very kind of fits and starts, because we would take these conversations and turn them into, "Let's have this conversation about imaging; let's have this conversation about scanning digital transparencies; let's have a separate conversation about, how do we get the data right about objects"; and it never was a holistic, "Let's look at where we're going to go with transforming a big layer of infrastructure at the museum from analog to digital."

02-00:44:25 Tewes: That reminds me, when I spoke to Sally Hibbard, she mentioned in the early

days, when staff at the Registrar's Department got word processing, for example, it was really hard for people to realize that you don't need to have both the hard copy and the digital copy once you create that. I'm wondering


what the reaction was among the Trust as a whole, or the departments with which you were working, to shifting thinking about technology and its uses?

02-00:44:58 Hamma: It was various, and Sally—it was all complicated by the fact that technology

was what it was. I remember, there was a time when we were—all the curatorial departments were spending time putting information into the collections management program run by the Registrar's Office, and a woman named Amy Noel would then print out these binders, big, fat binders of all the records for your collection. And for the Antiquities Collection, it was hundreds of thousands of records, because every vase fragment, for example, had its own records, and there were thousands and thousands of these things. Amy would then print these out and bring them, distribute them, and ask us to read them through and proofread them. And of course, we all just put them on a shelf and thought, Well, we'll do that someday. It was just an impossible task and a task that eventually became automated, and so it became much easier to find errors and inconsistencies using technology itself instead of reading through these printed things. At that time there was not a useful way of looking at the information with a computer. There was a way of looking at that information, developed specifically for the Registrar's Office, that made sense to them for their processes and for inputting information, but there was no way for a curatorial department to look at that information in a way that made sense. And so, it was a long way from the collections information database to something even remotely resembling a publication catalog of the collection.

So there was a huge gap, and I think it just took a very long time to get past that, working at both ends of the problem, redefining requirements for our Collection Information Program that were not just the Registrar's, but were the Museum's. That instantly became a larger conversation. I think all of those changes—whether it was just with information about the collection or about imaging—as technology provided opportunities for change and for thinking about things differently, one could either react to that as an opportunity or as a threat, and one saw the entire spectrum over and over and over again through the staff at the Museum.

02-00:47:40 Tewes: Mm-hmm. I wonder if particularly people working with the collections

themselves might have felt, Well, I'm supposed to make the primacy be the object or the painting or the image, and so it's hard to switch that thinking to a less ephemeral, or more ephemeral, way of thinking about it.

02-00:48:07 Hamma: I think partly, but partly also it was a sense of, there were what essentially

were policy decisions to be made by the Museum that the Museum was avoiding, because one couldn't see the need to make these decisions. For example, every curatorial department had in its own files its printed information and images, its own files about the collection, information that


was not available to the Registrar's Office, and they owned that information. There were many points where the Museum had to decide who owns the information. And in the end, of course, the Museum owned the information and it could do whatever it wanted with it, but there were a lot of those little battles to be had. There were basically policy questions for the Museum, not unlike: who's allowed to reproduce things? Who's allowed to talk about the collection in a public forum? So, is it okay for someone in a curatorial department to go on some early version of social media and talk about the Museum collection? And the Museum was very concerned that, no, that wasn't right because the Museum had its own voice, it had the right way of talking about things, and you couldn't have just anybody talking about works in the collection. That really became an issue when you had a public website and you'd allow people to comment; or you'd allow people to take information and repurpose it for other websites, take twenty-seven works from the Getty Museum and copy the information about it, and put it in an educational website for a class that someone's teaching at UCLA. This was, early on, "Oh, what are we going to do about that?"

02-00:50:11 Tewes: Did you have an opinion at that time?

02-00:50:14 Hamma: Yeah. I was always of the opinion that the more open the Museum was, the

better. And that changed. I mean, what that meant to me changed over time, partly as I thought about it more but partly also as technology provided opportunities to be more open and more fluid with information. It seemed to me that it was the responsibility of the Museum to take advantage of those in every way that it possibly could. Even though the Museum would have continued to argue that, "It's just wrong to have a reproduction of Van Gogh's Irises on a shower curtain. That just is demeaning to the object and it's wrong, and we'll try to prevent that wherever we can," my thought was, So, what's the problem? Really, what's the problem?

02-00:51:10 Tewes: That's so interesting. I don't know that I have a good follow up to that, but—

[laughs]

02-00:51:17 Hamma: But it was just different ways of thinking. In institutions, a big part of it

always is, That's the way we've always done it, and that's the way we're going to continue to do it. And that incentive, even for staff at the Getty, was enough to simply say, "No we're not going to change it." There's a roadrunner. [looks out window] And that was interesting in itself. A default position, an easy default position in times of change is simply to say, "This is the way we've always done it. Why should we change?" And that works amazingly well.


02-00:52:10 Many, many years later after the Getty when I was running my own consulting business and working with the Provost's Office at Yale, we had this conversation again, shortly after Harvard University Faculty Senate voted to do open access for all Harvard faculty publications. In other words, Harvard faculty would maintain copyright, it wouldn't pass it off to a publisher, and they would figure out how, with the resources at Harvard, to do online open access publishing. The topic came up at Yale, and we talked about that, and we talked about making all of the public domain works—that is, anything older than Christ, I mean, anything older than whatever the copyright on the pages were—the work itself is public, there's public domain, there's no more copyright interest inherent in that work at all—that's the way the copyright law works in this country—about making all of those things also open access, that Yale would no longer maintain copyright interest in images of those works, but make them freely available, and not stand in the way of the very fluid possibilities of technology to distribute that information. I remember, we had a day, the directors of all the collections at Yale were sitting in the Provost's Office after the long conversation about this. At the end, the provost said, "Well, I don't see why Yale has to be a leader in all of this," and that was the end of the meeting. Eventually, very soon after that, things began to change. The dominoes began to fall and things changed rapidly at Yale, but that default position of, Ah, I don't know why we have to do anything different than we always have.

02-00:54:12 Tewes: Mm. That's a good example. When you were talking about meeting with other

leaders in other fields about how they were handling this emphasis on information technology, like Disney, I'm wondering, were you also attending data information conferences? How were you discussing this with other people?

02-00:54:42 Hamma: Yeah, there were meetings, annual meetings within the museum community

itself, where we would get together and talk about: what are we doing with technology, what are the possibilities, what works, what doesn't work. Those were extremely useful in terms of addressing some of the things that were particular to museums, in terms of the quality of information and what the goals were. How museums feel about the quality and quantity of information that accompanies an image from that museum is different than how a stock house like Getty Images is. And so there are things that are peculiar to the Museum, but there are also things that are shared.

02-00:55:26 I remember talking with a man, whose name I don't remember, at Disney, who was in charge of doing a handheld guide to Disney Animal Kingdom in Florida that people could take. It would show images and it would tell about the animals and it would guide them from one thing to another. He said, "We had a really hard time. Even though it was extremely useful, we had a hard


time convincing people to pick it up and take it with them." It was exactly the same thing that museums had, in terms of audio guides, for example. They can be extremely useful, but there's a large percentage of people who visit museums who are not the type to use audio guides. I count myself in that group. We thought about that for a while. And finally, about six months later, the guy from Disney calls me up and said, "We solved it! We figured out how to get people to use this thing." "What did you do?" "Well, we built in the possibility for people to use this thing to take a selfie." We didn't use the word selfie then, but they could take a picture of themselves with the bobcat in the background, or their group in front of the cage of parrots, and suddenly everybody wanted to use it. They used it to do that, but then they also used it for wayfinding and all the other purposes that Disney had developed the thing for. That sounds like an obvious thing at the moment, because everybody does that with their smartphones now, but in the nineties, we were like, Wow! Really?

02-00:57:20 Tewes: So what was the lesson you took from that?

02-00:57:23 Hamma: I didn't have a lesson. There was nothing for me in that, because the Museum

was still at the point of, We don't want anyone taking pictures in the Museum because we want to control images of the works in the collection. So it was a nonstarter. It's okay to take a picture of an animal in the zoo, but it's not okay to take a picture of a Rembrandt painting.

02-00:57:47 Tewes: Which brings us back to rights.

02-00:57:50 Hamma: The whole rights issues, yeah, exactly. It was just another policy issue that

technology forced on museums, on cultural heritage in a way that had never been proposed before, yeah.

02-00:58:09 Tewes: In thinking about training, you mentioned that, in the mid-nineties even, not

everyone had a desktop computer, and eventually rolling that out. I'm wondering if there was any effort to train staff, maybe not just about the computers, but about how this larger information process is going to work.

02-00:58:32 Hamma: There was. I think that was a big part of eventually what we got into, but it

was after moving to the Getty Center, once we had figured out what it meant to manage a digital infrastructure. And that took a long time. What kind of talent, what kind of people do you need, how much do you pay them, where do you find them, where do you build it and how do you maintain it over time, how do we talk to the IT Department about what kind of infrastructure you need and what kind of tools you need? Because I still believed at that time, with centralizing those core aspects of technology, the nuts and bolts of the


servers, the wires, the cables, still made complete sense, that should be centralized and it should serve the interests of the programs that it's meant to serve.

02-00:59:26 We did want to take that over, but there was this layer of knowledge management, basically, because museums and research-like institutes are in the business of managing knowledge about collections and about books and about topics. How do we build that out? How do we make it efficient, and how do we do it in a way that ensures that we can all play eventually in the same sandbox? How do we aim for a larger goal of having kind of an über-website that could look at all the museum websites in the United States and present a global view of—or the possibility of asking Google questions: you know, "Show me all of the Rembrandts in collections in the United States that have issues of provenance from World War II," for example. It would be a useful question and the answer would be useful. And so, thinking about, What do we need to do to aim for those larger objectives, and still provide value locally in our own institution—staffing, budgets, machines, everything? I was in the lucky position of having been able to hire about twenty people, limited term, for the interactive system that was meant to be up and running; and when we got there and did that, letting some of those staff go, but managing to keep some of them and transition them into other positions that were not project based, but really were infrastructure based for a knowledge infrastructure for the institution.

02-01:01:13 I was really lucky in having been able to hire really good people who could then carry on, on their own; establish contacts with people in other institutions, both at the Getty and externally, to talk about the issues that they were facing. There might be a person whose job it was to ensure that all of the information that the Getty was storing long term, or the Museum was storing long term, was compliant with vocabulary standards, and so it could be consistently used and found and repurposed. That person, that was their job. And part of their job initially was to define the job: what are you going to do, how do you measure success, what are outcomes, what's going to happen here? That was built both internally, but also that person taking responsibility and eventually talking to people in similar jobs at other institutions and coming up with a network of people to try to help ensure the larger goals that were more universal.

02-01:02:29 Tewes: That makes me think that in the late nineties, this was still very new, as we

were talking about, industry-wide, even beyond. I'm wondering what kinds of backgrounds your staff had to bring to this new project, this new idea.

02-01:02:42 Hamma: All they had to do was be interested, and at some point in an interview with

them to say, "Oh! I get it." That was all I was looking for, because there was


no training. People were not trained to do this stuff. People were trained to the extent where people are trained to work in museums. They were being trained for very traditional jobs. Curators have PhDs in art history, and that's all you need. Directors generally had been a curator at some point, and that's all they needed. It was what it was. There was no particular training. There is now. And in the early days, I remember sitting with people in the library school at UCLA and talking about, "How can we extend the kind of training you do for librarians to people who work in museums, because it's essentially a version of the same sort of thing? And by the way, can we think at some point down the future of being able to search museum collections and library collections at the same time and get interesting results?"

02-01:04:01 Tewes: That's interesting. Were librarians already starting to implement more digital

aspects in their training?

02-01:04:08 Hamma: For what are called MARC [Machine-Readable Cataloging] Records. It's a

very specific format for libraries, for bibliographic material, and so not just for libraries, but even more narrowly for bibliographic material. Eventually, years later, librarians realized that MARC Record, because bibliographic material, one book has 1,000 copies or 10,000 copies, it suddenly dawned on everybody, Oh, well really only one person needs to make a record for that book, and then everybody can use the same record, because it's the same book no matter where it is. As that began to settle in, and as management within libraries began to accept that, they began to look at their special collections, which were much more like museum collections because they're one-off things, and how do you deal with that? And so there was an opportunity to begin discussions that were mutually supportive in finding solutions.

02-01:05:16 Tewes: Did you ever consider partnering with UCLA to further that at the Getty?

02-01:05:21 Hamma: There was no partner at UCLA to play with, no. And it was more—at least

then—it was really at a kind of mental level. We couldn't figure out, How do we implement anything here? We get what the problems are, we can see possible solutions. We know how to move from a to b, but we can't get from a to d yet, and so we really haven't got anything to do. It wasn't until, again when I was working at Yale, long after I left the Getty, that we were able at the Yale Center for British Art to have a website that would allow anyone to search across all collections, including the library and archives, everything at the institution, with a single search.

02-01:06:06 Tewes: And again, that took time to open the possibility?


02-01:06:09 Hamma: It took time, but it also took new technology that really wasn't available in the

nineties or the early part of the century.

02-01:06:24 Tewes: What were some of the other challenges you were dealing with in these early

years in Collections Information Planning, at that point?

02-01:06:38 Hamma: Again, when you talked about earlier and I dropped it, with the curatorial

staff, getting them to think about the kinds of information that they were dealing with was not just a word processor and they printed it out and put it in their file, but trying to come up with ways in the Museum to allow that information to be captured and flow into a larger repository about information about the collections. That was over the long term, and how to involve the curatorial departments in managing that collection in ways that made sense to them, and in ways that also served them. They didn't feel like—and they weren't—working for the Registrar's Department to make the database better, but they were working for themselves to build an information repository of the collections that would be useful for them in their own publications and their own purposes. And that took a long time.

We would run into big problems, like the policy issue I talked about earlier: Well, that's our information. Why would we want to put that into a place where other people could have access to it? And even if you say not everybody's going to have access, how can we trust you? If it's just in our files and we go lock them when we go home at night, problem solved. From those kinds of issues down to, in the nineties, the system being used for managing information about the collections at the Getty could not deal with non-Latin characters, it couldn't deal with accents, it couldn't deal with a diacritical mark, it couldn't deal with odd punctuation. It had to be a normal Latin character: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's it. And of course, curatorial records were full of different languages, which required different character sets. And unless we could accommodate that, what was the point?

02-01:08:46 Tewes: So what was the short-term solution?

02-01:08:48 Hamma: The short-term solution was to go back to the people who developed the

collection information system we were using with a very non-registrar kind of request: "We need to be able to manage multiple languages."

02-01:09:07 Tewes: So again, that was the technology needed to advance.

02-01:09:10 Hamma: Yeah, and it was not that difficult a request, but it was nothing that a

Registrar's Office would ask for, but a curatorial office would say,


"Obviously, we need to have multiple languages." And so it was, in a sense, a little step in democratizing, as it were, within the institution the usefulness of information technology.

02-01:09:39 Tewes: I like that concept, "democratizing" the information.

02-01:09:42 Hamma: Well, it worked both ways. At the same time I thought it was important to let

the information go and be available anywhere in the world, it was also important to support the entire staff at the Museum as this transition was taking place, where the digital revolution, as it were, was going to affect the curatorial departments as much as it had the Registrar's Office.

02-01:10:14 Tewes: Are there any other projects you want to talk about from those early two

years?

02-01:10:20 Hamma: Probably, but I can't think of any right now.

02-01:10:24 Tewes: Well, I'm sure there'll be plenty of time. So, in 1999, I believe you made the

transition to assistant director for Collection Information. Had that changed at all, in terms of—I know the department name changed, but had the department changed?

02-01:10:42 Hamma: I don't remember when exactly when things happened. I think the change in

my title was mainly due to the fact that Philippe de Montebello, who was director of the Metropolitan Museum, had come back for a second time to try to get me to move to the Metropolitan Museum, and the Getty wanted to keep me there. It was the beginning of kind of the unsettled last years of the Getty when that happened. Barry Munitz was then president of the Trust. I remember talking with Barry, and also with Jill [Murphy], about some of the broader issues of technology at the Museum, of how to keep centralized the IT Department, which still is that way, but how to involve more of the institution in thinking and helping them think about sort of the mission critical needs of technology: what did they really want to do? It's not enough to have an IT Department that goes out and says, "How many desktops and how many servers, and what speed of an Internet connection do you want?" You needed an IT Department or you needed some other department to translate those goals that were most important in terms of knowledge management and distribution into requests for future technology. And so when that happened, I certainly had a feeling that Barry was more interested in keeping me at the Getty than the Museum was.


02-01:12:38 Tewes: Do you think that was a personal interest on his part in maintaining the

momentum you'd built?

02-01:12:46 Hamma: I think it was that. I think also, Barry, coming from a university environment,

had a much broader and more ecumenical understanding of information technology and what that meant. On the other hand, I think that the senior staff in the Museum was still very much crouching down in their traditional roles, hoping the world wouldn't change too fast from underneath them. It was extremely awkward.

02-01:13:15 Tewes: Did that impact working relationships?

02-01:13:18 Hamma: It did impact working relationships, because I instantly had a better working

relationship with Trust administration than probably anybody else in the Museum. I think it wouldn't be unfair to say that there was a level of antagonism with Barry from before he showed up at the Getty, people reading his online CV, and understanding where he was coming from. I think Barry entered an environment that was tilted against him a little bit from the get-go. It made things a little bit awkward, but it also meant that it put me in a position in the Museum to work with the departments that were then answering to me to really implement some efficiencies and move forward very quickly, especially with Photo Services and realigning fulfillment services, and simply saying, "We're never going to make a box of black and white images for any department ever again. It's all going to be digital. And then you, Paintings Department, if you want to pay for a box of black and white images, we'll make them. But now we're not going to do that anymore." And suddenly, it was okay with everybody.

02-01:14:57 Tewes: Because policy became more ingrained?

02-01:14:59 Hamma: Partly, but also, everybody said, "Oh, if I have to pay for it, then maybe I don't

need it so much."

02-01:15:07 Tewes: Got it. That makes sense. Just for the record, you started this new position in

1999, and I believe Barry started in 1998.

02-01:15:20 Hamma: Yeah.

02-01:15:20 Tewes: So, it was pretty soon after—


02-01:15:22 Hamma: The Getty Center had just opened in 1997; Barry started in 1998; this

happened in 1999. I think the dominoes were falling very quickly. I think we look back at that time and look at individuals and look at proactive actions and thoughts, and try to make a history out of that, and we forget, in that context, what a huge and dramatic change the Getty had been through, moving to the Getty Center. All of the programs were suddenly all in the same space. Staff would see each other from across the programs having lunch every day. People reacted to that in various ways, and some people embraced it and some people would go get their lunch and run back to their safety of their program or their office. It was literally as obvious and stark as that. But for the Museum, it also was a huge transition. There was a big staff turnover that was a result of dissatisfaction with new offices or the fact that now the Getty was all in one place, why couldn't they provide daycare? All these issues that had been bubbling along, just suddenly everything came back again. And the Museum, I think more than other programs, was impacted by its new space because it had opportunities for temporary exhibitions that it never had before. The impact on staffing in the Museum was enormous. Exhibition Design, for example, went from, at one point, nonexistent, to a staff of ten or fifteen people. The Registrar's Office, having to track not just acquisitions coming into the little museum on PCH [Pacific Coast Highway], but having to track exhibitions coming in and going out, resulted in a huge staff increase, and our workload. Also for Preparations staff, who managed the crating and moving on every work of art, installation in the galleries, and physical moving of lights and pedestals and objects. It was a huge transition.

02-01:17:42 Tewes: That's a really good point. Because as we were talking about the siloed

various centers in the Trust, would something like Collection Information have been possible if there hadn't been a common space?

02-01:17:57 Hamma: It was, early on, possible, but I think it became much more interesting when

there was a common space and we could begin to talk about, Now we're all in the same building, how could we become even more efficient than we had been in the past? That was not always an easy conversation to be had.

It was, for Photo Services, for example, doing digital capture of works. In the Museum, one of the things we bought from the money we saved by not having cold storage was a scanner. The scanning bed was something like four by eight feet, and so it could do really big things. We bought it because we wanted to be able to do scanning, very high-resolution scanning of paintings, for example, which you can't do with a single capture from a camera. At that point, no matter how good that camera was, it could not capture the amount of information that this scanner could do. And so once we had that, and we were going, up and running, figured out how to use it, and got very efficient at it, I went to the Research Institute and said, "For some of the larger portfolios that you have and larger works that you have, maps, big things, we could scan


those for you in the Museum. We have the facility set up." Again, on L2, this L2 corridor, you go, come from the Research Institute over there from that locked door, L2 corridor into the locked door into where the Museum was, and into Photo Services. Doesn't have to go in an elevator, doesn't have to go outside; stays in an environmentally controlled space the entire time. "So why don't we talk about how we can share these kinds of resources so you don't have to build the same room and buy the same scanner or something similar?" Well, it turned out, if we wanted to do that, the work from the Research Institute [that] was 200 feet down the hall, had to go on loan to the Museum, and the Museum had to fill out loan papers. It just turned into this giant thing. It was like, Okay, yeah, we're still living in silos, even though we can see you down there.

02-01:20:17 Tewes: Wow.

02-01:20:18 Hamma: Yeah. And at that time, when I was still in the Museum, one of the things that

prompted eventually a transition into a Trust position: when the Getty Center opened, the Getty had eight websites. There were seven programs, and each program had its own website, developed at great expense, and some very fancy and some not so fancy. Trust Communications had their own website, which they said was a portal to all the other Getty websites, but in fact, they had nothing to do with each other. They were all different look and feel, differently made, completely different. And eventually the trustees noticed this. At one Trust meeting, apparently there was a discussion—I only heard about it afterwards—about the fact that the Getty is represented by eight sites online, and now that you're all at the same place, where do you go to find out how to get a parking reservation, for example? Well, you could have gone to any of these sites because they all said, "We'll manage the parking reservation for you." And so, where do you go to find out when the Getty—if you're not thinking about the Museum or the Research Institute or the Conservation Institute—where do I go to find out when the Getty is open, what days can I come? What if I don't want to visit the Museum but I've got a business appointment, how do I do that? The trustees noticed this and had a discussion at one of the trustee meetings And Steve Rountree, who was then the chief operating officer for the Trust, came to me—and I don't know why he picked me; maybe Jill or Barry or somebody over there pointed in my direction—came to me and said, "We've got a real problem that the online presence of the Getty looks like seven different programs and the Trust Communications office." I looked at him. I said, "Well, that's reality. That is how we actually operate here. Are you surprised? Is the board surprised?" And obviously nobody was surprised, but I was given the job then of trying to correct that.

02-01:22:46 I had no control over the underlying nature of the institution, which resulted in seven, eight different online presences. What I had to do was, like, to take the symptom and fix that without curing anything else. So, how do we build a


single website for the Getty that integrates all the programs into one place, that has a layer of Getty-ness about it—sort of what's governance of the Getty, like, when can I visit—that would result in, depending on where you want to visit, the right answer, but you didn't have to go to eight different places to wonder, Can I get a parking reservation here or over there? It was problematic, to say the least, to try to have a project that integrated these seven—these eight different websites that every program felt proprietary ownership for. It was like, No, you're not going to change my website. This is the way we want to present it. This is what we want to do—and to come up with an integral process that would integrate their concerns and their staff in something that would eventually be a single website for the Getty.

There were a lot of bent noses and hurt feelings, and I think realization that not everybody gets a say in what color this bar on the homepage is going to be, when everybody thought that was their decision, because, It's our program and it's our website. It was particularly difficult with the Trust Communications Office, because they felt—and I think rightly so—that it was their responsibility to do this, when in fact, they hadn't done it. They were not willing to be proactive to take up the challenge to make that happen, but as soon as it was proposed that it should happen, well of course, they should own it. So, it was a complicated event, and I think the first iteration was not perfect. I would say now the first iteration probably wasn't even good, but given the challenges that we faced, it was probably the only thing that we could do.

02-01:25:44 Tewes: It occurs to me, some of the challenges you're describing are sort of a

microcosm of the larger issues you talked about in organizing things together, that this all culminates in the website.

02-01:25:58 Hamma: Yeah. Simply getting people to sit down and have a meeting together was

difficult. Who from your program is going to represent your program when we do this? And I'll just make this up: the Research Institute would say, "Oh, well, we have eight people who are working on this project, and they'll all come to the meeting." Well, you may wind up with a meeting with a hundred people in it, and absolutely nothing would get done. And so it took a huge amount of time, just the effort of grinding this down into a doable project with goals. And just like the Collections Information Program started at the museum: where do we get the staff? Where do we get the budget? Where are their offices going to be? How's this going to happen?

That process coincided with one of the first things Barry did, which was to look at all the Getty programs and say, "Do we need all these programs?" To what extent that was his idea, to what extent it was somebody else's idea or the board's idea, I have no idea, but it was presented and carried through. And so, regardless of where the idea originated, presumably a majority of all those


people above my head bought into it and said, "This is what we're going to do." That, as you know, resulted in the elimination of some programs and in the kind of redistribution, as it were, of other programs holding on to some of their projects and some of their activities, as central to Getty mission, but, Do we need a whole program to do this, or can we stick it in someplace else?

02-01:27:55 In a mercenary way, that, I saw, Oh, there's going to be staffing positions and there's going to be budget available if some of these programs disappear. That occurred to me not before they disappeared, but after they had been cancelled. Suddenly, I began to hoover up. Oh, well, there were some staff at the Education Institute who were working on their website and managing rights and doing things, and so can we have those people for those positions, and the budget associated with them, to start building a team that would be this web team for the Getty? And so over a year, and [much] back and forth about budget and staffing, we found staff. And again, like the initial hiring in the museum, I had a month and I had to hire like fifteen people, and there you go. Just, there we go! But again, luckily, most of them were really good. There were a couple who I regretted hiring the moment they were on staff, but that happens.

Over time, we wound up with a web team that was the Getty Web Team, that served all the programs. Things quieted down and we were able to handle project requests from individual programs in a timely way and get things done so no one felt that they weren't represented. We were able to add on a layer on top of all of that that the Getty should have had all along about governance and transparency. When I left, the whole [Web Management] Program was handed back to the Communications Department, who should have dreamt this up from the beginning anyway, and so it was a good resolution, and, yeah.

In a sense, I look back on it and what I did, the technology at the Museum, at the Trust, was a limited-term opportunity. It was working through a transition from analog to digital in workflow, in product, in staffing, in org charts and budgets. And once we had done a couple of iterations of that and gotten to a point where it felt relatively comfortable, I didn't need to do that anymore. That's when I walked into Jim Wood['s office] and said, "I'm leaving."

02-01:30:41 Tewes: Well that's something I want to explore a little more later. But in terms of the

website, did you have to create your own platform for this?

02-01:30:54 Hamma: Largely, yes, and it was because some of the programs, including the

Museum, had evolved these digital management workflows, where we saw the efficiency in creating an image once and managing it out to different locations or different venues without retouching it, without having to have hands-on. There were systems like that in the Library, obviously, in the Museum, and smaller systems scattered throughout the Trust that we wanted to build into


engines that would be managed locally. The Library staff would continue to be the experts in cataloging the Library and determining how that would appear to the outside world. We in the Web Team would simply facilitate all of that into an integrated website for the Getty. And so, that, it required a lot of back-end technology and a lot of support from the centralized IT services to make that happen.

02-01:32:06 Tewes: Did that change over time?

02-01:32:09 Hamma: We got better at it, and so, yes, it changed. Also technology changed and so

we were able to do things in a more standards-based way. We didn't have to invent every little widget; somebody had already done that. There was a way, more modern ways in imaging data, would make it less proprietary to an application and much more open to be moved across platforms and across applications. Those changes made a huge difference and made things a lot easier. And as people got used to a unified, a single website for the Getty Trust, they gave up a lot of their proprietary interest in, "Well, I want this to be green instead of purple," or those kinds of really stupid decisions, and focused on what really was important, and that is the quality of information and how it was made intelligible to an outside audience.

02-01:33:17 Tewes: Can you give me a guess as to how long it took to make that first site?

02-01:33:22 Hamma: It seemed like an eternity. We were under the gun to actually do something,

and all the programs we were working with were under their own gun to make it impossible for us to do anything. There were months when people wouldn't return my phone calls. It was really, really difficult.

02-01:33:55 Tewes: And at that point, you were still under the Museum, so it might be difficult

to—

02-01:34:00 Hamma: Well, no, it's actually—so the transition of the Trust kind of happened at the

same time, because, especially talking with Jill—I'm not sure Barry noticed—I mean, sure he understood, but Jill noticed immediately: "Well, you can't do this if you're sitting in the Museum; no one's going to trust you."

02-01:34:20 Tewes: That was something that was already being considered.

02-01:34:22 Hamma: Yeah. I think those were her exact words; "No one's going to trust you."

Everybody understood how the programs at the Getty worked, and is what it is. So that led automatically then to a discussion, "Well, if I move to the Trust, what's my job?"


02-01:34:45 Tewes: Right. Are there other short-term or long-term challenges you want to discuss

about the website?

02-01:35:01 Hamma: They were really all short-term challenges, but when you're in the middle of it,

it seems like, This is never going to get resolved. But they were the same kind of issues that technology brings up when you try to make it more efficient, and leverage the same technology across multiple organizations. Everybody thinks that they have the best answer or the only answer or they're the only one who understands what needs to be done, and so it was a challenge for me also to show them that I understood some of their challenges—not all of them, but we would learn to mend. We would involve their staff and we would try to figure this out. I would like to think I was a better voice in doing that and in trying to coalesce some of the interests of the Getty programs around similar technology solutions and similar technology standards than the IT Department—that is the servers and wires, buttons department—would have been on its own.

One meeting I remember where we were talking about a new system for the Research Institute that would help manage the Library and its special collections. There were multiple possibilities, and in looking at them, I remember the head of IT at one point was sitting in one of these meetings and said, "Well, you've got stuff; the Museum's got stuff; the Conservation Institute has got stuff, images and records. This is just an inventory management problem, right?" And she went on, on a riff about inventory management and how we just get a vanilla inventory management system and probably install it, and everybody would be happy. [laughs] It revealed to me the extent to which people who don't understand your business, no matter how well intentioned, need instruction, because it never was about inventory management. There was one small aspect of it that that was true, but we quickly moved on from that early on to managing knowledge and managing public information systems, and trying to see them as a whole scope that we could fit into one box.

02-01:37:50 Tewes: Is there anything else from those five years, 1999 to 2004, you want to discuss

before we move to moving to the Trust?

02-01:37:59 Hamma: So there were these program reviews. The first one was of the Education

Institute. That was from Barry's office, as to review the programs. The Education Institute in the end was completely dissolved and went away. Staff, I remember, found jobs elsewhere in Los Angeles. Most of the projects that they were working on kind of went away. There were some derivative assets that had to be managed, and I think went to Publications. So there was a series of—I honestly don't remember what it was, but kind of glorified lesson plans—if you're doing this in art education, here's a box of stuff that you need


that will help you be the best at that you possibly can. Those were literally print publications, folders and posters and materials that came in a box, I guess, and those went to Publications. And so it was just managing the derivative assets.

02-01:39:05 There was a program review for the Getty Information Institute, that a man named Jack Meyers led and that I was part of. We were less destructive in that period, and decided that one of the difficulties for the Information Institute was that it had become in some ways disconnected from the institutions that it was meant to serve. An example would be: the Information Institute developed, at great expense, and a very useful thing for vocabulary control, and how do we, in cultural heritage institutions, begin to employ vocabulary in how we describe objects or books or other things in a way that make them more accessible? Because when you search on this word, you also get things that might use these other seventeen words to describe the same kind of object. And those were extremely useful, but they were not being implemented, they were not being used. One of the difficulties that we saw was: one can think about data and information standards in a way that is theoretical—this is the best way to do it—but that doesn't mean that people are going to do it. There is a missing piece there in how do you implement, and how do you talk to systems developers to make these implemented from the get-go so that people don't have to think about it? There were issues like that. I remember the board for the Information Institute, the head of the Information Institute would go to the board and say, "Well, we have developed at great expense these vocabularies that help control information, that everybody thinks is really, really important. Everybody thinks these are important." Somebody on the board finally said, "Well, if everybody thinks they are so important, why is the Getty the only one paying for them?" There were questions like that, and there were no good answers, except to rethink, to take what was really good there and try to re-imagine it in a way that responded to those criticisms—I mean, good criticisms—in a way that would make them more useful. I'm not sure we managed that. They went to the Research Institute, and they always felt a little bit like orphans over there. But yeah, we had a go at it.

02-01:41:38 There was a review of the Conservation Institute. There was a review of the Research Institute. In the end, there was no review of the Museum. And there was a review of the Grant Program. With one program going away—well, two programs going away: one disappearing altogether, one being kind of reintegrated—and the Museum having no review at all in this big Trust process to look at programs, there were obviously a lot of hard feelings. It was not very transparent. It was unclear why the Museum escaped any scrutiny. When you have an organization like the Getty where it was still very siloed, and people were wondering where our budget was coming from and going, and why is one program being treated special and others had been treated very


harshly, and, "No, I don't want to go see other staff from other programs when I have lunch; I eat here at the Research Institute every day," it led to an environment where there was a lot of mistrust, a lot of rumor being passed around as real information.

02-01:42:49 It was literally a time where, if you could be an alien and plop yourself down in one program, and ask them, "Tell me about the Getty, tell me about the Getty," you would get very, very, very different stories from one program to another. That doesn't mean there were points where the programs didn't cooperate. The conservation departments at the Museum always worked with the Getty Conservation Institute on scientific analysis and a scope of things that were outside of their purview, that the Conservation Institute could do for them. But in a broader sense, I think at that point in 2004, the Getty never felt like a more alien place from one program to another.

02-01:43:45 Tewes: Mm.

02-01:43:49 Hamma: And, it wasn't helped by the management style from the Trust, which could be

abrasive and dismissive.

02-01:44:00 Tewes: Which leads to why the Trust was a better move for your particular

department.

02-01:44:07 Hamma: Not my department. So, I left a lot of things behind at the Museum. I basically

said to the deputy director and director, "Okay, we've figured it out this far. We've built a pretty good roadmap. Can you manage forward from that?" They, I think, did a smart thing. The person who I hired as the head of Photo Services—at that point, not at all analog; all digital—who was a lynchpin in a lot of—and understood, I think, a lot of the data management, other data management issues associated with programs and systems within the Museum, took over my position. What happened after that, I didn't follow very closely. Other people in the Museum that were part of my purview, began to perform less well, and I was asked periodically to go back into the Museum and help them figure that out. Well, that was impossible. And so I'd say, "Yeah, yeah, fine," and then just not do it. I was no longer Museum staff, and because of the way everybody at the Getty were feeling at that time, I was just no longer part of the Museum, end of story. I was a friend of Barry's, and so that's all you needed to know.

02-01:46:00 Tewes: That's a good point. Well, can you tell me what the transition like into

becoming senior advisor for Information Policy at the Trust level?


02-01:46:11 Hamma: What that was basically was taking what I had done at the Museum, in terms

of, in the move from the analog to more digital—what does that mean? What does that mean for the Getty Trust? And so could we, for example, begin to have conversations, sensible conversations about managing collections of images, for example, whether those images are at the Research Institute, the Museum, Conservation Institute, or the result of [other] projects and reports, can we begin to have sensible conversations about how we catalog? Not that we change cataloging standards, but if we want to have a catalog that at some point will be readable as a single catalog across all Getty collections by an outside observer, what kinds of technologies do we need to make that possible and to make that a useful experience? Things like that.

And a lot of that, at least early on, was stuff in the website, because the website was the single place where all this stuff got mashed together, and where people would again ask us, "Well, I want to find out what the Getty knows or has about Rembrandt, and I don't want to have to go to the Library catalog and search there; and then go to the Conservation Institute and see if there were projects, Rembrandt-based projects that I need to know about; go to the Museum and find out what paintings, or whatever else you might have. Why can't I do this?"

So those sorts of things. And that would impact back into programs in different ways and need to be explained in different ways to various programs, because they were all coming at it from their point of view. It was like I was expected to understand that we had an elephant, but everybody else was only allowed to touch the leg or the nose or the tail or the ear, and don't understand what the elephant was. It was like trying to establish communication back and forth with the programs to get everybody on the same page about what that elephant was, and at least on similar pages within a chapter of, what do we do and how do we fund to get to that point?

02-01:48:43 Tewes: What were some of the solutions you were coming up with?

02-01:48:49 Hamma: I think we looked early on at the easiest things that we could do. And so

managing images, for example: if you have a system that helps you manage images well and it does it in a context of a cultural heritage institution, it's probably going to be good enough. So 80 percent for all the programs at the Getty—everybody's going to have their own thing that they want because their workflow is slightly different, or this person doesn't have a right hand, and so we need a keyboard that only does the left hand—whatever quirky, stupid thing that they needed, we could at least get to 80 percent. And then we'd help everybody understand that the additional 20 percent really wasn't important. I mean, we got the important stuff done.


02-01:49:38 And so, we were able to at least begin to have conversations about moving in the same direction. If it costs $100,000 to license an image management application per year, we do that once at the Getty and everybody would play the same game. We would do what we could to implement differently for each program so that it met their needs of how their workflow went and what they wanted at the other end, but we'd pay for that once and leverage it across all the programs. We got good at that in the website and how things sort of came out the other end, because we had some practice getting to that point.

So, it was those kinds of questions. But then also, to a certain extent, when I was at the Trust level trying to reach back to projects at the Getty that were intended to be more universal—and so the Data Standards Project that was left over from the Information Institute now residing in the Research Institute, how do we let that reside at the Research Institute but give them visibility across the Trust—to begin to have conversations that help the data that the Getty provides to the world swim better to the other, at least in the Getty environment. Those sort of things. But also the policy issues. What about copyright for public domain works? Can we across the Getty have a conversation that says, "We're going to allow public domain works to exit freely; we're not going to impose copyright on images of those works so that we can control the images; that's part of public domain. We're a 501(c)(3) public institution; that's our job"?

02-01:51:31 Tewes: Considering this was a conversation you'd been having for years, what do you

think pushed people toward that direction, that, Yes, we're going to allow the public access to this?

02-01:51:40 Hamma: Having the same conversation over and over and over again, literally. There

were incentives not to do it. The Research Institute, for example, would have a volume of prints by an Italian Renaissance printmaker and that they wanted to digitize, and these were big things. They needed to hire an outside company to do the digitization, and the cost was going to be $250,000. But the outside company once said to the librarian, the head librarian, "We'll do it for free, if you allow us to have copyright interest in the resulting images and have sole distribution rights." And so the librarian, until I caught it, said, "Yeah, that sounds good. We'll get it for free, we'll get these digital images for free. We can't distribute them, the Getty, and we can't do anything with them because you now, this outside company, by contract, have copyright in the images." So those sorts of things.

Or the president of the Trust wanting to, at one point, facilitate the acquisition of a group of photographs in the Museum, went to the estate of the photographer and agreed that they would continue to own, by contract, would continue to own copyright in these physical works that the Getty was going to acquire, if we could get them for 10 percent less or some discount. And that


was fine with him, but he was essentially locking up images of those works forever. This is what a public institution does, really? That continued to be a battle for a long time. And also, the old argument that I mentioned earlier: "Well, this is always how we've done things. Why do we have to change?"

02-01:53:46 Tewes: Out of curiosity, was that Barry Munitz in that last—

02-01:53:49 Hamma: No, it was his successor.

02-01:53:51 Tewes: Jim Wood?

02-01:53:51 Hamma: Yeah.

02-01:53:52 Tewes: Okay.

02-01:53:55 Hamma: But even then, I remember having a discussion with Sally about having open

access to images. She said, "We do have copyright in these images, and so we established a revenue stream." I said to Sally, "What's the revenue stream?" I don't remember what the number was. It was less than $100,000 a year. I said, "How much does it cost you to manage that revenue stream?" It was way more than the income. But then she said a bright idea and she said, "But, when people use Getty images in books and publications, we get two copies of the book." I looked at her. I said, "Sally. The Getty has a foundation that is worth—the Trust is worth billions of dollars, and you're relying on copies of books? Really? This is important to you?"

It almost sounds ridiculous when I say it now, but those were the kinds of conversations we were having. And the one with the selling out the copyright interest in this group of photographs I think was one of the worst things that the Getty has ever done in terms of acquisitions. But we were able then at the Trust level to initiate the conversations among the programs about, what are we doing when we're managing copyright here—what's the goal, what's the purpose—and to agree among the programs that we are not going to, by contract, give copyright interest in images of works at the Getty, public domain works at the Getty, ever. That was not what the Getty is. Whether that stuck or not, I have no idea, but at least we had the conversation. [laughs]

02-01:55:49 Tewes: What was the conversation like with board members about these policies you

were trying to create?

02-01:55:56 Hamma: It was very uneven. Depending on what business the board members were in,

they very much appreciated the end product of a uniform website for the


Getty. They got it. That's about brand. It's about telling people who you are. Some of the board members understood the desire to corral information and have an information environment, a knowledge environment across the Getty, and to make that efficient and to make it future-proof so we can migrate systems without having to touch all the information that we had collected. Some board members understood that. Some board members I think didn't have a clue, I would say, there. Some were appreciative and some were not. It really depending on where they came from and what kind of interest that they had in being on the Getty Board.

02-01:56:59 Tewes: So, for instance, someone with an art background might have a different

opinion than someone with a business?

02-01:57:06 Hamma: Yeah. I think the businessmen understood the goals much more than the art

people, and I think some of the art people largely didn't have a clue about anything. But I think for what I was doing, that feeling is no different from the curatorial departments, who would present nineteenth-century French sculpture to the Acquisition Committee, the board, realizing that a certain percentage of those people really had no clue, no clue at all, for quality, for value, for anything.

02-01:57:55 Tewes: Well, that's an interesting point. How were you communicating these big,

sometimes abstract ideas to people who just had no idea what this meant?

02-01:58:05 Hamma: With Barry's help, most of it, because some of it was new to me, also. We

would frame it the same way the university might frame it and say, "Okay, we've got 2,700 different departments across the Cal State system. How do we begin to think about technology so that we're more efficient? What are those conversations like, and who owns what?" I think as long as Barry was really interested in it, there was a clear sense that certain things were owned at the Trust level, that's just the way it was. People would eventually buy into that and say, "Okay, fine," especially if they were involved on a day-to-day basis or if their staff were involved on a day-to-day basis in discussions about what the goals were, what the means were, how we get from a to b.

02-01:59:02 Tewes: Did Barry lose interest in this, or was he having to deal with other problems?

02-01:59:08 Hamma: He eventually was having to deal with other problems. You know, when I was

talking about Marion at the very beginning, I can't guess at motivation. I don't know what resulted, I don't know where all this came from, but the net result, what one could observe, was that Barry seemed less interested in the Getty, less engaged. And as that happened—because it had been immediately preceded by and continued through a sense of mistrust among all Getty staff


and just wondering, What's going on, who's in charge, who do I like and who do I don't like, unh—it was almost as [if] every little increment that Barry let go at the Getty would get sucked up someplace else immediately. It was a process where, Okay, if he's really not that interested in this, I'm going to take it back, I'm going to do my own.

02-02:00:16 Tewes: What did that mean for your work in particular?

02-02:00:20 Hamma: Well towards the end, it got extremely difficult. There were staff, new hires,

for example, in programs, who didn't buy into the notion that there was a Getty at all. It was their program, that was it, that's all that mattered. They were not interested in having conversations across programs at all. Or if they were interested in it at all, they were interested in owning it. After I left, I had a conversation at a lunch with Jim Wood, and he said, "You'd be surprised how many people came to me the day after you left and said they wanted your job." I said, "No, I wouldn't be surprised, and I could probably name them." But it was over. Jim was not interested in that at all, so—

02-02:01:13 Tewes: Hmm. Well, was there anything you want to add about these years before your

last position at the Getty, which was executive director? Is there anything you want to add more about projects or goals and challenges you had?

02-02:01:35 Hamma: No. I mean in retrospect, it feels like every day was a challenge, especially

internally at the Getty. Everybody wanted to continue to do things the way they did. And as soon as I was able to define with Jill and Barry a scope of interest of kind of meta technology that would bring interest to the programs together, and in a unified way, and use that as a basis for trying to define what the goals and objectives of the IT Department should be for the next fiscal year, as soon as we sort of figured that out and put it together, then everybody said, "Oh no, I'll do that." Especially the IT Department said, "Oh, that's what we do, that's what we do," when in fact, no, they never did it. And so it was a daily challenge.

What actually was more interesting during that period was working with outside groups that the Getty had helped found, some of them, trying to find a new life in terms of, how do we keep a community across museums, libraries, and archives growing; to discuss their use of technology in a way that's beneficial to each of them? Those conversations took place especially with other funding groups: the Institute of Museum and Library Services, for example, IMLS in Washington; or with the Mellon Foundation; or with Kress [Foundation]. How do we shape programs and provide incentives to make these conversations more meaningful, and to keep them going?


02-02:03:26 Tewes: Was there any discussion about partnering with other heritage sites or cultural

institutions, in terms of this particular component?

02-02:03:43 Hamma: No. It's kind of not what the Getty did. It's like, yeah, you don't need to do

that.

02-02:03:51 Tewes: Would there have been any incentive to do that, in your mind?

02-02:03:54 Hamma: Yeah, and there were a couple of instances where it seemed to me, Well, we

have this whole infrastructure now set up and it's been running well; we're refining it to keep the whole web presence going. And we have got excess capacity in our contract for video distribution around the world. It used to be, you'd go to a company like Akami, Limelight, or something like that and buy—you'd buy into their distribution. They would have servers strategically located in twenty-seven places around the world, so no matter whose web browser was asking for the video, it would get it really quickly because there was a server within a few thousand miles. You had to buy into industrial-sized contracts, because museums were not their clients. Their clients were Disney, and Disney's got the big box of stuff, and we've got the relatively small box of stuff. But you had to buy the big-box contract because that's all they had. I thought, Well, we had to buy this big-box contract. Why don't we go to maybe other institutions in Los Angeles who want to have capacity for video, and come up with an agreement, a service agreement to give them a chunk of our unused space? Well, there was always a reason that we couldn't do that.

02-02:05:21 Tewes: I imagine that conversation came down to the copyright, again, and sharing.

02-02:05:24 Hamma: Well, it came down to, The Getty can't do that because we're a nonprofit

organi[zation]—I don't remember what the issues were, but there was some reason that we just, we couldn't possibly do that.

There were discussions about, even, we would rotate desktops out on a schedule; some people every three years, some people every five years, some people every seven years. Well, what do you do with the old computers? When we started that, Apple, for example, did not have the recycling program that it does today. What do you do with old computers? There were good reasons to do it, to keep things up to date, and because things—it would be kind of updated, but there were probably lots of institutions in Los Angeles less wealthy than the Getty who would like to have a three-year old computer. "So can we give these? Can we have a program where we give these away?" "Well, I don't know if we can do that or not."


02-02:06:28 Tewes: So to your knowledge, they were kept on site, or were they dumped?

02-02:06:32 Hamma: I have no idea what happened. I think they were just trashed.

02-02:06:39 Tewes: Is there anything you'd like to add that we've discussed today, or you want to

fill in some blanks?

02-02:06:46 Hamma: Mm. Probably, but nothing I can think of right now.

02-02:06:54 Tewes: Okay. Well, I think that's a good place to pause our thoughts. All right. Thank

you, Ken.

02-02:06:58 Hamma: Yeah.


Interview 3: June 13, 2019 03-00:00:03 Tewes: This is a third interview with Ken Hamma for the Getty Trust Oral History

Project, in association with the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley. The interview is being conducted by Amanda Tewes in Palm Springs, California, on June 13, 2019. So thanks for a third day with me here, Ken.

When we left off yesterday we were just making the transition in 2004 to the executive director of Digital Policy and Initiatives, which was also under the Trust forum. Was there anything significant that changed from being senior advisor for Information Policy when you made that move?

03-00:00:43 Hamma: I think it was trying to formalize that, in a way, that senior advisor. It's just

like Barry [Munitz] had multiple senior advisors, most of whom were not employed at the Getty but kind of flowed in and out, and lead conversations and show up at more meetings and dinners and that sort of thing. It was an attempt to formalize that in a way that put me in an office at the Trust. It was, looking back on it, I realize, managed almost entirely by Jill [Murphy] and not Barry. And so, in retrospect, I would say there was even at the beginning a kind of a feeling on my part of a distance from the engagement period it had up to that point. It meant physically moving into an office at the Trust; new title and new structure; rearranging, again, the org chart, the budgets, all of that sort of thing. But actually at that point, it was much easier, because there was an expectation set up that there were already some Trust-wide activities. That is, the Trust itself could have a program like the Web, the whole Getty Web presence, that all those activities didn't have to reside in one of the Getty programs. The Trust would be barren in that kind of thinking and was simply the location of legal issues, financial issues, and budget issues.

It was a kind of change that, even from the beginning, I suspected was not going to work well at the Getty, because the programs were—jealous is probably the wrong word—programs were very protective of their territory, even amongst themselves. I remember when I was in the Museum, depending on how acquisitions were going, there were relatively hard feelings between the Museum and the Research Institute about who collected photographs. You can collect photographs as historical documentation, you can collect photographs as fine art, and very frequently, there's no difference between the two. So, that sense of who owns the territory continued to the day I left the Getty, and was one of the things I was happy to leave behind.

03-00:03:37 Tewes: Looking back, would there have been a better way to set up your department?

03-00:03:48 Hamma: I don't know. I don't know if there was a better way or not. One could imagine

that an IT Department would develop the sensibility to talk to programmatic


staff on their own terms, instead of being IT meets program, and what kind of understanding happens in the middle of that? That never happened. I think there were people at the Getty who thought it did, but it kind of never happened. I think that it was that interface that I was trying to bridge, and sometimes it worked, and when it worked, it worked well. Frequently, it didn't work because people on either side of the equation wanted to own it. It was one of those situations where, once somebody defines the problem, everybody says, "Oh yeah, of course, I'll manage that; I'll deal with that." But until someone defines the problem or defines the structure or defines a possible solution, there's no conversation there at all. It was all about trying to be more efficient at the Getty with information technology, in all directions.

03-00:05:19 And so, in one direction, that might include consideration of open access or open-source technology instead of proprietary technology. That kind of rearranges the expectations in the budget of the IT Department, because with open-source technology, you have a higher learning curve and a higher—you manage the problems or help manage the problems with the community around that open-source software; whereas with proprietary software, you've got an 800 number to call. You pay up front a huge amount, but you've got an 800 number to call and say, "This isn't working for us," and someone will fly out and fix it, hopefully.

So it was in that direction, both with the idea of trying to lower the cost of ownership of technology, but also trying to build a model that other museums and libraries, other cultural institutions could follow, especially institutions with a lot less money than the Getty, trying to come up with a solution that would serve the community as opposed to only the rich institutions. I think the Getty was for a long time guilty of coming up with solutions only rich institutions could afford. We had the money to do it and that's how we played, and then we kind of badly turned around to the rest of the community and say, "Come on guys, catch up." It was like, "Well, we can't do that." I think that happened a lot at the Getty.

03-00:06:59 It was an attempt to rethink how the Getty used technology so we could be a model, or at least swim with other institutions who had less money. But also at the same time to make the technology more responsive to the staff at the Getty, whether they're managing the museum collection, whether they're curators, librarians, no matter who, so that their concerns and their legitimate needs for managing knowledge—which is something that is sometimes difficult to grasp because you have to really understand what it is that they're doing, who their audience is, what their product is—trying to make technology more responsive to that, as opposed to saying, "Okay, here we have a library application that manages bib records. Plug it in, and all right, go, use it." It was trying to create, really trying to create more conversation around those kinds of topics to make the Getty a little more strategic in its use


of technology for its own purposes, but also for the purposes of the larger community that we were part of.

03-00:08:22 Tewes: Can you think of any examples of project or big ideas that came from certain

departments around the Getty?

03-00:08:35 Hamma: There was, yeah. There was one project that actually was interesting and was

premised to a certain extent on this notion of, how do we make this more accessible to small institutions, and that was—and still operating in the old model of a set database that lives inside an application, and the data is immutable, basically, once it's stuck there—could we describe a kind of low-level, an entry-level scenario of data management that would include a minimum number of fields that would be retaining intellectual utility, that any museum or any library or any archive could map their data to, and say, "Okay, this is the little publishing model; no matter what you've got there, here's the little filter. And so map your data to it, and then publish that out"? If everybody did that, we would at least have this core of information about works, whether they're books or papers or works of art, that could be common and searched across with success, with greater success than what Google then or other search engines allowed, because the data would be better, and the data would be published in a way anticipating consistency.

That ran contrary to kind of what everybody was doing up until that point, where the more complex, the deeper the data, the bigger the quantity, the more useful and the richer it will be. At a certain point, banging your head against that brick wall, you realize, Why do we keep doing this? It has not worked to date, and it probably will never work as long as people are dealing with these buckets of data that they can't change. Let's describe something lower level and have a discussion with the community about what the shape of that is, how it should be used. That was actually quite good, I think, because it kind of infected a lot of projects that lived in the programs at the Getty and began to infect projects that they worked on with their larger communities, whether it was the Conservation Institute, the Research Institute, the Museum. It was supplanted before I left by advances in technology, but nevertheless, it was a kind of change for the Getty to say, "Let's speak to the community on its own terms, as opposed to insisting that they rise to our level."

03-00:11:37 Tewes: One project you were explaining to me beforehand was something about

ResearchSpace in the British Museum. Can you explain to me what that is?

03-00:11:46 Hamma: That was a Mellon-funded project, and it began before that. There was a

preceding project of trying to develop an application that would support conservation. Collection management systems in museums tend to be—or at the time—I think probably still—largely tended to be the core application for


how you managed that collection. They never had, until very recently, a module for that application that addressed the needs of conservation departments—so tracking the work that they do, the materials that they use, the scientific methods they use—and integrating that into the larger picture of the museum collection; both for the institution itself, so that everyone within that institution could see the full history, the physical history of an object: when was it treated, what happened, what kinds of chemicals were used, why were certain decisions made, that kind of stuff.

03-00:12:53 And so, working with the Mellon Foundation, there was an effort to create such an application. While I was still at the Getty, one of the things I worked on was trying to decide, How do you even begin to think about an application like that? What's the workflow like across multiple institutions, what are the concerns, what's the research like, what do they think about, what are the relationships internally? That led to a discussion, both at the Getty, but also at the Mellon, about a new data format that was the antithesis of the fixed database that everybody had always used up until that point, a format for data where each element of data carries with it all of the descriptors that tell you about its relationship to other things in the world. That element of data can go out and live in the world on the Web or someplace, and if you inspect it, you can see—you don't need to know all the other data in the database because it tells you, "My relationship to a work of art is this. My relationship to a maker is that. My relation to a date"—all of that sort of stuff would exist, and so in that world you could have data out there that would essentially triangulate among itself. If you could set up the relationships, the Web itself would carry those relationships and not just the elements of data.

03-00:14:30 The more we thought about that, we thought, This has a bigger application for all of the kinds of research that is done in the world that we live in, in cultural heritage. We began thinking about that—staff at the Mellon and myself—and we thought, This would be a really good project to have someone think about this and work on it. At the same time, I was working on another small project at the British Museum, which was really a Getty-British Museum project, and I said, "Well, why don't we go to the British Museum and see if they'll do it?"

So one spring morning, we met with the director of the British Museum and a man named Dominic Oldman, who was in IT at the British Museum, and talked about this concept that became ResearchSpace, essentially. And after a while, finally convinced them that that would be a good project; that Mellon would fund it at the British Museum; that they would take it on and work with it. It led to all sorts of troubles and all sorts of problems inside the British Museum that echoed, in many ways, the same sorts of issues I was dealing with at the Getty, that, fine, okay, everybody commits and then the director says, "Well, why are we doing this again? What do we get out of this?"


03-00:15:58 But, it survived and it's still there today, and I think will be a very viable tool for researchers to use, and a viable venue in which to place the publication out of all the databases from libraries and museums. Whether that's done in a way that you collect everything or it's just done in a virtual distribution, it doesn't matter. But we began to be able to see the combination of very rich dataset, very deep datasets, with the simplicity of what we had been trying to look at at the Getty with older technology. This new technical format for data would allow for the combination of both of those things to happen: lower the bar for participation for institutions, but also keep a very, very rich dataset for researchers and people who wanted to do investigations. That was, in a nutshell, the goal of ResearchSpace. Then there were a lot of complications with data, with images, with all sorts of things. But it was actually—has been very productive, I think, even until today. I'm not involved in it anymore at all, but I try to keep up with what they're doing there. That's one of the things that I'm still interested in.

03-00:17:24 Tewes: Well, you mentioned it's ongoing. I'm just wondering how long a project like

this requires to get off the ground.

03-00:17:31 Hamma: A long time, and that's partly because it's complicated and partly because the

technology elements are changing. As the train is going down the tracks, it's like changing the wheels on it without stopping it. And also because what I came to realize in the course of that project and my last years at the Getty is that museums and cultural heritage institutions are not software developers. To make those kinds of projects sustainable, there has to be a bridge to a development corporation, a standard company that's interested in developing and who is rewarded for developing—that is, that there's a market—and you come up with a model that allows for a company to realize income based on that, and that's what's tracked and that's why people do it. That's a long process and difficult. It's partly because there still is an issue between how IT people talk, those companies talk, and how cultural heritage institutions talk. Finding people who can speak both languages and can be effective doing that is really difficult.

03-00:18:59 Tewes: Was it part of your job to try to reach out and create those partnerships with

companies?

03-00:19:04 Hamma: Within the context of those kinds of projects, yes, absolutely, But also at the

same time, to realize that there are instances when you don't want to do that—it's just too hard and it takes too long—and trying to be clear about what that kind of a project is on the one hand, as opposed to the installation of software that runs your business on the other, where you want to be very clean, and a very clear understanding of what the finances and the expectations are.


03-00:19:45 Tewes: Well on that note, you mentioned that Barry Munitz wanted you to engage

more with the broader community. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

03-00:19:56 Hamma: Well, it's in those projects, exactly, there is one aspect of it. One example of

that is when we first started talking about an application for conservation in museums. The attitude of most conservation departments was, This is really secret information and no one should know about this, because it's our information and other people might misuse it. That was really quite strong. The analogy that conservators used was, "We are like doctors, and doctors aren't allowed to share medical information about their patients. We're exactly the same thing. We shouldn't have to share treatment information about works of art, except what we want to—so with other doctors or with other conservators. And so, what's the point of having an application, one of the goals of which is to make that information more accessible? We don't want it to be accessible."

And so a preceding conversation to the whole development of this application called ConservationSpace, which now exists and is managed—was managed into life by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, again, after arm-twisting by our little cabal at the Mellon to get them to do it. The preceding conversation was not unlike the conversation around access to public domain works of art: "All right, we understand that's the way you've always done it, but let's think about what technology might allow, if we change how we think about this information, if we can do that, and if you think that's possible." Those were the first conversations with Mellon.

03-00:21:54 I remember one spring a group of directors of European museums, maybe twenty or thirty directors of museums came with their head of IT to a meeting at the British Museum to talk about the issue of access to information about conservation. Where on the one hand, you had the doctor analogy where, This is like medical information, of course we can't share it; and on the other, also from the field of conservation but mainly from art historians and something called technical art history, This information is really important because it describes the physical life of these objects, and that's as important as the social life. The provenance is important as the story about how they were made and where they are now and what they depict and what their relationships are.

So it was another conversation where I think we really changed the field. And by the time the National Gallery inherited that project, which was after I'd left the Getty, they went around and had multiple meetings around this country about the development of ConservationSpace as an application to develop to manage conservation information, at maybe four or five different museums, trying to survey the field, in a way. I remember those meetings. The issue of this old doctor analogy, younger conservators did not buy into that at all. It was like, "Well of course—what do you mean—of course you want to share


this information." And so, it was able to kind of kick start another sea change for the community, not just for the Getty, but for all of these institutions. So there was that, which was about the community.

03-00:24:00 Barry also got me on a committee at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, usually referred to by its acronym, ICANN, whose offices are located in Marina del Rey. They manage the domain name structure for the Internet; that is, how people register; what the rules are about registering names, like Getty.edu; what the relationship for that is to a set of numbers and how many numbers. It used to be a set of four numbers divided by periods, and moving then into a world of six numbers divided by periods, because there was a need for more combinations and also more utility. Changing the namespace from the traditional four basic domains of .edu, .com, .net, and .org to be many, many, many, almost anything you could think of. And in their quarterly meetings that happened around the world, discussions around that namespace: if there is going to be in addition to those four—a .tv, for example—who gets it? Who gets to manage it? What are the rules? Can there be a .sex? Can there be a .xxx? Is this the sort of thing that Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers wants to sponsor? And if we do, what are the rules around it?

03-00:25:34 So, it was an interesting time to try to, in that context, also [decide], Is there a space in here for cultural heritage institutions? Those discussions were as fraught as anything else, because any time you're dealing with change and it involves more than twenty-seven people—and all these meetings were hundreds of people from around the world—everybody had very specific ideas about what the priorities [were], or what could be done, what couldn't be done, what might break the Internet, what might not break the Internet. Very contentious. In the end I think there was not much space there for cultural heritage institutions. But one of the discussions we did have was, Would there be a way to use the name structure, the naming structure of the Internet to help facilitate finding library, archival, and museum resources around the world? Is there a way to use that naming structure to make more visible or make special those kinds of websites that want to be targets for a shared discovery experience? But then, even if you decide that, how does it work? Who runs it? Who gets paid to do this? There were those kind of meta issues that I think were interesting but were so long range that I think any single cultural heritage institution, even the Getty, loses interest pretty quickly.

03-00:27:23 Tewes: And even ICANN wasn't able to resolve that?

03-00:27:26 Hamma: ICANN didn't. ICANN, as an organization, kind of didn't care. It was mainly

responding to the needs of its constituents. Its own agenda was: don't break the Internet. So what can we do that doesn't break the Internet?


03-00:27:43 Tewes: It's a good goal.

03-00:27:44 Hamma: Yeah.

03-00:27:47 Tewes: Well as you were speaking about that, I was realizing a lot of museums, they

end with .org, and Getty is .edu. Was that intentional?

03-00:27:57 Hamma: It was done before I was at the Getty, so I don't know. But it was also done at

a time where the policy around using a .edu was not well defined, and a number of institutions got a .edu. For what reason the Getty thought that was important to have, I have no idea, but it got it. It would not be able to get it today under new policy rules, but it's grandfathered in the way it goes. Yeah.

03-00:28:33 Tewes: Interesting. [laughs] Just made me think of that. For the record, I just want to

say, yesterday we were talking about the public catalog of [the] online collection at the Getty, and that's called Information Collection, or that project was called—

03-00:28:55 Hamma: It was in Information Collection but it was just basically building for an

online—you're thinking of the Museum specifically—

03-00:29:02 Tewes: Yes.

03-00:29:02 Hamma: The goal was to make sure or was to enable the entire collection to be

available online. Some things would be well described, and some things not so well described. And so, if you had 10,000 Roman coins and each one was simply "Roman coin," "Roman coin," "Roman coin," that would be fine. At least they would be available, with an image, and anybody who was really interested in Roman coins could do whatever they wanted with it.

03-00:29:31 Tewes: Perfect. We've also been talking over the last few days about open access and

rights and reproduction. And one thought that we'd been discussing was the idea of Getty images, and what that means for that. I thought you had a story to share about that.

03-00:30:02 Hamma: Which story? [laughs]

03-00:30:04 Tewes: Oh, the story with the licensing of Getty images, or images of the Getty.


03-00:30:13 Hamma: Well, images from the Getty, but it was actually a bigger issue. At one point,

once you sort of pull yourself up short and say, "Okay, it's not enough to say, 'Let's keep doing that because that's the way we've always done it.'" Why do we do that? It became clear to me that museums had a choice, everybody has a choice. If you take a picture of a work of art that's in the public domain—that is, the underlying work itself is in the public domain—you can assert ownership or copyright in that image, that picture that you made. Or not. It's a choice. You don't have to do one or the other. And so, ones think through the implications of that choice on either side, and where does the greater value for the institution lie? People had always asserted copyright in images for these works, because they wanted to have a revenue stream or—even a more difficult thing to argue against initially—because they wanted to control the use of the image: we don't want people to put that image on a shower curtain, we don't want people to do other sorts of things with it. And the value proposition was really difficult. It was very difficult even to sort of have a discussion about that value proposition because people's attitudes towards what we have always done were so strong, they were not able to even engage in a discussion of, "Why, why do we do this?"

We had this discussion internally at the Getty, and basically we got nowhere. The larger community was beginning to think about the issue in a way that made sense to me. That is, What value do you get by asserting copyright interest, what value do you get by allowing an image just to go out on its own and to go anywhere? That was another issue that affected projects at the Mellon, because all of the information projects and data projects that I advised at the Mellon on, there were always issues of copyright. And whether it was just data or images, copyright in a digital world tends always to be friction, and so it stops things from flowing. You have to click through an agreement, you have to pay money, you have to do something or you're just blocked from seeing things. If the product that you're asserting copyright interest in is your business, like a newspaper, fine. You should do that. That should be the standard expectation. If what you're asserting copyright interest is merely a byproduct of documenting your collection, it's a different equation, and has different outcomes. Getting people to talk about that was extremely difficult.

03-00:33:35 There was a meeting at the Mellon Foundation in New York at one point—again, after I left the Getty, these conversations continued to go on—with about twenty museum directors from the East Coast, largely, all of whom except one said, "Oh yeah, we get it. We don't make much money off of these images. In fact, we lose money if we take into account how much we pay the person to manage the process. So, why do we do this? And, if we let the images go free, is it really going to matter if a painting every now and then pops up on a shower curtain or is used by Hallmark cards? Is that really going somehow diminish the original work of art?" Actually, it became a much more interesting conversation in the larger community, and trying to bring that back


to the Getty early on was difficult, because—well, it just was. People were happy to live in the box that they had come to work in, and that meant, No, this is how we do things.

03-00:34:53 Tewes: Well, related to that is intellectual property issues. Can you talk a little bit

what that meant for museums and other cultural heritage institutions?

03-00:35:10 Hamma: I guess fundamental to a conversation about that was, What do you want?

There are different models, different ways of declaring your interest in how something is used, if you own it, whether it's an image or a dataset or a published essay, for example. The conversation evolved more around public publishing—essays, books—than it did around images, because they were simply more open to it and there was a larger community pushing in different ways on publications. What do you want when you assert interest and copyright in that publication? Do you want to make money off of it? Do you simply want to be known always as the author of it, so that people can't just copy it and say it was their own? Do you want to ensure that it stays, that it's available always as a public document? What do you really want? And so, as ways evolved to assert different notions, different ideas of copyright—and it could be simply to ensure that no one else could declare copyright in a work that you published, and that would always be yours, and that it would always be freely accessible.

So, intellectual property, I think, is still an interesting conversation to be had. I think as technology changes, there's different flavors, different flavors of the conversation that can be had, and so it just needs to continue, I think.

03-00:37:18 But I carried that also then after I left the Getty, both through projects at the Mellon, but also at Yale, where we had long conversations. I think I mentioned yesterday about copyright in the product of faculty—that is, their publications, their datasets, images that they may have made on an excavation or while they were traveling—that they may or may not have asserted copyright interest in. That whole conversation at Yale was influenced, and in an important way, by funding from the US government. So, when the National Science Foundation, for example, gives a grant to a researcher to do something, the grant comes with an obligation that your dataset, that all of your data and your publications be publicly available permanently. Which, in the academic world, is a different conversation from the one museums and libraries have been having, but also imposed on institutions like Yale a burden to provide the technical infrastructure to make that possible, to make that happen. So it wasn't enough to get a million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, do your work, and then say, "Okay, the project's over," and close up. There had to be some residual from that project that would be permanently, electronically available.


03-00:39:02 Tewes: And are we talking about updating the system, or is it something more than

that?

03-00:39:06 Hamma: It could be that, but it was more about that your research product, whatever

that was—a publication, a dataset, images, an application—whatever your research product was, but if it was funded by the federal government, that should be freely, permanently available.

03-00:39:33 Tewes: Mm-hmm. Are there any other projects or initiatives you worked on at the

Getty that you'd like to discuss now?

03-00:39:57 Hamma: I think in the last years I was at the Getty, it was more trying to find places

where we could leverage knowledge within the institution across the various programs, both in an effort to make whatever the Getty was creating richer, because it would involve different specialties, different intellects, different people, different staff, but also to see if there weren't ways that we could begin to think about technology at the Getty across those programs and those projects in a common way, and begin to think about the development of—or integrating technologies in ways that would serve multiple programs at the same time.

It was difficult, I think, because each program assumed that they would have their own special needs, and they did. And in many ways, the technology was not spreadable, not shareable, but in many ways it was. It took an effort to understand programs and their projects and their needs and the way they managed knowledge, and to think strongly about how to pair that with technology to support them. That kind of thinking only happens if you're deliberate about it. It doesn't happen if you have—as happened at Yale—you have an IT department that goes around and talks to everybody and say, "Okay, what do you want to do next year?" and then they decide what technology is going to be provided to make that happen. That results simply in spending a lot of technology dollars to support one project after another, one project after another, as opposed to thinking about, in a more integrated way, in a holistic way, about the institution and what it's doing and what its product is and what its purpose is. We did a lot of that at the Getty. Some succeeded, some didn't, but at least we had conversations and got people in the room together to talk about it.

03-00:42:16 As it was becoming viable, we talked more about open-source software, as opposed to proprietary software. Was there a role for that at the Getty, and if there was, where was it? And if we could imagine that, could we jump from that platform to engaging the community around similar solutions, which would be less expensive, could be managed by the community? For example,


would it be possible to build an open-source collection management system that would be distributed, would be managed in one place? I mean, you could get it and manage it yourself as an institution if you wanted to. If you were a small institution, you had no IT staff, you could simply sign up for it as a service and do what everybody else was doing. And in that context, embed all the stuff that the Getty had been interested in—data and vocabulary standards—and just trying to think of, Are there different models for how technology is employed in cultural heritage institutions that would be more efficient and effective, and also less expensive?

03-00:43:35 The Getty—not intentionally, but simply, this was the way things turned out—would often get involved with solutions for the community that were way too expensive for the community, or too complicated. Not every museum can have someone who understands data and vocabulary standards there helping them. It's never going to happen. It was clear from studies done by the Institute of Museum and Library Services that the vast majority of cultural heritage in the United States is in those kinds of institutions where, this is never going to happen.

03-00:44:17 So, that also then led to other kinds of projects where I'd sit down with groups at the Getty and try to take traditional projects that we had been working on, things that were important to them, and say, "Is there a way to think about this that makes it more accessible?" It's not about dumbing it down, but it's about kind of lowering the bar of participation so more institutions can participate. And those kinds of things kind of were the core of what was going on at the Getty. And then also interacting continuously with the IT Department, trying to keep conversations going on both ends. It was facilitated to a certain extent by still having this Web Group, the Getty Web presence and those staff under me, and being able to use that sometimes as a platform or as a starting point for other discussions; to look at the online presence of the Getty, for example, and say, "Okay, we still don't have an effective single calendar of lectures and events for the Getty. Can we do that?" That meant then working with IT and the departments around, What are the various applications and programs that the programs are using to manage their calendars and their events, and can we integrate that in the programs? That might have some backward impact in how people do business or in the application that they've always used. Maybe they're going to use something else, but the goal would be, Can we have an integrated calendar for the Getty? And because of the way the programs worked at the Getty in their silos, that—what sounds like, Well, that's reasonable, why don't we do that?—was difficult. So those were the kinds of things I was working on towards the end of the Getty.

03-00:46:28 But also, in my last years there, I was doing more and more work. I was absent from the Getty, working on other projects that the Getty was associated with or that had somehow started at the Getty or involved Getty resources—


like, I point constantly back to vocabulary and Getty standards programs, that those were critical in the long-term development of the Getty. I think a lot of what I was doing and a lot of my interest, I realized, in my last year at the Getty, was no longer there, but was elsewhere.

03-00:47:11 Tewes: That's interesting. Were there projects or big ideas that you were really

wedded to that just couldn't come to fruition for whatever reason?

03-00:47:21 Hamma: That couldn't? I think in the issue of public domain, works in the public

domain, and assertion of copyright, management of intellectual property; the notion of trying to rethink the use of technology in a way that would be less expensive and perhaps community-based, as opposed to institution by institution; were things that were really difficult to talk about at the Getty, because there was proprietary interest all over the place, and sometimes, hidden proprietary interest. And so, projects or discussions would not gain traction and I wouldn't understand why, and I would find out later it was because, well, somebody who sits in that office back there has always managed those boxes, shoeboxes of images—and literally shoeboxes of slides and transparencies—and that's their job, and they don't want to do this. I would wonder, Well, why doesn't their boss, who should be able to see the bigger picture, tell them they don't have a choice, or try to help lead them into it? And sometimes those things would just never happen.

03-00:49:02 Tewes: So was that an institutional problem, or as you've been mentioning, a

challenge across the field?

03-00:49:11 Hamma: I think at the Getty it was an institutional problem. From my early days at the

Getty when Harold Williams was president of the Getty Trust, there were attempts to make the programs work together. It didn't hardly ever work, unless there was some very specific little project that was of benefit to the programs that were playing well together. The more likely scenario that I think existed until the day I left the Getty was there was questions within each program about the budgets of the other programs, and, Why do they get the money to do that? Why does the—what was then the Foundation, that used to be the Grant Program—get money to give away to other institutions to help them catalog, make digital catalogs of their collection, when we in the museum need money to do that? The knee-jerk reaction was to be hostile and questioning, as opposed to looking for opportunity for joint resolution or joint participation in projects. That made anything at the Trust level, I realized, anything at the Trust level that wasn't simply IT infrastructure or budget or legal or finance nearly impossible.


03-00:51:00 Tewes: Well, you mentioned Harold Williams. I'm interested in that you worked

under several presidents of the Trust, but also in the Museum and then under the Trust. I'm wondering about institutional culture overall and how you may have seen that shift—or not—over the years.

03-00:51:21 Hamma: Hmm, good question. I think in some ways, the culture of the Getty didn't

change much at all over time. It wasn't in anybody's interest to have it change. As long as the Trust managed finances in a way that would allow each program to get the budget that it wanted or pretty much that, there was no incentive to do anything else, really, unless someone said, "No, you've got to do that." My first encounter with that was when I was still in the Museum, in the early days of working on the interactive program that would run in the new Getty Museum at the Getty Center, and Harold deciding, "Oh, well this is an opportunity. Let's have people from the Information Institute review the structure of the program and provide suggestions or input, or see what we can change," This actually was very useful, and I think the people I answered to at the Getty—or at the Museum at that time—saw it as intrusive and the wrong thing to be doing. In the end, it was actually helpful. But I think the basic attitude of, This is our program, the Trust gave us our budget, and we're just going to go do what we want to do, it might be different today. I have no idea. I'm sure there are small instances now and then of cooperation on project, but I think basically it's probably not changed.

03-00:53:21 Tewes: Well, part of being the head of your department is making the management

decisions along the way, and I was hoping you could speak a little bit about the budget for your department over the years, and also how financial challenges within the Trust and the larger economy might have impacted that.

03-00:53:47 Hamma: Even in lean years, there was enough money to do kind of everything the

Getty wanted to do. I think the one thing—and my insight into this is like only 10 percent—but I think the one thing that—where the pinch was felt was in the world of acquisitions in the Museum, but probably also in the Library and Archives. In terms of programs and projects, I think there was always funding. There meant a little dialing back at certain points, but it didn't mean laying off staff, largely, or anything like that. It was just, We'll do a little less this year.

But for acquisitions in my early years at the Museum, it became clear to me after—at some point, I remember when the money for acquisitions in those early days sometimes wasn't in the budget. It was the Trust willing to draw it out from principal to cover acquisitions. If you've got enough money, that's not necessarily a bad practice, but generally speaking that's a pretty bad practice to reduce the principal of your endowment for acquisitions, or operating budget, as opposed to simply taking the amount of money that's been earned in that year and using that, what the endowment spins off. At a


certain point after the Getty Center opened, it ended or was deeply slowed down. And so I think people who were in the world of making acquisitions for the collections at the Getty felt the change much more than program project people.

03-00:55:43 The pinch point at the Getty—that is, that which, it stopped things from happening—always was staff and time. We don't have enough staff and time to do this. It wasn't budget. It was, We're trying to do more than we can do. So budget wasn't an issue. I think one managed less to budget than to expectations of staff—both staff expectations for themselves, but also management expectations for when projects would get done, that would sometimes be delayed. And managing those expectations around simply, We haven't got the time and the staff to do this as we thought we were going to do it. Throwing extra money at it isn't going to make a difference. We simply have to work through the project that we've got in front of us, and it's going to take longer.

There were also instances of kind of backward—how do I put this—kind of managing backwards from outcomes, taking outcomes from certain projects and trying to say, "Okay, here's the result. How do we need to rethink the process of how we got here?" There was, after the Getty Center opened, an attempt on the Trust part to manage the whole technology budget of the Getty, which was nearly impossible, because managing the technology budget at the Getty meant putting your fingers in all of the programs and in the way they used technology, but there was an attempt. I don't remember the name of it, but there was this technology fund, and so the Trust said, "We'll put all technology dollars into this fund, and programs have to come—if they want to do things and get money out of the fund, they have to describe the project they want to do: what's the technology? How long is it going to last? What's the staffing? What's the budget?"

03-00:58:23 This resulted in the programs around the Getty submitting these projects. The group that managed the fund would meet, I don't remember, quarterly or weekly or monthly or whatever it was—it often seemed like too often—and you'd get projects, and so you'd read about the projects that all the programs wanted to do. So the Grant Program, for example, which, is now the Foundation, would want money to have a new application to manage grants and the outcomes of those grants, so that they would wind up with an archive of what they had done and how the money had been spent. Because people would call the Foundation and say, "This is the kind of project we want to do," and because they've been around long enough, there was nobody there with the memory to say, "Oh, we funded that sort of thing here, here, and here, and here, and these were the outcomes." But they wanted to have the ability to do that. Or the Museum would want a new collections information program, or the Library would want a new library management system, or the


grant staff once submitted an application to this technology fund for an application that would provide GPS location for specimen trees. We all did that, too. We said, "What? Like these trees are moving around and you need to know where they are?"

03-00:59:54 So, there was an attempt to corral the technology funding, and it led to sometimes useful conversations across the programs about how the Getty was spending technology dollars. But it also led to, not unexpectedly, a lot of competition among the programs to get the most money out of that fund that they could before somebody else got it. Eventually that was refined and finally abandoned, and a clearer or a cleaner line was drawn between what should be managed by the Trust, and that is the technical infrastructure that supports whatever it is that the Getty wants to do and what should be avenged in the programs that is the stuff that they wanted to do. That actually resulted in, in some ways, a much better conversation, where the center or the Research Institute could say, "Well, we want to do this project, and we have the money in our own budget to do this project, but the implications for the infrastructure that we need at the Getty to do this are the following." And then, go back to the IT Department and say, "In the next fiscal year, this is what we would like to ask for." It was a much cleaner conversation because it was in terms that the two entities understood, and that gave them a way to talk to each other.

03-01:01:28 Tewes: That's so interesting that that idea was floated of having one budget for

technology, because it seems to me, the work you were doing and the conversations you were trying to have were to encourage people to integrate technology into all areas. And, yes, you needed one policy, but everyone should be using this on some level.

03-01:01:48 Hamma: Yeah. It was also blown apart a little bit by a realization, which I think is still

a valid one, that there—one can think about technology in two different ways: there is the business technology, that is the systems that everybody uses to manage email, calendars, a financial application that all the businesspeople at the Getty used to manage budgets, and I guess finance, those sorts of things that you want to say, "Okay, there's no reason that this should not be this. Everybody should use exactly the same thing, and use it in exactly the same ways because the business roles, our understanding of email is the same no matter what program you're in."

So there was that kind of business infrastructure technology, and then there was, I think, what one—it's hard to come up with a term for, but I called it academic computing. That is the kind of computing that goes on that supports the product and the work of those programs. So, managing the Library catalog, publishing, managing information about collections, those sorts of things. That is kind of different, and at least in an organization like the Getty


where you've got lots of money, one should be willing to think about it a little bit differently. With email, with managing the finances and the business of the Getty, the budgets of the Getty, you would want cheaper, faster and cheaper, faster. In academic computing, you kind of want that, too, but you might also say, "Well, we're willing to experiment here a little bit because we don't know, we don't have a really good sense of exactly what the future's going to be. Or there are issues in terms of the technology we're using that lead us to think if we spend a little money here, we might have a project that the community it helps define."

03-01:04:00 So the unresolved issues that are still there, and that, for an institution like the Getty, that's part of its business, it should be willing to go there. It shouldn't do the same thing with an application that just basically runs email or manages the name servers of the Getty. That's standard across the business world, that's standard across a huge community, and why would we play with that? That was difficult, that was a difficult conversation, as everything at the Getty. Everybody had their ideas about what it should be, and, yeah, anyway.

03-01:04:38 Tewes: Mm-hmm. [waits for background noise to end] I think we're good. I also

wanted to talk a little bit about some of the problems the Getty was having in the mid-2000s, just a few years before you ended up leaving. We spoke quite a bit about antiquities problems, but it was also under a California Attorney General investigation, and there started to be questions about leadership. What do you remember about this time?

03-01:05:14 Hamma: I think it's really hard to pull apart the pieces now, even still. Somebody may

someday, but I think there were all of those things happening at once. You had a president of the Trust who, I would say, there were chunks of the staff who were skeptical about his leadership and his ability even to understand what it is that they were doing. You had his chief of staff, Jill Murphy, who could be abrasive, and some people really didn't like and would not work with. You had things going on with the Antiquities Department, both with the department itself and what was the role of antiquities at the institution, and around Marion [True], and what do you do about that. The Attorney General's investigation into leadership at the Getty Trust, where was that going to go, what were the implications. It seemed like, at the time, that what happened was the institution decided, Well, we'll deal with this by getting rid of it. And so Marion was fired, and then Barry was fired, and you had an institution—and shortly before that, Debbie [Deborah] Gribbon had left as director of the Museum after having a big fight with Barry Munitz, with some compensation from the Trust.

03-01:06:58 And so you had all this stuff happening at the same time. If you were at the Getty at the time, you would have said, "Okay, what's the core, what's holding


this whole thing together?" And that core were two things. I haven't thought about this much but just off the top of my head, I would say were two things: there were long-term staff at the Getty, from the most senior administration on down, who stayed the core of the institution. I think the board was looking to them to provide leadership, because they understood the institution. I mean, regardless of all the things about the silos of the programs and all the rest of it, they understood the Getty—where it came from, its values, where it could be going—and the board looked to them for direction. At the very same time, the board became understandably highly risk averse. They wanted everything just to calm down, to go away. I think that's why the board—no one on the board ever addressed any of the issues in any public venue of what was going on. It was complete silence, because they basically wanted people to forget about it, just, No, we just want to go back to being the Getty. It's why they hired probably the most risk-averse person I've ever met, Jim Wood, as president of the Getty Trust, who really didn't want to do anything but kind of help manage a museum and was completely out of his depth, as far as I was concerned, as president of the Getty Trust.

03-01:09:04 Partly as a consequence of all that, it became a very diminished institution for a short period of time. I think everybody was kind of holding their breath. Okay, what's going to happen now? For the established programs, it meant just continuing on doing what you're doing. And so the director of the Research Institute, the director of the Conservation Institute, the new director of the Foundation kept on doing what they were doing, and that was good and I think it provided continuity for the Getty. After Debbie left as director of the Museum, there was a search, and Barry hired a new museum director who was there relatively short term, and then another museum director was hired. And so there was at the museum I think a sense of, Oh, what are we going to do now? Because in the world of siloed programs, you simply looked to the director and no one else to help you do that. But at the same time, the board hired as president of the Getty Trust a museum director, Jim Wood, and then another museum director, Jim Cuno.

03-01:10:27 So, it was kind of a little safety blanket for the museum. But it was also frustrating, because I think people felt—I certainly felt—that in that process, the board's kind of naval-gazing for themselves, and protecting themselves and what they thought was the institution, a lot of other values were let go or were retained only by people who had been at the Getty for a very long time. I think senior management at the Getty now, for those people who have been there for a long time, they still hold that. I think that provides a core of value for that as an institution. But it was pretty much chaos for a while, not knowing what was going to be the next newspaper publication, not knowing what was going on with the Trust, what was going on with Barry.


03-01:11:26 I remember finding at the board meeting, where the board went into executive session to tell him that he'd been fired, how weird that whole weekend was. And then from my own position, as being a kind of a program type of a person at the Trust level, it got even weirder when Jim Wood was hired, because he didn't want any of all of that stuff that Barry was interested in, so that the broader integration, the challenges that the Getty faced, he was just like, "No, let's settle down here. We'll just have a quiet little museum and these other programs, and we'll just keep funding them and hope for the best." It really sort of, for my position, just basically took the rug out from under everything that we'd been trying to build and said, "No, we're not going to do that." And so I think when I decided to leave and I went in and told Jim Wood, what I saw on his face was relief. Now I don't have to think about this.

03-01:12:53 Tewes: Were you concerned then that when you left your whole department would be

erased?

03-01:13:01 Hamma: No. One of the things that I tried to do as a manager was to hire staff and

position staff for future. And so I think by the time I left, I knew that the one part that was critical, ongoing, was the whole Web Team, and trying to position that as to migrate into the Communications Office at the Trust and stay as a kind of Trust event, as opposed to being run by each of the programs, was the only thing that I was concerned about. Everything else was a world of possibilities and ways that the Getty could be better and be a better community partner. If the Getty wanted to continue to do that or not, I, at that point, didn't care.

03-01:13:56 Tewes: You mentioned it was kind of a surreal weekend when you found out Barry

Munitz had been let go. And since he had been quite helpful for getting a lot of your initiatives off the ground, what did that mean for you personally?

03-01:14:10 Hamma: It meant holding my breath at that, to sort of see what was going to happen

next. Because if your boss doesn't support the whole context of what your office is meant to do, that's it.

03-01:14:33 Tewes: So this was 2008 when you eventually left the Getty. Did you have a sense of

what was next for you?

03-01:14:40 Hamma: Yeah. I had been good friends with Jack Meyers and Amy Meyers for a long

time, since Jack was in the Grant Program and Amy was at the Huntington [Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens]. Amy was, at that point, director of the Yale Center for British Art, and we had Christmas dinner with them, I think, and I mentioned to—well, I talked with Jack a lot. Before I left


the Getty, Jack had left the Getty, through a similar sequence of experiences that left him—and so it was easy to talk with Jack and Amy about what was going on at the Getty and how I was feeling. Amy said, "Well, come work for us." I think I had plotted out the outlines of that consulting project with the Yale Center for British Art, which then grew to also include the Provost's Office and other collections at Yale, before I left the Getty. And so, I wasn't concerned at all about what I was going to be doing next. I was a little bit concerned as I left for people who I admired at the Getty, who's work I admired, who I knew were going to be in ever smaller boxes at the Getty because the people they worked for knew people who had come in didn't understand what it was that they were doing or why it was important that they do it.

03-01:16:23 Tewes: You've been mentioning working with the Yale Center for British Art as an

independent consultant. Can you tell me more about that project and what it became?

03-01:16:34 Hamma: It was basically to take the Yale Center for British Art—which had no

consistent collection management at all internally; had a kind of jury-rigged digitization program for capturing digital images of works in the collection; had a miserable little website that was set up by an outside company that they couldn't control because they didn't have access to controlling it; who basically had nothing; whose IT Department consisted of one or two people who would go around and sort of help you with desktop applications. It was a non-digital institution, and the goal was to, over a relatively short period of time, turn it into a fully digital infrastructure for collections management in the Library and in the Archives and in the art collection; take all of the back-end photo services stuff, convert it to digital; build a website that would have the entire collection available, with images, over time and be searchable across all collections—not just the Museum, the Library, and the Archives as separate repositories because they had different applications managing them back end, but to be able to search across all the collections—to retrain staff, take existing staff and retain them from analog operators to digital operators; to bring some staff, some person along to help manage intellectual property in that world; to take two existing low, very low-level positions that were the IT positions, and try to find money and try to build or to start an IT Department from scratch—where would that report to, who do we hire, how do we get somebody who's interested in the intellectual questions around IT in an institution like the Yale Center for British Art to come to an institution where there's nothing—all that sort of stuff.

And again, it was not easy. It was a lot of the things that we'd done at the Getty. I was a little more relaxed about it because I was an outside consultant and I didn't have to fight their internal political fights if I didn't want to. I'd just say, "Okay, fine. This is where we want to be by December. If we're not


going to do this, you tell me how we're going to get there." Over a relatively short period of time, we built internal infrastructure, hired staff, and integrated those staff into the institution in a way that when subsequent staff changes happened—so when the head of IT quit—they didn't need me. They, on their own, could figure out how to solve that problem and hire a new head of IT. They knew what to look for. They knew what qualities they wanted in that IT person. When I left there eventually, there was an IT Department with four people, an IT Department that managed all the stuff for the collections, but also ran things for the Business Office, and for the Bookstore, for calendaring, for the Communications Office; basically was capable of managing all of that stuff. The collections were online, a far greater chunk of the art collection than anybody ever thought we would ever get to. The Library still had some issues, but it was being operated in a more regular and a more professional manner than it had been before.

03-01:20:42 Relationships with other programs at Yale were better, and so there was a clear definition of what Yale University Library did for the Library at the Yale Center for British Art, and what the Yale Center for British Art got to do on their own, how priorities were set. Wound up with a website that had everything that the director wanted, that was then eventually given over back to the Communications Department, who were very unhappy that they weren't allowed to develop it themselves, but who, in the end, realized they didn't have the capacity to develop it. But once it was put together, and staffing had been built in underneath it in an IT Department and in Photo Services and other places that they could manage, then that part—the puzzle was put together and they knew what pieces were theirs and how to put them in—and, wound up with a digital Yale Center for British Art. They were then able to participate in conversations at Yale about the other issues that I was interested in, like intellectual property and public domain.

03-01:21:55 Tewes: So was in this many ways, a culmination of the ideas you'd been pushing for

many years already through the Getty?

03-01:22:03 Hamma: It was a continuation, I would say, of them. Yale University turned out to be

one of the first big institutions to say that it would provide free open access to public domain works in their collection, would no longer declare an interest in copyright in images of those works, but make them freely available. It was done in a year when that happened, other institutions were on the cusp of doing that, and they did also: the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Metropolitan Museum; and eventually even institutions in Los Angeles like LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art], and after LACMA the Getty. So, the dominoes went down pretty quickly once a few big institutions put their foot in the water and said, "This is what we're going to do."


03-01:23:02 Tewes: Another project you were involved in was with the Museum of New Mexico

Foundation.

03-01:23:10 Hamma: Yeah, I did consulting. Yale Center for British Art was my main client for a

number of years after leaving the Getty, but I consulted with a number of other organizations: Canadian Heritage Information Network, the Museums of New Mexico, the Rockefeller Archive Center. Those were all much smaller, shorter duration consulting events to, again, address some of the same issues.

The Museums of New Mexico Foundation, for example, provides funding for the Museums of New Mexico, which is a specific group of museums in Santa Fe, and they wanted to take on a broader scope of interest. It was prompted in part by a woman named Barbara Anderson, who was at the Museum when I was there, the Getty Museum, and was a long-time friend and colleague who, at that point, was director of exhibitions for the Museums of New Mexico. As they were talking about it, Barbara said, "Why don't we ask Ken to come and talk to us about what's been going on?" They were facing exactly the same issues as all other cultural heritage institutions at the same time, at that time, of, How do we best manage our collections? How do we pay for technology? How do we publish our collections? How do we do this in a way that makes us look like a single institution, and be supportive of each other instead of fighting over the money that we've got? And by the way, we haven't got very much money, so the fight gets all the worse because the stakes are so low. What can we do to make this a better professional experience for us, and with better outcomes for the institutions?

03-01:25:06 And in a small institution like that, it was—because there still had been very little done in terms of community or open-source software that would serve smaller institutions, it was really difficult, because technology is expensive. But conversations were had. Things changed. I think there was when I left a better understanding among staff of those institutions of the problems that their colleagues faced, that happened to be in a different part of that institution. And so, I think it was a better place. Not a lot was accomplished, but I think the stage was set for things to be accomplished.

03-01:25:58 Tewes: Did you take any lessons from that particular experience?

03-01:26:05 Hamma: Yes, and I think it actually was a good lesson also for them. One of the first

things you have to do is to survey what talent you have on the ground. Your staff talent, more than anything, is going to determine outcomes. It doesn't matter what you want to do. It doesn't matter what budget you have or don't have. If your staff are not capable or if your staff are unwilling, not going to happen.


03-01:26:46 Tewes: So again, a bit of institutional culture?

03-01:26:49 Hamma: Institutional culture, yes, and the old bugaboos of, Well, this is how we've

always done it, and so why do we need to change? It's very difficult to discuss value of change when everybody knows it's going to be difficult to change because you don't have the money, and so why bother to think about it?

03-01:27:21 Tewes: And, just for the record, I believe you were continuing to consult until about

last year, 2018?

03-01:27:27 Hamma: A couple of years ago, yeah. It was at a point where I realized projects or

things that I'd been working on, people would call me and say, "Can you come to this meeting," or, "Would you read this and tell us what you think?" and I wasn't getting paid for it, so it was no longer consulting. So I said, "I'm not going to do this anymore." It was a no-brainer, one of the easy things.

03-01:27:51 Tewes: Okay. I'm glad that decision was easy to come by.

03-01:27:54 Hamma: It was very easy.

03-01:27:59 Tewes: Well I think I want to talk a bit about changes in the field, digital platforms

and information technology that—you've been mentioning some of them over the years—but I'm thinking specifically best practices, of how to approach the many ideas you've been discussing, how those changed over the years.

03-01:28:30 Hamma: Oh, I don't know. I think the question might be, How haven't they changed? I

think one of the difficulties with the way we have deployed technology is that it was done in a way that becomes, in many ways, determining of the future. You have legacy systems, you have legacy data, that is very difficult—given the way it was done in the eighties and nineties—is very difficult to migrate forward. And so some things haven't changed hardly at all; we're kind of stuck with that. The technology that was used is being used at ResearchSpace, which is more open-ended and more catholic with a small c in its sense of what data is and where it resides, and can play well with a lot of these legacy systems, is a kind of technology that a lot of businesses are now using to be a kind of umbrella over legacy systems.

You might have an insurance company, for example, that has twenty-seven different technical systems that it uses to manage its business, that don't speak well to each other, that are siloed. But because they have such a commitment in those systems, for the amount of data that's in there that's being managed, that would be a huge headache to try to get out and migrate someplace else.


They leave those legacy systems in place and then put this kind of umbrella over the top of it that makes it appear to be unified. There's not much incentive for cultural heritage institutions to do that because in the same way that Getty programs were siloed, so are cultural heritage institutions. It's very difficult to look at the community of museums, for example, and identify a museum, a player in that environment, that would raise its hand and say, "We'll take on that project, which is of great benefit to the community, not necessarily to us, but to the community in which we live." Almost never happens, never. It's all about, What's happening in my institution, and how does our institution get rewarded for the money we spend on staff effort? I think that, in some way, is a way to think about what seemed to be the changes at the Getty as I was leaving.

03-01:31:35 When I started at the Getty, in my earlier years at the Getty, it seemed like the Getty had a community-focused responsibility, was willing to take on those kinds of projects that would benefit itself a little bit, but would benefit the community enormously, because it benefited each member of that community also a little bit. By the time I left, I think there was none of that. I think there were still staff who grew up in that environment, but I think as an institution, there was no commitment to doing that sort of thing. And so, I think in some ways, the hopes we had in the nineties for solutions to community issues, for cultural heritage institutions, have been diminished, if anything.

03-01:32:36 Tewes: As a field?

03-01:32:37 Hamma: Yeah.

03-01:32:46 Tewes: Well, that's—

03-01:32:47 Hamma: Well—

03-01:32:47 Tewes: —unfortunate to hear.

03-01:32:48 Hamma: —one of the things that the Getty did, and consciously did, was to raise their

hand when there were those kinds of community issues and say, "We'll do it." I think they were unique in that. And that's probably the answer to the question that board member had when they said, "Well, if these vocabularies that the Getty has been spending so much money on are so valuable, why is nobody else paying for them?"

03-01:33:32 Tewes: Did you see that sort of commitment as tied to the Getty's mission, or—


03-01:33:38 Hamma: Yes, absolutely. I think it was embodied in that mission. Again, going back to

Nancy Englander and Harold [Williams], when they started these other programs, they were frequently outward-looking as opposed to, What benefit does the Getty itself get from spending money here? There were community programs. I think the Getty lost that over time, except in the sense of giving grants or building projects, that sense of serving not that group over there, because that's the focus of our conservation project, but serving the community in which we live, that is that benefit cultural heritage institutions in the way they do their work, and making them more efficient and better at doing it. Yeah, I think that evaporated.

03-01:34:42 Tewes: Well that leads me to the question of, what impact do you think the Getty, as a

whole, and your work in particular, has had on the field?

03-01:34:55 Hamma: It had impact as it lasted, and there may be some residual impact, but we

would look sometimes, when discussions about these issues would come up—in European countries, there was frequently something like a ministry of culture that would manage it for the country, and it was easy for Germany to say, "We will have universal access across all German collections of art by the year 2018," because there was a place, there as a locus for that conversation, and it was the ministry of culture. It might be affected through various offices or various museums, but the ministry of culture was, like, doing that. And we would, in this country, frequently lament there was no ministry of culture. There was no place to have these conversations. The Getty was a place that was willing to initiate those conversations and expend resources on making sure there were community organizations that would bring people together, that would have meetings.

When I was at the Trust, I also looked to other places like the Mellon Foundation or IMLS, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is a federal funding agency, to be a locus of those conversations. Tried hard with the National Gallery of Art, because that's a federally-funded venue, with the Library of Congress, to say, "Okay, how can we have these conversations? What could your role be? Because here you are sitting in Washington, D.C., and we have no ministry of culture. What can we do to support conversations across institutions in this country?" I think as long as there was a sense at the Getty that that was part of its mission, that was a useful thing to be doing. And sometimes it was successful. I mean, the Library of Congress is quite on their own very active in a lot of these things, and I was happy to have colleagues there that I could talk to and think about projects that we could do together or run on projects that the Getty might undertake that would address some other issues that was falling between the stools there.


03-01:37:36 And so as long as that notion was still alive in the Getty Trust, it was a viable thing to be doing. But as that faded away, it wasn't a viable thing to be doing. I think Jim Wood, probably, when he went to go home at night, said, "I don't know what Ken is doing here. What's he contributing to the Getty? I don't know what his job definition is." Because he never was part of that culture and he never understood that as part of the Getty culture. I think it leaves a hole a little bit. But I really, truly have stopped paying attention, so what still goes on out there in that world, I have no idea.

03-01:38:37 Tewes: Well before we wrap up, there were two conferences and publications that I

thought might be interesting to discuss as a part of the field as a whole, and how you communicate these ideas to everyone else. One was at a UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] conference, I believe, in Saint Petersburg in 2005, "Policy and Process in Favor of Cultural Diversity Online."

03-01:39:02 Hamma: Yeah. Actually, this is less interesting that it seems. [laughs] This came up in

the context of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and a question of how that is governed. Should it be governed like the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers governed it, or should it be governed in the manner that the telephone system is governed? There's a worldwide agreement about telephone numbers. You don't think about it, but there's got to be some place that has decided this is going to happen, and the country code of this country is this, and the country code for that country is that, and so that the whole thing works and you can pick up your telephone and dial any number anywhere in the world and get the expected result, right? The same is true for the Internet, but the question is, Why should that be the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that guarantees that, as opposed to some international organization?

And so the United Nations, a group in the UN, started grappling with this question and decided to have a conference. There're reasons that it happened in Saint Petersburg that were completely political; I don't remember what they were. Because I and a couple of other people had been associated with ICANN and we were in the museum world, we were invited to come and talk about these issues, and we did and other people did. There was no result from the meeting, but we all had an interesting time in Saint Petersburg. [laughs] There could have been an interesting result, but I think the interest at the United Nations was short-lived, in governance of the Internet, and just went by the way.

03-01:41:22 Tewes: Do you still think that that would be a valuable place to regulate?


03-01:41:29 Hamma: No, it's too diffuse, it's too diffuse. I think things are fine the way they are. I

think the first indication that things aren't fine the way they are is something will break, and then they'll have a really clear idea of what that is.

03-01:41:50 Tewes: Fair enough. You also wrote an article in Art Libraries Journal in 2006, about

"Public Domain Art in the Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility." And I'm just wondering—we've been talking a lot about public domain—how this particular project played into your larger conversations and goals in this area.

03-01:42:25 Hamma: That actually came out of having delivered a paper in New York. I was on a

panel with a man who was then general counsel for the Smithsonian, who I was talking about the ability that technology gives us to have an image available anywhere in the world, instantaneously, of high quality, and what a good thing that was. And he went on and he said, "Well, you know, if we can do this, one could imagine a future generation of technology where an image, imaging a painting is more than a visual image of it, but in fact, it is its structure. And so, one could, in using that kind of technology and the same kind of worldwide distribution, provide the ability for anybody to create a replica of that painting, down to the atomic level or some level that the replica would be indistinguishable from an original." Why would that be possible? I don't know how you would do that. I don't know how that would happen, but if one's thinking down the road a little bit, why not? He said, "And then, would we think differently about intellectual property?" I don't know. But I think it's nice to be reminded of that kind of open-endedness once in a while when we think we have solutions and we think we've kind of solved that issue, we've solved it for the world in which we live.

03-01:44:38 Tewes: But there's always open possibilities.

03-01:44:41 Hamma: Who knows? Yeah.

03-01:44:49 Tewes: Is there anything you'd like to add about the field itself and where it has

come?

03-01:44:56 Hamma: No, I don't think so. I think probably things have changed enough since I

started taking my oar out of the water, that that'd be better talked about by somebody else who's still more engaged than I am at the moment.

03-01:45:17 Tewes: Fair. Well, thinking back to your career at the Getty, in particular, I'm

wondering what you think your greatest achievements were at the institution.


03-01:45:36 Hamma: Hmm. That's a hard question to answer, because I don't think I ever thought

about it that way. I don't think I ever thought about what I was doing in a personal way. I really sort of thought about, What was the Getty accomplishing given its resources, what was the larger community accomplishing, how was it moving forward? I would be hard-pressed to say that I personally had any great accomplishment or built anything, but simply participated with a group of people who all made it possible.

03-01:46:35 Tewes: Well then I guess in thinking about it, that framework, what do you think the

Getty's greatest achievement was during your years?

03-01:46:43 Hamma: It had lots. I think all of the programs were really successful in what they did

and the goals they set for themselves. I think the Getty still provides a kind of glue, because of its visibility in the fields in which it operates—I think that's mostly true of the Conservation Institute and the Foundation—but still, provides a kind of visible flag bearer for the values in those areas. Other than simply operating a museum or running a normal kind of library, I think those kinds of accomplishments are probably—not that running a museum and having a good library aren't important, but I think those other kind of accomplishments that go beyond what the institution itself is, are probably the best things the Getty's done.

03-01:48:10 Tewes: And you've detailed a lot of the challenges you faced and the Getty has faced

over the years, but can you point to a few that were particularly challenging that you saw positive outcomes from?

03-01:48:38 Hamma: Hmm. Hmm. Challenging in what way? I'm not sure I understand where

you're going with that.

03-01:48:55 Tewes: Well you, in discussing challenges in, for instance, not having the technology

required to accomplish certain things at the Museum, or needing a cohesive approach in order to accomplish projects, and if any of those stood out to you as having a result that was, in the end, positive.

03-01:49:20 Hamma: I wouldn't talk about that. Yes, but I don't think about that in terms of projects

or specific goals that I was trying to achieve. I think the real positive, best positive outcomes, from my own point of view, were from hiring and training staff, who then took over and could run on their own. I think it was most satisfying to see people rise to the occasion, and after a learning curve that might be a year, that might be three years, really invest their career into something and carry it on their own, either at the Getty or at someplace else. I think that was, in some ways, also was in the back of my mind from when I


left the Getty that, for the things that were going to continue, that were now part of the program, of one or another programs at the Getty, were in place and were staffed in a way that I knew that it would keep on going. There were staff who knew what they were doing and committed to doing it for the right reasons. I think that's the best thing.

03-01:50:45 Tewes: That's great. Is there anyone you want to acknowledge here now?

03-01:50:50 Hamma: No, because if I did, I'll forget somebody and they'll be unhappy.

03-01:50:56 Tewes: Better be safe. [laughs] I'm interested; you've had a really interesting career

trajectory: starting off with classics and being academically trained, working in Antiquities at the Getty, moving into this new field of information collections. I'm wondering if you see the possibility for someone following a similar path now.

03-01:51:26 Hamma: Oh sure, yeah. Why not? I think it has less to do with there not being

possibilities. I think it has much more to do with someone who is willing to just jump off a cliff once in a while and say, "Okay, let's do this, or let's try that." I think it's more about that than being willing to sit in the box that you were hired into and spending forty-seven years doing the same thing over and over again.

03-01:52:11 Tewes: Opportunity for personal growth.

03-01:52:13 Hamma: That's it, yeah, yeah.

03-01:52:17 Tewes: Well finally, how would you like to be remembered?

03-01:52:22 Hamma: I don't know, I don't know.

03-01:52:34 Tewes: Still working on the solution?

03-01:52:35 Hamma: I don't have an answer. Yes, exactly. I don't have an answer for that.

03-01:52:39 Tewes: That's fine. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't

covered in our sessions?


03-01:52:47 Hamma: No, I don't think so. I think just a very general observation that working at the

Getty was in many ways a privilege. The way things kind of unraveled at the end was really unfortunate, because I think a lot of people were misunderstood, a lot of people were hurt, a lot of people took it as an opportunity really to gossip and talk about other programs at the Getty. It was a mess and it was too bad, I think. There's no way to go and undo that. There's no way to go back and explain or understand much, because so much of it was hidden and so much motivation was ill understood. It just was really unfortunate.

03-01:53:51 Tewes: Thank you so much for your time. I've really appreciated it.

03-01:53:53 Hamma: Yeah, you're welcome.

[End of Interview]

Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library … · 2020-06-25 · Oral...

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