Tag: collections

Every organisation has a collection now

On Tuesday, I attended GovCamp to learn more about public sector innovation beyond the GLAM sector. As expected, the recurrent themes of balancing risk and innovation, benchmarking and measuring success and impact, and new ways of doing business that include digital as core were central. Although enjoyable, most of this discussion touched on ideas that I was already familiar with.

What I found interesting, however, was just how many of the concerns and questions that I (naively) considered to be largely the purview of GLAMs are being replicated beyond our sector. One presentation on the Australian spatial innovation data structure discussed linked open geolocation data for use in urban planning, emergency management, policy decision making and much more. In it, Helen Owens from the Office of Spatial Policy raised the question of stewardship of fundamental spatial/geolocation data, asking “who are the custodians of spatial data to ensure that it is authoritative?” Soon after, Julie Harris from the Australian Bureau of Statistics spoke about contextualising the ABS “collections”. Although I was aware that the ABS “collected” data and information, I hadn’t considered the implications that online, their data is a collection that needs contextualisation as much as that of a museum.

Monique Potts of ABC Innovation addressed the broadcasting organisation’s movements towards open collections, shared data and collaboration, with particular emphasis on educational content. Almost across the board, speakers address the recurring themes of context, connection, collaboration, and contributing to the global ecosystem of ideas. Many talked about the challenge of engagement and providing interactive and immersive environments online. Adam Carlon, from the Social Innovation Branch, Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, spoke about the emphasis on engagement, better educational outcomes and place-based impact initiatives. Questions that to me once seemed particular to museums (if only offline) are certainly not so in the digital space.

Elizabeth Merritt recently wrote about the broken economic model of museums, proposing that:

the visible and profitable parts of being a museum can, and are, peeled off and replicated by for-profit institutions. Travelling exhibits? Check out venues like Discovery Times Square. “Museum quality” merchandise? Not a problem. Places to spend the day with the kids in an edutainment environment? Common and proliferating. And none of these institutions have to bear the costs of collecting and preserving, undertaking research, and making education available in an equitable way both to those who can pay the true costs and those who cannot.

But it’s isn’t only the visible and profitable parts of museums that are being replicated. Even collecting, preservation and public contextualisation of that which is collected is being repeated by a broad spectrum of organisations. Many public sector organisations far removed from the GLAM sector have collections and archives – of data or information – that they now want to preserve, contextualise and communicate effectively, specifically so that it can be repurposed and used to create new knowledge.

It seems to me that those organisations who have data at the centre of their collections are far better prepared for the making them useful and usable in the digital context than are museums, where minimal emphasis has been placed on making and maintaining good data. Beyond this, although authoritativeness was emphasised by the public sector orgs, trying to prevent or limit reuse was not. Multiple speakers mentioned the importance of making available remixing tools so that the data could be actively used. This is certainly an idea that is gaining momentum in our sector too, but I fear museums are pushing against a self-limiting legacy in our perspectives on these issues compared to many other organisations.

I keep returning to a recent post by Nick Poole, who wrote:

When we think of the challenges which confront museums, archives and libraries today, they are not simply challenges of marketing or presentation, funding or political profile. Nor are they challenges of how to ‘go digital’. They are challenges of relevance – our fluency with social media will define the confidence with which we step into the Connected Age. Our comfort with shared authority and interpretation will define the extent to which we empower or disenfranchise our users from creating and exploring their own connections. Our commitment to integrity and transparency will define the extent to which the coming generations will see us as part of the problem or part of the solution. Our deftness with open business models will define whether our future customers understand, and are willing to pay for, the value we can add.

The challenges of relevance are not merely limited to a fluency with, and understanding of, social media. Museums are not just trying to establish new conventions of display and publication online; they first have to break established ways of thinking about the use and value of their collections in an arena where good, remixable data is becoming increasingly emphasised. Koven recently reminded us that “As more and more institutions make their collections data available via APIs, we are effectively heading towards a place in which every museum will (theoretically) have access to every other museum’s data.” I’d argue that we need to remember that it’s not just museums who have collections, and not just museums who are making their collections data available. Everyone has collections now, so what we need to be thinking about is how our collections can and should fit into this context.

What do you think?

Museum collections and the “rhetoric gap”

There are a couple of questions that have started nagging at me when I look at museum websites, and particularly when I look at online collections. With the American Association of Museums annual meeting on in the States this week, it seemed like a good time to start asking them.

Are museum collections actually as important as we often say they are? I cannot count the number of times I have heard someone in a museum argue that the most important thing about the museum is its collection – and why wouldn’t they? Each museum’s collection is unique. It is here that museums can differentiate themselves. A local art museum can collect works of national and local importance, and use each to speak of its place in a community. A history museum can define its very purpose by those objects that it has acquired.

Even more than this, as Steven E. Weil points out in his excellent book Rethinking the Museum, the justification makes “a kind of strategic sense to stress what it is that is most distinctive about museums – that they acquire and care for collections.” (p29.) In doing so, museums craft out a niche for themselves.

In Managing Things – Crafting a Collections Policy from the AAM’s Museum News, John Simmons writes:

It is clear that what distinguishes the museum from other educational, scientific, and aesthetic organizations is its relationship with its collections. “Museums exist,” writes Morris Museum Director Steven H. Miller, “because of an assumption that physical objects have value.” In Museums, Objects and Collections, Susan M. Pearce writes, “The point of collections and museums . . . revolves around the possession of ‘real things’ and . . . essentially this is what gives museums their unique role.”

But when I look at the message I get from museums on the Internet, the collection rarely sits front and centre. Many institutions still don’t have their collections online, and although I realise there are often both financial and time constraints, this just reinforces my sense that the collection has fallen down the priority list.

When even a major collecting institution such as the Met – whom have clearly invested a lot of time, thought and money into their online collection, and who were just awarded MW2012 Best of the Web for Research/Online Collections – does not obviously feature their collection on the front page of their website except in the navigation bar, it does not reinforce the message that the collection is what is essential and unique to the museum.

I know that we don’t really know who or what online collections are for, but maybe the Internet exposes the fact that we don’t actually know why our collections would be valuable to anyone for reasons other than the ones we provide in our existing displays and scholarship.

As regular readers would know, I firmly believe the Internet is actually the perfect vehicle for making museum collections more useful and more valuable, by ensuring that the collection can be found, used and reconnected to the ever-deepening well of online information. We might be able to ensure that the ideas anchored by our collections are be able to be put to worthwhile use externally to the museum, as well as within it. We are only just beginning to imagine how and why the Internet will be useful for the production of new knowledge and new memories, but it seems to me that there is richness to be found here.

Still, we contradict ourselves when we speak of the importance of our collections, and then act as though our programming is the centre of our existence, as is often the case online. Certainly, programming is easier to quantify and market. Our audiences know what it means to look online for events and changing exhibitions. It’s something they understand. But it’s also something we understand and know how to talk to.

Weil continues (p.29.), writing (emphasis mine):

The difficulty is that somewhere along the line too many of us – and here I must include myself – have too frequently misapprehended what has been a strategy to be the truth. We have too often taken what is a necessary condition to the work of museums – the existence of carefully-acquired, well-documented and well-cared-for collections – and treated that necessary condition as though it were a sufficient condition. In developing justifications for the public support of museums, we too have forgotten that their ultimate importance must lie not in their ability to acquire and care for objects – important as that may be – but in their ability to take such objects and put them to some worthwhile use. In our failure to recognize this, we run the danger of trivializing both our institutions and ourselves.

It seems to me that the Internet is exposing the fact that the rhetoric about the importance of collections to museums is not necessarily matched by actions that support that narrative.

Obviously each individual institution is different. Some institutions do emphasize the importance of their collections on- and offline, while others no-doubt place greater emphasis on other things in their missions. Non-collecting institutions are surely exempt from this issue (are they the institutions most honest with themselves about the reasons for their existence?). But what does this say about us as a field, that our rhetoric does not necessarily match our actions. And if we are lying to ourselves, should we change our actions to match our words, and actually find ways to put the collection front-and-centre online, or do we alter the stories we tell ourselves?

What do you think? Is the Internet exposing an internal inconsistency between what we say and what we do in museums? And if so, is it our rhetoric that should change, or our actions?