Continuing the conversation about museums and curating the digital world

Curating has become an accidental obsession of mine in the last few months. I’m not a curator. I’ve never been a curator. But lately I find myself thinking (and talking) about curation often; paticularly about whether museums should be curating the digital world, and what that process might look like. This obviously picks up from the paper that Danny Birchall and I wrote for Museums and the Web earlier this year, but it’s a discussion with a lot more juice in it yet.

In response to that session, Koven Smith wondered whether “digital curation” is emerging as another or new curatorial discipline, one that ‘deals with “objects” that are neither unique or scarce. It has its own practices, as does film curation or arms & armor curation (to use two random examples)…’ Yet in another post he continues, asking if ‘the fact that the raw “stuff” of digital curation is not in any way scarce (or unique) eliminates the need for specialized people (i.e., “curators” in the traditional sense) to do the work of curation.’ (Emphasis mine.)

I don’t think it does, but it’s an interesting question. Does it matter if the ‘stuff’ that is being curated in a digital sense is nonrivalrous? What exactly should museums be looking to curate from the plethora of stuff online? Is it just that which relates directly to the existing collection? Or should the goal be broader than that? If museums were to invest time and resources in curating the digital world, what are the unique features that doing so would have in a museum context? Should it be for long or short-term purposes? Timely or timeless? What sensibilities would be involved? And how could museums use a curatorial mindset to connect their collections and objects, their exhibitions, their missions to online conversations happening beyond their walls?

For me, the answer to that final question is the reason all these other questions are worth asking. This is about how museums connect their content, their information, their stories to that which is happening elsewhere; and is about bringing those rich discussions happening elsewhere into contact with our stuff. It’s not just about output; about feeding what we have into the world. It’s about connection.

The Tate’s Digital Strategy starts with a short provocation from Nicholas Serota:

The future of the museum may be rooted in the buildings they occupy but it will address audiences across the world – a place where people across the world will have a conversation. Those institutions which take up this notion fastest and furthest will be the ones which have the authority in the future … the growing challenge is to … encourage curatorial teams to work in the online world as much as they do in the galleries.
Sir Nicholas Serota 20091

If Serota is right, if the growing challenge is to encourage curatorial teams to work in the online world as much as they do in the galleries, then I think these questions will continue to emerge within the sector. Is there a role for museums to curate the digital world, as Danny and I have proposed there could be? And if so, what should or could that job look like? And what skills would a curator of the digital need to have? Would they need to be able to write code, or just to locate and contextualise relevent content, whether produced inside or outside the museum? Is this the natural extension of a social media or a web manager’s role, or is it something different altogether?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

Museopunks episode 3 – The Shape of Punk to Come – is online

This year, I’ve been super lucky to embark on a few different collaborative projects. One of the major ones was the paper that Danny Birchall and I co-wrote for MW2013, which kicked off a whole new line of investigation for me in research, and the other is the museopunks podcast that Jeffrey Inscho and I launched in April.

Both projects have been super rewarding, and I think it’s because they’ve eached pulled me out of my own headspace and the set of assumptions I port around, and forced me to push my work in new directions. Danny summed up similar feelings when he wrote about the experience of collaboration earlier this year:

When you’re working with someone towards a definition of a shared project, there are many modes in which you can operate. Sometimes you try to write down what you think they’re already thinking (and sometimes fail); sometimes you get to try your ideas out before they’re fully formed; you can take it in turns to lead the process. Most importantly, your paper or presentation goes beyond just trying to fill your audience’s cup with the knowledge you have, and moves towards making and thinking new things.

With that in mind, I’m super pleased to announce that the third episode of museopunks is online. In this episode, Jeffrey and I chatted to Bridget McKenzie from Flow Associates about future scanning and museums. It was a subject I was super keen to dig into a little further after being part of a session on Shaping the Future of Museums at Museums Australia 2013, and when I noticed all the Tweets from Bridget’s talk on a similar subject at MuseumNext, I knew we had to talk about the shape of ~~punk~~ museums to come.

This episode is actually the first of two with a focus on museum futures. Next month, we’ll be talking to Elizabeth Merritt from the Center of the Future of Museums, so if you have any particular questions you’re keen for us to investigate, feel free to send them through.

In the meantime, you can subscribe to Museopunks via iTunes, or check out our first two episodes. In Episode 1, we spoke to Michael Edson and Paul Rowe about museums in the Age of Scale, and Episode 2 focussed on museums, design and design thinking, with Dana Mitroff Silvers and Scott Gillam. If you have any ideas for topics you think we should dig into, or potential guests you’d love to hear from in future, please drop me or Jeffrey a line. We’re always eager to have our own ideas pushed a little further too.

MW2013 reflections on emerging and collapsing museum roles

Well I’ve been hanging out in America for the last week with a mind full of thoughts in the aftermath of Museums and the Web 2013… and computer problems. It’s been frustrating, but it also provided the perfect excuse to upgrade my laptop after years of slow technology. Hooray! Truly, a new computer is a pleasure.

Now that I’m back online, I thought I’d start a series of quick posts on the issues that really caught my attention during the conference (a kind of belated version of what Koven Smith was doing in his live-blogging from Portland). In the meantime, if you’re feeling less patient and just want an overall summary of the themes and discussions that came out of the conference, check out the great reads by Danny Birchall, Susan Edwards and Ed Rodley.

So, theme no. 1: the fluctuation of museum jobs, and the impact that has upon the sector
On Day 2 of the conference, Rob Stein and Rich Cherry presented a plenary session that asked what is a museum technologist anyway? During the questions that followed, Liz Neely asked how many people in the room had made up their own job at some point in their career. I was surprised to see the number of hands waved in response. It was probably close to half the room, all of whom had created a job for themselves.

As someone who has never known where I would fit within existing career paths in this sector, I was pretty excited by this. But then I started thinking further on the implications. When a job is created for someone, rather than created to fill a particular pre-identified need or purpose, then that job will be necessarily built around their individual strengths and weaknesses, maybe even more than the institution’s actual needs. So what happens when that person leaves the organisation? Does the museum then look to fill that position, or to craft another one in concert with the person who comes next into the role? I know I’ve created at least one job for myself in this sector, and it’s now something my museum will always need to have someone doing… but the opportunity came up because I identified the gap, not because they did. How often does this happen?

Sitting next to Michael Parry in one session, I had a discussion about the frequency with which museums should revisit their ~~digital~~ structure and strategy. Given how quickly the technological and work context change, should a museum rewrite its ~~digital~~ strategy and organisational chart regularly? And what are the benefits of doing so very regularly (maybe every three years) versus waiting longer; of making foundational instead incremental change? Two critical issues here become the value of adaptability vs stability, and the potential loss of corporate knowledge (not to mention staff morale… do people want to work in an environment where they position is always up to be questioned?). But it is something worth considering in the frequent discussions we have about writing a digital strategy; getting beyond the how and looking at the when.

These were just some of a series of questions that started to come up about the fluctuation of museum roles. In the session on digital curation that Danny Birchall and I were a part of, Danny looked at different curators who have influenced the sector to show just how diverse the notion of a “curator” is, even in the museum sector in order to demonstrate what museums could teach those who now seek to curate the digital world (one of these being Iris Barry, founder of the film department of the Museum of Modern Art, who herself created her own job based on her own skills and interests), while I looked at what museums could learn from some different types of curators of the digital world. In response to this session, Koven got to the heart of the matter and asked whether the discussion was indicative of the need for a new kind of role within the museum; that of the curator of the digital. Are we witnessing the birth of a new museum profession in these discussions? Do we now need someone who curates the digital world for stories and information as they relate to the collection and/or mission of the museum, in addition to more established curatorial roles?

In the unconference session that followed, Seb Chan pointed out that many museum, archive and library roles were beginning to collapse onto themselves as the differences that defined one from the next became less distinct in the digital realm. All of which makes me start to wonder just which roles within the museum will stand up as they currently are, and which other roles (like digital conservators) will begin to emerge as more and more critical in the coming years? Just how fluid is the museum’s institutional and organisational structure, anyway?

And, finally, what happens if you design yourself out of a job? There is a tension between wanting to create efficiencies and do things better, and wanting to maintain your job and an organisation’s need to employ you. Given that the positions needed in and by this sector appear to fluctuate more than I had previously imagined, I’m interested in how this tension plays out in career paths, and whether institutions can or do support those whose once-essential skills are now only peripherally useful.

This is where my relative newness to the sector starts to really get in the way, because I cannot look back at institutions and their history to know how these kinds of questions play out. But I am sure some of you can.

I’d love to hear more about your experiences and what you’ve seen in your own careers. Do the roles that museums need filled fluctuate significantly over the course of years? And what impact does that have on the museum? How often should a museum actively revisit its structure and strategy to ensure a fit for purpose?