three reasons to worry about museum researchers
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Three reasons to worry aboutmuseum researchersMonty Reid a & Bruce Naylor ba Manager, Exhibition Services, Canadian Museum of Nature ,Box 3443, Station D, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada , K1P 6P4b Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology , Box 7500,Drumheller, Alberta, Canada , T0J 0Y0Published online: 11 May 2007.
To cite this article: Monty Reid & Bruce Naylor (2005) Three reasons to worry about museumresearchers, Museum Management and Curatorship, 20:4, 359-364
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Commentary
Three reasons to worry about museum researchers
Monty Reid a,*, Bruce Naylor b
a Manager, Exhibition Services, Canadian Museum of Nature, Box 3443, Station D, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1P 6P4b Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, Box 7500, Drumheller, Alberta, Canada T0J 0Y0
Received 5 August 2005; received in revised form 11 August 2005; accepted 6 September 2005
We’re getting older. Perhaps nostalgia is setting in. Certainly, our appreciation of some of the
traditional ideas about museums seems to be improving. We hope it isn’t just a function of our
impending dotage, but also a result of increasing experience and, just a bit, please God, of better
understanding. Together, we have spent more than 50 years in museums, some of them working
together, others in diverse institutions. Although we have different backgrounds and different
responsibilities, we’ve both worked closely with researchers most of that time, and have both the
scars and the friendships to prove it.
During this time, a variety of trends in museum programming and administration have come
and gone. We’ve been entrepreneurs, edutainers, and story-tellers. We’ve had Total Quality
Management and we’ve had management by objectives. We’ve focused on objects and we’ve
focused on experiences. And while much has been learned over the years, it is doubtful that any
one approach can be said to be definitive.
Given this, we suggest that the traditional and rather generous definition of a museum, as an
institution that preserves, studies and educates, is a good one. There is plenty of room, of course,
for discussion about how and whether we achieve those ends, but it remains a useful and
productive description of museum activities.
Just to be sure it’s clear, our experiences are different, and we have different perspectives on
how museums operate. However, we agree that exhibitions remain the primary public face of the
museum. They are certainly not the only face, but in our view they are the most important.
Colleagues have suggested from time to time that we give exhibitions more emphasis than
appropriate. This may well arise from our particular experiences in museums—we’re happy to
acknowledge that. But it also arises from a fundamental commitment to the objects of a museum,
as well as a reasoned and considered view about the function and history of museums and a
pretty unswerving belief in their continuing importance.
Museum Management and Curatorship 20 (2005) 359–364
www.elsevier.com/locate/musmancur
0260-4779/$ - see front matter q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.musmancur.2005.09.004
* Corresponding author. Tel.: C1 613 566 4743; fax: C1 613 364 4022.
E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Reid).
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The definition above typically privileges the collection, but we need to remember that a
collection is always a constructed thing. It did not arrive by magic, but was built by a variety of
people through many historical epochs, with changing priorities and abilities. So at some level it
is responsive to social needs. That means it can change, that it has changed and will continue to
change. It can even disappear, as recent conflicts in the Balkans and Iraq have demonstrated. The
history of collections, from the library at Alexandria, to the Wunderkammer, to Aunt Emma’s
collection of saltshakers, is well-documented and we won’t go into it here. We just want to make
the point that collections can and do change—they’re crucial, but not absolute.
Traditionally, in a nicely-integrated compound, museum research is based upon the
collection, and museum programming activities grow out of the research work. The theory
remains good, but in practice we face many challenges. The challenges arise for many reasons
and from many sectors of the museum, and sometimes they arise from the researchers
themselves. We want to articulate several of those challenges here, which are perhaps most
apparent from the public programming sector of the museum.
Museum research faces the major problems that continue to face research everywhere:
(1) how do we get to useful, dependable knowledge and (2) how do we make that knowledge
available to the larger community. These are big, old questions and go some distance beyond a
museum setting. Scientific researchers will always face them.
But the topic here is research in museums. In that context, there are three worrisome issues.
They probably come down to money, sex and power, so maybe they were not unique to our
situation. But they all do have a current application:
(1) Money. Museums, no matter what their funding arrangements, are usually short of cash. So
they hunt for it in many different places. Museums must, of course, be accountable to their
funders and every influx of money brings with it a little extra something, whether it be the
beatific assumption of political correctness, or the expectation that the donor’s portrait will
hang in the entryway in perpetuity. There is no pure money, and there never has been. But
what’s different today is that money today has shorter and shorter strings attached. In the
past, private donors often gave money to museums in order to provide for themselves a
general social legitimacy, and sometimes for genuinely philanthropic reasons. Now, they
may well want their specific point of view disseminated, and are willing, able, and in some
cases insistent upon, providing their own research to support it.
Donors rarely force their agenda. In fact, the pursuit of their agenda usually takes a very
benign form. They offer help, in addition to their money. They have in-house researchers
working on the subject, or they can put you in touch with others that do. This may well be truly
helpful, and it has never been, in our experience, a case of an inimical agenda being forced. And,
of course, it isnot just private donors that have an agenda. So do governments. In Canada, the
federal government has supported several climate change exhibitions. Those exhibitions are
viewed with suspicion by some provincial institutions (did we mention Alberta?) that consider
the federal support for the Kyoto Accord to be misguided.
The point we’d like to make here, although related, is slightly more subtle. Regardless of
what the agenda may be, the fact that external agencies can and do bring research capability to
the table, may in itself be a challenge to museum research. It may not undermine museum
research per se, but perhaps it slides a wedge between research and programming. This is a risk
that may be necessary and even welcome at times, but no one should be blind to its potential
impact.
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In 2003, the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) opened The Gee! in Genome, what has
turned out to be a very successful traveling exhibit. It was funded generously by Genome Canada
and Canadian Institutes of Health Research. CMN has limited research capability in this area but
nonetheless felt it was an important area of interest. In addition to money, the funding groups
were also able to bring considerable research expertise to the table. The research was reviewed
and cross-checked and alternative viewpoints sought. Nonetheless, some viewers were
concerned that the exhibition did little more than present an official line.
That’s a debatable point. What is definitely true is that CMN researchers played a limited role
in the project. Several display elements based on CMN research were included in the initial
installation in Ottawa, but do not tour with the main exhibition. In terms of scientific input into
the overall project, CMN simply didn’t have adequate expertise. What worries us is that a side-
effect of the project was to further separate museum research from museum public
programming, and the success of the project may serve to exacerbate the separation. While
this may have brought sighs of relief to both designers and scientists, we do not see this as a
healthy trend. But it is a trend that is growing.
(2) Loneliness of the Object. We have come to believe more and more firmly in the importance
of objects for a museum. Nothing else grounds the museum as steadily. Nothing else gives it
such profound gravitas. Nothing else demands so insistently that the museum is more than a
metaphor, but is a real, locatable site.
The status of the object has become increasingly contested in museological debates. This is
certainly clear in exhibitions, where constructivist educational approaches shift attention away
from the object to the audience, to language, and to representation. If, in fact, what we are doing
is telling stories and creating experiences, it follows that we may find more effective ways of
telling them than with the objects themselves. Science centres have definitely taken this
approach, and museums, once they got over their palpitations, have learned a great deal from
science centres. You may not need the object to tell a story, depending on what that story is.
That, however, may be a problem more with our stories than with the objects. It leads to the
danger that, just as art can be displaced by its own spectacle (Debord, 1995) so specimens can
suffocate under the weight of our exhibitry. Certainly experience teaches that that we have to be
very careful, in our excitement with multi-media, replicas, immersive experiences and virtual
simulations, to keep a focus on the object.
This is a symptom, of course, of a much broader societal move away from the actual towards
the virtual. In philosophy, you can track it at least from Nietzsche on, or maybe it goes back to
Plato’s suggestion, that we see only the shadows’ ideal forms. Certainly it’s near the heart of
postmodernism, which has had such a great impact on the humanities and social sciences—just
think of the Culture Wars (Hunter, 1992) in the States, or the anxiety in social sciences that’s
current today (Friedman, 2004).
Our world of mass media is both a symptom and a cause, with its endless tunnel of images and
representations and its leveling of all events to fit a time slot. The web, and its so-called
intelligentsia, contribute. In cyberspace, they say, space becomes a metaphor and emotions
become icons (Michael, 1993). We do not believe that metaphors and icons are adequate.
Abstraction isn’t limited to philosophy and cyber theorists. It’s a necessary part of science, as
well. Few things are more abstract than theoretical physics. The natural sciences can only
proceed with some degree of abstraction. Even in paleontology, which has always been a pretty
object-oriented discipline, you can hear the researchers say it isn’t really the specimens that are
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important; it’s the information you get from them that counts. Nevertheless, science must be
grounded in the real, in the measurable, and in the object.
And the object, sturdy as a dinosaur tibia or fragile as a robin’s egg, survives our debates.
It isn’t pure; it is out of context—it’s in a museum after all. It’s been decontextualized and
recontextualized. It doesn’t care about our visitor’s learning style. Narrative constructions come
and go, traditional taxonomies get replaced by clades, yet the object remains. It is not exhausted
by words, it isn’t exhausted by theory.
We don’t object to narrative constructions—museums must function in a social context
that they must acknowledge. However, they need to insist on the grounding of their
knowledge in the actual world. And we must confess to being tempted occasionally by
exhibits of many years ago, which included the objects and very little more than identifying
labels. These seem too arrogant and authoritarian, not to mention boring, to us now. But the
truer arrogance remains with us today, in our belief that current interpretive strategies have
accomplished more, have given us a better fit in our world, or have helped us live our lives.
They do not. It is a persistent human characteristic to consider the current paradigm as final
and fixed for all time.
Our specific worry is this—just as exhibitions are being pushed farther away from the object,
so may researchers be, as well. Museums evolve, of course, and the changeover from the
intelligent amateur as director, to professional manager as CEO, is a widespread adaptation to
the current environment. Similarly, in many institutions, curators have evolved into researchers
and have gradually lost their responsibility for, and in some cases their attachment to, the
collection. Is it possible that some researchers see the collection as an unwelcome constraint on
their priorities?
If, in fact, both research and exhibitions are drifting away from the collection, does it suggest
that perhaps how the increasingly-lonely collection is structured is itself problematic, or maybe
in itself the problem. Perhaps the collection is just an embarrassing symbol of our colonial self-
aggrandizement. Or a tired re-enactment of the will to power. Or just an unwelcome budget line.
Significantly, some European museum directors are considering the possibility of a collection-
free museum. La Musee de la Civilisation in Quebec is a very interesting example of just that.
If exhibitors, administrators, and possibly even the researchers themselves, are being tempted
to abandon the object, it leaves the object in a precarious, lonely position. All the more reason to
love it.
This leads us to the third point:
(3) De-integration. The notion of the museum as an integrated array of activities has been
around for some time— sort of like the dream of a unified theory. It seems as though we are
always suspicious that we aren’t in fact, an integrated institution. Maybe this is true—
exhibitors and research staff rarely work closely enough together. Certainly the pressures
(money, educational theories, collaborations, etc) felt by many museum disciplines do tend
to draw them away from their neighbors within the institution.
Is it possible to be more integrated in the face of those pressures? Maybe the great value of
those pressures is, in fact, to keep drawing us apart. Maybe society doesn’t want us to be any
more integrated than we already are? Maybe we’re being pushed to be a distributed museum,
although this flies in the face of much museum thinking.
Integration was, and still is, an important concept in big business. Henry Ford smelted his
own steel and grew his own rubber trees; MacDonald’s grows (and smelts) its own cows.
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In 1960, components, as opposed to completed products, consisted of 20% of the world trade in
manufactured goods. But by the mid-1990 s things had completely switched—components
made up 80%. So the pieces are being made all over the place, and companies have in fact
de-integrated. It, too, is a major component of current business practice (Organization for
Economic Development and Cooperation, 2003).One of the symptoms of de-integration has
been outsourcing, a word that makes most of us cringe. But, in fact, museums do outsource a lot
of their work, from security to software. Should we outsource our core activities? Probably not,
but think for a moment about our current emphasis on partnerships—is it just outsourcing in a
prettier dress? This may not be true, but it might form an interesting point of discussion.
Or maybe we are integrated. Perhaps, in spite of our rhetoric, we don’t want to be any more
integrated than we are. If we truly wanted to be and it was a panacea, surely we would be easier
to come by.
Integration still appears to be an ideal we need to work for, both in our institutions and in the
larger world—precisely because there are so many opportunities to spin apart. We suggest that
this integration can best be achieved by a persistent appreciation of the objects for which we are
responsible as museums.
Let us make a few comments on relevance. The Canadian Museum of Nature and the Royal
Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology (RTMP) try to make the results of research relevant in their
programming. Many, but certainly not all, ideas for exhibitions come from researchers. Once
generated, there must be a preliminary assessment based on a number of factors. First of all, does
the idea fit within the articulated goals of the museum? Can it be supported by our collection and
research areas? And the very practical questions of do we have the space, the environmental
controls, or the resources to do it?
At the Canadian Museum of Nature, if the idea makes it past that first, and admittedly fairly
rough, review, it will move on to the Museum’s Program Committee, which is chaired by the
Director of Research and includes the heads of collections, marketing, and education, among
others. At this committee the same kinds of questions get asked, but from many different
perspectives, and with increasing rigor. How does this fit with what we want to do? To what
extent can collections and research support it?
At the Royal Tyrrell Museum, a similar process occurs. Exhibition ideas come from many
sources and are often developed by some combination of researcher and designer. Nonetheless,
the final decision for any substantial exhibition lies with the Director and his management team.
They consider the same kind of questions and, as a branch of the provincial government of
Alberta, must also ensure compatibility with governmental priorities.
In a sense, that just defers the issue. How do we know what we want to do in the first place?
The CMN has been very proactive in talking to Canadians across the country to find out what
will serve them best. Several years ago it held town hall meetings right across the country. Since
then it has followed that up with polling, focus groups and as much evaluation as it can afford.
Both the CMN and RTMP, among others, have worked hard developing the Alliance of
Natural History Museums of Canada. The Alliance, made up of museums with substantial
natural history collections and activities, is an attempt to create a collective voice for natural
history institutions and thus to provide more collaborative clout on issues from policy to
programming. Not least among the benefits the Alliance provides, is that it serves as a much
broader sounding board for our, and everybody else’s, ideas. Clearly, we’ve tried to listen to our
constituencies and serve their needs.
All in all, the process of exhibition development has led us to create projects as varied, but as
relevant, as shows on climate change, genomics, and the Burgess Shale. It’s not perfect,
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certainly, but it’s a fairly reasoned, transparent, and integrated approach. Still, without the
object, all it is talk.
Integrated, or not, the development of public programming in our museums has faced many
challenges, not least of which has been its connectedness to museum research activities. Now,
however, research itself is in danger of becoming a marginalized and forgotten activity. It is in
the best interests of the museum’s public programmes to ensure that this does not happen.
References
Debord, Guy (1995). The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books (Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith). See
also. Foster, Hal (1995). The return of the real. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hunter, James Davison (1992). Culture wars. New York: Basic Books.
Friedman, Jeffrey (Ed.) (2004). Is social science hopeless? Critical review: An interdisciplinary journal of politics and
society. The entire issue discusses the status of the social sciences.
Michael, Heim (1993). The metaphysics of virtual reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also Derrick, de
Kerckhove (1993). The skin of culture: Investigating the new electronic reality. Toronto: Somerville House.
Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation. (2003). On-line fact book.
Commentary / Museum Management and Curatorship 20 (2005) 359–364364
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