Continuing our postings from the 2007 MCN scholarship recipients, today we hear from a Heritage Museum Director from the beautiful Southern Okanagan Valley in British Columbia.

Darryl MacKenzie, Museum Director/ODHS Administrator, Oliver and District Heritage Society, http://www.olivermuseum.ca/

I would like to start my article by thanking the scholarship committee of MCN for selecting me as a recipient for this year’s conference. It was truly an honour, and I came back from the conference refreshed, and full of ideas and understanding of the direction the field is taking.

I have to admit, most of the time, I felt like I was in the Neolithic watching a rocket take off to the heavens. My day to day experience is far different from most of the projects and capacity of many of the organizations showcased during the conference. I am the Director of a small history museum with a budget of less than $150,000.00, with two staff, in a small rural town 4 hours from the closest University. This experience appeared to be far different from the vast majority of participants at the Conference, who seemed to be associated with major art galleries, large history museums, or closely associated with Universities. I resonated with comments from Janice Klein, who stated that there are 14,000 museums with annual budgets of less than $250,000 who must depend on volunteer or high school students for their IT support. Fortunately, I have grown up with computers. I have participated in many of the social networking sites, and I use IT in many ways to support my work, though more pastorally than what was presented. The trick for me in the conference was to listen to the presenters, but bring what was said into the context of my experience.

One of the items that I came away with that I could implement right away was the concept of using social networking as a form of Guerrilla Marketing. This is a low cost, highly visible means of getting your name and message out. As an organization, we certainly lag far behind the curve here. We do not have a lot of pointers to our website, but if we had a presence on Facebook, MySpace and Wikipedia, which are all free sites, we could place pointers to our main website. This would increase our website effectiveness. I have recruited a student through our High School career placement counselor who is currently working with us on this.

Attached to this is development of our website. Currently it is a standardized web page using free page making software. It gives us a presence, but it has been ‘in construction’ for over a year as we have dealt with other projects. Other than telling of our hours of opening, and providing a distribution medium for our Annual General Meeting this past spring, it is underutilized. The website can provide so much more in the way of a portal to our services, especially to the archives. It should not stop there, however, and I saw a solution to one of our local planning challenges.

Many residents of my area trace their heritage identity to a gold rush town which thrived for about 15 years at the turn of the 20^th century. Although the buildings from this town have long since disappeared, there are many people in the community who would like to see this site restored to its 1890 appearance as a tourist attraction. It would not be authentic, and funding agencies have stated they would not support this initiative because the return on investment is questionable. What we can do at a fraction of the cost and in a more sustainable way, is build the site in a virtual format, and people can explore the community by entering through our website. I have broached the topic with our Economic Development Officer, and we are meeting this week to discuss possible ways to include this as an attraction to the community.

The value of the conference to me was more in the subtext and conference context. In my position, I am not simply a director. I am a curator, IT resource person, and I provide consultation to local governments on heritage conservation of community assets, among other roles and responsibilities. I glimpsed a sense of globalization that permeated some of the presentations. If one can offer a single virtual experience which brings together aspects of different cultures, times and places, where is the sense of place? How does one differentiate between the different component cultures that brought about the possibility of the experience? I came away with a greater appreciation of the need to work vigorously on conserving icons of local heritage that will continue to be attractions for real world visitors to our community. It is items which are outside of our museum walls which are our greatest cultural asset at this time. I have already written an article for the local newspaper on this topic.

Let me explain this point further. As I have taken visitors on tours of the museum, there are areas which people gloss over, because they have seen the same two-man saws in every museum they have visited from California to Alaska. There is nothing particularly unique about these items, except possibly some local pioneer once touched them. As there are a plethora of locations on the web that can provide us with images of the same type of hand saw, there is no real reason to invest significant time with what is really a non-descript item. We need to be more selective in what we promote as heritage, and how we promote and curate the items of the greatest local cultural value. In my town, the actual community has 87 years of Colonial history. Most of the items in the collection are readily available on e-bay. What we cannot duplicate are vernacular items and the local built heritage items such as the only remaining high school in Canada in the Streamline Moderne architectural style. It is the sense of time and place that has the greatest value to the community, and suggests a re-definition of what we do as an organization, and how we do it. We can still display that two person hand-saw if we want, but it needs to be placed in the context of what it means to the community’s unique heritage character.

Perhaps no where did this concept hit me more fully than the Thursday evening opening of the Art Institute of Chicago. I turned one corner, and there I saw a leather and teak Bauhaus style chair, similar to the chair my father used for several years. It was a utilitarian object for me, but here it was elevated to un objet d’art. It was illuminated in a whole new way so I gained a greater appreciation for it. It provided a better sense of time and place. Contrasting this experience with the conference presentations, the sense of the importance of this concept hit particularly forcefully. We must be more careful about what we conserve and how we present our collections. Our history museum cannot just display old items. It has to convey importance in order to give a sense of time and place. As an organization, we have to be more attentive to how our collection speaks to our unique identity.

And at the same time, it gave a sense of unease. What is my organization’s capacity to meet this change of focus? How do we redefine ourselves in the face of competition for resources if we cannot define ourselves in terms of two-man hand saws? There were several mentions of the ‘elephant in the room’ in discussions between IT professionals and Directors. The question of traditional museum professionals feeling threatened by IT is a reality. IT makes our collection available for global consumption, and we are unsure how our collection compares with others. If the organization has a unique collection such as a major art gallery, or a large history museum, then the capacity to retain a sense of identity may be buffered. I may have seen ‘American Gothic’ several times in print, but it was the ‘pilgrimage experience’ of seeing it in person; to be able to see the brush strokes and the aura of the piece that made me place it high on my ‘list of things I must do in Chicago’. I suspect that this unease of how jobs and practices will change is behind some of the suggested rivalry during the session led by Nik Honeysett. In museums, how many secretly wonder if the Emperor really does not have any clothes? That is, are we holding onto collections that may not be as unique as we would like to think? Will mass availability of two-man saws expose the weaknesses of our collection as quotidian, blasé or ineffectual, and if so, how do we justify our position?

I found the exposure to advanced cataloguing systems important to understanding some of the limitations of our jerry-rigged database. We may not need as much data, or track as many different pieces of information as some of the larger organizations presenting, but certainly a standardized format would make communication between museums easier. Toward that end, I very much appreciated the Digitization Standards for the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation. The booklet gives clear, easy to follow instructions, and problem solving techniques. The exposure to iPod discussions and digitized audio/video tours also provided new ways of packaging existing services.

I had so many thoughts on projects which will enhance, but not replace, what we currently do. I doubt we will have time to do them, and that is what I consider the most challenging aspect of this conference. There is a lot of competition for limited resources in a small organization. Attending this conference on an annual basis would be prohibitive. The annual staff education budget would be exceeded by the cost of this conference alone. When I go to a conference, I tend to look for offerings that have a wide variety of topics from which to choose. As I indicated earlier, a small museum necessitates the wearing of many hats, and technology is just one of the concerns we must address daily. I do not believe I am alone in this concern.

On my way to Chicago, I met with colleagues from a few museums in Central Washington State. They voiced concerns about IT, specifically the data management issue, as one of their top priorities for future in service training. It is recognized as a need, but there is little chance to receive training in the field. When they found where I was heading after the meeting, they asked that I bring as much information back as I could to share what I learned. They simply could not afford either the cost and/or time where they are often the sole charge of a facility that closes for 6 months of the year to extend the budget. To that end, I was quite pleased that the conference led by example. Sessions were recorded for podcasting, many of the presenters offered slides for their discussions freely on the web, and there was reference to continued connection through musematic and archimuse. Distance education programs are on the horizon. Social networking of information and subsequently sharing where to find the information is something that will definitely help smaller museums.

As stated, however, the main concern is implementation. I fear that my colleagues in smaller museums who have not seen the vision of the future which I had the privilege of seeing through this conference may not have the capacity to adapt. We will hang on for a while and see the world change. We’ll continue to see rockets ascend, but eventually our existence may be threatened unless we take time to strategically adapt and re-define ourselves, as larger organizations have shown us through their leadership. People are already getting their information elsewhere. One speaker stated that ¾ of the visitors to the Met never go through the doors. In a small museum which depends on donations from visitors, a similar decrease in visitorship is fatal. We must act now to find ways to draw people back by offering unique services and experiences. We have to adapt to remain relevant within our niche. That message is what I consider the true value of the conference.

And for that, I am extremely thankful.