Interesting conversations are engendered by pajamas. Many of my deepest chitchats begin when I and a friend are safely tucked into our jammies and curled on the couch.
I’m currently in Washington DC to attend the Museum Computer Network conference. I’m staying with the ever-wonderful Suzy Sarraf, and after a bit of a lazy day (for me. SHE had 3 computers running all at once for work!), talk ultimately turned to our line of work. We talked about the MUSE Awards and I talked a little bit about Memory Lab. In many ways, both of these topics are about history and technology, which led us to muse about how the muse-tech field has changed, and how the technological leaders of today aren’t necessarily the big museums anymore. They’re the smaller and mid-sized institutions taking advantage of all of the wonderful free or inexpensive tools now available to them.
When I was writing my Master’s thesis, one of the things I was struck by was the hesitation by curators to adopt “nontraditional” uses for museum collections databases (eg. sharing collection information and images online), and the slow adoption rate by small and mid-sized museums (mostly due to funding). Not having been present during that time period, I can only opine based on my research, but it appears that large museums were willing to invest in new technologies in ways smaller museums couldn’t, and as a result, small museums would watch and wait to see if the experiments of the big guys were a success, before trying to invest in those same technologies.
However, it appears to me that the tables have turned now. With the abundance of free and inexpensive web-based tools available to smaller museums, they are now more easily able to adopt new strategies and experiment themselves. I’ve noticed that in my mid-sized institution, we have a pretty high degree of flexibility to try new things, mandated from the top. Our curators aren’t overly invested in some sort of power structure within the institution, so we’re not limited in that way. We’re free, somewhat, to play.
This does not appear to be the case for large institutions. Curators are much more powerful in large museums than they are in many small museums, and opportunities for innovation aren’t being adopted as speedily as one might expect. I think there are many reasons for this, including concerns over control, authority, ownership of information, institutional hierarchies, and a general distrust of small companies which might disappear in a year or two.
So it seems to me that the risktaking of yore is now the mantle of the medium-sized institutions. Small museums have been a bit slower to adopt as well, but I think that’s more an issue of staffing and lack of available infrastructure to support new technologies. Mid-size institutions are seeing opportunities to do interesting things with their information which they were not able to do before, and they are showing the big dogs that some of these experiments are able to provide a significant ROI.
It’s an interesting time to be a museum technologist, particularly in the medium-sized institutions. With no little bit of pride, I’m looking forward to seeing how the work my mid-sized museum brethren and I do will affect the rest of the field.
