Recently, a press release went out about a new appointment to a local museum. I’ll be somewhat vague here, as the particulars don’t matter to the discussion, but there was a phrase within that had some of my colleagues (and myself) a bit piqued. The release stated how excited the person was to be working at an institution “unencumbered by collections.” I found this choice of words particularly curious as, regarding the individual, their position is one that has very little to do with collections, and as to the institution, artifacts from other museums are constantly used within their exhibitions. But “unencumbered”? That implies that every collecting institution on the planet is “encumbered”! And to that I strongly disagree.

Do collecting institutions spend a great deal of money, staffing, space and time caring for collections? Most definitely, yes. Is this a waste of resources, especially in a digital age when they could conceivably scan or make models of artifacts and then store only the copies? I won’t repeat the results of years of research conducted by a great many folks who have studied how access to original artifacts supports learning, research, and emotional connections to places, people, and history. Digital objects degrade in ways physical objects do not, nor can they replicate the meaningful, unquantifiable aura of the original.

Wedding Dress, Turkey, 19th century. gold metallic embroidery on velvet. Gift of Sara Levi Willis. 86.42. The Magnes. Click the image to read more about this piece.

Could this encumbrance upon the institution be caused by the devotion to objects by hiring collection managers, when funds for staffing could be used for additional curators and educators instead? Perhaps so, but there are also costs associated with borrowing artifacts for exhibitions and programs. Not as much as storing them, true, but the costs still exist, even if they’re not borne specifically by the non-collecting institution. Someone has to shoulder the burden of storage and management, if there are to be objects to display and study at all.

Are institutions without collections effective and valuable? Of course! I am very pleased that they are able to take the materials we collecting institutions can provide and use them to develop exciting and unique educational content. But that doesn’t mean that collecting museums can’t develop similar programming. And I’d be surprised if there’s evidence to support the idea that non-collecting institutions develop better programs than collecting ones.

As someone whose mission and purpose in life is to make cultural heritage materials accessible to the world, the thing I think I find most insulting about this choice of words is that it demeans institutions, professionals, donors, and all other stakeholders who take great pride in protecting the world’s treasures. We’ve a duty to our public to safekeep and share these artifacts. I would very much like to applaud those archives, libraries and museums – with a special nods to smaller places – who have made fantastic strides in the past decade to increase access to their collections through innovative programming, digitization and publication on the web, leveraging social media for incubating research and ideas, open storage, remixing, etc. We’ve come a long way in a very short period of time, and I can say quite definitively that far from being “encumbered”, we are empowered by our collections.