OpenCulture

What are the essential ingredients of a museum? If you’d asked this question perhaps 10 years ago, the list would have been pretty straightforward - walls, objects, respectful visitors, curators. The mental archetype of the museum in the popular consciousness would have been a place with things in it, cared for by people who knew about the things. Probably wearing tweed, and almost certainly male.

Fast forward a decade, and the picture is nothing like as simple. Walls? Pah. A museum is so much more than walls - it is an attitude, a belief, a set of principles, a pop-up in a shopping centre, a tent on the foreshore of the Thames.

Things? So 90’s. Yes, of course we need some stuff, but only to the extent that they help us tell the human story of the world. Collections are the heart of the museum, but they are (or should be) subordinate to design, interpretation, narrative and experience.

Respectful visitors? Sod that, culture-nazi. Museums are places of joy, celebration, learning, entertainment and egalitarianism. They’ve even got kids in, for god’s sake. Where once the museum had every right to expect its visitors to be quiet, well-behaved and have at least a nodding acquaintance with clerical latin and taxonomy, nowadays it is very much the duty of the mountain to make itself available for Mohammed.

And Curators? Well, thereby hangs a tale.

Every good story needs its heroes and its villains. It needs simple 2-dimensional characters we can boo and cheer at. And in the story of the progress of museums in the past decade, it is very often the curator that has found themselves the villain of the piece.

If the thrust of museum discourse is essentially progressive, the curator has come to represent everything that is retrograde about the ‘old’ museology. Where much of the rhetoric about museums is about openness and equality of participation, the lazy characterisation of curators is as hoarders of knowledge, using their control over ideas to exter control over their colleagues - indeed over the museum itself.

The archetypal curator is essentially an academic - highly specialist, extremely focussed and driven not by the impulse to share knowledge with a non-specialist audience but by the urge to enhance the general fund of scientific understanding. This is a gross characterisation, of course, there are many curators whose greatest gift is communication but there are just as many for whom the public role of museums is an unfortunate inconvenience to be tolerated not celebrated.

The heyday of the ‘old-school’ curator in England really ran between 1890, the great period of expansion and collecting (not just in museums) and the 1950’s. During this period, the supremacy of the curator as the arbiter of knowledge and objective truths was largely axiomatic - nobody really questioned it. Then, of course, society changed, and museums changed - the great expansion of social policy, the invention of social history, the re-coding of the museum’s role in society all happened between 1960 and 1980, and things have never been quite the same since.

Today, in all but the largest National and Regional museums, the idea that every collection (not just every museum) should have a curator is almost an anachronism. The assault on curatorship came from numerous angles all at once:

• There was the argument of simple economics - as museums have had to increase delivery on diminishing budgets, the idea of a specialist curator attached to every collection became simply untenable. Indeed the idea of having a specialist curator in every museum (along with the concept of having in-house access to a professional conservator) is now regarded simply as a financial impossibility by many.
• Then came the Collections Manager - if you look back over the last 10 years of Museums Journal recruitment ads, there is a marked trend. People stopped advertising for specialist roles like ‘curator’ and ‘documentation officer’ and instead started advertising for more broad-spectrum curatorial roles like the slightly suspect ‘keeper’ and, particularly ‘Collections Manager’. The Collections Manager was expected to bridge two worlds - the world of business process/management and the world of curatorship. In the process curatorship came to be seen as a set of repeatable processes, and started to become detached from the idea of scholarship and subject authority.
• Then came a profound shift in the design idiom of museums. We abandoned almost completely that onslaught of skeletons and picture frames and handwritten labels and camphour fumes that characterised the Victorian museum and embraced instead light, space, sparseness - the idiom of the art gallery and the experience. Where once people came to a museum to see as many unusual things as possible, now they come to experience the whole museum.
• Then came the Internet, and with it the appropriation of the word ‘curate’. People today curate their shoe cupboard, they curate online exhibitions by choosing some pictures, they curate social media strands of conferences (apologies for that one). A ‘curator’ meant someone who had deep specific technical and/or scientific knowledge of the subject of their collection, and who used that knowledge to develop the collection, to research it and to enhance the general fund of knowledge. Like an academic forced to perform on a reality TV show, the need for the curator to reduce this knowledge to a form suitable for public exhibition was not always a comfortable fit.

There are all sorts of reasons, practical and political for the devaluation of the currency of curatorship. And yes, there is a case to be made that the control exerted over the museum by its curators had become a limiting factor on its ability to change, and that some degree of positive action was necessary to redress this balance. But we have to guard against the risk of going too far in the opposite direction.

The Collections Trust’s vision of a sustainable museum is inherently about balance. Like the Ancient Greeks believed that health was a question of keeping the humours of air, earth, fire and water in balance, we believe that a healthy museum is one in which four priorities - humans, collections, knowledge and money - are kept in equal and mutually respectful balance.

A balanced museum cannot function without curatorial knowledge. Curatorial knowledge cannot function without the support of learning, access, outreach, gallery and web. Neither can function without money. None has a purpose if they are not used.

The risk of not having access to ‘old school’ curators is that museums will gradually stop moving forward, and will instead begin to feed on the knowledge and collections accumulated in the 40 years either side of the turn of the century. A revolving video in the Natural History Museum tells visitors that ‘90% of the worlds species haven’t been discovered yet’ (how do they know??) and yet many museums have quietly stopped acquiring, stopped carrying out new research.

Two candidates have emerged in recent years to backfill the loss of specific knowledge that comes from having a curator. One is crowdsourcing, the other is joining together what remains of the UK’s ‘network of expertise’ into Subject Specialist Networks. The crowdsourcing vision holds that knowledge of the collection is not the preserve of the museum, and that if we can but unlock the vast untapped reserves of knowledge in the community, we can extend the idea of participatory culture to embrace participatory curatorship. I have always been troubled by this - the flipside of the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ is the ‘immense self-reinforcing stupidity of the crowd’ - the fact that when crowds are right, they can often be more right than experts, but when they are wrong, groupthink can make them forget to question.

Subject Specialist Networks are a vital, indeed thriving way of opening out specialist knowledge, of filling gaps and of helping people support one another - but they are an adjunct to, not a replacement for, the idea of having curators in museums working with their collections.

And so what to do? We cannot go back - a return to the hegemony of the curator would help neither curators not the rest of the essential functions of a museum. But perhaps we could made some different decisions about how we go forward. Instead of regarding curators and ‘other staff’ as being at odds, perhaps we could focus instead on their common aim to preserve heritage and to make it available for education, enjoyment and research. I think too much has changed to re-assert the old role of the curator. Perhaps instead we could think about how we assert a new role that is fundamentally predicated on balance.

OK, let me get this out of the way from the beginning. I am not an Apple fanboy. I own an iPod, but I have never used a Macbook (I don’t trust anything that doesn’t have a DOS prompt). I have tried to avoid writing this post, but for some reason it just won’t go away.

Last month, Steve Jobs died leaving behind him a company whose projects have touched the hearts and changed the lives of millions of people. I never met the guy, and I know nothing about him other than what I have read in the press both before and after his death. And yet, the mythology is of a man who transformed the world of consumer electronics because of at least 4 fundamental qualities:

1. Exceptional leadership
2. Extradordinary design sensibility
3. A singular focus on the user experience
4. Strong business acumen

The reaction to Steve Jobs’ death was one of genuine sense of loss - that something uniquely valuable had gone from the world. It isn’t often that someone who essentially makes a living by making stuff and selling it to people achieves this kind of personal relationship with their customers. And it got me to thinking - museums should always look outwards to other industries to see what we can learn from their success. In previous posts, I have drawn on examples from gaming, from manufacture and from logistics, but never consumer goods. So, I wondered, what if Steve Jobs had made a museum?

Lesson 1. Playing your own tune

On the face of it, in a culture defined by open standards and open content, Apple should not be a success. It uses proprietary formats,is ultra-secretive about new products and polices patent infringements with enthusiastic vigour. Apple products ask their users to subscribe to the Apple way of doing things in a way that must have struck terror into the hearts of the team responsible for marketing the 1st generation iMac.

That they can do so is a result of at least two factors - (1) immense confidence and (2) the knowledge that if you offer people simple, functional and beautiful experiences they are going to be willing to meet you halfway when it comes to acquiring the skills and vocabulary to use them. Apple products demand that their users do things the Apple way, but the payback in terms of attachment and depth of engagement is correspondingly greater.

So if Steve had made a museum, I think these would have been the founding principles. It would be 100% rock-solid in its confident assertion of its place and purpose in the world - without trying to be all things to all people as museums can sometimes do - and unapologetic in asking people to engage with it on its own terms (rather than trying to rewrite the ‘vocabulary’ of the museum to present a more user-friendly face to the world). It would accept that some people are simply not ‘museum’ people, in the same way that some people aren’t now, nor ever will be, ‘Apple’ people, but be ready all the same to welcome them in the event of an epiphany.

At the heart of it, having the confidence to know that you do what you do best, delivering something that solves a genuine problem, and knowing that people want what you are delivering are the most fundamental ingredients of success.

Lesson 2. Inside-out design

Steve Jobs famously once said ’some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. To design something really well, you have to get it’. So, while the beautiful aesthetic of many Apple products is the first thing most users see, what really differentiates them is this holistic, end-to-end approach to design which results not only in beautiful things, but also beautiful interfaces and, ultimately, beautiful experiences.

So Steve’s museum would, of course, adopt the same design philosophy. All of the elements of Steve’s museum, from stores, to galleries, to reception to the loos would have been designed with this integrated view in mind. He would have ‘got’ the fundamentally interconnected roles of museums to collect, preserve, interpret and share, and he would have ensured that all of these elements co-operated seamlessly to deliver a coherent, beautiful and compelling end-user experience.

This, as luck would have it, is exactly the design philosophy which inspired the Collections Trust to create the BSI Code of Practice for Collections Management (PAS197), which has as its very core the principle that the quality, depth and relevance of the end-user experience is directly and implicitly connected both to the strategic mission of the museum and the processes by which it manages its collections. Steve would have approved!

Of course, with his legendary attention to detail, Steve would not have been happy until the design of his museum had been stripped of anything extrinsic, unneccessary or which presented any kind of barrier to the user experience. From the steps up to the front door, to the font on the website, everything about the presentation of and interface with Steve’s museum would welcome the user, draw them in, encourage them to form a lasting personal, emotional and psychological bond with it. Visitors to Steve’s museum would, I am certain, have left with the impression that it was theirs, designed around and with an implicit understanding of their needs and values.

Critically, too, Steve’s museum would leave people feeling empowered with a sense of their own cultural literacy - that they had encountered, learned and acquired the necessary skills to make the museum their own - rather than culturally passive, disempowered or even bored.

Lesson 3. Making money

This morning, Apple Inc. shares are trading at $385.33. The ‘brand value’ of the company is approximately $153.3bn. Apple products are used in affluent nations throughout the Western world. By any measure, it is a massively successful company. Its success is not purely economic - it has also succeeded in carving out a leading position in a highly competitive marketplace through a culture of innovation and quality.

So would you have to pay to get into Steve’s museum? I rather suspect that you would. Not only would you have to pay, but you would almost certainly pay a premium slightly above the price point of other similar leisure attractions in your area. But pay it you would, because nothing else would deliver the depth, engagement and value that Steve’s museum would be offering you. And yes, that price point might well be exclusive, which flies in the face of a decade or more of opening up and diversification but at the same time, the museum would move from being something egalitarian but disposable to something desirable, aspirational and financially sustainable.

But, perhaps most importantly, Steve’s museum would be characterised by movement and momentum, not by stasis. It would explore multiple platforms, multiple points of delivery. It would look for new problems to solve, integrating technological innovations as it goes. Building on a clear core philosophy and aesthetic, it would expand laterally, defining new relationships and articulating new value propositions for its audiences.

The good news is that Steve’s museum exists everywhere, in different forms and with differing emphasis. For many, particularly those battered by spending cuts, it is hard to be confident about the future and about the intrinsic value of what we do for people. There has been too much emphasis on hitching museums onto other people’s value propositions and not enough on the unique core value proposition of museums in their own right.

Sometimes, the integrated design philosophy has been lost in successive waves of change. But at heart, the museum profession’s conception of what constitutes an effective modern museum is dynamic, responsive, user-focussed and streamlined. Museum professionals everywhere are confronting new challenges with innovation and creativity, and using design idiom to have new conversations with the visiting public.

I’d like to think that Steve would approve.

I want you to imagine a scenario with me. Picture your museum. Now imagine it with no servers, no in-house IT team, no Collections data onsite at all. Imagine that all of the software you use to manage your Collections is accessible through your browser, with your data held in a secure, stable server farm somewhere far, far away.

How do you feel?

The idea of applying the principles of Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) to Collections Management is not new. Indeed, in some ways it is much older than most people think - harking back as it does to the very early days of using remote terminals to access processing power provided centrally on a mainframe. Back in the early 1980’s, museums all over Europe would ship their hard-copy record cards to the MDA Computing Bureau to be transcibed into electronic records, again, making use of the economies of centralised computing power.

Fast forward 30 years, and the scale, complexity and richness of electronic recording of information about museum artefacts have expanded exponentially. Documentation and cataloguing are a global business, supported by a thriving community of highly specialised software applications and standards such as SPECTRUM.

The prevailing model of computing in museums is (as it is in most other types of enterprise) to have a number of relatively highly-powered machines connected to a Local Area Network which acts both as a conduit to the Internet, a firewall, a communications layer and a shared filestore. Until relatively recently, most Collections Management Systems were engineered to operate in this environment - either installed across the network or on a dedicated internal server. 

This model had its advantages. A LAN could include multiple physical locations, enabling, for example, curators onsite and conservators in offsite stores to interact with a common dataset. It empowered the museum to run its own kit, and to establish policies for things like backup and disaster recovery. In essence, it put the information about the collections inside the same physical context as those collections.

But the networked-application model also has some profound drawbacks. It is inherently inefficient, requiring expensive user support and onsite technicians. It requires physical space appropriate to the operation of high-powered and energy-hungry machines. It places a barrier to the upgrade path for the software, requiring manual intervention, downtime and occasionally bespoke development. The knock-on effect of this is that innovations funded by one user of the software are seldom cascaded automatically across the entire user community (or where they are, the time-delay involved can be considerable).

Collections Management Software as a Service, in which Collections data is held on low-cost, scalable offsite storage and manipulated using browser-based interfaces, appears to hold the solution to many of these issues.

It makes sense from the developers point of view - hugely reducing the complexity and therefore cost of maintaining 2000-3000 separate installations of their software. It provides a relatively painless path through which upgrades and new features can be cascaded out across the entire user-base of a given system. Not only this, but it offers a development path for new features and functionality - perhaps in the form of integration with tools for Digital Asset and Digital Rights Management, Workflow Management, Visualisation or Digital Preservation.

It also makes sense from a managers point of view - onsite IT infrastructure (and the skills to maintain it) can be very expensive. The space required for dedicated onsite kit can be given over to storage, administration or other hard-pressed functions. CMSaaS can be cheaper, offering the flexibility of subscription-based models which scale with the content and its uses, and in the process, offering a means of futureproofing against the evolution of the museum and its information management needs.

It makes sense, too, from a professional point of view. A community of clients using a common Cloud-based Collections Management System forms, almost by definition, a community of practice. It leads to the sharing of knowledge and expertise, to mutual support and other forms of collaboration. Not only this, but it naturally tends towards the principle of openness with museum datasets, encouraging the more proactive use of data through API and 3rd party applications and websites.

For all of these reasons, the majority of the leading Collections Management Systems have either already developed fully-hosted versions of their applications or are in the process of developing them. And business, it seems, is booming - at least partly in response to the strictures imposed on museums by funding cuts. Most vendors are reporting significant increases in the uptake of their Software as a Service offers, with some confidently predicting a full transition to Cloud-based, browser-based Collections Management within the next decade.

And yet there are many for whom the idea of Cloud-based Collections is unpalatable, to say the least. Some point to the inherent instability and insecurity of the Cloud as being too much of an operational risk to entrust their Collections data (which is intended to be the canonical and authoritative record of the Collection) to it. Others point to the fragility of their connection to the web - raising the prospect of downtime, lag or failure. Others point to the creativity and innovation which comes from having technologists, technology, curators and data under one roof. Others, too, suggest that this places them in a position of total dependency on their vendors and software providers, effectively rendering them hostage to the vendors charging model. It is also suggested that each and every installation of a Collections Management System represents a bespoke tool, specific to the needs of that museum and that SaaS would fail to deliver the kind of local configurability that museums and their Collections demand.

It is too early to say whether all of these concerns are equally valid. Certainly many museums run antiquated hardware and suffer from poor Internet connections - although people suffering with a bad PC should in theory benefit from the lighter processor load of using browser-based applications. Many are also governed under a Local Authority IT Policy which stipulates requirements that make CMSaaS all but impossible. It is also fair to say that many Browser-based applications are not quite as responsive as their locally-installed counterparts (although the gap is closing).

As to the risk inherent in Cloud storage, I suspect this may be based on an overestimation of the stability and security of locally-based physical media. After all, the data is still bits encoded on a spinning disk (or solid-state drive) whether it is under your stairs or sitting in racks in a data warehouse somewhere. I also suspect that the inexorable and inevitable rise of mainstream consumer-focussed applications which run in the Cloud will gradually help people to overcome this concern.

As to the creativity and innovation that comes from having museum technologists on the team - this has doubtless led to the flowering of ideas and applications, but it may simply not be sustainable in the face of the economic realities confronting museums in most countries worldwide. This is, of course, a gross simplification, but we may come to see a relatively small number of museums (outside of the larger institutions) that are able to maintain this kind of staffing and capital overhead. Many museum technologists - disaffected in some cases by the inability of the museum to enable them to deliver what they know they are capable of, have themsevles defected to commercial vendors and development houses.

In reality, we are unlikely to see a total transition to Collections Management in the Cloud anytime soon. This is a tremendously diverse sector, with a huge range of different types and scales of institution. There will always be those who need an installer and a locally-based application, for whom this is the simplest and most effective option. What I do think we’ll see, particularly over the next 4-5 year cycle, is two significant trends:

1. A significant swing in the medium-to-larger end of the museum community towards full-service online Collections Management Software and;

2. The emergence of more online tools with a very low barrier to entry (both in terms of cost and complexity) which are suited to the needs (and budgets) of smaller local and community museums.

Is it time for Collections in the Cloud? I’d love to know what you think!

Collections Link is the Collections Trust’s online service which supports networking, collaboration and professional development for people who work with Collections. The service has been online since 2006, with some 1,800 registered users, more than 500 specialist how-to guides and 40+ networks. Since late 2010, the Collections Trust team have been working on the 3rd generation of Collections Link, and as we approach the launch, I thought it’d be useful to reflect on how we’ve got to where we are. (more…)

I was invited along to the offices of We Are What We Do the other day for a get-together to discuss the launch of HistoryPin.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with HistoryPin, it is essentially a web-based and mobile application which encourages young people and old people to ‘pin’ their photographs and the stories they tell to a map of the world. The web platform and iPhone app will be ‘launched’ (the web platform’s already been available for a while in a basic form) on the 11th July. (more…)

I was asked recently to summarise the current UK situation for museums and the digital agenda for some overseas visitors. Here’s what I said: (more…)

As the cuts to Arts funding chunter ever onward, some new motifs are emerging. ‘Where is the leadership?’ people cry. ‘When will the Minister intervene?’. But even as we enter the darkest hour for museums, some new aspects of this landscape are becoming clear. (more…)

The Spending Review announcement of October 20th was characterised by an oddly short-term quality. Having stirred up a foment of public support for cuts to public services, and generated an atmosphere of fear through a combination of strategic slash’n'burn (BECTA, anyone?) and wildly varying numbers (25%, 40%, higher, lower!) the end result was a careful blend of ‘bad, but not as bad as we expected’. (more…)

The Collections Trust has announced OpenCulture 2011 - a 2-day Collections Management event for the UK and international community.

The first international event to focus on current and next-generation practice in Collections Management, OpenCulture 2011 features a Great Collections Management Exhibition and Trade Fair and a conference addressing key themes in Collections policy and practice, including:

• The Strategic Role of Collections
• Next-generation Collections Management
• Collections Management and the End-user

Delegate fees start from as little at £66 plus VAT and there are attractive earlybird discounts for people registering before December 2010.

Find out more about this exciting event and register online at http://www.openculture2011.org.uk

The sad news of the proposed closure of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), UK Film Council and Advisory Council on Libraries is the opening salvo in a battle that promises to be both bloody and strangely one-sided. The Treasury has brilliantly engineered public support for a Spending Review which will most likely change the entire landscape of museum, library and archive service provision and there is little hope looking either to the general public or to the media for support in the coming months.

(more…)