The Curator’s Egg

Or, Living in a Culture of Continuous Improvement

I attended a meeting today about developing a “quality assurance framework” for museums. The essential driver for this being that if we don’t develop one ourselves, we will have one imposed anyway by the Scottish Executive. As Peter Stott commented, we need yet another set of measurements and forms to fill in like we need a hole in the head. My reply was that, given that we can’t avoid the hole, we are being offered the opportunity to influence its dimensions. But once we move beyond the concrete things measured by Accreditation and the VisitScotland quality scheme, and the process-measuring of things like IiP, we enter territory that is inevitably subjective and difficult, if not impossible really, to measure. How do you measure the value of a cultural experience? How do you quantify it? How do you compare such experiences, and meaningfully evaluate them against more concrete measures? Collecting evidence is all very well, but like with web stats, useless if you don’t really know what the evidence means. Yet we find ourselves in a situation where we spend more and more of time time doing just this - measuring what we do, instead of doing what we measure. And of course we are being measured against not what the public, our visitors and other users may want, but rather against a set of ambitions which are essentially political and social.

Now, it may be my deep-dyed libertarian cynicism, but whenever I hear the phrase ‘continuous improvement’ it makes me feel as though I have fallen into a kind of nightmare of top-down, Stalinist dirigisme; where aims, objectives and targets are set centrally, rather than locally, with little respect for difference; where figures are collected and paraded to show how things are always getting better, when everyone knows that really things are getting harder day by day; where the same (or a smaller) ration of butter is being spread over ever more slices of bread; where the daily struggle to keep going is hidden behind a sort of happy, clappy, gung-ho public enthusiasm as we all wave our flags and engage in our mass arithmetical calisthenics; and where local government has become merely the implementation arm of an all-powerful central government apparat, infected with an overwhelming managerialist hubris.

No, hang on - I’m not dreaming…

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)

On another blog I was reminded of the two things meme, so here’s mine for museums:

1. Collections, not buildings
2. Access trumps conservation

Once upon a time I used to do really curatorial things - cataloguing collections, researching and writing exhibitions, rooting through the collections* - all the interesting things I’ve referred to elsewhere. One of the penalties of increasing management responsibility is that you end up doing less and less of what you came into museums to do, though I managed to avoid that for the first few years in my present post. These days I hardly see the inside of the museum store from one week to the next, and as for cataloguing objects - well, I have changed a couple of database entries in the last few years, and I did fill in some entries in the daybook a few months ago, but that’s about it.

It has come to this - my role is to pass on wise words of advice, the accumulated experience of some nineteen years in museums, while others do the actual work. As for exhibitions, I’m involved in the discussions, and I do have the final say, but at times it seems my main purpose is to provide titles. Titles for exhibitions, titles for exhibition sections, punning titles, cunning titles - this is my domain. I have to say that I do quite like this. I am inordinately fond of puns, and as we all know, a really good title should feature a pun somewhere.

I wonder occasionally how much difference the title makes. Some I have seen are prosaic (”Gold of the Pharaohs” - an exhibition of, well, the gold of, errm, some pharaohs) was a smash hit in Edinburgh in 1988. A touring exhibition, I believe. A subsequent blockbuster attempt in 1990, on the Incas iirc, fared less well. I wonder if the title (”Sweat of the Sun”) had anything to do with it?**

Sometimes the title just springs out at you. When we were working on the exhibition commemorating the 150th anniversary of the railway from Edinburgh to Berwick (the first international railway line!), a number of things struck me - first that Dunbar was where the various dignitaries had come back to for their mammoth feed; and secondly the stories of itinerant agricultural workers arriving in the town somewhat drunk. All of a sudden it’s obvious: Steaming into Dunbar***.

My favourite though has got to be the exhibition we did about the (now-scraped-away as-if-it-had-never-been) outdoor pool. We were really struggling to come up with a title that wasn’t just really, really dull. Listening to people talking about the pool though, the one thing they all commented on was the coldness of the water (well it was the North Sea that it was filled with). I suggested, almost as a joke, that we should call the exhibition Brrr!**** That just resonated so well with everyone who had ever used the pool (and the local children had their swimming lessons there - such cruelty is not allowed these days).

And so to this year’s exhibitions. 110%, not alas my idea, is an exhibition on sport and health. My only contribution (other than saying ‘yes you can spend that inordinate amount of money’) is the title to the healthy living section For the health of it. Our other exhibition celebrates 30 years of John Muir Country Park, so inevitably it’s called Park Life. Yes, it will be John Muir Country Park - the Brit Pop years.

Still I can’t really complain, I do get to do all the fun techie stuff. And there is a certain pleasure in giving people the go-ahead to take forward a project. It’s just, it’s just… sometimes I miss the objects*****.

*How many exhibitions, I wonder, have had their genesis in someone’s trawling through the collections in search of one item, and finding another that really fired their imagination?

**I had nothing to do with either of these exhibitions, btw.

***Steaming being a common word for ‘less than exactly sober’

**** Gratuitous information… Language change in action. When I was a child (not that long ago), ‘brrr’ was merely a conventional way of spelling the sound people made when they were describing how cold it was (usually while rubbing their hands) - a sort of voiced labial trill. In much the same way that the dismissive sound when being expected to believe some rubbish or other was conventionally spelled ‘pshaw’. Weirdly, though ‘brrr’ is now pronounced as written. I’m sure my grandparents would have thought that very strange.

***** I am however assured, as part of the sport exhibition research, that with practice my aim will improve.

…at least temporarily, until my internet connection is back up and running and I can upgrade and install a plugin to kill the spam comments. Sigh. There’s always a few who spoil things for everybody else, isn’t there? I’m sure that actually spam doesn’t really work, it’s just the triumph of hope over experience (except for those who are selling to the would-be spamming millionaires, of course).

An interesting presentation of a collaborative online ‘game’, Q-CSI, from Questacon in Australia using Flash Communication Server. Nice humorous delivery (typically Aussie, really), and in many ways it looked pretty cool - check it out yourself. Of course there are many issues associated with using Flash, of which the developers are well aware. I wonder if there might be another way of achieving the same sort of collaborative interactivity without Flash. I suspect that even if there were it would be expensive to develop, and even thinking about how you might do it is well beyond my limited skillset.

Hmmm, I ought to ask Andrew and Angus about using this idea though. I’m sure they would both be interested, and maybe we could get some funding…

There are times when I feel like a set of actuarial tables (see title of this post). But it did occur to me to wonder about the demographics of the conference attendees. From a class perspective resolutely middle class - but we would be that defined by our profession. As for other categories I don’t know: ethnicity, gender, age? I do see that as regards work background there is a range from hard-core techies to education specialists to fine art curators. I wonder if there is any research on this?

Breakfast this morning was a ‘Birds of a feather’ affair. That is you choose to sit down at a table dedicated to a particular topic or theme. I have an interest in the idea of Creative Commons and licensing our content for re-use by the public (whoever they may be). The table was dominated by issues coming from the perspective of Huge Art Museums (or HAMs), but not in a negative way - it’s good to see such institutions looking to free up their content for scholarly (whatever that exactly means) use. Of course where you have works which are still in copyright a whole additional layer of complication intrudes, but for the majority of us tiny non-specialist museums this is in the end less of a problem. The real problem is how to get our content out there and being used, and letting the audience know that it’s OK to do so.

Talking to my children in real time via a webcam every day. A fantastic way to keep in contact (especialy as my phone doesn’t work in the US), but I guess I am of an age where I still look at something like this and think it is utterly fantastic (in the unbelievable sense). My kids just take it as a matter of course, but I keep thinking back to Arthur C Clarke.

I have seen the future - and it’s worse. A presentation about using handheld devices to supplement a museum visit seems harmless enough, but somehow the idea of using ‘intelligence’ to drive content to the visitor (rather than enabling the user to make these choices) seems to me at least to be the very converse of personalisation. Making assumptions about what the visitor wants is surely nothing more than Clippie expanded to monstrous proportions.

“It looks like you’re looking at an exhibit…”

…in Albuquerque. The elevation (over 5000 feet above sea level), combined with the dryness of the atmosphere means that I am a) continually thirsty and b) I have an almost constant headache. Add in the fact that my body still seems pretty confused about what the time of day is, and you will understand that I am feeling more than a little fragile.

On the other hand, the presentations today have been really good on the whole. I enjoyed the plenary session first thing - especially the ritual humiliation of some large institutions via the Wayback Machine.

However, there is still an issue about the material being presented here. All to often it is from large institutions supported by corporate sponsorship in major, but one-off, projects. The question needs to be asked: what relevance has all this to the majority of museums which lack all these resources of institutional profile, sponsorship and staffing? What can the groundlings get out of it? I think the answer is ‘quite a lot’, but I haven’t heard that yet.