The Curator’s Egg

Wednesday am. I couldn’t sleep. My body thinks it is 1pm when it’s 6am, so I have to get up. Dealt with a couple of emails from work, and sent another to my daughter. Then downstairs to register. I discover that I hadn’t booked in for any workshops (why are these extra?), so I spent some time talking to Rene from Adlib in the Netherlands. I’m now feeling tempted to look again at moving from the Access database we currently use to a more tailored solution. There is no need after all for us to have to do it all ourselves just because we can - if we are willing to spend the time.

A short chat with Jim Devine too - nice to know I’m not the only person from Scotland here. Also trying to put together my thoughts on a paper for next year’s conference. But of that, more anon. Now to lunch, and an afternoon workshop (I booked in for one in the end).

Travelling to Museums and the Web 2006 (or mw2006 as it calls itself)…

[At Chicago O'Hare]

Got up at 5am. Now in Chicago O’Hare Airport. The clock says 4pm, my body insists it’s really 10pm. It also says ‘Sleep!!!’

An observation - I really do mark myself out as a museum professional. Strolling through Terminal 2 on the way to gate C1 I spotted the skeleton of a brachiosaurus, and I immediately said (out loud) “Of course, the Field Museum.”

Cultural differences. In the USA they make you put your trainers through the X-ray scanner. Not so in the UK. OTOH, if you leave your baggage unattended it “may be confiscated by the Chicago police”. In London “it may be destroyed.” What was it about divided by a common language?

[In Albuquerque]
My flight from London to Chicago arrived 40 minutes early (strong tailwinds). This of course does you no good if you have (as I did) an further flight to catch. The Albuquerque flight left late, and when it got to Albuquerque stopped some 50 yards shy of the gate. For about half an hour. Apparently, the gate was reserved for another flight first (passenger temper was not heped by the fact that all the other gates were unoccupied at that time - but I guess this was the United Airlines gate). Great, eh? Travelled about 5,000 miles to have a hold up 50 yards from the destination? You’ve got to laugh (really, you have - it’s compulsory if you are British to laugh in these sort of situations).

Now in my hotel room, it’s nearly 6am (or 11pm on the day before as the locals imagine), so I’m off to bed. More on the morrow.

…and in a sense tragic, but this guy is (or is that was) surely a candidate for a Darwin Award?

Right back at the beginning of this blog I wrote about the experience which more than any other led me to working in museums. Now while that fixed in my head the value, the importance, of objects as the physical link to our past, it must be admitted that very few museums will provide that kind of experience. Indeed they generally (and we are no exception) provide almost the antithesis of it. For what was magic about my interaction with the 10,000 year old broken pottery? The fact that I held it in my hands - like making a physical contact with that unknown person ten millennia ago who made the pot (and whose fingerprints could still be seen in it), and with the people who had used it.

But what do museums provide? The same objects safely behind glass, or things on open display signed ‘Please do not touch’. Yet all too often the full experience can only be had by touching. I can already hear curators and (especially) conservators wincing (if it’s possible to wince audibly), and indeed the dangers of fragile objects being on open display were illustrated recently. Accidents will happen, eh?

The question then is how can we safely - both from the point of view of the objects and the public - make our collections more available. How can we share with the public (who after all pay for the service through taxation) the thrill we get from handling these objects.

As the Fitzwilliam’s director said:

“Whilst the method of displaying objects is always under review, it is important not to over-react and make the Museum’s collections less accessible to the visiting public.”

I’m not sure what the long-term answer is. We need to balance two essentially incompatible aims - to provide access, with the inevitable risks of damage and detrioration, and to preserve the collections for the future. My first thought is perhaps to have a regular programme of supervised handling opportunities, advertised in the press, and inviting visitors to ‘Get in touch with the past’. But I don’t mean a specially-created ‘handling collection’, I mean real objects from the core collections, and it will mean taking some risks.

Indeed, having thought of the title, I now feel quite enthused. It’s time to share the experience.

How often have you heard or read something like this:

“The proof is in the pudding.”

Well, no, it isn’t actually. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, dammit.

And don’t get me started on ‘enormity’. Too late. It is not, as so many seem to think a synonym for mere bigness. On the other hand this does occasion me the odd moment of unintended amusement…

‘On starting my new job, I was staggered by the enormity of the task ahead.’ Why? Had you become commandant of a death camp or leader of the Tory party?

[On the birth of a child]‘I was overcome by the enormity of the event.’ You’ve become the parent of Satan?

I realise that this is a losing battle, however. Language changes, there’s nothing that can be done to restrain, control or direct that change, and the process is quite mysterious. You can notice that change has happened, but never see it happening. Not that long ago people used to say ‘conTROversy’. Now they say (even BBC announcers) ‘controVERsy’ (on the analogy of ‘controversial’, I suppose). Using a rising intonation at the end of flat statements - making them sound like questions - is increasingly common. I even find myself doing it sometimes, yet when I first encountered it (in real life as opposed to on TV) in the late 1980s, I found it utterly confusing:

‘I’m from Toronto’
‘Errm, I don’t know, are you? Have you forgotten?’

As for enormity, I suppose that eventually even dictionaries will recognise the ‘very big’ meaning as primary.

Hint: ‘enormity’ means ‘monstrous wickedness’.

From the Department of Irate Pedantry

This rhyming stuff just seems to take over your mind - sort of like OCD - one just leads naturally on to another like ritual hand-washing.

And if you keep producing verses
Through toil, and tears, and sweat (and curses),
And sparks of inspiration too -
Though sadly these are all too few -
You’ll find, though it may seem like cheating,
That some damn lines just keep repeating.
While stunning new rhymes stay quite hidden,
Ones used before just rise unbidden,
Then stubbornly won’t go away.
It pains me more than I can say,
But finding rhyme and rhythm’s tough
And if on reading through my stuff
You find you’re reaching for the bucket,
Then all that I can say is ‘Look it’s
Just some doggerel, OK?
It doesn’t matter anyway.’
In any case, that’s it, I’m done.
Thanks for playing, it’s been fun.

So we are to have a new Statutory Performance Indicator for local authority museums. We are to replace the weird “% of museums supported by the authority which have full registration” (annoyingly just at the point where we achieved 100%) with measures of visitor numbers. Now for physical visitors that could be relatively easy - except how do we count those visitors to our big open industrial museum site? Currently we only count those who come into the visitor centre (open April to October, 11am to 4pm), and not the much larger number who use the site during and outwith those times.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, we are to count web site visits - not just any web site visits, though, only those which are enquiries which aren’t merely “when is the museum open” or “where is the museum”, etc. The fact that it’s actually impossible to collect meaningful statistics on visits was pointed out during the consultation (by me at least, if not by others), but I assume Audit Scotland or the SMC will be providing us all with the I-Spy MagicStats plug-in for our sites so we can read the minds of visitors, even when they are viewing the site through an intermediate cache.

The really funny thing about this is that it will actually penalise well-contructed sites (which are cached and thereby served up quicker to their visitors) and reward badly-made sites that make caching difficult. Once again, you couldn’t make it up. Sigh.

Still it will achieve one thing - we’ll spend more and more of our time measuring what we do, and less and less doing what we measure. Is this really the best way to be spending public money?

Well, that’s a relief. We are an Accredited Museum Service (or rather, a Museums Service which runs Accredited Museums). The MLA Accreditation Panel met on Friday, but I didn’t find out till yesterday. Apparently we were the first item on the list so… it may only be by twenty minutes or so, but technically we were the first local authority museum service in Scotland to achieve Accreditation*. Yay! Go us! First is still first, and second is nowhere! Win! Win!! etc.

Hmmm, seem to have used up a full months quota of exclamation marks there.

Still, this is a good result, as we are a small service and we put in a lot of hard work to bring everything together, including rushing round at the very last minute to get papers signed and faxed off. Well done everyone. You can all have next week off.

*The Gordon Highlanders Museum was actually the first Scottish Museum to get Accreditation, but they aren’t a local authority service - a situation with both disadvantages and distinct advantages.

Well. According to this review on the Guardian web site of Tim Worstall’s book I am a gem. As long as that’s a Midget Gem, rather than an Iced Gem (did anybody ever like those?) I’ll mark that down in the “feel a bit smug all day” box.

Oh, and my copy arrived in the post today. Ta. However… the goddess Typo (the tenth Muse, ISTR) has intervened and Schrödinger is mis-spelt every time with an extra ö. Sigh. Now people will think I’m an illiterate.

*It used to be fifteen minutes, but with the proliferation of ‘celebrity’ and ‘reality’ shows on TV, the ration has had to be reduced.

I gather that every single local authority in Scotland has received an FoI enquiry about works of art that they hold. For some reason the enquirer, working for a well-known national newspaper, wants to know how much the things are worth. Actually that’s not quite fair, as the enquiry asks about the ‘value’ of the works of art, but it’s pretty clear that monetary, rather than aesthetic or historic value is intended.

Now I’ve no objection to making public what works of art (or other collections) are held by public authorities - indeed it’s our aim (when we can find the cash and the staff) to put all this information on-line. But I do feel uncomfortable about broadcasting financial information about collections - creating effectively a thieves’ shopping list, and perpetuating (if not actually generating) the idea that it’s the cash value of museum collections that is paramount. And museums after all aren’t about the financial value of their collections. Public collections are not monetary assets, nor are they financial investments.

But what makes me feel even more uncomfortable is the amount of time (and hence public money) being tied up in doing unpaid research for a commercial organisation, in what amounts to nothing more than a speculative unfocused trawl. It really is journalism at its laziest, and I’m sure this was not what was intended when the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 was passed. Perhaps we should charge commercial bodies a search fee, and get some money back into the public coffers. After all, they are planning to use the information to sell newspapers.

This sort of thing has happened before elsewhere. I blame the Antiques Roadshow.