Museum Careers in the Next Millennium

(Each summer the Center for Museum Studies organizes the Museum Careers Seminar for Smithsonian and other Washington, D.C., area museum interns. This year we were fortunate to have two distinguished members of the museum community deliver the keynote address. We asked Beverly Sheppard, acting director of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and Pat Williams, vice president for policy and programs at the American Association of Museums, to speak about how they got involved in museum work. They also discussed current and future trends in museums, as well as skills that can help aspiring museum professionals to succeed. We present here an edited transcript of their presentations.)

Beverly Sheppard

I have been passionate about museums since I was a child. My guess is that most of us who love museums can recall a museum visit that made a lasting impression on us when we were young. Today I want to talk about the many changes that museums are going through and reflect on what these might mean to aspiring museum professionals. There are many ways in which your education can go, and I would like to offer some important considerations about how the field is changing.

I will begin with an image that's long been a favorite of mine: a painting by Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum. It's essentially a self-portrait, and many of you may be familiar with it because it appears in many publications about museums. The painting depicts Mr. Peale, well-dressed and rather gentlemanly, pulling aside a velvet curtain. As we peer behind that curtain, we notice all kinds of extraordinary things. There is a little bit of the natural history world - a skeleton of a mastodon - as well as paintings and portraits of Revolutionary War heroes. One gets a sense of his museum's powerful allure. Charles Willson Peale himself was quite extraordinary. His museum, located in Philadelphia, was the product of a curious mind - a perfect mind for the museum professional. He valued scholarship, held culture in high esteem, partnered art with science, and saw the museum as essential to the development of the new Republic.

Mr. Peale's museum was part cabinet of curiosities and part temple of the fine and the beautiful - they resided well together. The withdrawn curtain held artfully in the hand of the artist makes us aware of a wondrous place, and gives us a sense of privilege. As we think about this museum, remember that Charles Willson Peale did not have to worry about the many issues that we have to think about today. To begin with, the wonder and the mystery were not segregated into disciplines. These mastodons and stuffed birds were able to reside perfectly with the artwork. There were no issues of climate control or appropriate light levels. He did not have to think about which font to use on his labels, or about the tension between what the scholar wanted to say and what the public would be willing to read on those labels.

His velvet curtain admitted only a portion of the population - once he dropped it, he and his staff were no longer able to look out into the world and see what was going on. It was all happening there, in that magical place. There was little concern, if any, for making certain that the whole of the population had access to this museum, or that they were reflected in its collections and exhibitions. There was no wheelchair access that we know of, and no ADA requirements. There was no concern for reflecting multiple viewpoints, ethnicities, or learning styles. He probably didn't package up the stuff and take it on the road. I don't think he had to spend a lot of time analyzing the mastodon's disappearance and its implications for the environment. No high-tech specialists there, no marketing wizards, no museum shops, no cafes, no emphasis on earned income, probably no diverse lecture series. Mr. Peale probably didn't have to do family programming or an orientation film - and I would guess he wasn't out there working with the local debtors prison to make certain his museum would enlighten, enrich, and help heal the debtors. He was not concerned, nor did he have to be, with the nearby commercial shopping mall that was going to cut into his audience. There are so many issues that were not a part of his world that are a part of the museum world today. His museum was extraordinary for the nineteenth century, in fact very much ahead of the game, but it would never have made it in today's world.

If I'm using an extreme image, I think it does point out that museums have been resilient. They have been tied into the culture and have been integral to the society in which they exist. All of the things that Mr. Peale did not have to worry about could fall into several of the general categories (accessibility, changing educational roles, community service, and audience diversity) that are so much a part of our world today. They are part of a major shift from the museum looking internally to its looking at the audience beyond. In a recent conversation, someone noted that museums are not about something, they are for someone. I think that statement gives us the shift that we need to examine. As museum professionals, you must think about how to manage the internal activities of the museum, and also how to build bridges to a diverse public beyond. That's the image I want you to reflect on as I move forward.

I want to share a bit of my personal route into museums and then move on to issues that you should consider as you examine careers in museum work. You've probably heard that the route of a museum career tends to be a little circuitous and eccentric at times. Most museum careers are somewhat spiral-like. As you go around that spiral, you keep picking up more pieces, and eventually they fit together into something that is very rich indeed. A lot of my work, and much of what I have cared about the most in museums, has revolved around the immense potential of the museum as an educator - formally and informally. But I must tell you that my career path is also a roundabout road. A little over a year ago, I was the associate director of a history center, working feverishly to develop comprehensive programs to serve museums, libraries, archives, and other public programs. Today, I'm the associate director of the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a federal agency. Not exactly a straight line. Nonetheless there are a lot of things that built through my career - the little details make it all seem more logical than it appears on the surface.

My undergraduate degree was in English and art, and I have a master's in studio art, specifically painting. Studying art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art gave me a profound feeling for museums as natural and appropriate places for learning. I thought about working in museums right out of college. There were few museum studies programs then, so I put out applications and was actually offered a job in the Chicago Art Institute's publications department. The person who offered me the job, however, told me, "I'm going to give you a piece of career advice - don't take this job."

I was a little shocked, but he continued, "I really think you have a great passion for museums, and I'm afraid that in this large institution, particularly in the publications department, you will come to work each day without even realizing you're in a museum. It's also not going to be very easy for you to move from this particular position into an actual museum job. My advice is to start in a smaller museum. Start somewhere that you can get a sense of the whole operation, where you don't have to make an immediate decision about whether you want to pursue a career in curatorial or education practice."

I took his advice, but not for the reasons he told me - the publications job paid very little. (Unfortunately, that is one of the things you're still likely to run into along the way.) I put the experience aside, never really forgetting about it, but it would be many years before I had another museum opportunity.

I spent some years teaching English to middle school students. I spent three years as an educational consultant, constructing all those wonderful textbooks and teachers' guides that probably nobody ever used in the long run anyway! I spent a brief stint at a nursery school as a sort of low-level art teacher, until I discovered that not all little children are as adorable as those that you often think of. I spent time at both the graduate and the undergraduate levels teaching art history and art, and it was here that probably the most important route opened for me.

I was teaching art history in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and could not possibly just talk to students about a painting or a sculpture. We had to go and look at the real thing, so I began to use my community's museum quite frequently, and the staff got to know me. Eventually, I got discovered. Before I knew it, I was working at every level of that museum. It was an incredible experience. I did everything from publications to education to exhibition development to public programming, and learned what is perhaps the most important piece today - museums thrive if they are for the public, and the public will support, attend, and become involved in museums when they feel welcome. If there is a single lesson that served as the common denominator of all my museum jobs, it is the notion that the museum does indeed exist for someone. It is a lesson that applies to all museum practices.

Way back in 1975, I read a statement in a magazine article about living history museums: museums are not attics, they are forums. I've also heard it stated that museums are not temples, they are forums. The word "forum" has great impact, and it is a word that should be central to your thinking about museums.

Think about that word, and what it conjures up, concepts like the Roman forum or the idea of forums in discussion. Think about what you hear in a forum, the many different voices, the exchange of ideas, the sharing of authority, the whole sense of something that is lively, dynamic, growing, and related to real people. If you use "forum" to describe what a museum can and should be within its community - and in the broadest possible definition of its community - you will have a very vibrant image to help move you forward.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has hosted a number of recent discussions about the relationship of the museum to its community. Metaphors abound here too. Let me share some of my favorites: museums are conveners, catalysts, cornerstones, kaleidoscopes of diversity, bridges to understanding, and foremost they are places of ideas. When thinking about museums in terms of collections, objects, and activities, expand your thinking to include the idea of your museum as catalyst, cornerstone, and convener.

For decades, we have polished the most wonderful professional habits within museums. We have become quite good at collection care and exhibition techniques. Now we are taking many of those internal professional habits and looking at how they serve the broad purpose of reaching out and serving a diverse public. Recently, I've heard that museum mission statements that say, "We are about collecting, preserving, and interpreting," are actually statements of activity, not mission. The key questions are for whom and for what purpose? Keep these questions in mind as you think about shaping your museum career.

Let me detail some of the most important societal issues that have affected the evolving museum. Chief among these has been the strong emphasis on the museum as educator. We may indeed entertain and delight - I hope that people walking into museums will always have that sense of being able to say "wow" about things. But we also have a responsibility to move beyond that and provide enhanced understanding of the cultural, historical, and scientific artifacts around us, what they mean, and how they connect to the greater sense of humanity.

In this age of great competition for support of all kinds, a second important issue is accountability. We are expected to say why we are good, to document what we do, to collect and interpret data, and to use sophisticated tools for evaluation.

It is no longer sufficient to say, "We are just wonderful places." People want to know how and why. We need to open up our world of information and articulate our case.

We are also expected to reflect another powerful theme in a democratic society: equal access to all. This includes increased access to museum resources for people who might be educationally or socioeconomically disadvantaged. It incorporates access to persons with disabilities - meeting the needs of someone with a sight or hearing impairment or someone in a wheelchair changes the way we do business. We must provide access for all kinds of underrepresented groups, those who have been excluded racially or economically. We must make certain that everyone can get into the museum and has access to understanding who and what we are all about.

The fourth issue is a new emphasis on marketing skills. We not only need to collect the information that says we're good, but we must master the skills that get our message out there. The need for marketing in a world that is driven by advertising and image also changes what we do.

Finally, we must consider our roles as civic players and community citizens. Our museums are not isolated or alone. We need to consider ourselves as part of our communities. We have to think about how the museum partners with other museums, with other cultural institutions with educational overlaps, and with economic institutions within our communities.

Each of these areas - education, data collection, marketing, access, and community - takes what we do internally and puts a twist on it. Each adds a new set of responsibilities. Let me now talk about what these areas mean to you as aspiring museum professionals and what sort of training and preparation you might need.

The museum as a learning resource. Each one of us needs to understand the impact of education. When talking about educational experience, we often think in terms of children and a formal educational experience. We say to ourselves that this is the primary responsibility of museum educators. I suggest, however, that it is everyone's responsibility. Whether you are a curator, collections manager, public relations staffer, or administrator, you need to be savvy about how learning takes place. It isn't just what you have to tell - it is also how people will learn what you have to tell. You need to be knowledgeable about learning styles and theory. You need to know how exhibits communicate, and how design - juxtaposition, color, and organization - contributes to the learning experience of your visitors. Everything needs to be sensitively developed. Knowing what motivates people to visit the museum is important to doing your job effectively.

Audience research and evaluation. We need to understand who visits our museum. How does the museum visit affect people? Who does not visit? We need to think about data collection as an extraordinarily important tool in what we do every day because there is an increased need for museums to articulate their worth and reach multiple audiences, including donors, fund-raisers, and policy makers. We need to create a mindset among staff to value this process. Staff may consider the work boring and tedious, but we need to respect the significance of data collection at all administrative levels. This should be built into program development, so that our exhibits, programs, and visitor activities all include opportunities for important dialogue with all audiences.

Strategies for access. Many communities are underserved by and underrepresented in our museums. What strategies are we going to put together to make certain we heal these breaches? We need leadership in this area. Museums need to know the needs of their communities. We need to know how to analyze demographics effectively and how to invite diverse opinions into our processes. You will need skills in outreach, developing participation, and inviting multiple perspectives. You need to have a real touch for listening and setting up forums where people exchange ideas - and you must be open to new ideas. You also need to be savvy about where people are, where they gather, and who's willing to share interesting and important information with you. A whole host of interpersonal skills, including a core openness, are necessary for working with diverse audiences. For society to prosper, we simply cannot afford cultural exclusion.

Marketing opportunities. Getting the word out isn't just the job of public relations and marketing. Everyone working in a museum must be able to tell the story of that institution. Everyone who works on collections, exhibitions, or programs needs to be aware of the stories within those collections, exhibitions, and programs. You must also be attuned to ways of translating ideas into visual images. To help to create an identity for your institution, you must be able to bring the full range of wonderful, rich, personal, human stories to the attention of the marketing people in your institution. All staff must have PR savvy to do this well.

Museums as active civic players. I can't think of anything more important than an increased need for civility and respect at the heart of our institutions. There is a growing recognition that economic and social vitality in our communities can't be achieved alone - we have to work in concert with the whole. This means you must be willing to be a part of your communities, both as an organization and as an individual. It means you might have to go to other board meetings late at night, or attend Rotary meetings at 6:30 AM. You must be willing to listen to the needs of your communities and interpret them correctly, so that your museum can determine how it might be able to address those needs. You need to be sensitive to collections that could shed light on your museum's history or that could reveal instances of how groups of people in the community resolved similar problems in the past.

Each one of these areas requires you to think broadly. You are going to have many opportunities to learn specific skills. Take advantage of them and learn to place them within the broad context of services to your many audiences.

I conclude with a summary of those things I think you will need for a museum career in the new millennium: a broad understanding of learning and how people learn; a breadth of social and interpersonal skills, especially listening skills; an ability to conduct audience research and evaluation; a willingness to apply what you learn through evaluation; an interest in your communities and an openness to diverse opinions; a talent for negotiating discussion to permit, evoke, and validate many different viewpoints; and a knowledge of contemporary business practices. I haven't even touched on management, including marketing. Be well read; look for connections between objects and the bigger ideas they represent; have subject expertise, but be courageous enough to express a point of view, and generous enough to entertain divergence and controversy; and finally, sustain a continuing passion for the idea of museums as forums for all people.

Thank you.

Pat Williams

I think Beverly did a great job of identifying the skills, abilities, and experiences that you should bring to the table when you work at a museum. I'm going to build on that and maybe add some things to this overview of today's ever-changing museum community. I'm going to talk from a tension point of view, laying out some of the stresses that are going on in our institutions. I may reiterate what Beverly has said, but within that context of tension. I'll start by saying something different about Charles Willson Peale's museum.

The American Association of Museums (AAM) published Mermaids, Mummies and Mastodons, a book about the history of Peale's museum. It's still available through our bookstore, and it's actually quite a wonderful read. A couple of things strike me in my remembrance of it. Peale had a little bit of the Barnum in him - he was interested in entertainment as well as education, and he was very interested in getting people to visit his museum.

Two of his sons shared his enthusiasm and later founded their own museums in Baltimore and New York. In Baltimore, Rembrandt Peale set up a partnership with several other businesses to build a gasworks to gaslight his museum so it could be open at night. He realized that many people worked during the day and were not able to visit the museum. I think that he had an earlier understanding about how difficult it could be for common people to visit his museum, and perhaps a little broader definition of access than we might think. Sadly, his museum is now closed. It only failed two years ago, but it failed. There are lessons to be learned about why it failed, and I want to use some of those lessons to illustrate some of the tensions we're facing in the museum community today. There is a real set of global, ethical issues that museums are being asked to deal with more sensitively and more thoughtfully than we have in the past.

The first issue is the tension between the original role of the institution - collection conservation, stewardship, and protection - and the movement toward greater access. Allowing the public to have a more complete experience of the museum object, while preserving that object at the same time, often engenders lively discussion within the institution, particularly between conservators, curators, and educators.

We are asked to be more thoughtful about whose material culture these objects represent. To whom do these objects really belong, and who has the authority to interpret them for the general public? Two important examples come to mind.

Next year, we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act. The NAGPRA legislation was passed to ensure that Native Americans would have an opportunity to recover human remains, sacred objects, and associated burial material from many museums in this country. When the legislation was introduced ten years ago, the museum community's ethical and moral position on these matters was different from its views today. As a matter of fact, scientific curators in particular were outraged at the idea that they had to return these objects to native peoples. They protested loudly that they had no opportunity, as anthropologists, pathologists, etc., to study human remains that had important lessons to tell us. They were outraged as cultural anthropologists that they had no opportunity to study the cultural material associated with burial and religious practices.

There was a great cry to protest, fight, and reject NAGPRA. The government and public affairs office at the American Association of Museums was ready to join this protest. As director of standards, I warned them not to go in that direction, arguing that we did not want to lead the American museum community towards a position that would protest the return of human remains and sacred objects. I sort of brought a little sense to the group, and we sat down and began a dialogue and got a piece of legislation that still has a tone of that earlier resistance. Today, when museums look at the NAGPRA regulations, it is often with a sense of rejection because they didn't come from the individuals up, but from the top down. That is our own fault because we should have been more sensitive to these issues when they were first brought to our attention.

The second example is the issue of cultural property that has been illicitly imported to this country. This can include items taken from Ecuador, North Africa, or Turkey, or things that were stolen or confiscated during the Nazi era, 1933-45. The return of those cultural property materials, mostly artworks (but in the future we're also going to look at stamps, coins, rare books, and other materials confiscated by the Nazis) to the rightful owners can be complicated. Our colleagues today are thinking about these issues much more sensibly than they would have ten years ago. We have set up policies to look at ways to balance ownership with shared authority, shared access, or return.

NAGPRA and other cultural property issues require flexible thinking. Because we are public trust institutions, we must create a balance between keeping the material available to the public and ensuring that the rightful owners receive their property back or at least have a share of the responsibility for any objects that remain in our collections.

Beverly touched on another tension when she mentioned management. Our institutions need better management, particularly at the senior level. From the perspective of senior management, I would say that today's numerous museum graduate training programs are not giving their students enough experience in institution management. The AAM board, composed of 21 museum directors, regularly complains that graduate training programs are still not giving us individuals with the experience and training that we need. We are trying to encourage graduate training program directors and museum directors to work together to ensure that graduate training is congruent with what museum directors really want when they recruit people to work in their institutions.

In particular, directors feel that newly minted graduates lack financial management training. There is tremendous pressure on museums today to be self-supporting, but this is quite a challenge when you're running a cultural institution, and it can often clash with the mission. The vigorous movement towards the earned revenue has to be balanced with the mission. This creates a huge tension within our institutions today.

I conduct a financial management survey every couple of years on the economics of running a museum. In 1997, 31 percent of our funding came from government, versus 1989 when it was 40 percent. So you have a 9 percent drop in overall government support. Private support, on the other hand, is now at 24 percent versus 19 percent, and earned income is at 33 percent versus 30 percent. So, we must earn our own way in a more vigorous manner today. It's also important to know that the sectors of government support have changed dramatically. In 1989, the federal government was a major source of government funding to museums. Today, it's far and away local government that gives more substantial funding than either state or federal government. What this also says is that you need to stay savvy and politically active in your community. When it's time for the budget review and you go before the city or county council, they need to know you as somebody who is active in the community and involved in civic affairs. I'm presenting this for a slightly different reason than Beverly did - when the budget is passed, I want your institution to be part of the cultural mix that's being funded at the local level.

Members of the museum community differ about who our audience should be. Museums are under pressure now to attract a greater number of tourists because tourists bring dollars to the community. The AAM has been working in cultural and heritage tourism, and the number of dollars that it can bring to a community is astonishing. Tourism is the second largest economic base in the city of Washington, generating a huge percentage of the city's budget. All the cultural institutions, from the Smithsonian to the Historical Society of Washington, are under tremendous pressure to be visitor-ready and tourist-friendly. And yet, many of those institutions, including the Historical Society and the Phillips Collection, also see themselves as being here to serve residents of D.C. and the greater metropolitan area. The tension between being ready for a huge number of tourists and still keeping educational programs to serve the residential population puts a great deal of stress on institutions these days. The balance between these two things is something all of us are thinking about.

Although the tourist population in Washington is very important to museums, it brings environmental problems to our city. Huge numbers of tour buses all over the Mall and the city streets are damaging to the infrastructure of the streets. They are also causing harm to the buildings, and, in some cases, to people. Some of our more creative colleagues in Baltimore have banded together to buy an old bottling plant in the Inner Harbor to create a bus corral to reduce the number of buses on the city streets. Who would have thought that the museum business would have to think about buses and where to put them? This is another example of the skills that have to be at your fingertips.

Another stress on the institution is top-down authority versus shared authority. Our institutions are moving more towards team management - groups making decisions together - but institutionally we're still very structured with a CEO at the top and everybody else below. That is a difficult stress on the institution because we want to promote team management but we haven't yet set up reward systems to encourage teamwork. You are still rewarded by what you accomplish and what you add, in many cases, to the institution's bottom line.

We're seeing a lot of pressure to focus on the institution and ensure it is whole and well taken-care-of, yet at the same time we can't do that in isolation from the broader community. One of the hardest issues that Beverly has alluded to is how museums and communities work together. IMLS is now doing a project, and AAM is getting ready to launch a project, concerning museums and communities. Several years ago we did a smaller, one-city project in Philadelphia, "Museums and the Life of the City." We found that when community organizations aren't familiar with museums, and museums aren't familiar with community organizations, a lot of planning, dialogue, and seeking for mutuality of interest must take place before the two institutions can begin to work together systemically.

When we partnered the Freedom Theatre and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, they didn't speak the same language for the first six to eight months. It took a number of face-to-face dialogues before they began to understand how they could possibly work together. The financial reality of that particular project was that our funder wanted us to solve the problem in a short amount of time. These are not projects that can be done in a short amount of time - they require long-term sustained work and a real commitment on the part of the museum to change the way it does business, from top to bottom. This kind of systemic change in an institution is not an easy thing to bring about.

I echo everything Beverly said about career skills. I would add that there are some skills you probably would have to acquire outside of your current graduate or undergraduate program. One is a good understanding of how a community works: how planning takes place, who makes decisions, where the seats of power lie. Some background in political science and community urban planning doesn't hurt. Clearly, financial management is important. If you can't read a profit and loss statement, don't come into the field. We now have new trustees coming onto museum boards, and the first thing they want to know about is the bottom line and how you get there every year. All staff are now responsible for making sure the bottom line is black and not red.

Another thing that I haven't touched on - and it is my grand passion - is technology. It is totally transformational of society, and its going to be totally transformational of museums. Its growth and use in museums is phenomenal. We have the opportunity to digitize collections and make them available on the Internet. We have an explosion of museum web sites. We have the ability to reach broader audiences, to develop long-term relationships with schools, and to readily provide course material and curriculum over the Internet. Yet there are tensions here as well. Do we give it away, or do we charge for it? Should we make all of this material accessible to the public when we have a responsibility to take care of four walls, a collection, and our employees? I think that we could do a little bit of both, and use things like site licensing. We should make material available for educational purposes, but add a hefty fee on the material that is going out for commercial use.

Technology is also going to change the way the organization operates. The ability to communicate solely by email sounds silly, but there truly is less paper on my desk. I think we're going to see change after change in this arena, coming so fast that our institutions are going to be overwhelmed in some cases. Our museums will need to recruit people with advanced technology skills.

I will conclude with a little bit about how I got to where I am today - again, the circuitous route, funny things that happen to you, serendipity. You may not plan it, even if you have a well-developed resume and good counseling.

I had an opportunity to work for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, an organization that now has 353 employees and a $50 million budget. When I went to work there, they had 13 employees. I was with the Trust during an amazing period of growth. I started out filing photographs, then did photographic research, became the archivist, and then the coordinator of research. I had an opportunity to go into education, which I grabbed, and loved every minute of it. I also felt that I needed more management experience, so I took the opportunity to become the personnel administrator and also got a graduate degree in organizational development, which has been a wonderful tool for me.