Tomorrow's Breakfast for Museum Champions

(The following is based on a presentation given at the 1997 American Association of Museums meeting. The session, "Getting Up To Date: Guidelines for 21st Century Museum Studies Programs," began a dialog about new guidelines for museum studies and professional museum training programs. Three panelists, Bryant Tolles from the University of Delaware, Ricardo Viera from Lehigh University, and myself spoke briefly about the history of, the present needs and future needs of museum studies programs in the United States. I spoke on human resource needs in the 21st Century museum. The 1998 AAM meeting will continue this dialog in the session, "Reaching Excellence: Museum Studies in the 21st Century.")

Hi, I'm from the future and because so I am going to be relatively brief and a bit non-linear.

If anything, the criteria and guidelines (1) that were set up in 1978 through 1983 for museum studies programs - that are still with us - are inwardly focused. They look at the museum in a vacuum. The museum is not in a vacuum - it is very externally oriented and in the future (and now) we have to be much more outward looking in what we are training our people to do and what museums are going to be doing.

There will be changing demographics (that is obvious). Museums are going to have to accommodate a wide variety of demands from a wide variety of people. Museums will be a place of process. There will always be a core population that will support the "traditional" museums that we have now but museums should become more a place where people can go and have dialogue. We should be training for that. We have to have more communication and connections made, more collaborations. There is more work with our communities that has to be done in the future.

The museum community has got to do a better job of educating the public as to what it is museums do and why we do it. How does the public perceive us? What is it that we do? Do we do education? Entertainment? Information? How is that incorporated into our curriculum?

Collections are going to continue to demand attention but what is it that we are going to collect and how is it that we are going to collect them? How do we train for that?

Electronic access will increase. Computer literacy has to be taught. It is not enough to hire a specialist. Museum staff are going to have to know more about technology if only so that they can be capable of being better able to hire somebody to do some of the more technological things.

More management training is needed. It cannot be just an option - it has to be put into graduate training programs. There has to be teamwork within the organization and we have to acknowledge the broad range of duties that people do. Even if they are not the director of an organization, people become supervisors - they need interpersonal and management skills. This has to be put into our curriculum.

Globalization: our students must know the resources that are out there. There is a lot of exciting literature being written in England and Canada. There is in this country too. But in terms of U.S. museums, we have to perhaps step back and be a little more theoretical and abstract. It is maybe a cultural thing here that we have a lot of American practical know-how, but I think it would help the profession if we could sit back and be a little more theoretical sometimes and I think that should be incorporated into the curriculum.

My last thought is: what is the satisfaction that a museum career brings to us? How do we incorporate that passion and sense of satisfaction given the seeming willingness to put up with substandard salaries, oftentimes inadequate resources, 60-80 hour work weeks, into the curriculum?

I now return you to the present.

Bruce C. Craig is Deputy Director, Smithsonian Center for Museum Studies and current Secretary for the AAM's Committee on Museum Professional Training.