Museums for the New Millennium:

Proceedings:
Town Meeting

	One, to reexamine what we are collecting and why.
	For museums to become generators, as opposed to mere reflectors of culture.
	For museums to begin to help communities place themselves in the wider world and to use our exhibits and other programs to validate and legitimize that process, that effort.
	To provide a forum for a continuing dialogue between the museum and its audiences.
	For museums to see themselves as preservers of culture.
	For museums to become testing grounds or laboratories for new concepts.
	Museums to see themselves as risk-takers.
	To inform the public how the meaning of objects change once they're removed from their original context.
	To build new models for expanding collections.
	To make sure the meanings of objects are understood and their relationship and connection to human society.
	To build collaborations with other kinds of institutions, churches, and businesses, all other kinds.
	And finally, to engage people in a new way of thinking.

I don't think that covers really the breadth and the depth of our thinking, but that gives some of the highlights and I would welcome Tom Hill or anyone else from that session to add anything to this.

MR. ELLIS: Don't you dare go anywhere. You've got 10 minutes. Let me ask you a question about the "how." [I ask] the group that put this together: How would you do this? Just pick one, and then tell me how you would do that.

MS. JAMES: You want me to do that.

MR. ELLIS: Or any other member of your group.

MS. JAMES: Could someone else from the group help me? I will start. It's hard to pick just one. I was thinking about Dr. Ghose talking about museums, particularly in developing countries. We used to think of museums as being mere repositories of culture[...were] we take objects and materials in from living cultures, we interpret them, we restage them, we present them. But many developing countries are beginning to think about how museums can be put at the service [of the] developing nations in terms of building nationhood, in terms of issues of language, of ethnicity, of looking at multiethnic states and trying to bring diverse groups of people together to basically build a nation. That's one way we started thinking about some of the future challenges of museums in the 21st century. Anyone can add on to that, that challenge to the museum.

I think particularly we got started on talking about museums as generators of culture in response to one of the earlier presentations this morning about the role of museums in World Number One, Number Two and World Number Three, and we were talking about the fact that museums perhaps have a lot more to do in developing nations than we were able to talk about this morning.

MR. ELLIS: Okay. Thank you, Portia.

The second group was Gordon Pullar and Douglas Evelyn.

MR. EVELYN: Gordon is right down here and will help if there are any questions.

We had the same subject, the purposes of museums. Our group reflected well, I think, the total spectrum of interests here. We did have people who felt that the traditional purposes of museums: collecting, documenting, working with the public to define what is important to be retained and researched, were important but that we'll wind up doing them in new ways. There was great emphasis on what was called the "forum," the capacity of a museum to be a forum for the community, a place for sharing stories, for exchanging information about different cultures, for creating linkages between people. A center in the community. This related, as well, to the concept of reaching into the museum's resources and making accessible the information that museums have. So there was both an emphasis on building new information through these associations with a broader spectrum of the community, as well as sharing information that is retained within the museum and passed on through the museum, sharing that information in new ways.

There was a concern about validation: the museum as a place for validating the authentic, separating the real from the reproduction. There was a concern about being a place of quality. There was a concern that we should be places for volunteerism in the best sense: a place that engages people from the community to come in and work with evidence of their own past, help interpret it and make it available for other people in the community. This is one way in which the museum serves as a forum for engaging people and bringing them in and helping them to work together.

[Other ideas in our discussion included] the business of telling your story and learning the stories of others, the museum as an agent for building partnerships in the community, and an emphasis on operating efficiently. In order to serve their communities effectively and get the support that is needed to continue, the museums have to operate more efficiently and they have to deliver their product wisely.

There was an understanding in our group that, in order to be these kinds of institutions (that are more actively engaging, are transmitters of information and gatherers and generators of information that engage the public) we'll also have to have new attitudes and new tools for getting the information out.

This is the idea of "in-reach," of the ocean liner image mentioned this morning. There are resources that have been hidden, are below the water line (I guess that's an appropriate image for this building here, especially today) that need to be made accessible. They can be made accessible if the right attitudes are there and if we use the tools that we have wisely.

Gordon, are there other matters that you or any of the members of my group that would like to add to that?

MR. ELLIS: There was one comment that you made. What if your board of trustees gives you the mandate to diversify, to broaden your perspective. You need to go out and do much more with the community and make the community a part of your museum when you have 30 years of experience of not doing that. All of a sudden you have to turn around and begin to do that. The board has mandated it but they are not giving you any idea of how you do that.

What kinds of strategies would you recommend or that your group talked about that would in some way begin to make inroads into communities that heretofore have been outside of the museum?

MR. EVELYN: I think the fact that the board mandating that you do that is at least a good start, you're not pulling the board. And then I think if the board is properly constructed, the board is an initial vehicle for that. Can Mary Case or some of the other members of my group speak to that?

MARY CASE: The first thing I would do with the board is hold up a mirror to make sure that they were reflecting themselves in what they were asking me to do.

MR. EVELYN: Other comments? The concern is: the board's willing and you're not sure how to do it. That's basically it? Well, if the board were reflective of the community, I'd certainly start there since they are paying me, and telling me what to do, that would be logical. But I think we would look for resources to build the staff to reflect that community, and to provide the proactivity. I think that's another theme that went through our meeting. That has to do with these new attitudes.

You've got to go out. We went through a lot of words: inclusivity, transparency, community-based. Somebody said societal glue. You know, that museums ought to be more malleable than they are. I would like to think they are more malleable than schools. And we need to use that versatility that we have inherently to meet these goals.

MR. ELLIS: Thank you, sir. [The last group to discuss this topic was led by Stephen Weil and Diane Frankel.]

MR. WEIL: Doug referred to the "topic," museum purpose. We had the "question" of museum purpose. We began with some, a minority within the group, who really questioned the question, and wondered why we needed at this point, after our many, many years in the field, to be looking at these questions. They felt that perhaps we were too caught up in the rhetoric of the day instead of being willing to rely on what had been some very traditional strengths of museums.

They felt that we were being put on the defensive by questions like these. And some cautioned us not to under-estimate or neglect the huge importance that existing collections have as a baseline for knowledge about the past, for scientific research and for other reasons. So we certainly were not a monolithic group.

I think the majority of the group, though, embraced the question as a legitimate question and used it to focus on what they felt was a shift of focus in the field from collections to audiences. There was some suggestion that that was not the first time that this shift has occurred that, this may be a cyclic thing that has happened in the museum field over the century. But there was a pretty broad agreement that audiences were probably what we were going to have to talk about if we were talking about purpose. I would say that's about the last thing we agreed on.

With Diane and I as co-chairs, I think we felt like we were breeding guppies. We walked in with two people and walked out with 100 questions.

There were some very tough questions asked about audiences. Should we be talking about audiences as "they," somebody very apart from us, or are audiences a "we" of which we are a part?

Are we dispensing things from ourselves to them or is this really an enterprise which is a seamless connection between the people who visit museums and the people who work in museums.

There are questions about whether museums ought to be defining the communities they serve or whether they should be seeking to serve everyone or whether it is possible for any one museum to be all things to all people.

There were some very, very difficult questions posed about where the authority lay or how that authority was exercised to make decisions about what it is that a museum wanted to do with an audience, what outcomes or impacts was it seeking with the audience. To what extent was that something that the general public decided, to what extent was that something that funders decided, to what extent was it something decided by museum staffs? How do you balance conflicting interests if they are in conflict with these various stakeholders?

I think what began to come up toward the end were some very specific and, I thought, some very, very positive statements about what it is that museums might be doing with those audiences. The emphasis was on the museum as a means, the museum as a tool, not the museum as an end in itself. And some of the things that that were suggested involve the museum both as a tool for social development and the museum as a tool for individual development.

In terms of social development, there was thrown out the idea of creating a sense of community, the idea of capturing a people's history and of giving them a sense of identity.

In terms of individual development, there was again the notion of identity: the museum could be a place where people re-encountered their identity. Also the sense that the museum was a place where they could come for active learning. There was quite a bit of stress on the fact that it was up to the visitor very frequently to take responsibility for that learning. The museum could provide the means for it but visitors had responsibilities, as well.

There was a suggestion also (and it was really in response to the question of, if learning can occur in a variety of sites, what is it that privileges the museum site and makes that a better site?) that the museum provided a kind of experience that could connect people to bodies of knowledge in ways that they could not be connected through other institutions, not through schools, not through television, not even necessarily through the Web or cyberspace in general.

For me, I think the most important thing that I heard and found most moving was the notion that in the end, the importance of museums is that museums can help society to make better decisions. Museums can prepare people who live in a community to make better decisions about how they will govern themselves, what their community will look like, how they will relate to one another. [The people in the community] can help shape museums in highly desirable ways. I think that pretty much sums up.

Diane, wherever you are, do you have more to add?

Diane: I think you did a great job.

MR. ELLIS: From the perspective of Stephen Weil, as you look at not only what museums need to do in order to become viable institutions in the coming years, what do you see in terms of what's needed in terms of leadership?

MR. WEIL: I think what is needed in leadership are people who will be able to articulate in what way museums add value to the society. We ask museums to be supported not simply by the people who come to them. We ask many more people than that to contribute toward their support. We need to be able to be highly articulate in telling those people that we are asking to support museums, what that value is and it seems to me consistent with what we heard earlier today that museum leadership is largely going to be exercised outside the museum, rather than inside the museum.

We know how to run museums today. We have dozens and dozens of people that are superb at running museums. What we need are people who can represent museums in the community, who have sufficient knowledge of the museum discipline to speak with authority and who also are able to speak, as I think they can, convincingly to the rest of the world as to why we are worthy of support.

MR. ELLIS: Other comments, questions for Steven? Thank you, sir.

MR. WEIL: Thank you.

MR. ELLIS: Now, what do museums do now that is too important to be lost? The next group is headed by Betsy Bennett, David Pawson, and they were joined I believe by Maarten Frankenhuis and Michael Robinson. Who is going to represent that group?

Mr. Pawson: Good afternoon. We had a very busy group and we came up with about 10 statements. "What do museums do now that's too important to be lost?" This wasn't discussed but I think the most obvious thing is that they employ a lot of people.

We all agreed that objects remain the physical heart of museums, there's no question about that. We also agreed that they stimulate a strange affective response in members of the human species and these objects connect people with the world around them.

Museums must remain places that foster critical thinking, providing real comparisons between actual objects and between cultures. And they must also continue to assist in filtering information in answering questions and in posing new questions to the visitors.

Museums must continue to conserve specimens and a personal bias of mine is that they must conserve them in increasing numbers.

They must continue to provide an interface to the public for researchers and their collections. And they must continue to be storytellers in the grand sense, providing a context for understanding difficult concepts of all kinds.

Museums must foster connections to memories and personal experiences. That's involved with the storytelling aspect, as well.

We felt that the public must have access to the expertise of the staff, the specialists and curators in the museum, and we felt this is a very important point. And the communication between the public and the staff must go in both directions. The public has a lot to offer as well to the staff of museums.

Museums must remain as trustworthy places, inspiring the confidence of visitors.

Museums must continue to seek funds at the state and national level in increasing quantities. In relation to putting "stuff" up onto the World Wide web, we wondered how objectively important it is. Most of us in the room felt that the Web provides for us a very important billboard experience. It stimulates the interest of the viewer and can actually draw people to museums.

And it was felt that in this day of -- and tomorrow of -- World Wide Web activities, the sites themselves provide a stimulus that cannot be matched. Whether we like it or not, we will be increasingly involved in web activities.

I would like to thank Betsy Bennett, Michael Robinson and Maarten Frankenhuis for making me come up here.

MR. ELLIS: Any further comments from anyone else from that committee? Here is a question I'm going to ask once everybody has finished so you can begin to think about it.

What didn't we ask that you wish we would have?

Carmen Ruiz-Fischler and Cynthia Adams Hoover, had a group as well to deal with this issue. Cynthia, okay.

MS. HOOVER: We had a wonderfully diverse group that included people from specialty museums, anthropology, history, community museums, educators, curators, directors, a couple consumers, a graduate student who is very puzzled about what museums really are and is at this conference to see if he can find out, and a high school teacher. So we had an unusual and I think a stimulating group to work with.

We saw the question as asking for things that were positive, not negative: What do museums do now that is too important to be lost? And we are a very optimistic group, so we came away with feeling that most museums are already moving into the future and are developing the skills to thrive in the new millennium.

We agreed that museums should continue to serve their communities, however that community is defined. W had a little heated discussion about whether museums should do everything and then we quoted what an earlier speaker this morning said, that you should realize that different museums have different communities, and I think that's something.

We affirmed that museums should continue to interpret life and culture through collections, through public programs, through tours, teaching. I come from music so I think it should be performances, too, and through embracing new technology.

We should remain as places for communicating. This word communicating came up a lot; and dialogue, that word came up a lot, too.

Museums should remain as a place for inspiring a sense of wonder and a sense of place. They should be open classrooms, a place for teaching. We had a wonderful example with the high school teacher that had a class [which has made a] CD-ROM with the University of Pennsylvania Museum, called Create. She was explaining to us what museums bring to her classroom and it was very exciting to hear. So we felt at least one place, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, was doing a very good job in that area.

We should continue to ask questions and sometimes answer them. We talked about ways that we might get people to interact more so we can get their questions, too.

Wwe didn't all agree on the importance of collections. Some of us felt that they were vital, that's what distinguished museums, but I thought one thing that we said was really important: we collect not only things but also ideas.

We should enlarge -- and when we were talking about collections, we were given the instance of a community museum in Alexandria, Virginia, which has been meeting a certain public and has certain collections for that. Now, Alexandria has a large community of Vietnamese people. What do they do to reach that community? Can they start collecting in that area? Should they? As we seek new ways to reach new communities, we felt one way,without going into a lot of collecting, was through collaborations between museums and other cultural institutions.

We really felt that the time limit came much sooner than we wanted. We debated whether we should just keep on talking and not make a report here. We decided that we only scratched the surface of what museums are doing today and are very optimistic about the future of museums.

Thank you.

MR. ELLIS: Tell me some more about this hot issue that caused the arguments. What did you say it was again, about the role of museums or the audiences of museums?

MS. HOOVER: About the communities, that they [museums] should try to reach a lot of their communities.

MR. ELLIS: Why did it get hot? Why did it get heated, do you remember?

MS. HOOVER: Someone in our group felt very strongly about this. Would you like to speak up if you did? [There is no response]

MR. ELLIS: I say "Not in this forum!" When do you say no? When do you say there's a new community there. There's a new constituency there. We should be reaching that group. We should be reaching this group. When do you say no, we can't do that. We simply don't have the resources, we don't have the expertise. We simply can't do that. When do you say that?

MR. MACKAY: I was a member of that group. I'm not the one that started any kind of heated debate. But I think one point that we touched on that actually I think I did raise was that occasionally the community that you're serving can change faster than your institution or collection is able to change in meeting that new segment of the community's needs. Things can happen very quickly and we all realize that if we're going to be as responsive as possible to larger segments of the community, a broader representation of the community, we need to be pretty flexible, pretty fast on our feet. And I don't think that was anything heated, but --

MS. HOOVER: We suggested this could be done through programs not only in in the museum itself but go out to those communities.

MR. MACKAY: If your collection itself cannot link to that community then do something else meaningful to that community. You, as a representative of that community, need to find some other, non-object related way to reach that community and make yourself meaningful to them.

MR. ELLIS: In the rear.

VOICE: I think you say that [saying no] when you want all the people in your employ and yourself to cash their last paycheck. I think it would be self destructive to say that.

MR. ELLIS: Does anybody else think it would be self destructive to say no? Not now?

VOICE: I think what we're doing is we're not making decisions. We just don't look at our other audiences fairly enough so we don't say yes, we don't say no. I'm not even sure that's the right question.

DR. GHOSE: I just wanted to say that we have to first make a move, like the people who play the chess. We have to first make a move. If we say that we do not have the resources, we do not have money, we do not have people, we do not have the objects, then nothing can be done. One has to make a move.

I look after a fairly large chain of science museums in India. when I say before any gathering that we don't have any funding problem, people stare at me. I know that we, the Science Museums in India, are probably some kind of an exception even in my own country when we say we have no funding problem. We have plenty of money to do our work. This did not come automatically. It took about 15 years' time to develop that kind of credibility with the private sector who funds us. But once the people had that patience and developed the credibility, it was done. You would be floating in money.

MS. HOOVER: Rich upstairs.

VOICE: Rich raised the question of when do you go into the community, [what is] the importance of collecting from the community. What if you are charged to start a museum in northeast Idaho and now you're there and you find yourself amongst the skinheads and Aryan Nation and all these other folks who want to see themselves reflected in their community.

Are you going to reflect them? Are you going to reflect those values in the community?

MR. ELLIS: Did everybody hear the question? What if Rex Ellis has been charged with beginning a museum in northeast Idaho and has been charged with reflecting the culture of skinheads, the Aryan Nation, the John Birch society and all of the rest of it. What do you collect, what decisions do you make? What exhibitions do you mount?

MS. HILL: They wouldn't have you as the director, probably.

MR. ELLIS: So what are you saying? She said they probably wouldn't have me as the director.

VOICE: One of the issues that I think is important is looking at what are communities. Are we talking about communities as particular segments within a population? What population are we looking at? Are we looking at a specific geographic segment in our traditional markets? Or a subset of that, be it based on race or on some geographic subset.

With the introduction of World Wide Web technologies, are we going to be developing empires where we have a completely different sense of communities. Or are we going to have new communities that we're serving across the world? And how do we begin to address the issues of addressing those communities' needs?

Where do our priorities lie? Do our priorities end up lying in our local geographic communities? Do they lie where we're receiving our funding? Or do they lie in those consuming our resources and who are using the facilities that we have and the information we can provide?

VOICE: I think one of the things is to relate it back to our mission. We just don't have, like the Smithsonian, such a broad mission. So we really need to reflect the various missions of our institutions and go with the strengths that we have. As an anthropology museum, we can't continue to collect everything. It is not the Noah's Ark approach to get two of everything in our museum and be complete and continue to do that.

We have to keep working on the strengths that we have. We have to represent the majority and strengths of our community. Every time a new population comes in, I don't think we have to continue to be Noah's Ark.

VOICE: I want to go back to answering your question about Rex's museum in northeast Idaho. I think it should be a museum of tolerance. We haven't talked about that very much and I think that is critical to the future of society and the future of our museums. We have to learn to get along with each other. The subjects that you mentioned that are going to be in that museum are represented in many of our institutions so they are not explicated properly so we can understand and learn from them. You can borrow from all of us and when the museum has achieved its purpose you can give them back to us. I think we can have maybe many museums like that around.

Museums may come and go as society ebbs and flows and I think that is something [to consider] when you build your museum in Idaho.

VOICE: I think one of the things we have to look to in the future is answering the question "can we represent all of our communities?" with the question, again, "how?" One of the things that's always impressed me as I continue with the museum profession is the way in which we creatively develop different ways of communicating. We don't always reach a community by an exhibition or by an educational program. We can do it by special events. We can do it by community outreach. We use a variety of creative techniques. And for the future the ability to reach a variety of audiences is going to be our continued creativity in finding different ways to reach audiences. They are not all created equal. In terms of the number of people we represent, I think that's where we have to look to the future.

MR. ELLIS: Cynthia, I bet you didn't think you would be up there that long. You can come on down. Thank you very much.

Another comment.

MS. RUIZ-FISCHLER: One thing I wanted to add is sometimes, as museums get more exposure in their community, they're being asked to provide many more services than they are able to do. It's not a matter of saying no, it's a matter of listening to whatever they're asking for and finding ways of helping them find solutions. It happens to us in the Ponce Museum of Art. We have the only conservation laboratory [in Puerto Rico]. We can't conserve the whole of Puerto Rican culture but we try to help with seminars, consultants, finding ways to solve the problems together. Many times that is what we're being asked. So it's not turning them away but helping them find solutions.

MR. ELLIS: Thank you very much. Other comments. In the back.

VOICE: I think it's too easy to assume that there's a universal model for a good museum, kind of platonic idea when in fact one of our strengths is the innumerable models we have come up with over the years for good museums.

MR. ELLIS: So that we all have a place. And there's still room for more. Okay. Let's hear from the third question. What are the core conflicts challenging museums? Alissandra Cummins and Francine Berkowitz. Who's your spokesperson?

Ms. Cummins: I am.

MR. ELLIS: What are the core conflicts challenging museums?

Ms. Cummins: We had a very interesting group with us. The panel that met was small and intimate, but represented a broad panoply of museums and issues that were involved in the discussions that we undertook. But nevertheless, by the end of the session, rather at the very beginning, we were able to identify three major issues that we wanted to discuss. And the issues were very much the same across the board, whether big or small museums, whether they were scientific versus cultural institutions, whether they had resources or did not have resources.

What made the difference was perhaps the level of access and availability of human and financial resources in all three areas.

Museums have clearly taken care of a very small part of the potential audience, and what came across in our discussions was that there was a need to reach out to all of those audiences we had not yet addressed. In doing so, a lot of the experience of these museums was that the whole action kind of gathered steam and overtook the museums in trying to achieve their goals.

The questions that the group looked at were [1.] The ivory tower versus outreach. [2.] Technology versus traditional museum techniques. And [3.] business culture versus the museum culture, some of which have been addressed in other groups but I hope we can bring our own unique vision to this discussion.

In terms of the business culture versus the museum culture, we discussed this issue in the context of both the management of museums and the funding of museums. In terms of business funding, our group's response to this topic was to regard this as a potential conflict, not just about how to get it, how to get the funding, but what did you have to give to get the funding. And that raised a whole series of conflicts in terms of the museum's vision.

Also in terms of the management of museums, our group's response tended to regard the practice of business management techniques, strategies and philosophies as having the potential for being invasionary rather than visionary in approach. So we also needed to look at how we could take the best of business management practices and apply them in the museum context and where could we find the balance between the two.

I have to say that one of the very major points that came out of this part of the discussion was the reality that there was no getting away from the need for public funding. It just is a reality. You have to have a public funding in order very often to access the private funding that has become so vital to many of the museums.

We needed to learn to accept and incorporate new ideas, new values, but at the same time, take a stance that business must also accept the validity of the museum culture.

In terms of the ivory tower versus community outreach concept, the museums have largely been involved in serving a very minute proportion of the potential audience, and now the museum is being asked to be a social agent without being given the necessary tools to do the job. Here we recognize that the reality of both situations, whether ivory tower or community outreach. Often the museum has an internal conflict as to what it is. Could it be one without the other? Was it a combination of both? Was it a comfortable combination? These things of course we discussed but did not or could not resolve.

The fact of the conflict and the distance between both stances was also part of the discussion. In reality, the position that museums have reached today is obviously due to some of the points raised before: Lack of resources, lack of communications, and loss of validity to a broad museum audience. And this has created a position almost of confrontation with the very audience that we serve or pretend to serve. We had very graphic examples drawn to our attention where museum staff were being threatened by the audience they sought to serve.

In order to attract and engage this audience, its sympathies and its support, the museum has to respond in a number of ways, and in so doing, they become a social worker, a health educator, a sports organizer in one context. These are some of the examples that were drawn in this discussion.

Ironically, in order to reach their audience, the traditional museum media has in itself become a potential issue. In some sense, community audiences, when they were invited to, wanted to tell a story that was often or largely celebratory rather than inclusive of historical conflict. How does the museum address these issues of seeking to expose what we regard as the reality of that new history and how do we at the same time address the audience's needs and desires?

Essentially, therefore, museums are seeking to establish and nurture successful partnerships between equally respected parties, and this is something that is not easy to achieve.

Finally in terms of technology versus traditional museum techniques, much concern was expressed along two major lines. On the one hand, how do we harness the new technologies as a tool to educate and inform. On the other hand, isn't there a danger that the new technologies could harness the museum, tying institutions so closely to the resources they use in an effort to effectively carry out their mandate that museums which could not afford to maintain and upgrade such systems on an ongoing basis would be buried under the burden of the bite.

So concerns were expressed also at the potential distancing which access to new technologies could encourage between the audience and museums. On the one hand, involvement in these media might prove so enticing as to keep the audience at home and away from the museum.

One pet concern of mine on the other hand is the potential of technology utilized by museums to reduce even further the possibility of direct interaction with the audience or community that we seek to serve. There is also the danger of conflict between the virtuosity and virtual reality of our museums.

So we have ended up rather in this group with more questions than answers as I think Stephen Weil just pointed out. How do you get the resources that you need once you've got them, how do you maintain them?

And once you've got them once, how do you get them again in order to keep going? Thanks.

MR. ELLIS: Thank you. Resources, getting the money, convincing folk that you are worthy of having what it is they have. How does one do that on a consistent basis and do it successfully, those of you who have done that? How? What strategies have you used?

You guys are dropping fast. It's as if I see this pall over this group. Some folk are boldly getting up and walking out. Others of you are sitting up and saying "My God, my God, how much more of this can I take?" I tell you what we're going to do. We're going to finish the reports. After we finish the reports, we're going to end your misery and then we're going to take a long break and then hopefully ask some of you to go into the technology showcase and look at some of the computerized things that are there and then end the day. It has been a very, very long day. And here is what I'm going to assume simply for my own survival. I'm going to assume that it is not that you are not stimulated by the conversation, it is simply that you are tired, fatigued. Can I assume that?

VOICE: All yes.

MR. ELLIS: Yes, in the back.

DR. GHOSE: I just mentioned that we, the Science Museums in India, do not have any funding problem. And everything started small, very small. I give one example. Someone asked "what is your strategy?" The strategy is to start in a very small manner, and it has a snowball effect, it goes up. I remember, maybe 20 years back, a teacher came to me and said, "When I teach my geography students on the blackboard, I have a problem explaining eclipses . We all know eclipses cannot be explained on a two dimensional plane. It requires a three-dimensional object, a demonstration." I told him, "Okay, give us 10 days' time and we'll do something for you." We did that one. That was a small beginning, I would say.

Now, to help the science education stream in my area in their classroom lecture is now a very big activity. It took time to grow but it is now subscribedto by the school system. We get plenty of money for going this sort of thing for the schools. One example, there are many, I don't want to go on talking now. It's time for that wine and cheese party.

But we thought that this would be the right way of doing that one. Start small but start now without planning for the big thing. And then it grows on and on. Today we are in a position to take up very big projects anywhere in our country at very short notice. We find that money just flows in. Then we are asked can you give us a science center In six months time? In six weeks' time? As if there were a switch that we could turn "on" a science center.

MR. ELLIS: That's a man to get to know. Let's hear from Ron Chew and Mary Jo Arnoldi. That group. What are the core conflicts challenging museums, Mary Jo.

MS. ARNOLDI: Hi, I'm not Ron. I'll be very brief because I know you're very tired, and I think the last group raised a lot of the same issues.

Our group, although small in number, represented a real cross section of museums - from local community based museums to mid size and large institutions. Members of the group also included directors, curators, and educators.

One core conflict that we discussed at some length was the conflict between the museum's dual roles of Preservation and of Access to its collections. Members from small locally based museums which are undergoing rapid growth spoke about the processes they are undergoing in the professionalization of their operations and staff. This professionalization process often involves some reduction in the community's access to collections, museum spaces, etc. Weighing the benefits and costs of professionalization vs access were issues that participants from small organizations saw as critical to their futures. Mid size to large museum staffs also recognized the professionalization/access issues as a basic conflict in their own institutions as they explore and experiment with viable and meaningful ways to become more open and involve the community more directly in the museum while maintaining their roles as stewards of the collections under their care.

A second core conflict within the museum revolved around museum authority and the opening up of participation in the interpretive process in making exhibits and in public programming. All of the participants were committed to a team approach to making exhibits. Teams not only should include the full range of museum professionals ie. curators, designers, and educators, but stake holder groups from outside of the museum. During this discussion individual members shared anecdotes about successful and failed team processes. All agreed that the team process is extremely difficult and must be carefully managed. It must have a clear and well defined set of roles and attainable goals. As part of this discussion the group noted that we must move away from a notion of a community and recognize the internal complexity of communities and the multiple, shifting, and sometimes oppositional identities within what might appear on the surface as a single or cohesive group. Successfully working with the many communities we hope to serve will require our understanding and attention to these dynamics.

Finally, while everyone is excited by the potential of new technology to extend the museum experience, there was some uneaseness which was expressed about how this new technology has so seduced the professional museum community that it is sometimes seen as a panacea. Individuals cautioned that as professionals we must not forget that our museum audiences also expect to have a primary physical, tactile, and spatial experience as part of a meaningful encounter with objects in our institutions. |

MR. ELLIS: Thank you, Mary Jo.

The last group is Robert Archibald and Neil Kotler. And they have the same question, what are the core conflicts challenging museums.

We have Bob.

Mr. Archibald: And probably we have the same responses. Ours was a very engaged group that was more than willing to share various points of view on conflicts that are confronting our institutions as we enter the next millennium. I think in some ways as I listen to the conversation both here and this afternoon that there is here a constant sort of need to reinvent ourselves and to rethink ourselves which is probably a very, very healthy activity in which to engage.

It seemed to me that the kinds of conflicts that we identified fell into a number of related categories that had to do with competition from other kinds of entities within our communities that began or have begun to offer services that are comparable in some respects in the public's mind to those that are offered by museums.

I think there was a general sense that many of the conflicts that we face over the nature of community, over ownership of institutions, over shared authority or authority over voices, were reflections of larger changes going on in our societies as a whole and that what we are being called upon to do as institutions is to respond to changing needs as well as changing expectations by societies that are being impacted by all kinds of pressures that are inducing change.

One consequence of that, I think, is both internal as well as external conflict. Some of those conflicts are, for example, and they have been mentioned in other contexts here, the conflict between our traditional obligations to collections and our traditional activities based on those collections, and the imperative that now demands that we adopt a much more community-focused orientation, and the appropriate balance between, as one person in our group put it, the future and the past of museums. I think there was a concern about mission versus money, particularly in the sense that as we compete for scarce resources, it will be indeed attractive and seductive to modify our mission or to obfuscate our mission in favor of the securing of financial resources.

I think there was a further concern related to finances which was that as we are pressured to find more ways to behave in entrepreneurial ways, do we or should we run the risk then of erecting money as a barrier limiting access to our institutions?

I think there was a concern expressed related to that about commercializing our institutions versus what one member of our group called integrity. When it came to the issue of community, I think that there were questions about our ability to represent multiple voices, that is, how many voices can we represent? Although within the group there was a clear consensus if not unanimous agreement that multiple voices within the community all had places within our institutions.

I think related to the question of financial pressures was the question of entertainment and the balance between entertainment and our traditional role of education, the balance between our traditional roles versus what one person in the group termed relevance. And the balance between the need to represent new voices without excluding established voices.

I think there was also expressed a concern about, and one other group I think mentioned this as well, the emphasis that ought to be placed upon what Ellsworth Brown called the general manager or business management of our institutions versus the need for a disciplinary voice, disciplinary-based voice that could articulate based on the disciplines represented in our institutions, an imperative that would induce the public support that would be necessary.

Through all of this, though, I think was a general agreement that perhaps the most fundamental issue we face in response to the changing environment is the need to rethink our mission. And I know that as one who has been in this field for some time, that issue comes up perennially. It is constantly there. What is the role of museums in society? What are museums for? And while on the one hand it may seem as if we simply are rehashing and reiterating old issues and coming up with no new answers, it does, on the other hand, seem to be a conversation and discussion that does lead to an ongoing reinvention of museums and a constant redefinition of the role of museums given the changing nature of the societies we serve.

I think there was a clear consensus that museums ought to be places for expression of multiple perspectives on whatever the disciplinary base of the museum might be. That museums were places for diverse voices, that museums were places for discussion of identity, that museums are places for a sorting out of how much of our past or how much of our culture is a burden, and how much of it is a legacy to be treasured? That museums are places for conversations about enduring issues, that museums are facilitators that share authority, places where ownership is yielded, and where authority is shared. Places for conversation about how we differ but perhaps even more importantly about what we share, because only in that can we develop the broad-based level of consensus necessary for decision making about our future.

I know there were a number of other people whose views I have attempted to incorporate into this. If any other members of the group would like to speak up, I invite them to do so. Thanks.

MR. ELLIS: Thanks, Bob.

I think you have deserved your wine and cheese. That is the next step, to go to room 3111, and we're going to start the technology showcase early and have you do your wine and cheese. There's a comment here, yes?

VOICE: Could you just go over the schedule for tomorrow morning.

MR. ELLIS: Nancy, you want to do that?

Nancy: We gather here at 9:00 sharp and we're going to hear Bob Janes from Calgary talk to us about internal structure in museums. Then at 10:30, Peggy Loar will lead an interesting panel of people, five people from different countries and they're going to tell you about experiences in their countries. At noontime there will be a box lunch in the castle and the regent emeritus, Jeannine Smith Clark will speak about the role of regents since the beginning of the Smithsonian in 1846.

Then the afternoon will be the Technology Showcase from 2:00 until 3:30. And at 3:30, Bran Ferrin from Disney [and Betsy Broun] will talk to us about new technology. We'll close with Richard Kurin summing up about 5:00.

Questions? We hope to see you all tomorrow.

MR. ELLIS: This has been a wonderful day. I'm not saying that because I want you to leave. I'm just saying it because it's the last time we're going to gather to do something like this.

(updated December 3, 1996)

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