VANDA VITALI
When the importance of Panarchy in this volume is considered, as well as various connections, conversations, and perspectives inside or outside of museums, it is important to remember that a museum is a museum. Museums have been created and exist for a reason. They are there to collect, preserve, and exhibit evidence of our heritage. Our primary role as museum professionals is to interpret these holdings and place them in the context of our time so that the public can fully appreciate, experience, and enjoy them. Whatever evolution of museums we imagine or participate in, the goal remains that museums become better museums. The sharing of information and methodologies by museum professionals is of the utmost importance for the development of the museum discipline and its many institutions. Networks of museums, networks of museum professionals, and networks of those connected to museums all play important roles in this sharing.
While information technology allows for the development of large-scale networking, there is increased need for human encounters among experts from various disciplines so that we may consider developments in the museum field, either directly, in conversations and debates, or in mediated forums such as symposia, conferences, or publications like this volume.
Museums across the world have participated in museum networks for more than a century. Both the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the Canadian Museums Association, since their foundings, have been bringing museums together to help develop standards and best practices, gather and share information, and advocate issues of concern to their communities. Similarly, the International Council of Museums (ICOM), created in 1946, is the organization of museums and museum professionals committed to the promotion and protection of natural and cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, with some thirty thousand members in 137 countries. The idea behind the creation of museum associations around the world is anchored in the belief that museums can learn from one another and that exchanging information and practices will create better museums.
Over the past few decades, driven by business considerations and desires to improve efficiency, museums, and in particular public museums representing national or regional collections, have explored amalgamation into larger institutions that allow a sharing of administrative (back-of-house) activities such as human resources, management, marketing, and even governance, while keeping independent activities such as the development of exhibitions. This is happening in the Western hemisphere (the focus of this book), but it is also happening throughout the world. Most of the advancements in terms of linking museums have been achieved through the collaboration of public institutions. But private museums have also explored efficiencies of scale. For example, Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, which is owned by the Carlos Slim Foundation, retains within the museum itself responsibility for its collections and exhibitions, but shares non-core functions (security, legal affairs, finances, et cetera) with other members of the foundation or even other holdings. This arrangement allows not only for efficiency, but also for a cross-pollination of public and business knowledge.
Furthermore, as mentioned in this book, a plethora of small museums and cultural sites in this hemisphere are struggling financially, and also for audiences. Some of them have created links and ties with universities, and these university-museum collaborative networks are allowing the museums not just to survive, but to prosper. And with advancements in information technology, the degree of connectedness has greatly increased; new ways of “linking” have become possible or are anticipated.
Museums are embracing new technologies and exploring the use of information networks in all domains of institutional functioning: operations, core work, publics, and strategic positioning. The efficiencies of scale that museums achieve by merging their operational activities are today more easily achieved because new technologies allow for larger-scale operations and do not require the movement of people. For instance, the Balboa Park Museums in San Diego today unites some fourteen museums in the park region, as well as the zoo (which is not in the park), allowing them to market and promote activities jointly. It is hard not to imagine that public museums, particularly in the same geographic region, would not in the future share operational activities such as security, human resources, purchasing, financial and legal operations, conservation, facility management, and even governance, very much in the spirit in which universities function with various departments.
In the domain of collections and their management, networking allows for much broader and more standardized collecting, for the creation of collections of significance, and for exchanges of information between the institutions and individual researchers, which can lead to new knowledge. A great deal of progress has been achieved in creating joint if not united databases across the world on a variety of levels. Eight ethnographic museums of Holland have created a joint database. For years, the Canadian Heritage Information Network has been developing databases, networking, presenting online exhibits, and offering assistance to Canadian institutions. Natural history museums across the globe are participating in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which will eventually result in a single database. Europeana.eu is a web portal that acts as an interface to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects, and archival records from all across Europe. More than two thousand institutions are participating in this project, ranging from major international museums such as the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum to regional archives and local museums from every member of the European Union.
Collection enrichment and storytelling have also benefited from information technology. Science North, in Ontario, Canada, has established programs of collection enrichment by involving amateur science groups. So has Naturalis, the National Natural History Museum of Holland, but on a much larger scale. The Auckland Museum, New Zealand, has developed online educational programs with native communities as well as with some selected local schools.
At this point, the exhibition domain is least prone to large-scale or widespread developments. With globalization, museum communication is becoming more local and tailored to local audiences—their needs, identities, and circumstances—as well as demonstrating a new vitality in response to the global village phenomenon.
In the domain of strategic positioning, although much less present than in other domains of museum functioning, information technology has facilitated work, if not substantially changed the nature of that work. The Auckland Museum, aided by information technology, has established collaborations with local arts groups, science institutes, and universities to create a social hub for civic discourse.
Information technology is helping create museums as nodes in networks of institutions. This is an ongoing process driven at this time principally by economies of scale. But information technology also allows museums to do more. When networking leads to true collaboration, it also creates opportunities for the advancement of knowledge. Development of comprehensive databases of information and the sharing of experts are all positive developments for museums. But, as with all new developments and tools, caution is required. New technologies and the desire for efficiency and economy of scale can drive museums back into disciplinary boundaries. To avoid further divisions, feedback mechanisms, exchanges, and reciprocities, as well as shared authority and responsibility, are necessary.
The bringing together of international experts from a variety of museums and experiences to focus attention on interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinarity, the direction in universities, or what we can learn from one another, as demonstrated in this volume, is of utmost importance. And sharing information and knowledge about key museum issues in small-scale “conversations,” which the International Museum Institute has promoted as a way of experimenting and incubating solutions to various museum challenges, is essential to preserving the true spirit of museums.