I’d like to start by introducing people that you won’t see today, so the project I’m going to talk about, I’m not doing it alone, and I would like to show you our team.
They all are from St Petersburg, Russia, and are all not museum people, but movie makers, translators, designers, programmers, who all got interested in the project and have been working on it with me for more than a year already.
I would like to dedicate my presentation to Alexander Dremaylov who passed away in October and was one of the pioneers of museum computerisation in Russia, and one of the first people to be interviewed for the project. He was also one of the first Russian museum professionals to take part in various conferences here in Canada and in the States.
So I’m here to talk about the project “Ideas for Museums: a Biography of Museum Computing”. I will give an overview of what the project involves, explaining the interview process step by step and discussing the findings.
So the project is entitled “Ideas for Museums: a Biography of Museum Computing” and the double title has a special meaning. The word “biography” in the title refers to those parts of the interviews that have been collected in order to historicise the process of museum computerisation. And the word “ideas” describes what the other part of the interviews is about: museum professionals sharing their thoughts on the current situation in the world of museum technology and their predictions about its evolution.
Recording one interview usually takes from half an hour to one hour and the resulting video is then cut to 10-13 minutes and uploaded on the official YouTube channel. Since November 13, 2012 I have recorded 29 interviews, and a few are still being edited and translated.
On the project website one can find transcripts, extended infos and translations.
I also wanted to try out new forms and do something special for this conference,so I have conducted a survey with the questions similar to the ones I ask during the interview, but using the Google Drive platform. It had brought 18 new stories and several candidates to be interviewed on film later. The idea of this survey as well as the term “museum technologist” was based on the survey conducted by Rob Stein and Rich Cherry for their Museums and the Web 2013 presentation.
All the questions that were asked both on film and in the Google Forms survey can be divided into three groups:
- the background from which the respondents came to the museum world,
- their careers
- how they see the future of the field.
I will now start discussing the background group of questions. Apart from the factual, measurable information like the person’s academic degrees, I was interested in finding out about their attitudes to the museum world before they became professionals in the field. I was looking for childhood stories, first memories about museum visits, and answers to the question what the interviewees wanted to be when they were young.
One of the first major findings was that very few people were interested in working with technology in museums from the very beginning. Some came into the field seeking to work as curators or tour guides, some were interested in technology and were simply looking for a place where their programming, designer et cetera skills were needed, and in the course of work these two kinds of people were gradually merging in a profession that is called a ‘museum technologist’. Surprisingly, a major share of respondents replied that they got their first museum job completely at random, just looking for any place that would employ them.
I also had a theory that some people may have been led to a career in museums by their subconscious, to be more precise, their childhood experiences and fantasies. I have asked all of the respondents to share what they wanted to be growing up, and I was at first a bit disappointed by how standard these answers appeared to be, all these policemen, pilots, ballerinas, et cetera.
Although, it seems interesting that these similarities were so strong, considering the fact that the respondents come from very different locations and contexts, and are aged between 30 and more than 70. It seems worth mentioning, that some of the answers were outstandingly original:
- a puppet master
- a Q*Bert
- a time traveller
- a wise old woman
- and somebody who sweeps the streets in winter
I do not know what to make of it, but it certainly makes me believe that museums attract and promote creativity.
In general I don’t think that the amount of answers I have received can be a solid ground for profound conclusions, but I can share more of an observation: most of the respondents said that they wanted to be inventors, archeologists, designers, artists, educators, and that is basically what they are doing in their job now, even though they didn’t know they would be doing it in a museum.
Another question was aimed at exploring how childhood museum visits could have affected the future career choice. This has, of course, been more fruitful during the live interviews, since the respondents could really dive into their memories. And I believe that it is very important to look at individual cases here, rather than collect statistics. For instance, I talked to Ross Parry, who is the senior lecturer at the University of Leicester, and during the interview he suddenly remembered a story from his childhood that in fact corresponded with his current research. I would like to show you this part of his interview now:
Some of the other professionals I interviewed have a strong interest in archaeology, some of them in fact having been archaeologists prior to joining the museum sector, and this interest stems from their childhood, for example, British museum computerization pioneers Geoffrey Lewis and Andrew Roberts both told stories of playing in the ruins of Roman fortresses and such.
With Andrew Roberts
Many of the respondents had trouble remembering an exact visit, but had some early memories of museums anyway, mostly about when they were under 10 years old. A lot of the interviewees talked about their families being museum goers, and being regularly taken to various museums since their early childhood.
Alongside happy memories filled with fascinating activities I’ve also received a few replies, usually about school trips, where museums, either all of them or only certain types, were represented as traditional, boring, lifeless institutions.
And I must admit I am one of those whose earliest memories of museums were rather disappointing, but later I got to know a museum educator who showed me that the experience of a museum visit can be different.
This part of the research seems to be the most promising and I have a feeling that I should work more on obtaining these stories, and they all clearly show how important it is for us as museum professionals and some of us as parents not to take our responsibility for the children’s first exposure to the world of museums lightly.
The questions about the background which our respondents had before joining the museum community also concerned the level of their experience with technology, however, the data I obtained doesn't seem to be enough to achieve the goals which I pursued with these questions.
The next set of questions concerned the respondents’ careers. I’ve obtained important data regarding their job titles and duties, as well as geographical coverage and chronological data.
The point of asking about the person’s job title and duties was to work out a job description that fits a certain title and if it varies from a country to a country or from an institution to an institution. For example, there could be different titles for basically the same job, or different jobs having the same title. Unfortunately, this part of the research also requires more data, but there was a part of it that I find successful, that is the hunt for interesting titles.
For instance, Seb Chan’s job title involves something called Digital & Emerging Media, you may be familiar with what it stands for, but where I come from we don’t have it, so I felt the need to explain what it is just in case. This basically means everything to do with the new ways of digital communication and applying them in the museum’s everyday routine, as opposed to the channels and media we are already more or less familiar with. Maybe you know another name for that? Yeah, Digital Transformations. Also it seems to be very popular to have the word multimedia in your job title and I think it’s good, it’s a concise term. Again, Russian specialists usually use the acronyms IT or ICT in their job titles объяснить на сайте, and I think it really shows what the emphasis is on - in the case of Russia it is technology for the sake of technology, in your language it is more about technology as means of telling stories, a media. I would like to suggest a topic for our discussion later, I think it would be interesting to find some more poetic job titles if you know some and exchange the ideas on whether it’s good to use these words or it is just our jargon, and it’s not very healthy.
As I already said, there were not enough replies to create a job description for every title I received, but the respondents all associate themselves with the umbrella term "museum technologist", and so I thought I could get a clear picture of what that is.
But the replies I got were very different, and that brings me to my next point. In the course of working on this project I have come to realize that the term "museum technologist" is too broad and at the same time focused on technology for the sake of technology, whereas lots of people who describe themselves as museum technologists basically use media to create content as designers, social media managers, et cetera. At the same time we have, for example, curators and archive workers who also use technology in their jobs every day, but for some reason they don't call themselves museum technologists. It seems that now, when the digital permeates almost every aspect of our work, it would be more accurate and timesaving to avoid the words "technology", "technological" and "digital" in those titles which are concerned with the digital as means of doing the job not as the goal of it, e.g. System administration.
That's another thing I'd like us to discuss after I finish my solo, if we really need the term museum technologist and could we remember or come up with a new umbrella term that wouldn't be so focused on technology for those who create content via media.
Now let's go back to discussing the research. Perhaps the most valuable thoughts on what our jobs are all about and what can be done to improve our performance come from the part of the interviews where the respondents are asked to give advice to young aspiring museum professionals. Let’s hear what some of our interviewees had to say:
Interestingly, this kind of question is also a possible way of comparing cultural backgrounds of the respondents.
Another thing I was interested in was if the respondents felt the need for an additional degree in order to better fulfil their duties. Surprisingly, I didn’t get a clear picture: half of the respondents said that they would like to get another degree, and most of them are interested in programming skills, and another half doesn’t feel the need for an additional degree at all. Interestingly, nobody said anything about studying the humanities. Moreover, only a few respondents have a background in museology, however, as we can see, they are rather successful professionals. So, perhaps, museum studies are not an integral part of success.
The question about additional degrees was a part of the final questionnaire section entitled “Future”, and it contained only two other questions. In one of them I asked the respondents to formulate how in their opinion technology has already changed museums and with the help of the other one I wanted to collect their views on the future of museums.
Most respondents talked about some aspects of museum life that have been transformed by museum technology, a few didn’t want to go into any details and just said that the changes were tremendous and concerned everything. And there also have been a few, who don’t feel that technological progress has in any significant way affected museums. And perhaps these people have the right to think so, because one can argue that technology merely changes the form, but not the content. But I think this question is beyond the scope of my talk today, so I’d like to leave it at that.
That brings me to the final question of the survey, the question about the future of museums. There is an optimistic note in all the predictions I received as nobody doubted that museums as institutions will exist. If we were to sum up the thoughts that I received, we would see that these are the most popular ones:
A museum as...
- … a network of open information
- … a place to relax, spend time with friends and learn new things
- … a place for creativity to create collaborative, cross-institutional learning and discovery resources.
Interestingly, very few people talked about the role of collection items as if their importance was somewhat forgotten. This is the answer I got from the survey:
To me the object in a museum is such a powerful thing, I would not feel comfortable in a museum that only told stories through interactives and movie screens.
The fact that so many answers were about content and telling stories, even though the question was diabolically placed after the one about technology, works well with my theory that the museum person of the future is somebody who works with, above all, the content, and I strongly believe that the skill of interpreting museum information and broadcasting it is a more important part of a museum professional’s education than technical skills.
Thank you very much for your attention, and many thanks to those who contributed to the research both on film and online. And I’m looking forward to the discussion and to hearing the next speaker.
