The role of objects in the 21st-century museum seems to be a hot topic right about now, especially with many museums incorporating digital collections, 3-D models, and reconstructions into their understanding of what it means to interact with a museum object. When we think about digital collections and 3-D models, however, historic house museums might not be the first thing that pops into our head. Yet, as a student currently taking a course called Revitalizing Historic House Museums (HHMs), my mind has been infiltrated with thoughts about how to make the visitor experience worthwhile in a genre of museums with declining visitor numbers. In my experience, HHMs seem to be one of least likely kinds of museums to create a digital collection of their objects. One reason for this could be because HHMs sometimes serve as dumping grounds for community members to donate their personal belongings that they feel are important enough to be preserved, and thus many sites have a plethora of unrelated objects that they may not even know they have. Another reason could be that many HHMs contain mostly objects that are not original to the house. And a very pressing and apparent issue is that HHMs typically have small operating budgets, low numbers of paid staff (and oftentimes are run solely by volunteers), and are dealing with houses that are sometimes hundreds of years old that require careful and costly maintenance. So how can HHMs compete with other bigger, flashier, more digitally-oriented museums when they are focused on keeping their doors open and the house still standing?
While it can be hard to see past some of the unrelenting issues HHMs as a genre are facing, digitizing collections and creating reconstructions could make them a more desirable place to visit. Indeed, in our modern world where visitors are asking (begging) more and more for an interactive experience rather than a lecture from a stodgy tour guide, HHMs might need digital collections and 3-D models more than any other kind of museum. Think about this: many HHMs have a strict “DO NOT TOUCH” policy when it comes to the collections. Yet how does this recreate a realistic home-life experience for the visitor? If a goal of HHMs is to allow visitors to experience what it was really like to live in the house, how does a hands-off policy achieve this? What person lives in a house and touches nothing (and does anyone really live in a house with Plexiglas over the bookshelves and velvet ropes in front of the bed)? Whose home is always perfectly set up to look as if no one has lived in it the way many HHMs are? This is where digital collections, 3-D models, and reconstructions can come in. While it would be unrealistic to recreate every object in the house, even having a few objects that visitors can touch, sit on, or interact with would greatly add to the visitor experience. An online digital collection where visitors can zoom in on and manipulate the objects in the house could also be an option and can be an effective stand in for those people who will, for whatever reason, never be able to visit a particular site. Digital collections accessed prior to a visit have also been known to increase visitor interest in a museum, which could improve declining visitor numbers at HHMs who do have an online collection. However, these endeavors require time, money, and resources which, unfortunately, many HHMs do not have.
Thus, I have more questions than answers about this topic when it relates specifically to HHMs (*sigh*). Is it necessary to create an online collection of objects that are not even original to the house or have anything to do with the house or site? If the objects are not original to the house, are they there to simply create the ‘experience’ of being in the house and how could this experience be recreated with a digital collection? Additionally, does it matter if non-original objects are touched by the public during a site visit? If an HHM is able to create a digital collection, how can they do it effectively so that it enhances the visitor experience rather than simply providing a picture with the same information from the proverbial house tour? What objects will be chosen and who has the final say in this? Will the visitor’s experience of the objects online and out of context from the house itself be as rich as an on-site visit? Is it even responsible to create an online collection if there are so many other issues with the house, and where on the ‘to-do list’ of HHMs should creating a digital collection fall? Is it an HHM’s responsibility to have an online collection for those who cannot visit the house?
These are just a few of the questions I have come up with (some of which came to me in the middle of writing this reply), but I think there are many more that are important to think about with regards to HHMs, their collections, and the possibility of digital collections. Let me know other questions or thoughts you have in the comments below!
I will probably end up writing way too much, but this is such an important, deep, and ongoing discussion, for HHMs and all history museums! I’d like to add to a point you touch on above: how these problems intertwine with interpretation at HHMs. I work with three house museums, and access to and the use of the collections is certainly a multi-layered issue that each deals with continually.
In one, all the objects on display are from the time period we interpret but have no provenance stemming from the house or family. But at this particular site, we like to think of the furnished house as a “stage set” for the narratives we share and the issues we try to bring into discussion with the visitors; the objects themselves are not the point. This being the case, it seems like this HHM could be one where they take the reproduction or “hands-on” collection approach, like having chairs meant for visitors to sit on. Like you say, how easily can visitors imagine themselves in the usual environments HHMs create? However, in this museum, we try to encourage the visitors not to automatically see themselves in the shoes of the owners of the house or their peers (how many times do we hear guides or see exhibition texts begin “Imagine yourself as a guest of the So-and-sos” or otherwise asking visitors to only identify with a person they may not easily be able to relate to?), but rather to imagine the perspective of those who also inhabited those spaces as workers who made the finery and comforts possible. The objects HHMs display contribute to interpretation, but the ways in which we talk about them and the perspectives from which we see them have the power to really connect visitors to the intangibles of our sites in non-traditional ways.
Another collections and interpretation conundrum in HHMs that I’ve come up against is visitors’ frequent desire to see “real” objects in the house. There are lots of articles out in the field about how people still have special connections to “things” and value seeing artifacts, and there are explorations of why and how humans so strongly stitch experience and meaning into things (I particularly recommend the Objects and Memory Project and its documentary). As a result, HHMs often hear the question “Is all this real/original?” Despite the ability of reproductions and non-“original” objects in museums to still help facilitate meaning-making, visitors do appreciate the “real stuff” when they can get it, especially if the HHM focuses on people and their lives. You mention the many houses that are filled with objects not original to the house; I think these collections work somewhat better when the interpretive purpose of the house interior is to show a generalized picture of domestic life in the particular time period and location. It gets harder when the museum interprets specific lives and experiences.
In another HHM I work with, we are lucky to have a full collection left by the inhabitant of the house. We share with visitors very personal narratives of this woman and her family, creating a sense of them in the house while hopefully giving the visitors an understanding of them as fleshed-out, real people. Many visitors have commented to me that they love being able to see actual pieces of the lives they’re learning about. Other visitors, though, do want to be able to touch and sit and make themselves part of the environment they are being shown. This is understandable! But if we were to replace some objects with sittable and touchable objects, we risk losing the great value we can derive from all the “real stuff” that is so tightly intertwined with what we want to share with visitors. How can HHMs balance showing visitors our great but no-touching-allowed objects with widening the experiences we offer to meet the needs of other visitors? How, especially in the usual domestic set-up of many HHMs, can we mix hands-on pieces with original artifacts in a way that visitors don’t confuse the two? As you say, there are many questions, but hopefully there are also many creative responses from HHMs!