Museum Studies at Tufts University

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Category: Museum Topics (Page 11 of 30)

Open Access and Museum Collections

January 29, 2019 / / 1 Comment

According to the American Alliance of Museums’ Characteristics of Excellence, a museum should, “guided by its mission, provide public access to its collections while ensuring their preservation.” Although museums protect over a billion objects, did you know that on average, less than five percent of a museum’s collection is on view for the public to enjoy? To make up for this, many museums have turned to the “visible storage” display strategy, in which collections not on exhibit are stored in open cases for the public to still see and enjoy.  While certainly effective, albeit overwhelming (and sometimes confusing, with little-to-no interpretive wall texts), more museums are instead embracing the digital age and implementing a completely accessible collection online.

For instance, last week, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) announced its “Open Access” system, providing the public with free access to thousands of images from the Museum’s collection to learn from and even download to use for commercial purposes. With a simple click to the Museum’s collection page, users can now select an artwork, zoom in, and observe close details that are difficult to notice when the same object is placed behind a glass vitrine or on the wall in a gallery space. Moreover, it is now permissible to even download a high quality JPEG of the image, to use in any capacity one can imagine.

According to the Cleveland Museum’s website:

“Open Access means the public now has the ability to  share, collaborate, remix, and reuse images of many as 30,000 public- domain artworks from the CMA’s world-renowned collection of art for commercial and non-commercial purposes. In addition, portions of collections information (metadata) for more than 61,000 artworks, both in the public domain and those works with copyright or other restrictions, works are now available.”

The Cleveland Museum joins a growing list of institutions that have prioritized an accessible online database – open to students, scholars, and the general public to use without any restrictions. Other museums include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, LACMA, the Getty, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

In a recent study by Ian Gill, a graduate of San Francisco State University’s M.A. Museum Studies Program, it was found that museums with Open Access “benefit the public, promote scholarship, and align with the museum’s mission;” however, it is an expensive system to initiate without help from outstanding grants or other sources of funding. As an art historian who can easily spend hours searching through Google Images’ archives in search of a high quality photo of a specific artwork, I am excited to learn that the Cleveland Museum of Art has shared its diverse collection online, providing me with a new go-to source for finding JPEG images that are free under Creative Commons Zero.

What are your thoughts on Open Access?

Thinking about museum workplace communities

January 18, 2019 / / 1 Comment

When we think about the people that comprise a museum’s community, sometimes we overlook the very core of that group: the staff. Like all non-profits and cultural organizations, museums often have a small but dedicated crew of people giving 110% toward accomplishing the museum’s mission. And they wouldn’t have it any other way, right? But besides the devoted staff, museums can also often rely on tight budgets, small headcount, and, for small museums, no formal HR department to handle the needs of the people. This can all lead to the feeling that museums are (or should be) a stressful place to work. This can be dangerous for a mission-driven workplace, leading to employee burnout.

Burnout is a bit of a buzzword these days, but with good reason: If an institution’s culture makes people feel exhausted, frustrated, and alienated from their work, people will and do leave. If an industry’s culture does it, they will leave the industry. And we know that has been happening, because people have been writing about it. And as a member of EMP groups online, I can testify that the agonizing conversation  over whether or not to leave the field is taking place all the time, all over the country. That turnover can mean that institutional knowledge is walking out the door faster than it can be replaced, making a museum even more difficult to work for because people are constantly having to reinvent the wheel to keep moving. Museums, like many non-profits and places that depend on inspiration to motivate labor, are places where a number of workplace issues can come together to drain staff of their energy, enthusiasm, and ability to build a great institution. As emerging museum professionals, we should know the signs of burnout and of work cultures that will hasten it. This way, we can try to avoid toxic workplaces and build or grow non-toxic ones as we go. The best way to do that is to think about how we like to be treated in our other communities and implement those processes in our workplaces.

In our other relationships and communities, communication and dialogue in which everyone gets to share their opinions and needs are valued. It may be useful then for museums to create venues for feedback from staff, just like they do for visitors! This can include anonymous surveys, “listening sessions,” where someone in management hosts a group of people to get their feedback, or “postmortems,” meetings after issues or events where problems are assessed and betterments for the next time are decided. Implementation and followup is key: when people share their concerns, institutions must try to figure out how to make progress toward common requests. Do people want more vacation? Can your institution create a flex time policy so people can work around school pickups, appointments, etc? Do people want more money? Can your institution arrange a salary review, comparing salaries to like institutions and see if they are at par? Take in information and communicate plans to address issues.

Let’s not underestimate how important it is to show gratitude and encourage development, either. Thank people for their work. Thank teams for their work. Recognize work publicly. Celebrate finishing a project or hitting a fundraising goal. Encourage professional development, even if it means that a staffer might eventually outgrow their position and leave. Think creatively about low or no cost ways to help your staff develop. And remember that feedback goes both ways! Does your institution do performance reviews? It is difficult to know if you are doing well or to set goals without data.

There are a number of resources and action groups people can get involved with if they want to work more directly on these issues. Joyful Museums is a blog that conducts an annual survey of museum workers and, as the title suggests, thinks about how to create better museums. Gender Equity in Museums Movement (GEMM), is an advocacy group working for equity and transparency in museums on a number of workplace issues and they offer a tipsheet about combating burnout.  The Western Museum Conference recently held a panel on workplace culture, and the thoughtful handouts are available online. Do you have more ideas for fighting burnout or creating a happy and productive museum workplace? Share them in the comments!

 

Adventures in Repatriation: Around the World and Down the Street

December 6, 2018 / / 2 Comments

 

Last month, the Medford Public Library, in the town where Tufts University is located, announced an auction of “surplus goods”. The goods turned out to be a number of Native American religious objects, including shaman’s masks and rattles and a totem pole, all of considerable monetary value. The items were donated to the library in the 1880s by James G. Swan, a Medford-born collector of Native American objects, long before the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in the 1990s. The auction was halted by the mayor of Medford, Stephanie M. Burke, after public outcry organized by American Indian groups took hold.

Even though NAGPRA governs ownership and repatriation of sacred indigenous objects and remains in the hands of institutions that receive federal funds, not all organizations have completed the required inventory of objects that apply to this law. An incident like this might have happened and could still happen anywhere in the country. Native American object collecting was incredibly popular in the late 19th century, as indigenous people were thought to be “vanishing” as the conquest of the American continent completed. It is entirely likely that similar collections exist unprocessed in the archives of other libraries, schools, or museums across the country, and that more attempts to auction goods may take place in the future against a background of dwindling federal funds for cultural institutions.

Controversies around objects stolen from indigenous, colonized, and otherwise disempowered people around the world are making news every day now, in a flood that is by turns both reparative and dismaying. Under reparative, the President of France, Emanuel Macron, recently announced the planned return of 26 works of Dahomey art to the Benin government, who formally requested their return a number of years ago. Macron suggested that more such repatriations would be forthcoming, an important step in acknowledging the role France had in the destructive colonization of Africa in the 19th century.

Under dismaying, however, one can find any number of refusals including the famed Benin Bronzes or the Kohinoor Diamond, all of which remain in British hands for now. But changes may be underway. Not only are governments demanding the return of cultural objects from colonizing countries, in some cases countries or individuals are stealing objects out of the Western museums that keep them. Private citizens are also forming groups to wage social media campaigns that pressure institutions to return works to home countries.

As technology and globalization conspire to shrink the world, the call to return wrongfully obtained objects will only grow louder. Amid the din, protests and refusals from governments and institutions still holding ill-gotten treasures will sound like the weak excuses they are. In an attempt to counter tours that highlight illicit artworks at the British Museum, the museum has developed a series of lectures that focus on the proper provenance of many works originating in other countries. While any move toward transparency is positive, telling a partial story designed to improve an organization’s credibility while ignoring the larger issue the institution is complicit in is marginally laudable. With some luck and a lot of guilt and outcry, however, the public can keep pushing this important conversation to a place of resolution, rather than obfuscation.

Call for Papers

November 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Editors of the upcoming book For Love or Money:  The State of Museum Salaries, are offering the students in the Museum Studies program an opportunity to submit proposals for essays to be included in the book to be published by MuseumsEtc in the fall of 2019.

The museum profession suffers from systemic under-compensation and pay inequality. This book will examine both the causes of this situation and its resulting effect on staff, institutions, and the profession.  It will also propose strategies for remedying the problem.  It will identify internal and external factors that suppress wages, consider the impact of the present practices and paradigms on the field as a whole, articulate the benefits that fair and equitable compensation would achieve, and develop solutions to address wage inequity with the goal of strengthening our institutions, allowing committed museum staff to advance in careers that are financially and personally rewarding.

Further information and topics covered can be found here.

The closing date for the proposals is 17 December 2018.

The Centennial NEMA Conference and the Stamford Hilton Boycott

November 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

This past week many museum professionals and emerging professionals attended the New England Museum Association’s annual conference Museums on the Move. This year was a big year for NEMA celebrating its 100th annual conference. The theme of the conference was meant to investigate how museums have evolved over the past century and how they are “positioning themselves for success in the century ahead.” However, this years conference was marred by situations beyond the conference planners control that brought up many insightful discussions both at the conference and across the field.

According to NEMA’s Statement Regarding the Labor Situation at the Stamford Hilton Hotel and Executive Meeting Center, NEMA went into contract with the hotel for the centennial conference in August of 2016. In December 2017, workers at the hotel voted to join Unite Here local 217 with a vote of 110 to 5. These workers entered into this vote after months of intimidation strategies from the hotel owners including the presence of armed guards and the hiring of anti-union consultants.

UNITE HERE is a labor union representing 270,000 workers across Canada and the United States. They boast a diverse membership, predominately women and people of color, from across many industries. Their goal is “to enable people of all backgrounds to achieve greater equality and opportunity.” The hotel workers at the Stamford Hilton are currently in contract negotiations with the Stamford Hilton for three main demands: better wages, free quality healthcare, and pensions.

NEMA chose not to change locations for the conference as progress had been made in talks between the two sides over the summer. However, in recent weeks the headway made deteriorated and demonstrations and picketing at the hotel has continued. While NEMA choose to continue with the centennial conference they opened lines of communication with the hotel workers and invited union leaders to speak at the crowd at the keynote meeting.  Pampi of Decolonize our Museums conference panel facilitator, furthered lines of communications and disseminated information on requests from the hotel workers including the cancellation of hotel rooms and moving workshops off site. The purpose was to show both the union workers and the hotel management our solidarity to the workers strife. So why is it important for museum professionals to show solidarity to unionized hotel workers?

As museum professionals, workers, and emerging professionals we must first and foremost have empathy. As human, we must have empathy for the struggles of others. However, beyond that, museum workers have much in common with hotel and other service industry workers. Not just in the long hours and low wages we share, but in the structures of the industries that often relegate women and people of color to the lower levels. In recent years many non-profits have been turning to unions to organize workers and collaborate on common causes and increasingly museum security and custodial staff have unionized. Museums such as MoMA and Plimoth Plantation have unionized workers and have successfully fought for better working conditions, wages, and healthcare. Other organizations such as #Museum WorkersSpeak have attempted to look “at the relationship between museums’ stated commitments to social value and their internal labor practices.” We stand in solidarity because these labor issues effect this profession as well. We enter the museum field drawn in by a love of museums, but research shows many emerging professionals leave do to low wages, insufficient benefits, and lack of job prospects among other reasons. What more can we and should we do to create better labor environments for both ourselves and others?

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