WORKSHOP: NETWORKED INFORMATION CHANGES MUSEUM CULTURE
Friday, March 27, 1998, 1:30-2:45 p.m.

PRESENTER: ROGER BRUCE, Director of Museum Education for the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY.
By: Rita Putnam

This workshop, attended by approximately 35 museum officers and visual arts experts and educators from around New York State and other parts of the US and Canada, touched on five key points in its discussion of how the networking of information is changing museums and cultural institutions.

The first of these points was that the data records that a museum registers are themselves an artifact of a set of prejudices concerning the meaning of those objects held in trust by the organization; the second was that networked systems can (and have in the case of Eastman House) change the interpretive role of the museum. The third point made was that digital information is theoretically infinite (archivally) and, simultaneously, fugitive in terms of its physical life span. Bruce cited an article in Science News that reported on a trip by anthropology students to a dig at a city dump and unearthed a 32-year-old package of Oscar Mayer wieners -- far more durable than many digital media!

The fourth point made was that while digital systems generally enter the museum to enhance productivity on a previously existing job, they have a tendency to profoundly re-order the tasks as they become networked. The fifth and final point of Bruce’s presentation - which elicited much discussion in this hour- and-a-quarter interchange – was that networked information erodes a certain kind of curatorial authority, the sort that once ensured that privileged access to objects led to privileged knowledge about said objects. The forward-looking group of attendees brought up the point that the kind of curatorial authority that is eroding will certainly challenge the curator; collections data was referred to as “in itself a subjective view of the collection.” Review of, or input to, collections data in an art museum by, for instance, a labor historian was seen as a chance for growth rather than an erosion of curatoral authority.

Content was described by Bruce as “the knottiest subject – a fabulously interesting problem” – so much so that he had humorously toyed with the idea of returning to Eastman and suggesting that they call it instead the Image Description Institute. Robert Baron, Director of the Museum Program at the New York State Council on the Arts, later reiterated that “it comes down to ‘how do you describe an image?’” Many were enthusiastic about efforts to use multiple texts or multiple stories to describe images; one attendee cautioned that museums are generally “able to document their collections once, as the process is extremely expensive – therefore, the choices [it] makes are strategic.”

Mention was made throughout of the Getty’s Museum Educational Site Licensing (MESL) project, and of AMICO (Art Museums Image Consortium). One attendee asked whether curators and other museum personnel are not now thinking of themselves more as educators, and Bruce concurred. Others were concerned that “anyone with a web page can become a journalist or a critic. How do we evaluate what’s out there? What’s our responsibility in terms of education? Is it our job to teach that sort of assessment?” Bruce commented that museums have evolved in the direction of other service organizations, and added that Americans pay less attention to national initiatives than to a “more pluralistic model of pulling together resources.” Mention was made of Faces of Los Angeles, a consortium of 19 organization that pooled collections and made them accessible through a single interface, in a laboratory-like arrangement.

Regardless of how open collections become to networking, Bruce averred that “the museum stays the museum, remains the authority. What does the museum have to lose in sharing? Nothing.” David Cinquino, Exhibition Designer at the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, added that “without the ability to share, we may never change – never accept challenge”. Bruce added that although one speaks often of ‘outreach’, “we’re not reaching out – we’re allowing them - the public, and all those who avail themselves of technological connection to the museum - to reach in. It’s not our collection, it’s theirs.”