The Curator’s Egg

After the morning session on museum blogging developments, I went out for a walk to get some fresh air and a bite to eat. Bought a really nice bacon sandwich and a coffee and sat in the little park behind the Yerba Bueana Center for the Arts. It’s a beautiful warm day (rather like June in Scotland*) today - hope I managed to avoid burning!

Two sights you wouldn’t see in the UK: two policeman on bicycles (what a strange reversal that is); and Scientologists soliciting victimembers.

‘Well, I’m back’, he said. And in San Francisco, in the hotel and ready for Museums and the Web 2007 (now with added me). The paper is online, the presentation is (pretty much) done, and I haven’t slept for over forty hours. I went to bed at 11.30pm on Monday (UK time), but just could not get to sleep - and I had to get up at 3am anyway to make the first flight down to London from Edinburgh. So I’ve been awake since about 10am on Monday and my clock (and body) think it’s now 2.20am on Wednesday. You may think this is all my own fault - couldn’t I have slept on the plane? I’ve never been able to do that, somehow. Still I did see a number of films, including Night at the Museum which was really rather fun. And we had the added excitement of the San Francisco police coming on to the plane when we landed before anyone was allowed to disembark. Immigration and customs though was much quicker than in Chicago last year, and it was just a quick trip on Bart and a short walk to the hotel. I can hear the clanging of the cable car bells outside - which reminds me: I must set the alarm on my phone. And so to bed.

I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while now, but better late than, etc. I must recommend the Pepys Diary blog project, now in its fourth year. I happened upon it by sheer chance, and have been hooked ever since. It’s a simple concept - each day the diary entry for the same day, annotated by readers in the comments. The project began on 1 January 2003 with the first diary entry for 1 January 1660. It’s a compelling read, and although I was vaguely familiar with the general outline of Pepys’s life, I never had got round to reading the three volumes of Bryant’s biography that my dad had (and which I guess are now in New Zealand with my brother), nor had I ever encountered the diary itself (which has been published several times over the last 200 years or so). The diary can be pretty explicit, but it’s been a brilliant window into Restoration London and also into the mind of the diarist. Have a look for example at his witnessing of an execution or when he fears his wife will need surgery (and his relief when she does not). There’s a catch-up summary for latecomers like me.

Great stuff. Go read.

Another of these silly what [x] are you quizzes [via]. Apparently I am Isaac Asimov. Is that good or bad? Scarily, I do have quite a lot of his books.

I am:Isaac Asimov One of the most prolific writers in history, on any imaginable subject. Cared little for art but created lasting and memorable tales.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Pity about the clunky cut’n'paste code, though.

Well, I did get may paper for Museums and the Web 2007 in on time - right on the deadline 30th January, though I had calculated that since it was being submitted to somewhere in Toronto I would theoretically have until 5am on the 31st… and at times it seemed like I might need the extra five hours. I’m not sure what it is about deadlines, but I often seem to need the threat of their imminence not only to get going, but actually to work well. This is a worrying character trait, but hey, at least I’m good under pressure. Just as well as I also had a grant application to be written up and in on the 31st (for a new post - fingers crossed).

The strange thing about writing this paper was that when I first sat down to work on it, not having done anything like this for - well, let’s just say a long time - I wondered how on Earth I could write 5,000 words. After all most of the writing I’ve done since university has been about keeping things short - the 150 word exhibition panel, the thirty word (if that) object label, or the short article for a magazine (even the professional ones don’t want too many words).

That however was several weeks ago. When I went back to my research and actually began writing I’d forgotten what the word limit was, and didn’t check back on the mw2007 site. I just sat and wrote. It was actually pretty easy because I knew what I was talking about and what I wanted to say. By the time I got round to doing a word count I was at 7,500 words, and I hadn’t finished. Oooops. So the last couple of days were a severe pruning job - a lot of stuff about other countries disappeared at this point, and I had to tighten up what remained. I think (though who am I to judge?) that this actually improved the paper a lot. We shall see. Now I have to work on my presentation.

I wonder if my jokes will travel?

My proposal for a paper for Museums & the Web 2007 has been accepted! I am overcome with excitement … coupled with a terror that I now have to write the damn thing. I don’t mind talking about it - public speaking doesn’t worry me at all - but the writing somehow terrifies me. On the other hand, I’ve been thinking about this for months, so maybe it won’t be too hard. No choice now, anyway, and no-one to blame but myself - it seemed like a good idea at the time!

Or, Living in a Culture of Continuous Improvement

I attended a meeting today about developing a “quality assurance framework” for museums. The essential driver for this being that if we don’t develop one ourselves, we will have one imposed anyway by the Scottish Executive. As Peter Stott commented, we need yet another set of measurements and forms to fill in like we need a hole in the head. My reply was that, given that we can’t avoid the hole, we are being offered the opportunity to influence its dimensions. But once we move beyond the concrete things measured by Accreditation and the VisitScotland quality scheme, and the process-measuring of things like IiP, we enter territory that is inevitably subjective and difficult, if not impossible really, to measure. How do you measure the value of a cultural experience? How do you quantify it? How do you compare such experiences, and meaningfully evaluate them against more concrete measures? Collecting evidence is all very well, but like with web stats, useless if you don’t really know what the evidence means. Yet we find ourselves in a situation where we spend more and more of time time doing just this - measuring what we do, instead of doing what we measure. And of course we are being measured against not what the public, our visitors and other users may want, but rather against a set of ambitions which are essentially political and social.

Now, it may be my deep-dyed libertarian cynicism, but whenever I hear the phrase ‘continuous improvement’ it makes me feel as though I have fallen into a kind of nightmare of top-down, Stalinist dirigisme; where aims, objectives and targets are set centrally, rather than locally, with little respect for difference; where figures are collected and paraded to show how things are always getting better, when everyone knows that really things are getting harder day by day; where the same (or a smaller) ration of butter is being spread over ever more slices of bread; where the daily struggle to keep going is hidden behind a sort of happy, clappy, gung-ho public enthusiasm as we all wave our flags and engage in our mass arithmetical calisthenics; and where local government has become merely the implementation arm of an all-powerful central government apparat, infected with an overwhelming managerialist hubris.

No, hang on - I’m not dreaming…

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)

On another blog I was reminded of the two things meme, so here’s mine for museums:

1. Collections, not buildings
2. Access trumps conservation

Once upon a time I used to do really curatorial things - cataloguing collections, researching and writing exhibitions, rooting through the collections* - all the interesting things I’ve referred to elsewhere. One of the penalties of increasing management responsibility is that you end up doing less and less of what you came into museums to do, though I managed to avoid that for the first few years in my present post. These days I hardly see the inside of the museum store from one week to the next, and as for cataloguing objects - well, I have changed a couple of database entries in the last few years, and I did fill in some entries in the daybook a few months ago, but that’s about it.

It has come to this - my role is to pass on wise words of advice, the accumulated experience of some nineteen years in museums, while others do the actual work. As for exhibitions, I’m involved in the discussions, and I do have the final say, but at times it seems my main purpose is to provide titles. Titles for exhibitions, titles for exhibition sections, punning titles, cunning titles - this is my domain. I have to say that I do quite like this. I am inordinately fond of puns, and as we all know, a really good title should feature a pun somewhere.

I wonder occasionally how much difference the title makes. Some I have seen are prosaic (”Gold of the Pharaohs” - an exhibition of, well, the gold of, errm, some pharaohs) was a smash hit in Edinburgh in 1988. A touring exhibition, I believe. A subsequent blockbuster attempt in 1990, on the Incas iirc, fared less well. I wonder if the title (”Sweat of the Sun”) had anything to do with it?**

Sometimes the title just springs out at you. When we were working on the exhibition commemorating the 150th anniversary of the railway from Edinburgh to Berwick (the first international railway line!), a number of things struck me - first that Dunbar was where the various dignitaries had come back to for their mammoth feed; and secondly the stories of itinerant agricultural workers arriving in the town somewhat drunk. All of a sudden it’s obvious: Steaming into Dunbar***.

My favourite though has got to be the exhibition we did about the (now-scraped-away as-if-it-had-never-been) outdoor pool. We were really struggling to come up with a title that wasn’t just really, really dull. Listening to people talking about the pool though, the one thing they all commented on was the coldness of the water (well it was the North Sea that it was filled with). I suggested, almost as a joke, that we should call the exhibition Brrr!**** That just resonated so well with everyone who had ever used the pool (and the local children had their swimming lessons there - such cruelty is not allowed these days).

And so to this year’s exhibitions. 110%, not alas my idea, is an exhibition on sport and health. My only contribution (other than saying ‘yes you can spend that inordinate amount of money’) is the title to the healthy living section For the health of it. Our other exhibition celebrates 30 years of John Muir Country Park, so inevitably it’s called Park Life. Yes, it will be John Muir Country Park - the Brit Pop years.

Still I can’t really complain, I do get to do all the fun techie stuff. And there is a certain pleasure in giving people the go-ahead to take forward a project. It’s just, it’s just… sometimes I miss the objects*****.

*How many exhibitions, I wonder, have had their genesis in someone’s trawling through the collections in search of one item, and finding another that really fired their imagination?

**I had nothing to do with either of these exhibitions, btw.

***Steaming being a common word for ‘less than exactly sober’

**** Gratuitous information… Language change in action. When I was a child (not that long ago), ‘brrr’ was merely a conventional way of spelling the sound people made when they were describing how cold it was (usually while rubbing their hands) - a sort of voiced labial trill. In much the same way that the dismissive sound when being expected to believe some rubbish or other was conventionally spelled ‘pshaw’. Weirdly, though ‘brrr’ is now pronounced as written. I’m sure my grandparents would have thought that very strange.

***** I am however assured, as part of the sport exhibition research, that with practice my aim will improve.

…at least temporarily, until my internet connection is back up and running and I can upgrade and install a plugin to kill the spam comments. Sigh. There’s always a few who spoil things for everybody else, isn’t there? I’m sure that actually spam doesn’t really work, it’s just the triumph of hope over experience (except for those who are selling to the would-be spamming millionaires, of course).