21st Century Curation

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21st Century Curation

• Suzanne Keene
• Institute of Archaeology

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21st Century Curation

• Disruptive technologies
• Are museums immune?

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Disruptive technologies?

• They are radically different from existing
  technologies.
• Initially perform worse by some measures than
  existing dominant ones.
• Appeal to a market sector thats not important
  and not served profitably by established
  technologies.

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Notable examples

• Music downloads and file sharing vs. compact
  discs
• e-publishing vs. physical publications
• e-commerce vs. physical shops
• Open-source software vs. proprietary software
  (Linux)
• Digital photography vs. conventional photography

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Museums - what disruption?

• Nature of collections and their management
• Collect the intangible heritage
• Demand to contribute and share (W2)
• Disclose whats in the collections

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Disruption 3 sources

• Expectations and costs
• Collecting
• Demand for greater collections access and use

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Expectations and costs
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Melbourne Museum ethnography collections
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Collections in two museums
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Does it matter?
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Archaeology
Local history
Natural history
Science industry
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Does it matter?
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1001 kinds of collection

• the aesthetic
• functional objects
• archives for research
• places people collections
• intangible heritage

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1001 collections, 1001 uses ...

• Research
• Learning
• Memory identity
• Creativity
• Enjoyment

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Museum examples
ISIN scientific instruments
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21st Century Curation for museums?

• Guardians of collections
• gtgtgt facilitators of engagement with them
• Storing static collections
• gtgtgt collections as a service (but ... for the
  future, too)
• Different and separate from other institutions
• gtgtgt some of the players in a networks for
  research, learning, creativity, enjoyment and
  leisure in which others take the lead

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The museum needs to be turned inside out the
back rooms put on exhibition and the displays put
into storage.
Mark Dion, installation artist
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Disruption in action

• The Australian Museum's fish collections
  Unbeatable - and beautiful - a fabulously
  comprehensive collection website, complete with
  collaborative features and a list of publications
  by outside researchers based on the collections.
• http//www.austmus.gov.au/fishes/

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Disruption in action

• Tracing your roots 200 years of migration to
  England In the website project Moving Here, 30
  local, regional and national Museums, Archives
  and Libraries from across England collaborated to
  build a website with access to their records and
  the ability for people to add information about
  their own experiences of moving to live in
  England.
• http//www.movinghere.org.uk/galleries/roots/

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Disruption in action

• PictureAustralia's website, a great collection of
  images from museums, libraries and archives all
  across Australia
• http//www.pictureaustralia.org/apps/pictureaustra
  lia

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Disruption in action

• The Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco, 'Thinker'
  image search Search for whatever interests you -
  pictures have been tagged by volunteers with
  terms that make sense to them, rather than by
  using art historical classification. A museum
  example, ahead of the game, of the use of
  folksonomy (in contrast with taxonomy).
• http//www.thinker.org/fam/about/

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Disruption in action

• Canada's Digital Collections Using public
  resources such as images and information from
  Canadian museums, the digital collections were
  created by Canadian youth, as part of the
  Government of Canada's Youth Employment Strategy.
• http//collections.ic.gc.ca/E/view.html

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Disruption in action

• A Chinese Canadian Story The Yip Sang Family
  This digital collection was produced under
  contract to Canada's Digital Collections program,
  Industry Canada.
• http//collections.ic.gc.ca/yipsang/

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Disruption in action

• The Science Museum's programme of stores tours
  The 2004-5 programme is finished, but was
  featured quite extensively in the press, for
  example The Guardian "Searching for the lost Ark
  of the Covenant? Curious about the location of
  the Holy Grail?"
• http//www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/collections/ingeni
  oustours.asp