Ask More? Ask More!

I've been thinking about writing an end-of-year post for more than a week as I read other reflections, advice,  what-ifs and to-dos.  But I realized that thanks to my great group of planning colleagues, I've been doing that kind of reflection for several months.  So no top ten list from me.  But just this morning, thanks to Anne Ackerson who blogs over at Leading by Design,  I read The Bamboo Project's list of six 21st century skills you really need.

It's a great list--but I really focused in on one skill for me to work on 2012.  It's #2--Asking more questions.  For me, it really relates to all the other skills. Asking hard questions of myself can make me more self-aware;  questioning can help lead to empathetic listening;  question asking can lead to authentic conversations; it can lead to reflection; and question asking can help take me outside of conversations with people just like myself.

So what kinds of work-related questions do I want to ask in the coming year?  Here's just a few...

For myself:

• What new skills can I learn?
• How can I stretch my own skills further?
• How can I continue to encourage or mentor others?
• What contribution can I make to diversifying our field?
• How can I better organize my time? (as, sadly, I have realized that the prettiest new file folders aren't the answer)
• Where in the world could I go next?

For potential new clients: 

• Do you want real change?
• How can we be most effective working together?
• What do you want me to bring to the table?
• How have you asked questions of your audiences?  What have you done with the answers?
• Do you have fun when you work?

 For audiences and potential audiences:

• How can museums make themselves into real places for deep listening, reflection, conversations, and interactivity?  
• What would make you pay a visit? What keeps you away?
• What community stories are we not telling?  Can you help us with that?

For museums I visit:

• Do you really need that no photography rule?

For readers of this blog: (that's you!)

• What do you want to read more about?
• What blogs do you want to make sure I read?  Who should I make sure to follow on Twitter?
• Have you liked the Uncataloged Museum on Facebook yet?

When I began this blog four years ago (four years ago!)  I thought about it as a place to raise questions, to share ideas, and to learn from all of you.  Those same motivations still continue for me--and I'm very interested in working with those of you who share a commitment to active questioning and listening.  So please be in touch if you have a project in mind.

So let's raise our glasses to a question-filled 2012!

Images, top to bottom
dullhunk on flickr
fffound.com
slainte74 on flickr

Got Something to Say? This Space Available

As the end of the year closes in,  I'm thinking about both the past and the year to come.  As I think about the past year, I realize how many voices I value.  Some of them are the ones close to me--Drew, Anna (above) and the rest of my lively family;  my strategic planning colleagues;  Sarah Crow, my Pickle Project partner; my walking partner Anne; and the clients who dig deep and commit to thinking about new ways of doing things.

My Ukrainian colleagues and friends (for example, Ihor and Tania Poshyvailo, above)  continue to be sources of inspiration as they work to remake their institutions or create new organizations against pretty some pretty incredible odds.  Some of the voices I value are just people I meet along the way.  I love the process of talking to museum visitors and potential visitors, something I just did last week in Canandaigua, NY.  Every museum should do more of it. Some of the voices are the ones implicit in exhibits--from Ukraine to Iceland to here in the US--when an exhibit works, it's a delightful place to be.


Our Pickle Project Conversations this fall showed me that building a space for free and open conversations can be a critical part of creating a civil society.  I'm always thrilled by the willingness of everyday people to share their thoughts on what we're trying to do from 18th century western New York to making manti in Crimea.  At several conferences this year I've found myself having memorable conversations with someone entirely new (a great lesson about approaching strangers at these things).  And conference session participants have been lively and thoughtful.

Then of course, there are those bloggers:  Nina Simon as she takes on a new challenge;  Anne Ackerson; Jasper Visser; newbie blogger Gretchen Jennings;  Beth Merritt ever considering the future; Susie Wilkening and many others.  This year there's also the voices of the people I follow on Twitter, from near and far, as they make me think, lead me to new ideas, and make me laugh, all in 140 characters or less.

For a long time when I wrote this blog, I felt like no one was reading--so the voices of those who comment are especially valued and I'm always happy to see a comment pop-up.  Keep up the great work, you commenters.

But I want to hear more of your voices.  In the coming year, I hope to feature guest bloggers here at the Uncataloged Museum.  Have you read a great book that connects to your work,  seen a compelling exhibit, or just need space to try out a new idea?  I'm particularly interested in featuring colleagues from outside the United States--so as your new year approaches, consider joining me here.   I look forward to many more lively conversations in the coming months.

I Wish I'd Known....

What do you wish you knew when you started your first museum job?  This week, I began a new project with the Connecticut Humanities Council and the Connecticut League of History Organizations,  facilitating a series of workshops as part of the new StEPs CT program which uses AASLH's StEPs program, combined with active mentoring and training, to help 20 plus organizations in the state move forward.

My meeting this week was with a talented group of project mentors, who bring, in total, decades worth of experience to the table. To get to know each other better, we began by talking about what we wish we knew when we began our first museum jobs.  Here's what we shared:

• That what I learned as a camp counselor would be far more useful than what I learned in graduate school.
• That I could temper my expectations and be more realistic.
• No matter how good the programming or exhibits, all the board cares about is the bottom line.
• Customer service never ends.  Every time the phone rings you have to be on your A+ behavior.
• That all institutions are so different from each other.
• That when you come to work in an institution, there's a whole host of existing relationships that you can only guess at.
• I have to be me--not what others expect.

What do you wish you knew when you began your museum career?  Let's hear it!

Photo by elycefeliz on Flickr

Do You Need Every Single Thing?

Often when conversations about new museum initiatives come up,  the reason for inaction is that there’s too much to do and not enough funding.  I won’t argue with the fact that right now is a really stressful financial time for every organization, but I do want to propose that perhaps, local history museums own too many meaningless objects--and that paying attention to meaningful objects will give us more time, more money, and more connections to our community.  After all,  consider the BBC/British Museum collaborative project, A History of the World in 100 Objects, a connection my colleague Christopher Clarke made at the WNYAHA meeting last month at the same time I was working my way through the BBC audio.

A couple months ago, I was working on a planning report for a museum looking to be more targeted about their contemporary collecting efforts.  A tweet looking for other models sent me to the McLean County (Illinois) County Historical Society and Susan Hartzhold, their curator, was good enough to chat with me about their efforts.

This historical society is an old one, founded in 1892, and a relatively large one,  with 9 full-time staffers.  When collecting started, in 1892,  all the objects were collected with provenance—a way of enhancing and reinforcing a sort of ancestor worship, I suspect. Susan’s been on staff for 20 years and she describes the issue as “stuff vs. meaningful stuff.”  As an organization, they were facing decades of collecting from curators who, for whatever reason, didn’t ask the questions that would provide the context for the object.

Some historical societies and museums might just shrug their collective shoulders at that issue—but McLean County chose another direction.  For the last ten years, the staff has gone back and looked at every single object,  trying to find, through research,  what meanings there are for each object—who owned, who used it,  how it compares to others.   They have looked at 18000 objects and deaccessioned 6000 of them.

There was not a collecting policy until the 1970s and now, Susan says, they have become, as a staff, hard-nosed about the collections they hold.  They have gotten rid of things that qualify as a “cabinet of curiousities,”  had no provenance or were in poor condition.  They have established benchmarks (i.e. limitations on the number of something—like wedding dresses from the same period) and objects with provenance always trump objects with no provenance.

It’s taken ten years and is part of a larger strategic plan—but what’s equally important, the size of the collection still stands at 18,000 because the society has continued to collect, but have been much more focused and strategic in their collecting.

What is that new collecting like?

Much of it has happened through partnerships with community organizations.  A local Black History Project grew from a teachers’ project and the museum became a repository for materials that were collected documenting the African American community in the county. 

There is an active South Asian community and the museum worked for five years to more fully engage with them—a task that was helped substantially by bringing in a traveling exhibit on Asian Games and inviting groups to support the exhibit.  But the engagement didn’t end with the traveling exhibit, the museum continues to work with the South Asian community.

There is a growing Hispanic community in the county and the museum has begun efforts to engage with it.  Susan admits that it’s a challenging effort as the museum is located in a courthouse, which makes many new immigrants fearful. They are currently working towards a partnership with a community’s Hispanic group to develop programming  for an upcoming exhibit about traditional Mexican arts.

Susan makes the point that these community efforts take a long time, take patience.   She says, “We have to go to them, we have to say, what can we do for you?’   

And that’s a great take-away from this story.  Collecting and caring for collections is a time-consuming process—but a wasted one unless we really approach the process in a thoughtful way—both in terms of what we have and in terms of how we engage with our communities today.

Images and captions courtesy of the McLean County Historical Society, and many thanks to Susan for taking time to share her work.

Top: 

The nightgown was donated by a local woman, Jean, who was born in 1916.  When asked about the nightgown, Jean had a wonderful story -- She said that she was surprised by the gift, that it really wasn't her style.  She felt that her husband had purchased it for one of two reasons:

             1) He didn't know what to get her, so he let a sales clerk in the lingerie department at the local department store  "convince him that it was exactly what she wanted."  During that time period lingerie departments always had female sales clerks who helped both male and female customers. It wasn't unusual for clerks to help male customers pick out gifts for their wives or girlfriends.

             2) "He'd seen way too many Jean Harlow movies"

Jean said she only wore the nightgown once, but the story and the nightgown tells us so much about  the culture of the time period.

 Bottom:

The pottery was brought to America by  the Alvarez's family; purchased in Zacatecas, Mexico. The donor’s father came to Bloomington in 1972, her mother and 2 brothers followed in 1974.  She joined them in 1975.  Her parents returned to Mexico in 1995, but the rest of the family stayed.

You Can Help Preserve an Endangered Culture

In 2010,  Peace Corps volunteer Barb Wieser found me through this blog, and we've since had the opportunity to get to know each other in person.  I've visited her in Crimea and had the chance to learn about the Crimean Tatar people's complex, rich history and her work at the Gasprinsky Library (and to learn how to make manti with her wonderful neighbors!) Barb's now working to raise funds to assist the library in its preservation work and I wanted to share her story with Uncataloged Museum readers.  It's easy to make a contribution--and I hope you can join me in supporting the work of the library.   Here's her story:

I am a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer and have been serving at the Gasprinsky Crimean Tatar Library in Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine for over two years.

A little background on my site: The Gasprinsky Crimean Tatar Library was founded twenty years ago when the Crimean Tatar people began to return to their homeland of Crimea from which they were forcibly deported by Stalin fifty years earlier (an action in which 46% of the population died and has since been labeled a genocide). Living in exile in distant Soviet republics, the Crimean Tatars were forbidden, like many other ethnic groups in the Soviet Union,  to teach their language or practice the traditions of their culture. As a result, by the time people were allowed to return to Crimea and reestablish their communities, after the breakup of the USSR, much of the culture was lost and the language had become endangered. The Gasprinsky Library was founded to preserve, protect, and revitalize the Crimean Tatar culture and language; to be, as my counterpart at the Library so eloquently puts it, “the keeper of the memory of the Crimean Tatar people.”

However, like many cultural institutions that are a part of the Ukrainian government, the Library suffers from a severe lack of funds to do anything beyond building maintenance and salaries (the average salary for a librarian in Ukraine is only about $200 a month). Many of the documents of the library are in urgent need of preservation, particularly in a digital form that would give them a much wider audience. 

The Peace Corps gives Volunteers the opportunity to do fundraising in the U.S. with their Partnership Program in which people can make a tax exempt donation to support a Volunteer’s project. With this Partnership project, we hope to raise $3000 which would allow the Library to purchase a small flatbed paper scanner for the numerous archival paper documents—letters, unpublished manuscripts and other donated papers—and also to purchase digital scans of some of the library’s old microfilms. The Library is particularly interested in purchasing scans of the microfilms of the newspaper Terdzhman, published from 1883 to 1918 by the Muslim educator and reformer Ismail Gasprinsky, whom the library is named after. Perhaps no other document is so vital to understanding the culture and history of the Crimean Tatar people than Ismail Gasprinsky’s newspaper, but currently access to it is limited to a very few people.

The Crimean Tatars are a unique Muslim people with a vibrant, tragic history. The Gasprinsky Library, the de facto cultural center of the Crimean Tatar people, has struggled hard to preserve the language and culture of their people. By making a donation to this project, you can aid in that struggle. Thank you so much for your support.

Photos top to bottom:

Many of the library’s important original documents are in a state of disrepair.  

 Billboard in Simferopol marking the anniversary of the day the Crimean Tatars were deported (May 18, 1944)

Many Crimean Tatar writers, political leaders, intellectuals, and artists have donated their papers to the Gasprinsky Library.

The Gasprinsky Crimean Tatar Library, located in the city center of Simferopol, the capitol of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine. The Library is a historic building that was the site of a madrasah (Islamic school) in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Take the Ten Word Story Challenge!

At yesterday's AASLH webinar on storytelling, I invited participants a ten word story challenge as a way of using our imaginations about the historic spaces that we share with our visitors.  What's a ten word story challenge?  At some point, it's said that Ernest Hemingway was challenged by a friend to write a story in ten words--he responded with a story in only six.  His story?

                        For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Many of the participants in the webinar had wonderful responses when I asked them for a ten word story about the image shown at the top of this post.  The responses had a sense of drama, of excitement, that is often not found in historic house interpretation.  Here are just a few of the responses:

The dog passed, the lamp went dark.  No one ever ate in this room again.   
Answered an ad to go to the prairie as a bride.

The house is still; mourners are in the parlour.
Mother left. The children found her dog.
Yikes! Empty space on wall!  Out looking for another picture.
Awoke. Snuck off. Had fun. With who?

A quiet man had lunch. 

After the earthquake the lamp eventually stopped swinging.

The light was lit, they led them into the hall.

 Take the challenge--what's your story of this place?

What Makes a Museum Exhibit Sociable?

The vast majority of us visit museums with other people--but many museums are just beginning to consider that sociability within the exhibit development and design process.  Maria Mingalone of the Berkshire Museum and I are presenting a session this week at the New England Museum Association conference where we hope to talk with participants about designing exhibits for social experiences.  Is it the concept?  the design?  do we think too much about just interactions for families and not enough for adult visitors?   Are there exhibit elements that automatically make an exhibit sociable or unsociable?   (For an important take on this,  take a look at Kathy McLean's new book, The Convivial Museum.)

But for our session, we'd love to hear from you in advance of our presentation about what you think.  Please share your stories (or pictures) of exhibits that encouraged or discouraged social interactions.  What works for your organization?  What pitfalls have you overcome?  and are there unwritten rules about social interactions at your museum.  Do tell!

Sociable museum activities happen anywhere. 
Top to bottom:  MassMoca, photo by Drew Harty;  American Museum of Natural History, and the Rijksmuseum.