Museums’ futures discuss the future of museums
Peter Simpson
When Chantal Prémont said she’s “trying to find out exactly where I belong,” she could have been describing the very purpose of the Canadian Museum Association’s group online roundtable with emerging professionals on the future of museums. Prémont was among the emerging museum professionals invited to the April 30 web talk, the second recent event for a CMA that deputy director Anne-Marie Hayden describes as “increasingly listening to different voices, bringing people together, engaging the younger element of the museum sector, and evolving when it comes to how we communicate.
Prémont is an assistant in collections and archives at the Centre d’Exposition Université de Montréal. Like others on the 90-minute Zoom video call, she has moved around in recent years, with internships in Paris and Dublin, and posts in archiving, cataloguing, research and education. She wrestles individually with the salient question facing Canadian museums during — and after — the pandemic. As participant Joanna Munholland put it, “How do we find our relevance in this time?
“The feelings that I get, having connections with museum people all over the world right now, is we’re in panic mode,” said Munholland, who has worked in arts and museums in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and currently is a visitor experience assistant with the National Trust in North Devon, U.K. “We’re in reaction mode, and we have to fight all these mini fires . . . We need to eventually find a moment to press pause, to breathe and to start planning. Because everyone knows that if you don’t plan, whatever we do going forward has a high likelihood of not working well.”
The CMA’s online roundtable connected the professionals remotely from home during the COVID-19 shutdown, and was facilitated by Hayden and Kyle Hanna, a program officer with the CMA’s Young Canada Works program.
The facilitators asked the participants to think broadly across “the programs, the collection management, the administration, the people management,” and to look ahead a few weeks, a few months, and even five or 10 years. “Paint a picture of what that museum looks like,” Hayden asked, and “how it’s different from the museums we saw yesterday.”
All seemed to agree that flexibility will be key. For example, wondered Hanna, “Should museums and museum associations be training their front-of-house staff to be a bit more versatile, to pick up skills that can be used for behind-the-scenes roles?”
Ben Fast, who is program lead for the Alberta Museums Association and digital content and outreach co-ordinator for ICOM Canada, added that flexibility with staff resources starts with not laying off people in the first place.
Photos — Ben Fast, Chantal Prémont, Anne-Marie Begin and Lorenda Calvert
“It’s a lot of work to rehire and go through the HR things of letting people go,” Fast said, from Edmonton. “Organizational sustainability is going to need to look at HR as much as anything else.”
Ann-Marie Begin, a heritage interpreter at Pier 21 in Halifax, noted that three new interpreters hired just before the shutdown have been reassigned to help with digital programs, instead of working face to face with the public. Such flexibility also depends on job stability and a living wage.
“Valuing front-line workers does come down to money at some point,” they said, “because no matter how much I love interpreting, if I can’t pay my rent I can’t keep doing it.”
Digital content was considered from the immediate to the long-term, and both internally and externally.
Lorenda Calvert, a recently hired programs officer with the B.C. Museums Association who called in from Vancouver, said she’d been providing online meetings for museum workers “as a weekly place where people can connect and share” ideas, such as how to deal with reduced budgets and staff, and effectively responding to extraordinary circumstances when “a team that might have been 300 people might now only be a hundred, a team that was five people is now two and a half.”
Scott Marsden, a museum professional in Yellowknife, said the pandemic “is an opportunity, a pedagogical moment, to look at the gaps and really look at digital strategy.”
Begin recommended that museums think about “long-form digital content,” and how to “take advantage of being a resource for deep information and thoughtful information, and not just, ‘Here’s an image of something for our collection and one sentence about it.'"
Eric Chan a.k.a. EEPMON, digital artisan and CMA Board Member, was invited to observe the roundtable and, following the discussion, shared his thoughts on the importance of digital strategy, “It is clear to me from my observations that the pandemic has revealed much uncertainty hence the ad hoc and unprepared disruption of the entire museum sector. At the same time, the discussions alluded to new opportunities and enormous growth potentials. I believe, more than ever museums require a fully-integrated, robust Digital Strategy.
Chan continued, “We are in the Digital Age! It is my own personal view that NOW is the time for museums to act on and establish timely goals to ensure the continuity and longevity of our Canadian institutions — small to large. #WeAreInThisTogether.”
Meanwhile, roundtable participant Calvert foresaw a gradual lessening of shelter-in-place rules and a flexible mix of field trips and digital outreach, though of nine or 10 months out she wondered, “what does that even look like?” Will students be in schools? Will public access to museums be staggered? How will museums make people feel safe?
Also, Calvert added, what about volunteers “who may not be able to come in at all”? And how are volunteers reassigned without losing the personal passions that may have led them to volunteering?
The group discussed collections management, and how COVID makes maintenance difficult while providing a template for future calamities, such as climate change. Fast cited Alberta’s annual floods and fires and wondered how to manage collections “during a season when technically we’re not supposed to be going into the building.”
Outside the building is also important, as social-distancing-friendly outdoor spaces that Munholland suggested have been underused by museums. Marsden said he’d like to see a more collaborative approach to curating and maintaining collections, while Fast noted that some museums are seeking COVID journals from the public, but wondered how those journals will be transcribed, interpreted and presented. Prémont hoped museums will have to look “more inward” into their own collections, rather than focusing on exhibitions from elsewhere.
Begin noted that in-person programs are most effective in building bridges between communities, and to helping people to understand their own communities. Fast said museums have already played roles in the discussion of issues such as reconciliation and climate change, which Hayden described as “a place for dialogue and discourse where we can talk about those difficult things and we can play a role in fixing them.”
Hanna wrapped up the discussion by noting “we may have come up with more questions than answers,” and said the CMA will continue “this cross-continent collaboration.”
Overall, Hayden concluded, “What I found really inspiring was the idea of an even more engaging, empathetic, welcoming and representable museum of the future, one that is even more collaborative with respect to so many ways in how it works.”
This roundtable was one of a series of similar meetings the CMA has been holding with stakeholders across the country over the past year. The CMA is looking at new ways it can connect with, hear from and share ideas among various groups, including online.