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Tuesday, January 11, 2011

At Last There is Some Authoritative Text on Museum Governance for Australia


At long last there is an authoritative text on museum and collection governance issues written for Australian situations. Shane Simpson's "MUSEUMS & GALLERIES COLLECTIONS LAW" is virtually a one stop shop on the issues confronted by most museum and collection trustees et al.

In 1982 Shane Simpson wrote "The visual artist and the law" which ever since has been the authoritative text on the subject. In fact it can be claimed that this book has in one way or another had a positive impact upon, and has changed, the ways in which artists are able to manage their practices.

Shane Simpson has an impressive CV. Notably, in 1983 he founded, and was the first director of, the Arts Law Centre of Australia. All in all. for near on 30 years Shane Simpson has not been very far away from the cutting edge of professionalism in cultural production in Australia. Apart from being the primary contributor to Collections Law: Legal issues for Australian Archives, Galleries, Libraries and Museums, Shane Simpson is the initiator of the project and primary author of the text it includes.

Shane Simpson has lectured extensively on the law relating to intellectual property, new technology, publishing, visual arts, music and museums. He has written or edited numerous books including: Music Business, Museums and Galleries: a Practical Legal Handbook, The Visual Artist and the Law in Australia, Discovery and Interrogatories, Music – The Business and the Law, and numerous articles in both Australian and international periodicals.

If you are looking for an authority on museum practice and the law, right now, Shane Simpson must the pre-eminent authority in Australia.

Some useful links:

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Museums and the Future


In the 20th C the 'typical' museum and/or art gallery in the imagination of the colonised and colonising world was an institution steeped in romantic visions of the classics, empire and hegemonic belief systems – albeit increasingly reflective visions as the century drew to a close. Overlaid on this came the celebration of the industrial era that was fueled by the socioeconomic Industrial Revolution that in turn fueled European expansionism and ultimately globalism.

In one way or another the collections held in museums in the Western world were/are essentially plunder of one kind or another that reflected 18th and 19th Century imperatives. The British Museum would be one exemplar that has set down some of the key museum protocols and practices that linger in current museology. However, by the last two decades of the century the world that museum’s were attempting to make sense of was changing at a pace unimaginable in the times, and the cultural dynamics, that shaped museums and museology practices.

In the 21st C comfortable reflections of the past no longer go unchallenged and especially so in public museums that rely on public funding to maintain their programs. There are newer sets of expectations in respect to accountability. Indeed, museology itself is increasingly of interest to researchers and once tight divides between disciplines are blurring. Against this background Communities of Ownership and Interest are looking to:
  1. Engage with museums’ leadership and management;
  2. Museums as a source of critically important information;
  3. The institution’s set of goals as a measure of their relevance to contemporary social and cultural realities;
  4. Drive museums’ programs toward strategic alliances and financial success;

"Museums are unique institutions with the potential both to develop and to explain new knowledge and its significance to the general public. By engaging society in a guided conversation about their world, museums can learn about the societal context of their knowledge. Museums have the potential to participate in shaping our collective futures by bringing their research, exhibition programming, and heritage collections together with society’s interests into integrated programs. In the face of a rapidly growing need to examine environmental, cultural, and socio-economic problems, people are turning to institutions or sources that will address global problems at local levels." Leading Museums into the Future .... read more here

In the case of museums auspiced by local government in Tasmania the Local Government Act 1993 provides for:

(1) A council may establish a controlling authority with the following functions:

(a) to carry out any scheme, work or undertaking on behalf of the council;

(b) to manage or administer any property or facilities on behalf of the council;

(c) to provide facilities or services on behalf of the council;

(d) to carry out any other functions on behalf of the council."

.... read more here

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Museums in a Local Government Paradigm

Museums in a Local Government paradigm confront a number of accountability issues. In Local Government its often the case that the roles of governance and management get blurred. The closeness of the constituency to the coalfaces of governance and public administration (management) often gives rise to contention with various players contesting an issue from sometimes conflicting points of view given their various interests.

The diagram here provides a perspective against which a situation might be assessed. In the case of a museum, a community cultural asset, it may be of some use in providing a perspective on how 'the asset' might be imagined, understood and administered on behalf of its Community of Ownership and Interest the Local Government constituency and beyond.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Museum Strategic Planning

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Purpose, Mission and Vision Statements
Mission and vision statements are relatively easy to write and the best of them bring people together in a common purpose. They are safe to write because they embody abstract concepts. However, typically museum staff see themselves as being on top of the management aspects. Their vision does not always concur with a museum's Community of Ownership and Interest (COI) expectations/aspirations and as often as not they often do not see 'visioning' as having a real impact on how they go about their work.

More important that the 'vision' is the institution's 'purpose'. The purpose statement tells you – institution members and its COI – what the institution must do to be relevant – and can be help accountable for. On the other hand the vision is aspirational – and some elasticity can be allowed if the aspiration is not met.

The fundamentally important thing in determining how a contemporary museum is able to shift from the status quo where it wants/needs to be is having a clearly articulated strategic plan. Refining these plans is where the roles governance and management starts to be felt by curators and the institution's COI.

At this point the status quo gives way to new imaginings and new operational sensitivities and sensibilities. While they may be similar to earlier activities by necessity they need not be the same. New sets of accountability also come into play but people need to be both reassured and encouraged by change.

Overall there needs to be a sense of pragmatism in regard to revenue and the value of previous activities in relation to the delivery of cultural dividends and the financial strength of the institution.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

A GOVERNANCE CHECKLIST

A public museum's membership/citizenry/constituency – members, researchers, ratepayers, residents, donors, et al. – needs a professional approach to governance and management to protect their interests as the institution's Community of Ownership and Interest (COI).

For the purposes of this article, governance is that cluster of activities that relate to decisions that define expectations, that grant powers and that verify performance along with taking actions to assure accountability for results (or lack thereof) and the correction of systemic and other problems.

In the context of a museum, governance includes:
Determining and/or validating community needs;
Verifying purposes and objectives to fulfill those purposes;
Assuring that strategies to achieve objectives are realistic – including funding;
Acts to assure accountability by testing against results achieved – or otherwise;
Acts to correct systemic or other problems that may be impeding results and value.

The museum's professional management team, its trained personnel, manage the operation of the museum and it programs while the decisions about community interests, value for money, affordability and standards of service are the domain of its governance.

Weaknesses or failures of governance would therefore be seen as:
Public dissatisfaction with value for fees, subscriptions, rates and other charges
Unsustainable – from the COI perspective – increases in inputs – fees, charges, subscriptions, rates etc.
Optional activities taking an excessive percentage of total budgets
Loss making activities impacting upon the level of inputs plus the quality and quantity of outputs – exhibits, projects, publications etc.

The overall impression would be an organisation that appeared out of control and unable to define or describe in any detail, how and why it was incurring expenses – e.g. unable to relate budgets to goals and activities as programs or line items – or failing to deliver planned outcomes.

Such a condition would be indicated by a lack of the normal organisational documentation that demonstrates a professional approach to governance. The documentation requirements and their purposes are outlined in the table below.

Click on the table to enlarge

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

DEACCESSION: Values roulette


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The New Criterion:
Deaccession roulette, Hilton Kramer, 11 August 2009 "The word deaccession is one of those bureaucratic coinages whose chief purpose is verbal obfuscation. If a museum director tells you he has “deaccessioned” eighteen Cézannes, you think for a second, “Oh, that’s nice” while you wonder exactly how to conjugate the verb “to deaccess.” What would happen if museum directors were more direct? Suppose, for example, that instead of saying “I have deaccessioned eighteen Cézannes” he spoke in plain English and said: “I have looted my collection of eighteen Cézannes in order to sell them and raise money to cover the budget shortfall I created by imprudent management.” It sounds rather different, doesn’t it?.... Read more online

Research libraries face a paradigm shift from a world where investigators begin their research at 'the library', relying upon printed materials for the most part, to a predominantly 'digitised world' where the researcher's first port of call is the Internet. To be effective, managing the in between period, as libraries struggle to reimagine themselves as "collaborative learning, research, and knowledge creation centers", it must be done via networking. Some reading online

In the context of this paradigm shift, research needs to be done and partnerships need to be built with libraries, museums and other institutions interested in the management of cultural resources to establish best collaborative and cooperative approaches. Clearly this impacts upon museum deaccession policies and it likewise points to the need for rolling reviews – siloed status quoism was never credible but it has lost any credibility it may have claimed for itself.

The qualifications of valuers and the veracity of valuations needs to be clear and independently evaluated. For example 'material' donated under the "Gifts to the Nation" program to museums the Australian Tax Office rules for tax deductibility demand that the valuer must be accredited. It would be reasonable to assert the same rule in any museum –large, small, regional, local whatever.

It is not appropriate for a museum employee to simply determine a monetary value of material to be deaccessed – minimal or otherwise. It may however be appropriate for them to report on its significance – cultural, scientific, whatever – and have that peer reviewed in various contexts during a cooling-off period.

The focus on monetary value in museums is in almost all cases totally inappropriate given that the significance is generally dependant upon an object's cultural cargo and this does not always translate into a monetary value – both cultural value and monetary value are subjective.

"The cynic knows the price of everything
and the value of nothing."
- Oscar Wilde

Monday, November 30, 2009

Musing Or Deeming?

In essence, a museum is a keeping place for:
  • The stories and ideas that help us make sense of place – Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, Oceania; and
  • The narratives that help us make sense of a changing world.
In a local context, museums reflect the cultural realities that lend meaning to places. Ultimately, museums add value to places and they are wealth creating.

SAMPLE STATEMENT: QVMAG MISSION: "Our mission is to be a leader in the intellectual and creative development of Launceston and the State by increasing our enjoyment and understanding of our natural and cultural heritage." LINK

Museums are places in our cultural imagination that are places where we might discover the extraordinary in the ordinary. They are places that cause us to wonder.

We construct museums and fill them with objects and ideas in order that we might make more sense of the world we share with each other. In a 21st Century context public museums are:
  • The keeping places of a community's cultural property and heritage;
  • The repositories of diverse, disparate and interconnected knowledge bases;
  • An 'Ideas Factory' of a kind, and a place a community depends upon to help make sense of their world and engage with complex ideas – it has been ever so. To read on click here ....
[Museums today are contested spaces and]"necessarily require a rethinking of the way museums have engaged and connected with communities, stakeholders [Communities of Ownership & Interest] and media in the past and how these modes of engagement can be extended and transformed to embrace the special relationship required for the proper engagement of potentially controversial subjects. To read more click here ... Transcending fear - engaging emotions and opinions - a case for museums in the 21st century ...

CURATORS: Musing or Deeming?

PERMANENT COLLECTIONS AND CURATORS: caretaker ... or ‘gatekeeper’ ... or a ‘culture’, exhibition impresario ... or a researcher cum publisher ... or an artist, political cum social activist ... or ‘culture shaper’ ... or ‘taste maker’ ...

Click here for an international perspective on the role and history of museum curatorship

CURATOR

cu·ra·tor (ky-rtr, kyr-tr)
n. One who manages or oversees, as the administrative director of a museum collection or a library.
[Middle English curatour, legal guardian, from Old French curateur, from Latin crtor, overseer, from crtus, past participle of crre, to take care of; see curative.]
cura·tori·al (kyr-tôr-l, -tr-) adj.
cu·rator·ship n.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
curator
n
1. the administrative head of a museum, art gallery, or similar institution
2. (Law) Law chiefly Scots a guardian of a minor, mentally ill person, etc.
[from Latin: one who cares, from cu¯ra¯re to care for, from cu¯ra care]
curatorial adj
curatorship n
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 6th Edition 2003. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003 ……

Curator (from Latin cura, care), means manager, overseer.
Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, or archive) is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections. The object of a traditional curator's concern necessarily involves tangible objects of some sort, whether it be inter alia artwork, collectibles, historic items or scientific collections. More recently, new kinds of curators are emerging: curators of digital data objects, and biocurators. …. wikipedia

cu·ra·tor [kyoo-rey-ter, kyoor-ey- for 1, 2; kyoor-uh-ter for 3]
noun 1. the person in charge of a museum, art collection, etc. 2. a manager; superintendent. 3. Law. a guardian of a minor, lunatic, or other incompetent, esp. with regard to his or her property.
Origin: L, equiv. to cu¯ra¯(re) to care for, attend to (see cure ) + -tor -tor; r. ME curatour AF L as above
Related forms:
cu·ra·to·ri·al [kyoor-uh-tawr-ee-uhl, -tohr-] , adjective
cu·ra·tor·ship, noun
Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.

cu·ra·tor Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, from curare to care, from cura care
Date: 1561
: one who has the care and superintendence of something; especially : one in charge of a museum, zoo, or other place of exhibit
cu·ra·to·ri·al adjective
cu·ra·tor·ship noun

The role
  • along with conservators and art technicians, to delineate a comprehensive and accurate record of the artwork, object, information, for the future ... read more
  • Traditionally, a curator has been defined as the custodian of a museum or other collection – essentially a keeper of things. The Association of Art Museum Curators identifies curators as having a primary responsibility for the acquisition, care, display and interpretation of objects, such as works of art. They work with their institutions to develop programs that maintain the integrity of collections and exhibitions, foster community support, and generate revenue ... A curator of an ... read more

Accountability & Relationships Diagrams

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“You need to focus on the main thing, and then you need to be sure that the main thing is really the main thing.” (Richard P. Chait’s – Museum governance in a new age 2001 – Museum Trusteeship VOL15 2002 )

"The past quarter-century has seen fundamental shifts in the public sector [museums], the theoretical underpinnings of which are rooted in agency theory, market economics and the `new managerialism’. This movement has brought with it an emphasis on
  • accountability, the monitoring of performance and incentives for good performance;
  • separation of strategy from delivery, and a focus on management rather than policy;
  • an inclination to introduce market mechanisms for delivery, including competition and contracting-out;
  • responsiveness to customer preferences; and
  • disaggregation of large bureaucratic structures, but with autonomy having to be earned within a framework of strong central control."
(Adrian Babbidge, Egeria Heritage Consultancy – PAPER – INTERCOM Conference: Leadership in Museums: Are our Core Values Shifting, Dublin, Ireland, October 16 – 19, 2002.)

MUSEUMS: Stakes, Shares & Ownerships

In the 1970s it was fashionable to start to consider “stakeholders” in planning and management processes. At the time it was intended to be an inclusive notion but very quickly some of these stakeholders began to assert precedence over others – they demanded ranking and privileges to match.

Very quickly their concerns were accommodated and as a consequence before anyone could be considered a stakeholder they needed to demonstrate a ‘legitimate interest’ – a pecuniary interest, an ownership, a potential loss of something, whatever. Stakeholdership quite quickly became at once an elastic concept and an idea in retreat – more often than not, one that served some more than others.

Rarely does the idea of ‘obligation’ come into the stakeholder equation but ‘rights’ are regularly asserted – albeit so often self defined. Stakeholdership is an untidy and contentious idea to say the least! It is especially so if you are left out of the loop.

However there is another way, and more inclusive way, to think about all this. If we think about Museum & Art Galleries (Cultural Institutions & Enterprises) as having Communities of Ownership and Interest– layers of cognitive owners including stakeholders – we might then begin an interesting conversation with each other in regard to resource management and cultural values.

There is no need to invent and then market this idea as if it were some new idea as clearly Public Museums and Art Galleries have an extraordinary Communities of Ownership and Interest (COI). All that really needs to be done is:
  • Identify the COI membership – individuals, groups, institutions, communities;
  • Acknowledge and celebrate the COIs presence; and
  • Begin the conversation!
That might seem to be a job for a consultant but not really – they have not delivered yet. It isn’t rocket science! It is simply about making a list and being prepared to continually add to it and act upon it.

Mapping the ‘ownerships’ shared in the cultural and intellectual property – cultural knowledge – enriches them rather than diluting or downgrading them. Nonetheless the tensions between Freehold Property, 'The Crown', Cultural Property and the Public Domain will not dissolve. However, they may be managed in more productive ways when these layers of ‘ownerships’ are acknowledged alongside all others in the cognitive ownership layering.

Do institutions shape our culture?
Or, do our cultural realities shape our institutions?


Acknowledging a COI is a cultural mindset. It is not a bureaucratic process – rather it is a participatory process. The cognitive ownership model demonstrates the richness of places – museums here – as an alternative to the poverty of perspective embedded in adversarial and unconsultative bureaucratic planning processes.

An audit of cognitive ownerships would reveal the confluences and conflicts in ownership claims. If we abandon the notion that there can be a hierarchical structure to the ownership of place, – museums here again – it is possible that managers of cultural property can begin:
• To work towards accommodating competing claims in the context of coexistent cognitive ownerships;
• To resolve conflicts and tensions over usage and access; and
• To establish appropriate planning processes and management systems that engage with the Community of Ownership and Interest.

Who are these cognitive owners? The simple answer is almost everyone but a list of them must be inclusive rather than exclusive or privileged and it must be an ‘open list’. More important than knowing 'who the owners are' is knowing what their interest and ownerships are – and the cultural context in which an ownership is claimed. Knowing that allows for the accommodation of inclusive and holistic planning and management processes.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Governance Model

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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

MUSEUM DEFINITIONS

MUSEUM:

  • A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment ... The International Council of Museums' Definition of a Museum ..... Development of the Museum Definition according to ICOM Statutes (1946 - 2007)
  • A building, place, or institution devoted to the acquisition, conservation, study, exhibition, and educational interpretation of objects having scientific, historical, or artistic value. ..... Answers.com
  • Public institution dedicated to preserving and interpreting the primary tangible evidence of humans and their environment ... In Roman times the word referred to a place devoted to scholarly occupation. ..... Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
  • An institution devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value; also : a place where objects are exhibited ... mu·se·um Etymology: Latin Museum place for learned occupation, from Greek Mouseion, from neuter of Mouseios of the Muses, from Mousa Date: 1672 ..... Merriam-Webster
  • SPECULATIVE: A museum is a non-profit, community cultural enterprise dedicated to servicing a Community of Ownership and Interest through the acquisition, conservation, research, communication and exhibition of the COI’s tangible and intangible cultural assets and heritage under its stewardship for the purposes of education, study and amusement.

Some Rhetoric