Museum Musings

QR Codes – the discussion continues

2012-01-27T16:00:00.000+11:00

I have blogged a few times recently on trails being undertaken with QR codes, see QR codes, RFIDs and Goggles, Providing Rich Media Content, including a view that they are of limited value and New Technologies in the Museum Sector.

That said it is early days, and there are a host of trials going on to help get at broader picture. Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum, who is always worth reading as the Brooklyn has been a innovator from way back, writes in the Brooklyn Museum blog that their latest findings from QR take-up has been indecisive, and one could read disappointing. All visitors are provided with entrance tags on the back of which is a QR code and an explanation of what visitors might find by scanning QR codes on objects into the Museum. Only 1.77% of visitors responded by scanning the code, and of those that did scan the code only an average 3.37% of those users (.059% of total visitors) scanned the codes that were placed on objects ( admittedly only placed on 30 objects out of the 3000 on display).

So my take on QR codes at present is as follows:

On the positive side, they provide at present the fastest way to a URL and the ability to share flexible information from a smartphone, but:

they need to be at least 30 x 30mm
they should always include details about how to download a QR code reader beside them
they should always identify which URL they send users too
museums should be prepared for a slow start and gradual uptake of interest

On the negative side;

you need a smartphone to read them, and although the growth in such is phenomenal ( 90% take-up by 2015 predicted), a significant proportion of visitors still don’t have them and are therefore disenfranchised by this method of content delivery
they are a hassle to use in terms of first of all downloading the QR reader and then aligning the QR code on the phone camera, scanning the image and waiting for the upload

For my money, it is the dual technologies of visual recognition and location awareness that we should be watching most closely in terms of their capacity to deliver content. They both appear to be developing far faster than QR code technology, of which more soon.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

That ongoing de-accessioning debate

2012-01-19T15:29:00.001+11:00

Nothing like kicking off the year with that old chestnut, unwanted objects and collections!

The Newark Museum has made the headlines in Philadelphia on the issue of having to store and insure loaned objects that they will never exhibit and would love to be rid of. The article picks up on the fact that 40 US states have legislation in place whereby collecting institutions can take legal possession of objects (and thus decide what to do with them) if they send registered letters to the last known address of the owner and publish notices in newspapers signaling the end of the loan, and receive no response.

And that is a good lead into an article I came across in the UK Art Fund’s latest excellent magazine by Sir Mark Jones, the recently retired director of the V&A. Jones writes about the impulses that drive the collection of art and where museums fit into this. He likens museums to the modern day equivalents of cathedrals, which in the Middle Ages vied for and elaborately housed relics to attract pilgrims.

People collect, he argues, not to fulfill basic needs but chiefly to assert status, to establish rank and power. Museums then become the place where these collections are deposited both to advertise the wealth of the collector, and also to place those objects out of rivals’ reach. Museums then have to tread a fine line between making these collections available and advertising the power and wealth of those who made them.

Many such collections come with stipulations that the collection not only can never be sold but should remain on display. The latter point is clear, namely to continue to bring prestige to the collector, which obviously cannot happen when it languishes in the store.

But the former point is one that is critical to the de-accessioning debate and helps to explain the problems and anxiety that such a process creates. Collectors have made donations on the basis that by doing so they place their collection beyond the reach of other collectors. If museums start a process of de- accession and selling works of art, they no longer can provide collectors with the assurances they need on this front.

Incidentally on the same theme, Patricia Andersen, Editor of Australian Art Review, makes some good points on how collections have evolved in her Editorial for the latest Jan-Feb 2012 edition, reinforcing how many museums in the western world began by providing a public face for private collections. It is, by the way, a great edition focusing on the great regional collections in Bathurst, Bendigo, Perc Tucker, Townsville and Broken Hill.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Environmental Guidelines

2011-12-19T12:37:00.001+11:00

I recently blogged on the issue of AICCM’s environmental guidelines for museums and galleries, and the awards AICCM picked up for them at the Museums Australia conference in Perth last month, both in the Sustainability sector and also the overall award.

We are a bit embarrassed that they are not yet available for public dissemination, but the reality is that until the new standard is released in the UK, as a net borrower of artworks and objects, Australian museums and galleries must wait. We now understand that PAS 198 (the precursor to the new British Standard) is likely to be launched early next year. However there’s nothing easy in this space!

The driver for change has been that current recommended environmental standards for display and storage conditions in museums and galleries rely on significant amounts of energy to keep them constant. Internationally the museum sector is facing a number of challenges, namely: rising energy costs; reduced budgets; and community pressure to be more environmentally sustainable.

These challenges raise two broad questions:

what are the opportunities/issues around reducing energy use in collection climate control?
what are the resulting potential impacts on collections (sometimes referred to as the 'preservation equation')?

The current generation of museum professionals have grown up working to the internationally recognised and until recently unassailable standards of 20°C +/- 2°C temperature and 50% +/- 5 % relative humidity. It is these that we are looking to relax.

However the National Gallery in London came out last week with its own view on the issue saying that in fact they are looking to tighten the parameters rather than loosen them to 21°C +/- 1°C in winter and 23°C +/- 1°C in summer and 50% +/- 5 % RH. See their well reasoned argument and indeed a broader background to the issue here.

My strong view is that, although the National Gallery’s old masters may need these very tight parameters, very few other collections do, and that the broad push to get the general standard relaxed must continue.

It’s interesting to see in the same week as the National Gallery’s announcement that the data centre sector is also grappling with the same issues. Data centres use vast amounts of electricity to keep their banks of computers cool.

Apparently these data centres run at 18-21°C to avoid hot spots that might cause the computers to malfunction. Now it has been shown that there is unlikely to be any problem letting computers operate in an environment up to 37°C. Even by relaxing the climate level by 9°C an astonishing $2.16 billion in energy costs would be saved by the sector in the US alone.

Now that is serious money saved and of course serious carbon dioxide emissions too.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

New technologies in the museum sector

2011-11-30T11:31:00.001+11:00

A notable aspect of the recent Museums Australia conference in Perth was the extent of interest in new technologies. From the impact of the NBN to social media engagement, from virtual palaeontology to iPhone apps, there was hardly a parallel session which did not have a new technology paper. This is a significant change from the same conference only a couple of years ago, and judging by the numbers in each session, there is a real demand for knowledge in this area. Perhaps this is partly due to a fact that Michael Harvey, Head of Exhibitions at the Australian Museum, commented on in his paper, that from his experience museum visitors tend to be early adopters of technology and to use social media above the average of the general population.

I gave a paper in one of these sessions on the opportunities for Smartphones in museums co-authored with Seb Chan. This particularly reported on the latest thinking on Smartphone communication technologies, from QR codes, NFC (Near Field Communication), and Google Goggles to wifi (see my blog for more details). But we started by picking up on the recent New Media Consortium's Horizon Project which examined emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in education and interpretation within the museum environment (2011 Museum edition).

It’s worth repeating some of their key findings which include:

Increasingly, visitors and staff expect a seamless experience across devices. More and more, patrons want the experience of interacting with museum content using the device of their choice, wherever and whenever they choose to do so.
Collection-related rich media are becoming increasingly valuable assets in digital interpretation. Museums are beginning to see the value in developing formal strategies for capturing high-quality media documentation at every opportunity. Museums are embracing the opportunities provided by rich media to enhance multimodal learning both online and in the galleries. Video, audio, and animations are no longer seen as afterthoughts in interpretation but increasingly as necessary components of an interpretive plan.
Digitization and cataloguing projects continue to require a significant share of museum resources. Visitors expect to be able to readily access accurate and interesting information and high-quality media. This requires museums to plan strategically for the digitization and cataloguing of collections.
Improving our ability to measure impact using new digital technologies is a critical need. Museums are good at traditional program evaluation, but determining the impact of new technologies on knowledge, attitudes, skills is more challenging.

One of the issues that I constantly hit in major museums, as I talk to them about new technologies, is their reservation about investing in a technology that may soon be superseded. One that I have had my own reservations about are QR (Quick Response) codes. So I was not surprised to read that recent research in New York has confirmed their limitations. In summary it was found that although there was general awareness of the codes, and an understanding of how to make use of them, very few people actually expressed an interest in doing so, mostly because they felt they could access the information/links more easily (and more cheaply) in other ways. Seb has blogged most interestingly on the issue.

Whatever the technology it must always be seen as an enabler, only as good as the content behind it, and the stories being told through it. So it’s good to read in a recent blog by Bruce Wyman, formerly Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum, that evaluation has shown visitors are getting more from their experiences using technology aid in museums and learning more about artworks than if they did not have access to such. That must always be the driver.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums Australia meeting in Perth

2011-11-25T15:48:00.003+11:00

I spent last week in Perth with 600 fellow museum bods at the annual Museums Australia Conference. It was held at the splendiferous new Heath Ledger Theatre at the State Theatre complex just north of the CBD, a great venue in terms of both the theatre itself and also the break out spaces, and Perth turned on some balmy weather to get us all in the mood. The conference was run jointly with Interpretation Australia, which was always going to appeal to me, as I believe strongly that one of the key reasons for our existence in this sector is to be able to tell the stories behind the objects we look after.

What did I come away with?

Some great papers (which I thought were to be posted on the MA website, but do not seem to be at present - I will explore further).

Susan Cross from the UK on the power of story telling, and the way in which people are looking for shared memories. Stories are contagious, namely by getting people talking they are more likely to pass them on. An inspirational speaker – you can get a flavour of her from a talk she gave in Scotland here.
Margaret Anderson from the History Trust of South Australia on the ‘About Time’ history festival, which in seven years has grown to a state wide festival of 500 events run by 300 organisations.
John Holden from the UK Demos Institute talking on the changing face of culture. John’s fellow Demos researcher, Sam Jones had talked at the AICCM conference in Canberra in October (see my blog), and their outputs are always worth reading/listening to. John’s angle this time was that creative culture has suffered from market failure, i.e. that not enough people are prepared to pay sufficient amount to support it, so it relies on government subsidies. In the long term this is unsustainable, and we need to move to a commercial model where the outputs are seen as providing a justifiable return on investment. This does not mean that there cannot continue to be government run models but that mainstream culture needs to get with the current generational aspirations in this radically different social, technological and political context of the 21st century.

A strong view that the mining royalties that are pouring into the WA Government treasury are about to be spent (finally) on a new WA Museum. Alec Coles, the recently appointed director, is clearly a man with a mission and appears to have the ear of government, judging by the relevant minister’s comments at the conference opening. Interestingly Alec said he was quietly pleased that the planned $450 million redevelopment of the Swan River powerstation as the new museum was canned as result of the GFC, as it would have been a disaster of a place for the Museum being so difficult to access.

A win for the work of the AICCM Taskforce on Environmental Guidelines for Museums and Galleries that I have been chairing. Not only did we pick up the MAGNA (Museums and Galleries National Awards) Sustainability Award but also the Overall Award. This is a great result as it gives us leverage into the senior corridors of power in museums and galleries to sell this message of the gains to be made by relaxing environmental parameters.

And finally the chance to view one of my favourite objects namely the Ife or Olokun Head from the British Museum (see my blog) It is part of a small but stunning exhibition currently at the WA Museum of treasures from the British Museum. If in Perth in the next few months, make a beeline to see it and the related objects. As always the real is much more spectacular than the image.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Ignite the Power of Art

2011-11-11T10:49:00.002+11:00

Understanding different visitor requirements is something I have recently blogged about, particularly the work of Gail Davitt at the Dallas Museum of Art. Gail has been in Australia for the last few days and gave a great talk at the Australia Council in Sydney.

What was really interesting was to understand the context in which DMA’s research was undertaken and how they reached the conclusions they did. As a reminder they concluded that there are four types of visitors namely:

Observers – those that stand back, having limited knowledge of art, preferring a guided experience
Participants – those that enjoy learning and the social experience of being in museums and galleries
Independents – those that are more confident with their knowledge and prefer independent viewing
Enthusiasts – those who are confident, enthusiastic, knowledgeable and comfortable looking at art

Gail first talked to the context, namely a Museum-wide view that it should seek to understand the triggers that get visitors to engage with art, hence the project title ‘Ignite the Power of art’.

The process involved 1) undertaking the research, 2) applying what was learnt, and 3) measuring the impact both on visitors and Museum staff.

Research produced the above visitor category breakdown, with some interesting side issues, e.g. that 30% of the Observers (least engaged) category were members – why?
Application involved everything from changing exhibition labels to provide for different levels of engagement to encouraging responses to exhibitions and using smartphones to deliver varying levels of interpretation
Impact involved both a much greater level of collaboration between staff and visitors and more listening to the visitors’ voice, changing in branding and mission of the Museum, better collaboration between staff departments and a much greater appetite at the Museum for experimentation.

So the take-aways from the exercise Gail identified as:

Visitors now being perceived as individuals
A much deeper sense of understanding of the quality of the visitor experience by Museum staff
The research that DAM undertook, whilst applicable to other museums was also very institutional specific

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and entry charges

2011-11-07T10:53:00.002+11:00

The National Maritime Museum (NMM) in the UK has seen a ‘drastic ‘drop in visits since they put in place an entry fee ( surprise, surprise) according to the latest UK Museums Association Journal. Visitors dropped from 706,952 to 470,800, but the entry fee generated an additional £521,000.

Meanwhile the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto under new director Dr Janet Carding (ex Deputy director Australian Museum, Sydney and prior to that the Science Museum, London) has made an early call in her directorate to cut admission prices by up to 35%, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail. Adult admission is now $15. Funding for the ROM is about 17% from visitor revenue, with 965,000 visitors in the last year. Janet is hopeful, based on survey results, that the reduction in admission will boost the numbers over 1 million.

Further south the opposite is happening with entry fee hikes going on (see two articles in The Art Newspaper). At the Met in New York prices have increased from $20 to $25, with MoMA following suit ($20 to $25) and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston lifting theirs from $20 to $22.

Three interesting issues here:

Do the numbers around charging for admission add up? In the case of the NMM their visitors dropped from 706,952 to 470,800, but the entry fee generated an additional £521,000. At a simplistic level the 706,952 pre entry fee visits generated no income at the turnstiles, but say £1,413,900 at an average £2 net in retail and catering sales. Now with entry charges the 470,800 visits generated £521,000 in entry fees and at £2 net in retail and catering sales a further £941,600, totalling £1,462,600. Once you deduct the cost of selling tickets and the related infrastructure it looks pretty line ball to me. In the UK of course this is academic where the Government makes the call that national museums have to provide free entry. They have found that increased retail and catering income tends not to cover the extra cost of dealing with larger crowds.
Is pushing up the price, as in the case of the Met and MoMA or bringing it down as in the case of the ROM likely to significantly affect visitor numbers? My guess is that in New York an extra $5 for those who were probably going anyway is not going to make that much difference, and based on the numbers staying the same, it will mean an extra $8m a year into the Met’s coffers. 10% of their annual budget (currently a whopping $320m) comes from admissions. Conversely in a less affluent city like Toronto my thinking is that reducing the entry fee will have less effect, as those deterred from coming at $22 may well still be deterred at $15.
Are members harder to attract if a museum does not charge, due to the loss of incentive of being able to offer free entry to members? It appears that the answer is yes, witness the astonishing 133,000 members that MoMA now has, driven in part by local visitors wanting to return regularly.

What everyone does know is that when charging museums turn to the free entry model, the numbers go roaring up. The Indianapolis Museum of Art saw numbers rise from 185,000 to 462,000 in a year after free admission was introduced in 2006.

And finally the problem of the reverse is not always a financial one, witness the political ramifications for the British Museum considering introducing paid entry. The model they were looking at was to make UK citizens free and everyone else pay. Hang on said the Europeans, isn’t the UK a part of the EU, so Euro citizens should be free? And then the Greeks joined in, pointing out that one of the key justifications for the BM holding onto the Elgin marbles is that they can be freely seen by anyone. Complicated!

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Conservation still matters

2011-10-26T11:28:00.003+11:00

The AICCM Conference wrapped up in Canberra at the week end, and I think the profession came away feeling that we are in reasonable shape. This was particularly driven by the conference focus being on the bigger contextual issues of our work, rather than the detailed expose of individual object treatments.

Three areas for me are particularly worth commenting on:

• Vicki Humphrey, the newly appointed Head of Conservation at the National Museum of Australia gave a great paper on the gentle art of persuasion. Her point is that conservators have not always been good at communicating their message and stories, and the value of their work, and that we can use some linguistic tools to help us to do so. She drew on the Aristotelian theories of persuasion to help us think better about how we communicate. These include ethos, concerning the credibility and moral competence of the source of the message; logos, concerning the rationality and logicality of the message itself; and pathos, the emotions of the audience. In other words conservators need to be authoritative as a source of information, clear and logical in what we are saying and sensitive to the audience to whom we are delivering the information.

• MaryJo Lelyveld, Conservator of frames and Furniture at the National Gallery of Victoria looked into the future with a most stimulating paper on the future for the profession using scenario planning techniques, a process she is studying for a Masters degree at Swinburne University. MaryJo included some interesting thoughts on what we as conservators need to be prepared for in the cultural sector, including:

- gameification of educational and cultural heritage experiences

- increasing commercialisation of the GLAM sector

- increased damage from extreme weather events and terrorist attack

- rise in volunteerism both out of necessity and interest

• Conservators as proponents for changes in environmental standards in the GLAM sector . This is an area I am helping to drive through chairing the AICCM Taskforce on Environmental Guidelines for Museums and Galleries. What became clear at the conference is that a) the profession is fully on board with the issues involved, including the risk of damage resulting form relaxation of temperature and relative humidity parameters but b) the profession is also up to the challenge of working with organisations and the public to explain the necessity for these changes and also minimise what damage may result to our cultural collections.

Let me know if you would like to hear more on any of these issues.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Why conservation matters

2011-10-21T11:44:00.004+11:00

It’s that time again when Australian conservators get together for their bi-annual conference under the auspices of our professional body the AICCM. This year we are meeting at the National Library in Canberra, which is proving to be a great venue, not least because the Queen came past in her motor boat yesterday morning to see what we were up to!

The conference kicked off with an absorbing keynote address from Sam Jones of the UK Demos Institute. Sam has written widely on cultural issues, and is particularly known to conservators through his co authorship of ‘It’s a Material World’, which looked at the impending closure of the world renowned Textile Conservation Centre at the University of Southampton in 2006 (since reopened at the University of Glasgow). Apart from being very well connected in the museum and cultural world, Sam also has the advantage of seeing things from the other side, having been seconded for a year to work within the UK Government’s DCMS.

His fundamental point to us as conservators was that we have a key role to play in ensuring the health of society, because we deal in the long term values of social well being in a world of political and financial short termism.

He provided three examples of where we can play a role in communicating why conservation matters:

By telling the story of how and why things were made in the way they were. In a world of consumerism we can help keep alive the set of values that explain the importance of thinking about how things were made and where they come from. We do that already with food, e.g. Fair Trade products, and need to do it more with made things.
By getting policymakers to see culture differently. It is extraordinarily opportune that the Government’s call for submissions on the new Cultural Policy closes this week, and we have been busy as an Institute putting the case for the role conservation can play as part of this. Sam’s point is that cultural policymakers need to break free from existing structures and explore new spaces. As he says ‘Culture roots us in our past and enables us to imagine and explore our future”.
By standing for a wider ethos of care, a means of connecting with deeper values. We live in an age of great uncertainty whether it is through financial challenges or more deeply the rise of mixed culture societies. Showing value in the world about us and how cultural capital is the glue that hold communities together is a role that conservators can readily take.

Big picture stuff but a very stimulating way to start the conference. More soon.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Catering for different visitor types

2011-10-13T17:02:00.001+11:00

One of the presumptions we tend to make is that all visitors to museums require the same experience, but even casual observation shows this is patently not the case.

I blogged last year about work that the Dallas Museum of Art had been doing in seeking to understand their visitors better and had ended up dividing them into four categories, namely:

- Observers – those that stand back, having limited knowledge of art, preferring a guided experience
- Participants – those that enjoy learning and the social experience of being in museums and galleries
- Independents – those that are more confident with their knowledge and prefer independent viewing
- Enthusiasts – those who are confident, enthusiastic, knowledgeable and comfortable looking at art, and who are most likely to actively participate in museum programs and be members.

So it’s good to hear that the initiator of the study that resulted in these categories, Gail Davitt will be the key note speaker at a Museum and Gallery Services Queensland seminar on November 2nd at the University of Queensland Art Museum. Gail will discuss how the Dallas Museum of Art changed its institutional culture and enhanced audience engagement and learning, using qualitative questions to uncover how visitors engage with art as well as their comfort levels in looking at and talking about art.

It has prompted me to look at others that have looked at the same issue and a colleague has pointed me towards Beverly Serrell’s 1996 book Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach, in which she identified three rather than four categories of visitors, namely:

- Streakers who move quickly through exhibitions, scanning for points of particular interest, but rarely lingering for long. Since they paylittle attention to details, they may form broad impressions or take in bold messages, or they may traverse an exhibition without being affected at all.
- Strollers who move more slowly, paying more attention or less at various places. They are exposed to many more basic messages, and they may pick up details here and there.
- Studiers who are conscientious and diligent exhibit visitors who move very slowly through a gallery, trying everything and reading all of the text. Studiers often linger at single exhibits for long periods of time.

Any given visitor may express different behaviours at various times, perhaps streaking through a gallery for orientation before selecting places to stroll or study, or streaking past some exhibits and stopping at other points of interest.

Where this has particularly contemporary relevance is the discussion about rich media. I have blogged recently on the issue of how this is not going to be about the technology but the quality of the rich media content, and the onus this is putting on curators. It is clear that this content cannot be homogenised to one visitor type but is going to have to offer an appropriate experience to different categories of visitors, however they may be defined.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Blockbuster exhibitions are still here

2011-10-07T09:41:00.001+11:00

I found myself quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday on the subject of where museums should draw the line on popularist exhibitions. This has become particularly focused at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney where the recent ABBA exhibition has now been followed by one on the Wiggles with a major Harry Potter exhibition not far behind. Where should that line be drawn?

Check out my previous blogs on visitor numbers as a chart of success, how to keep those blockbuster visitors coming back, and the pros and cons of blockbusters The comments in the latter blog from Liverpool’s David Fleming are still very much relevant (financial benefits against potential dumbing down of the museum).

With Tutankhamen numbers at the Melbourne Museum already reaching an astonishing 650,000, the financial benefit to the Museum should be significant. The issue may be that there are only so many such exhibitions like this to go round, and one has to ask what comes next, after the progressively increasing success of the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series ( Pompeii in 2009, Titanic in 2010 and now Tutankhamen in 2011).

But the reality is that blockbusters are here to stay, and although we may say there is perhaps more curatorial merit in a Tutankhamen exhibition than one on the Princess of Wales’ wedding dress (one of the Powerhouse’s recent successes), both reflect popular cultural interest. Indeed far from looking down our noses at the latter, it is interesting to reflect that the most successful exhibition in the V&A’s history was, wait for it, an exhibition of the Prince and Princess of Wales’ wedding presents in 1863!

Check out an interesting article that Giles Waterfield wrote on the subject in The Art Newspaper earlier this year (The death of the mega exhibition has been predicted for years. So why is it still very much alive?)

And a visit to the Powerhouse last week confirmed the place is currently buzzing with people (and strollers) visiting the Wiggles. Meanwhile the excellent Love Lace exhibition close to it was certainly attracting an audience that might not otherwise have been exposed to it. The popular and scholarly appeared to be working alongside each other.

Providing rich media content

2011-09-21T09:37:00.001+10:00

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about the challenges of providing ‘rich media ‘ to visitors, and after a whirlwind assessment of sites in Australia, the US and UK in the last fortnight can report on three technologies being used for this.

I talked about the QR code system being used at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney in that previous blog. QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix bar code with fast readability and comparatively large storage capacity. Apps for scanning QR codes can be found on nearly all smartphones, allowing you to scan the image of the QR code to display text or open a web page in the phone's browser. The browser supports URI redirection, which allows QR codes to send metadata to existing applications on the device. At the Powerhouse the labels ( which are on every exhibit) for the Love Lace exhibition present like this:

Check Out Seb Chan’s blog on the initial interesting results at the exhibition.

At the Museum of London, Nokia has installed RFID tags on a number of exhibits to allow access to rich media. Accessing is similar to that at the Powerhouse as follows:

Turning up at the Museum last week, it was difficult to find out much information on the system. The core problem with it is that very few phones are currently fitted with the necessary NFC ( Near Field Communication) technology to be able to read the tags, so they remain frustratingly inaccessible to the vast majority of visitors. I was unable to access it and did not see anyone in my time at the Museum doing so.

This position may change as new phones appear with NFC functionality included, but it is already clear the new iPhone 5 due for release within the next couple of months will not have NFC.

Finally to the Getty to see Google Goggles in action. This is a downloadable image recognition app created by Google and currently mostly in use for prominent buildings and wine label recognition.

Google’s Santa Monica office approached the Getty to install the application for their collections, a process which once approved appears to have gone very smoothly stitching together the data on each artwork from the Getty’s content management system with the necessary image. Once you get over the self conscious issue of photographing an artwork in front of a guard ( and expecting to be reprimanded), it works really well. When the artwork is recognised (which happens in about a second) a series of options are available from more text to read, links to relevant sites, and, to my mind the most useful, audio commentary on the artwork from a variety of sources, e.g. curators and conservators. The only downside at present is that the visual recognition technology struggles with the softer images of watercolours and anything 3 dimensional.

What do I make of all these technologies?

1) The day of the humble label as the primary means of communicating information is in my view numbered. Whilst there will always be a role for them, being able to stand back from a painting or object and accessing information in the palm of your hand rather than squinting at a wall label is a massive advantage. And this is not just about the technology. The National Gallery of London did an exercise last year where they put a simple one line label on each painting to identify it and then provided each visitor with a little booklet in which was all further information. They had a great response as not only did everyone stand back from the artworks so viewing was easier, but also they could access the information under their own control.

2) Accessing information on a hand held device is therefore going to be the way to go, but the critical issue is again not the technology but what the information provided is going to look like. Once we are beyond labels, there is going to be an expectation that we can access more than that which a standard label provided, and that is going to need much more input from curators. The Getty Goggles exercise has proved it can be done – the rich media provided is excellent.
3) What in my view this is NOT about is providing distraction from the artwork or object being viewed, i.e. lengthy videos or lots of images of comparable material are for accessing after the visit not during it. Again the content model the Getty is providing is a good one on this

Check out some useful further comment at http://www.themobilists.com/2011/08/30/qr-codes-in-museums

And watch this space as I have no doubt there is going to be a great deal of action here in the near future as these technologies play an increasingly significant role.

Art Gallery Extensions

2011-09-14T09:36:00.000+10:00

Art gallery extensions are often the defining mark of a director’s tenure, and even more defining if a ‘name’ architect can be brought into the equation. A brief visit to the US last week showed me a few.

First up Thomas Lentz, the director of the Harvard University Art Museums, which incorporates the Fogg, Sackler and Bush Reisinger collections has secured the services of the great I.M.Pei ( he of the Louvre glass pyramids) to build a major extension to the Fogg Museum, into which the other two collections will now be housed. This work is under way and it’s difficult to tell from the model how it will look, but as befits what are primarily study collections, each of the three collections gets its own study centre, complete with dedicated lift and curators and conservators on hand. This is a wonderful service beyond the resources of most municipal art galleries, and perhaps only mirrored by other great US university collections. I am told at the Yale Centre for British Art, for instance, you can walk in off the street and ask to see any painting in the collection, whether or not it is on exhibition.

In the same town over the Charles River, Malcolm Rogers , the director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, has just completed a new wing. In this instance the architect was Norman Foster ( he of the British Museum covered central courtyard), and Foster has taken the same theme by infilling a central courtyard, off which the new wing now sits. While to my mind architecturally succesful but not outstanding , what it has achieved is a spectacular re-presentation of the MFA’s very substantial holdings of colonial American art that must be almost the best in the country. The justification for extensions is of course often that the collections cannot be properly displayed in their current exhibition spaces, and in this instance certainly the new space has been put to impressive use.

And finally to Chicago, where James Cuno in his last act as director of the Chicago Art Institute before taking up his role as President of the Getty, oversaw the building of the new wing designed by Renzo Piano. The Art Institute is a very substantial gallery with its 100,000 sq m of exhibition space only rivalled in the US by the Met. This extension whilst adding to this floor space is a knock out. Opened earlier in the year, it is a seriously beautiful space of white walls, glass, light coloured timber floors and a translucent mix of natural and artificial light throughout. The top floor is dedicated to a rehang of their European 20th century holdings which must rival any outside Paris, and I wandered round in a daze not only being in the presence of so many familiar artworks, but so gorgeously hung. The final triumph is coming round a corner to be presented with a floor to ceiling view of the Chicago skyline with Frank Gehry’s auditorium in the foreground, in the form of an artwork seen through slightly diffuse blinds.

If you have only time to visit one of these head for Chicago.

Conservation challenges - two key issues

2011-09-08T18:02:00.000+10:00

Whilst in London last week for the IIC Council meeting, it was clear that there are two key issues the conservationprofession is currently grappling with.

Thefirst key issue is how we make decisions about the care of collections as we move tomore relaxed environmental standards in museums. There is no doubt that we aregoing to have to move away from the current very tight parameters that aredictated for temperature, relative humidity and light levels, as these areenvironmentally unsustainable. But we cannot expect to do this without therebeing some collateral damage to objects.

Threequestions arise.

Firstly, what is going to be acceptable damage? We usethe term 'the damage equation' to describe the dilemma, but we havenot yet assessed what is going to be our, and the community's, tolerance forseeing things deteriorate.

Secondly,how are we going to measure this damage? This is a somewhat easier question toanswer in that it just requires us to develop both the technology, and asimportantly, the language to describe this damage. For instance theprofession has already established one way of measuring levels of lightdamage (to get technical – a JNF, or ‘Just Noticeable Fade').

Butthis leads onto the third question, which is what is our role in decidingthis? There has already been a benchmark set of one JNF per generation, i.e.every 25 years, but who are we to decide this is acceptable?

Thesecond key issue is how we are going to make decisions about where our finiteresources (conservators and funds) are best used. To give a health parallel,many medical decisions are made either in triage form (at the site of anaccident for instance) or at a funding level on quality of life (e.g. arefunds better spent keeping one brain dead person on life support for manyyears as against being able to treat many people with a curable disease). As conservators, we also use the triage concept when deciding whatto treat with flood or fire damaged objects. What we are less goodat doing is making big decisions about collections – are we better totreat a single object to the nth degree when with the same amount ofresources we could stabilise and extend the lives of 100 other objects.

Asconservators, our interests and our training both tend to focus us on thedetail, rather than on the big picture. I believe that in order to address bothof these issues, we conservators are going to need to take a more expansive andcontextual viewpoint much more often.

Julian Bickersteth

Managing Director

internationalconservationservices

Conservation challenges - 25 years and counting

2011-09-04T13:44:00.004+10:00

25years ago today marks the day that I founded International Conservation Services (ICS). Well, not quite, in that it was originally calledCampbell Conservation before morphing into ICS in 1991. Back in 1986a wonderful man called Chick Campbell, who owned and ran the CampbellGroup, was prepared to back my hunch that there was an opportunity in the Australian market for a multi-disciplinary conservation company, and the rest,as they say folks, is history.

As I write this, Iam in London in the midst of a Council meeting of the International Institute for Conservation, of which I am one of the VicePresidents. And it is proving a useful time to reflect both on running aprivate conservation business over the past 25 years, as well as the challengesof responding to the current key issues in conservation – but more on thelatter in a future post.

Onthe face of it, the journey at ICS has been about how to keep a commercialconservation operation viable. There have been times when this has beenchallenging, for all sorts of reasons. However, one of the enduringchallenges has been the conflict between the passion to conserve, and thereality of commercial existence. Fundamentally, as conservators, we arein this profession to conserve objects. And most of us arepassionate about that. Yes, we know that we need to earn a living tosurvive, but making money doesn’t drive us the way caring for objectsdoes. The journey at ICS has therefore been about focusing thatcritical passion we all have for this extraordinarily privileged position we sooften find ourselves in, so that our business can at least operatesustainably.

Ithas also been about providing an opportunity for more than 100 conservators todevelop their skills, ply their profession, and indulge their passion, whilstconserving (we estimate) some 40,000 artworks and objects in that time, thusensuring their stories can continue to be told to future generations.

What Irealise that these 25 years have not been about is a series of ethicaldilemmas. The decision not to get involved, for instance, in treatinga painting from which a client wanted to remove an unloved sister, or arare textile which a client wanted to cut up into cushions, has never beenhard. Happily, these have been very rare occurrences.

Instead, thedecisions on how to treat an object have often been technically taxing,but as a result, frequently exhilarating. I think particularlyof Tasmania's Hamilton Inn Sofa, which took us on a fascinatingjourney to ensure the treatment both respected its history and reflected itsuniqueness as a decorative arts object.

Sonow for the next 25 years, folks! I purposely did not name the company BickerstethConservation (not sure that has much of a ring to it anyway!) as Iwanted to ensure that what we collectively built could live on pastindividual careers. No sign of the passion dulling on my part, butplanning for the future will be one of the challenges for the next 25 years.

Julian Bickersteth

Managing Director

internationalconservationservices

QR codes, RFIDs and Goggles

2011-08-31T18:25:00.003+10:00

Responding to the challenge of how to impart 'rich media' to visitors is gaining pace. This is all about how we can provide more than just text on a label and perhaps some video on an adjacent screen. I'm doing a quick circuit round the world to check out the latest (amongst other things. such as attending the IIC Council meeting in London).

But first up, as so often is the case in the museum technology world, our own Powerhouse Museum is trail blazing. Their newly opened 'Love Lace' exhibition is using QR codes to provide further information on each of the 120 objects in the show. You need: 1) a smartphone and 2) to download the appropriate app, and then 3) to scan the bar code on each label to access this further information. There is not a lot more information you get, but it is proving the point that this is a valid way to deliver rich media. Check out Seb Chan's blog post to read about the initial take up. And whilst you are at it, do visit the exhibition. It is a stunning collection of objects, the unifying theme being some reference to lace or the patterns thereof. It's even got a big article in the latest edition of the Qantas inflight magazine.

Two other technologies I shall be looking at. The first is the use of NFC (Near Field Communication) functionality on some Nokia phones, which is being used to deliver rich media at the Museum of London. Nokia has funded this rollout at the Museum to help promote NFC, and I shall be most interested to see what take up is like.

The second is the Google Goggles technology that the Getty Museum is using (see my blog post), which utilises visual recognition technology to connect via your smartphone to an array of rich media.

Interesting times and I shall report back shortly. Got to run - my flight is being called!

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Guard those valuable rhino horns

2011-08-12T09:45:00.000+10:00

I was alerted to the phenomenal interest in rhino horns at the Bonhams sale of the Owston Collection in Sydney late last year. Two rather ropey looking adult black rhino heads (with particularly unlikely looking glass eyes) which were each estimated to sell for $20-$30,000 both fetched $90,000. Two more were sold by Theodore Bruce Auctioneers only last month in Sydney, estimated respectively at $30-$40,000 and $50-60,000 and realising $90,000 and $130,000. The difference in price apparently reflected the likely weight and density of their horns.

And the reason they fetched so much? No museum future for these stuffed heads unfortunately, but an unceremonious removal of the horn and grinding up into powder to be sold for medicinal purposes in Asian markets, where it apparently can fetch up to $50,000 a kilo.
In a comparatively short time, i.e. the last twelve months, those poor rhino heads in public collections have become a significant target for thieves. This year there has been the theft of the head of a black rhino from the zoological museum in Liège, Belgium in June and another one from the Natural History Museum in Brussels in July. In the UK the Haslemere Museum, lost theirs in May, and only last week thieves broke into the Ipswich Museum in Essex, and took off with Rosie, the stuffed rhino's horn. "They wrenched the horn off Rosie — it probably only took them five minutes to take it and leave. They knew exactly what they wanted, and nothing was else was taken," Max Stocker at Ipswich Council told Reuters.

We don’t of course know how many in private collections have also been stolen

The legislators have moved fast to clamp down on the legal trade. Two years ago the European Commission ruled that rhino horn trophies, previously considered to be part of an endangered species in their raw state, were permissible as works of art. The "worked item" derogation (as it is called in antiques language) stated that an object which includes the "parts and derivatives" of an endangered species is exempt from the normal sales controls if it was acquired prior to June 1947 and has been "significantly altered from its natural raw state for jewellery, adornment, art, utility or musical instrument". Until this year, mounted rhino horns in their natural state were considered to be 'worked' meaning they could be legally traded.

But in a sudden move in February this year, the EC brought in a ban on selling rhino horn trophies with immediate effect. In particular they identified that "a rhino horn mounted on a plaque, shield or other type of base has not been sufficiently altered from its natural state" to qualify under the antiques derogation.

It also advised that "the conditions which require any alteration to have been carried out for "jewellery, adornment, art, utility, or musical instruments" will not have been met where the artistic nature of any such alteration (such as significant carving, engraving, insertion or attachment of artistic or utility objects, etc) is not obvious".

In summary this means that in the EC, including the UK, the sale of mounted, but otherwise unaltered, rhino horn is now illegal where the artistic nature of any alteration is not obvious.

Sadly those living specimens are not immune. In 2007, South Africa lost 13 rhinos to poachers, in 2008 the number rose to 83, and increased again in 2009 to 122. Last year more over 200 rhinos were killed for their horns in South Africa.
Apart from being generally aware of the new EC legislation and its likely implementation in Australia, the threat to museums of the theft of their rhino horns, heads and worked items is very real, and we should ensure whether in storage or on display they are all properly secured.

And the saddest thing of all? Dr Raj Amin recently advised the Zoological Society of London that tests by Hoffmann-LaRoche researchers had confirmed rhino horn contains no medical properties.

“There is no evidence at all that any constituent of rhino horn has any medical property. Medically, it’s the same as if you were chewing your own nails,” says Dr. Amin.

In praise of Scottish Museums

2011-08-08T09:26:00.000+10:00

When the Burrell collection first opened it created a buzz in the museum world much wider than its native Scotland, which was driven by a number of factors. First of all the building 3 miles from the centre of Glasgow was a stunner, since voted Scotland’s second greatest post war building. Secondly the collection was eclectic, including as it does everything from mediaeval architectural features, arms and armour, Islamic art, to Impressionist paintings and modern sculpture, all put together by one man, Sir Walter Burrell in the late 19th and early 20th century. And thirdly the setting in the historic Pollock Country Park allows for the place to be a destination for family days out.

At the time of opening (1983) it provided a focus on Scottish museums which had hitherto been seen as somewhat parochial.

So when the City of Glasgow reopened their city museum and art gallery in 2006 in the Victorian splendour of Kelvingrove(interestingly voted by locals Glasgow’s favourite building), the museum sector seriously sat up and watched what was happening in Scotland. Kelvingrove has since gone on to win various awards and is currently the most visited museum in the UK outside London. Again like the Burrell it combines a stunning building with eclectic displays housed within. The spitfire fighter plane zooming low over the stuffed elephant in the grand entrance hall says it all.

So it’s great to see excellence being piled onto excellence with the opening of the refurbished National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh two weeks ago. Once again we see similar ingredients, a magnificent Victorian building displaying a ‘gloriously eclectic archive of objects that Scottish explorers, inventors, soldiers and scientists brought back from their travels’ ( to quote the Sydney Morning Herald’s Travel editor - yes it even got the lead story in the paper’s Travel section last week end). That eclecticism is manifested in a great white shark alongside the world’s oldest surviving colour television and Alexander Fleming’s Nobel Prize medal. And the visitor numbers show what the public makes of it, 6,000 visitors in the first hour, and 22,000 on the first day of reopening and 100,000 in under a week.

You could say the challenge is in keeping those visitors coming back, but certainly Kelvingrove is showing it can. The broader lessons to my mind are that a) never underestimate the power of a great building as part of the visitor attraction to museums, and b) that we have an audience out there that loves eclecticism, the quirkiness of collecting and the stories that such objects can tell.

Changing environmental guidelines for museums

2011-07-27T09:43:00.001+10:00

I have been chairing a taskforce for AICCM (Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material) for the last eighteen months on changing guidelines for environmental conditions for museums. We’ve collated a pile of material on what is happening around Australia and in the world in this most interesting space. It is driven by a combination of rising energy costs (as much as 70% of museum expenses post salaries are spent on energy, most of it running climate control systems), reducing budgets and the need to be and to be seen to be environmentally conscious.

The opportunity for using these circumstances to relax the tight parameters that are currently stipulated for the display and storage of museum collections (typically 20 degrees C +/- 10% and 50% RH +/- 10% ) is being welcomed by some conservators and regarded with suspicion by others. The reality is that only a few types of materials really require these tight levels and we have ended up in a position where they are stipulated as a blanket condition for all collections. But as for coming up with new guidelines around potentially more relaxed conditions, in reality we can only move in Australia as fast as the rest of the world. As a net borrower of artworks and objects we must provide exhibition space that accords with international environmental parameters.

So it is very good news to have at last the UK’s latest thinking on these issues just published in the British Standards Institute’s PAS ( Publically Available Specification) 198 – Specification for environmental conditions for cultural collections.

Whilst these new specifications do not lay down the final rules on the new parameters (that will come in the British Standard) what they are saying is:

Collecting institutions need to acknowledge that attempts to establish a universal safe zone has resulted in unsafe conditions for atypical collections and unsustainable use of energy
The new parameters will not be narrowly prescriptive and will allow an acceptable degree of deterioration/loss
They will take into account the use of energy to maintain the collection environment
They will require decision making on environmental parameters to consider energy usage data, expected usage of collection items, and include a risk assessment
They will include as integral to the package of environmental parameters acceptable levels of light and pollution

We are busy writing the first draft of the AICCM Guidelines right now and hope to have them widely promulgated by the end of the year. We have even submitted them to the MAGNA Sustainability Project Awards at this year’s Museums Australia conference in Perth.

I will keep you posted as to when these are publically available.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Google matters

2011-07-06T10:22:00.007+10:00

A quick note on the fast moving world of Google and particularly how it impacts on the museum world.

I blogged on Google Art in March and April - a new initiative that involves providing 'street views' of the contents of 17 of the great art galleries around the world, and high resolution images of selected artworks.

Google Goggles is a visual recognition app that has been around since 2009. It is like the music recognition app Shazam, except it does it visually rather than by audio. It has focused on two areas to date namely architecturally recognisable buildings and wine labels. The former I could understand, but why the latter had taken the fancy of the folks at Google was not entirely clear – apparently there are enough wine connoisseurs out there who want to photograph a wine label and find out whether the bottle is worth $10 or $100.

However, the application of using a visual search engine activated not by putting in key phrases but by taking a picture with your smartphone has been begging to be applied to artworks, and finally Google has announced they have teamed up with the Getty to "Goggles-enable" (don’t you love the phraseology!) their permanent collection. Read all about it in the LA Times.

How it works is that you take a picture of any of the Getty paintings during your visit and instantly access information about the painting. You can also hear commentary from artists, curators and conservators on the works of art themselves.

The Getty has been trialing ways in which they can provide more information to visitors than fits on a wall label for some years. They pioneered the so-called ‘Getty Guides’, a mp3 player format that provided an advance on the audio guide concept by including images, but it was not found to be taken up with much enthusiasm by visitors.

The bigger picture is whether we are moving to a label free world in museums, as MONA in Tasmania is pioneering (see my blog). My view is that we shall never dispense with the label but the opportunities that smartphones in particular are providing for seriously enriching access to information on what is being viewed are only going to multiply.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Connectedness and museums

2011-06-27T14:02:00.000+10:00

We are inundated with information on how the digital world is changing our lives on almost a weekly basis, and one of the issues I struggle with is making sense in a practical way of what we hear and read, i.e. what these changes mean in our professional lives working in museums.

So it is good to report on two interesting documents which have appeared in the last week which provide some hard data to help cut through what it all means.

The first is a report from the Pew Foundation of Washington DC. I blogged about their presentation to Museums and the Web in April, and this is a useful update on internet use. What they have found from their most recent survey is that:

79% of US adults now use the internet.
47% of US adults use at least one social networking site (SNS), which is 59% of those who use the internet. This is close to double those using a SNS in 2008.
The average age of SNS users is now 38, up from 33 in 2008, with over half SNS users over 35.
92% of SNS users are on Facebook, 29% on MySpace, 18% used LinkedIn and 13% Twitter (up from 8% a year before).

The second report, which ties in well with this has been produced by the Australia Council. Entitled Connecting://arts audiences online it is a most useful survey of how new technology and platforms are making connecting and engaging with the arts quicker, easier and more open. No surprises there, nor the ability of this technology to enrich the experience, but what I was looking for was up take of this technology. For instance Twitter may appear to be prevalent as a SNS but Pew tells us only 13% of SNS users in the US are engaged with it.

So what I usefully learnt about the Australian online scene is as follows:

Half arts audiences have an internet engaged phone and this is growing fast
64% of arts attendees aged 55 and over actively use Facebook
90% of arts organisations have a Facebook presence and 69% had made a wall post in the last week
Although 25% of arts audiences have used Twitter, half no longer use their account
One in three arts attendees are going on line and engaging with others DURING an arts experience
34% shared photos, audio or video after the event

What do I take from all of this?

Social media provides a new way for audiences to express their affinity for the arts. Arts audiences want to engage with the event before, during and after it to extend, relive and remember the event. Such behaviour is spontaneous amongst younger audiences but needs prompting amongst older audiences.

Museum web sites need to easily link to social media, both to provide a functional means to reach their social media presence, but more importantly to respond to a comment often made during this survey that simply seeing key social media brand logos on an organisation’s web site immediately gives it street cred.

I am doing lots of work with apps and visit tracking at present through our technology company Smarttrack RFID (see the latest announcement), and in my view we are already beyond just producing apps that provide a guide to the exhibit or museum.

Apps now need to allow users to share the experience and interact with the exhibit. This is a world where we need to encourage SNS use big time, as it has the potential to draw a demographic into the museum which is currently not well represented. Whilst I hesitate to draw parallels with the new SNS view on classical concerts (listeners being allowed to photo and tweet during performances), the upside for engagement with artworks, objects and exhibits is enormous and so exciting.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

The free entry debate

2011-06-20T10:34:00.001+10:00

I had dinner last week with senior staff from the Natural History Museum in London, here in Australia for the opening of the new Scott exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum. Do make time to visit it if you are in Sydney until October or catch it after that in London at NMH or mid next year in Christchurch at the Canterbury Museum. And spare a thought for our colleagues at the latter museum, who had just finished getting straight after the February 22nd earthquake when another one struck last week and took them almost literally back to square one again.
But coming back to NMH, they have a nice problem of over crowding. At weekends and on public holidays they can have as many as 22,000 visitors a day and that is significantly compromising the quality of the visit. Overall numbers grew by 10% last year taking them over the 3 million visitors a year mark , and fourth in the UK museum popularity stakes behind the British Museum, Tate Modern and the National Gallery. So their focus is now on how to fill the Museum on quieter days and also ensure the quality of the visit is maintained. Bear in mind that all National museums in the UK are still free entry, despite political murmurings of doing away with this.

Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, achieving growth in visitor numbers is taxing senior museum executives, with numbers either plateauing or sliding at most major museums. One significant difference is that they are almost without exception ticketed entry institutions. The Met may still be the third most visited museum on the planet (after the Louvre (8.5m) and the BM (5.8m) at 5.2 m visitors per annum), but they have decided they need to raise the entrance fee on July 1st from $20 to $25.

That is causing some interesting debate as reported in the NY Times last week. Perhaps the most interesting are: a) whether public museums have a moral obligation like libraries to be free, i.e. should the public have to pay to see what belongs to them and b) how should an entrance fee compare in value to say a cinema ticket or a meal.

No one has a definitive answer to these issues, but there is little doubt that the acres of treasures at the Met remain good value for hours of edutainment even at $25. The bigger consideration is whether the rise is going to discourage lower income visitors, and indeed whether the price hike is in fact a way of limiting over crowding. The Met says very much not and points out quite validly that the entry fee is only recommended, and voluntary. Either way it is going to be interesting to watch their visitor numbers.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Sydney Ice Bear in perspective

2011-06-09T14:48:00.001+10:00

It has been a phenomenal week, with the Sydney Ice Bear’s impact being much greater than we ever thought possible.

To recap, we craned it into position at 2.30am last Friday morning:

Started carving at 7.30am:

And completed carving at 12.30pm that day:

Each night it has been complemented by the Vivid Festival’s illumination of Customs House, seen well on this 360 degree image of the ice bear in the middle of the Customs House forecourt.

Then on Sunday as the ice bear started melting we had a public rally at which Katie Noonan performed:

Followed by an ice carving masterclass on Monday:

The story has gone round the world from the Times of India to Xinhua Newsagency - see the clip here.

I am still trying to digest how we have achieved so much media and public attention, but it appears to be a mix of the incredibly power of this art installation and the skill of the media and marketing company Momentum2.

Catch it if you can before it leaves Customs House on Saturday.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

The Sydney Ice Bear is arriving tomorrow

2011-06-02T10:49:00.002+10:00

The Sydney Ice Bear is finally about to happen tomorrow, Friday June 3rd! I first came across this wonderful project in late 2009 when my sculptor friend Mark Coreth was developing it for the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December of that year. It ended up being the centrepiece of the WWF exhibit there and seemed to be the back drop to almost every news story from the Summit. Thence to Trafalgar Square in London, and Toronto, Montréal and Manchester.

Mark’s concept, drawn from watching polar bears in the wild in Canada, was to create an ice sculpture that people could touch, thus allowing them to metaphorically touch the Arctic, feel the problem of climate change, and be inspired to become part of the solution. So tomorrow a block of ice, weighing 9 tonnes and containing frozen in it the bronze skeleton of a polar bear, will be placed in Customs House Square in Sydney. From 7am Mark and his team will carve it into the shape of a polar bear, which will take about 4 hours.

With the inconclusive result of Copenhagen, the heart went out of the climate change debate, and getting funding for such a project proved nigh impossible in Australia. So it’s been fantastic to have found the wholehearted support of Rob Purves and the Purves Environmental Fund to make this happen. Rob has been tireless in his efforts to promote this project, working with Momentum2 to raise funds off the back of it for WWF- Australia, 1millionwomen and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. It’s a complete eye opener how this world of not-for profit fund raising around environmental issues works, I can tell you!

Tomorrow I’ll post some pictures of the bear arriving and being carved.

But for today check out this promo the National Geographic have done for us, and if you are in Sydney do come on down to see the Sydney Ice Bear at Customs House.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

That pesky issue of deaccessioning

2011-05-19T09:59:00.000+10:00

I see I have not mentioned the word deaccessioning in this blog for at least 18 months, but the issues that I wrote about then just keep on coming up.

The latest salvo comes from students of the University of Sydney’s Fisher Library upset by Senior Librarian John Shipp’s plan to deaccession 500,000 books and periodicals

John is a thoroughly decent man who does not deserve the vitriol being thrown at him, but that is what the process of deaccessioning seems to generate whenever it is mentioned.

The reality behind this situation is spelt out in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald on May 14th 2011, where a former staffer at the Library writes that “This is a decision that has been avoided by librarians at the University of Sydney for the past 40 years. Libraries cannot be allowed to grow indefinitely”. The writer then cites how a previous librarian accepted all the discards from American libraries in a large shipment that is still cluttering up the stacks.

Meanwhile in the UK as reported in the latest Museums Journal, Nick Merriman (see previous blogs for his interest in this area) continues to champion the deaccessioning of collections for financial purposes in certain circumstances: “The Museums Association continues to believe that ethically sound, financially motivated disposal has a role to play in the development of collections”.

What the words ‘ethically sound’ refers to is the MA’s Code of Ethics which states that disposal for financial gain is unethical where an artwork or item is part of the collecting area of the collecting institution. Thus for instance Bolton Council has withdrawn a painting it was due to deaccession and auction by a local artist, Alfred Heaton Cooper, because it did not fall outside their stated core collecting areas, despite the fact it did not depict Bolton.

The core issue here is that deaccessioning is and must remain a part of good collecting policy. The temptation to sell valuable items to keep the show on the road in times of financial stringency is strong, but that is clearly bad policy. Where however items are clearly beyond the collecting areas of the institution and are most unlikely to be publicly displayed, and where the funds that they might realise can help other parts of the organisation, e.g. with a new storage facility, then it makes good sense.

Antarctic conservation matters

2011-05-17T15:34:00.003+10:00

The heritage of Antarctic exploration is one of my passions. At ICS we have been deeply involved in the Antarctic Heritage Trust of New Zealand’s program conserving the some 15,000 artefacts that still remain in the four historic huts and various other structures in the NZ Antarctic Territory that survive from the Heroic Era of Exploration (1899 to 1916).

The project has had so many different facets from the process of writing conservation and implementation plans, to resolving logistics and finding conservators who are willing to spend six months in an Antarctic winter, most of it in 24 hour darkness. We are now into our sixth winter of conservators working at Scott Base conserving artefacts in the purpose built lab, and alongside that six summer seasons of conservators working out in the field at the historic huts.

The exposure that this conservation work has had has been fantastic for the profession – it has been referred to as ‘the most exciting conservation project in the world’. And that has been helped by some good publicity.

Primarily this has been through what must be one of the conservation profession’s longest running blogs hosted by the Natural History Museum in London. It is well worth trawling back through the last six years to see some real gems of postings.

More recently, last summer season Ben Fogle and a team from the BBC spent two weeks at Scott’s Hut at Cape Evans filming conservators in action, the resulting documentary being screened on prime time UK tv a couple of weeks ago. Again it is great to see conservators as the focus of the story. You can watch it here.

2012 is shaping up to be a big year for Antarctic exploration aficionados. It is after all the year that Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition landed in Commonwealth Bay (January 7th), Amundsen (having reached the South Pole in December 1911) announced his success from the steps of Hobart Post Office on March 9th, and Scott, having also reached the Pole, died on the return trip about March 28th 1912. I am busily organizing a meeting of the ICOMOS International Polar Heritage Committee for March next year in Hobart, during which we intend to re-enact Amundsen’s announcement.

And finally to commemorate the centenary of Scott’s expedition the Natural History Museum, London, the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch and the Antarctic Heritage Trust have collaborated to create an international travelling exhibition that will open at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney in mid June 2011. It will include a stylised representation of Scott's expedition hut at Cape Evans as per below. Check it out here.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums, mobiles and apps

2011-05-02T11:44:00.000+10:00

I often find that the full impact of a conference, especially one so immersive as Museums and the Web 2011 , only really hits home a week or two after the event is over. So, in promising not to mention the conference again, here are my considered thoughts on where the world is in this corner of the museum sector.

The museum in a mobile world was the primary focus of the conference, by which I mean that although tons of other issues were discussed, it is the potential for how mobile technology can significantly change the museum visit, whether through content delivery, visitor interaction or way finding that kept appearing as the most exciting current opportunity. And what became clear is that, just as there is no one single mobile platform (e.g. Android, iOS ( iPhone operating system) etc, there is no uniform way of using mobiles in museums. Indeed as David Bearman, the conference convenor, said the landscape reminds him of the late 1990s when museums were debating whether or not they should have a web site. Now they are debating whether or not they should have an app, and what it should look like. It is going to take some time until an element of uniformity arrives with a ‘standard’ app platform.
Apps are not going to be the latest iteration of audio guides. Not only is the business model going to be different, with museums choosing to do part of the app development in-house, depending on internal capacity and strengths (typically audio guides have been put together by external companies (e.g. Acoustiguide or Antenna) who have then leased the equipment to the museum), but the use to which they will be put is quite different. Using audio guides is essentially a passive activity. Apps are active encouraging interaction both with other users, but also the museum and in some cases the exhibit itself.
This new world of mobiles is going to need some significant organisational change within the museum profession. Mobile use is about a collaborative rather than authoritative approach to learning from exhibits. This is a challenge to the traditional view for museum staff. Social media programs are currently being run by the marketing/PR part of the museums, but it must draw in staff working in cross disciplinary groups from across the whole museum, with more face to face conversations for its opportunities to be maximised.

For a great example of what the world of the app in museums looks like, from internal cross disciplinary involvement to external marketing go no further than the Explorer system at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and the Web 2011 – the web site picture

2011-04-15T13:00:00.000+10:00

One of the highlights of the annual Museums and the Web conference is the Best of the Web awards. Museum web sites are submitted from all over the world and vetted by a panel of web developers, museum professionals and general tech heads. It is peers critically judging the work of their peers, and the awards are highly valued within the museum community.

So it was great to see Australia doing well with Museum Victoria taking out the award in the Audio Visual/ podcast category, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) getting not only the award in the education category but also the best web site overall – quite an accolade.

More broadly what I came away with from the papers I heard on web site issues is the depth of thinking now going on in the museum world about how web sites are used and the opportunities they provide for creating a quite different experience from the museum visit. I would particularly highlight:

The work of the National Museum of Denmark in bringing art stories alive (including an innovative and embedded use of what conservators do and what they can contribute to art stories). Read the paper here.
What the Tate are up to in rethinking their web site as a result of a massive four year rebuild. The Tate has always been at the forefront of web site development being one of the first major art museums to place their entire collection of 60,000 artworks on line. They realised that the budgetary and cultural restrictions imposed on museum websites was holding them back from competing in terms of leveraging the power of relational databases in a way their commercial rivals do, and that their website displays artworks on line in the same paradigm as print publishing – namely as reproductions. No real surprises there but the conclusions they come to are worth reading.
And finally the Smithsonian. They are engaged on a collaborative project across the whole Institution to review their web strategy, which involves a series of staff workshops open to all staff . Each of the workshops includes a real-time transcription of the proceedings posted to a wiki, where it can be openly evaluated, sifted, weighed, and considered by all. The project has very clear goals namely to define the optimum role for the Smithsonian in the next 100 years by:

Embracing new models of knowledge creation and dissemination
Providing better access to knowledge for geographically and demographically diverse audiences
Providing richer, more engaging means (storytelling) for different types of audiences to engage with our knowledge assets
Creating opportunities for inter-disciplinary collaboration and learning
Identifying new revenue sources to support the ever-growing programs

It is a great model for where the museum web site is going. Check it out here.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and the Web – in praise of Google Art

2011-04-13T10:32:00.000+10:00

I was rather dismissive of Google Art when I blogged about it a few weeks ago, principally due to the fact that I could not see what it was offering beyond promotion of Google that what was not already available on line.

Our final session at Museums and the Web 2011 involved a Q&A session with representatives of institutions who are part of it plus a member of the Google Art team. And I must say that their comments, along with a further play I have had with the web site, has turned me into a bit of a fan.

First up, a bit of background. Google Art is a project developed in house by Google staff in their 20% time (the day a week all Google staff are given to pursue their own ideas). It involved 17 art museums in Europe and the USA allowing Google’s ‘street-view’ technology to document their principal galleries along with each museum providing Google with 35 high res images of key artworks. In addition each museum had to choose one artwork for Google to photograph at super high res (gigabyte level). The project cost the museums nothing beyond their own staff time.

In good Google fashion each museum was locked into a very tight non-disclosure agreement so that for the two years the project took to develop, each one had no idea which other museums were involved. It’s clear that some museums had reservations about this and pulled out and are now regretting doing so.
And the reaction now that it is up? High praise from the museums that were represented on the panel, complementing Google on how good they were to work with, pleased with the results, and all of them citing massive increase in web activity on each of their sites, and significantly increased visitor numbers (which is why they did it in the first place). Concerns over copyright were allayed by artworks being blurred out in gallery views (particularly noticeable in the National Gallery, London’s site), and the potential loss in revenue by giving away high res images, which they normally sell, compensated by the higher visitor numbers. The representative from the Tate made the interesting observation that many of their curators who have tended to dismiss the internet were now excited about it and finally understanding its power in their sphere.

And the downside? I had sensed during the conference that amongst the museum web site fraternity there was some unhappiness. This manifested itself during the Q&A session in questions about Google’s lack of openness. Why could not the statistics on Google Art visitors be made public, why could not the ‘street-view’ sequences and technology be made available for the museums to use as tours themselves or for recording temporary exhibitions, and why did they not undertake the whole exercise as an open collaborative exercise with the museum sector?

The Google Art rep’s answer to each was politely circumscribed but was clearly that this is ultimately about driving traffic to the Google site as cost effectively as possible.

For my money, the end justifies the means. The project has created a significant new asset for the museum sector.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and the Web 2011

2011-04-08T13:30:00.001+10:00

I am in geek land surrounded by shiny new iPad 2s and a sea of tweeters - to be precise I am at Museums and the Web 2011 in Philadelphia, the annual get together of those of us interested in this space. There are apparently nearly 700 of us here from 23 countries. It has a similar buzz as my last attendance in 2009 in Indianapolis, the difference being that this could almost be called Museums and Mobiles, such is the focus on where mobile technology and use is taking us.

Lots to comment on, but I will confine this blog to the opening plenary this morning from Kristen Powell of the Pew Research Centre talking about their Internet and American Life project. Kristen's mission was to update us as museum folk on the latest data on the rise of mobile internet use and social media to help us to identify how these trends are shaping the way that content orientated organisations like museums interact with our audiences.

What came out of her presentation is best summarised in bullet point form. Bear in mind it is US data, but the trends it indicates are in my view global:

In 2000 46% of adults used the internet and 53% owned a mobile phone. There was no social networking. Those figures in 2010 were 74% used the internet and 85% owned a mobile phone (surprisingly low in my view). 25% of households do not now have a landline.
69% of internet users, which is half of all American adults, watch videos on line and 14% have uploaded their own video content.
Those going on line daily from their phone rose from 36% to 55% last year alone.
A typical teenager sends 50 texts a day with 33% of teenagers sending over 100 texts per day.
40% of internet users access social networking sites (SNS) daily with older adults (those over 65) the fastest growing sector, partly because younger adults are already at a very high percentage use.
Only 8% of internet users use Twitter compared to 61% for other SNS, i.e. Twitter is not that popular particularly with teenagers.

There were lots more stats, but in summary the emerging themes are that information gathering is becoming portable, participatory and personalised.

So what Kristen sees our role as museums as increasingly being is:

A filter - providing trustworthy information, that is relevant and directly accessible, e.g. by app.
Curators - collecting all relevant material and linking to primary and secondary sources.
A node in a network - making it easy to network, and being prepared to loosen control of content.
Community builders - sharing experiences and listening to feedback.
Tour guides - connecting content to real world locations, using such tools as geo location and augmented reality.

More from Philadelphia shortly!

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

The Ice Bear cometh to Sydney

2011-04-06T23:49:00.003+10:00

As a conservator I have long been of the view that the main purpose of our work is not the conservation of artworks and objects per se, but rather providing through our conservation work the ability for those items to tell their stories. So it is not a long leap to my latest project, the Sydney Ice Bear Project, which uses an artwork to metaphorically tell a massive story, namely the impact of climate change on the environment,

I first met Mark Coreth, the artist behind the Ice Bear Project, four years ago, although I had been aware of his work as one of the UK’s preeminent animal sculptors for some time. A number of his wonderful life size animal bronzes are in private collections in Australia, which we look after. Mark has long been a keen environmentalist, but a visit to Baffin Island to sculpt polar bears led him to want to do more to promote awareness of their plight.

So he came up with the concept of creating a polar bear in ice, and then letting it melt to reveal a bronze skeleton as a metaphor for the melting ice caps and the impact on the polar bears, and indeed more broadly on our planet.

The first ice bear was a centrepiece of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) stand at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009, with the second following in Trafalgar Square, London. A travelling ice bear was carved in early 2010 in Quebec, before moving to Ottawa and finally Montreal where it melted, and then another in Toronto in June last year. The latest was carved on 31 March in Manchester. Check out this video from the BBC of last week's carving. The Ice Bear is a highly dramatic artwork, and has received much media attention at each venue.

Anyway, I have been keen to see the Ice Bear in Australia ever since I heard about it. The Ice Bear team have been working to bring it here for the past year, and finally we have the funding for it to take place around World Environment Day on June 5th on the forecourt of the Customs House, Sydney.

Mark will be carving the ice bear over 6 hours from dawn on Thursday June 2nd and the bear will then start melting (we reckon it will take 4-5 days at that time of year) with a major public event around the melting sculpture to be held on Sunday June 5th involving some leading climate change experts. WWF, 1millionwomen and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition will all be project partners.

The frozen ice bear, encased in a large box and weighing over 9 tonnes, actually arrived in Sydney late last year, and has been in cold storage since then. International Conservation Services are managing the logistics for the Ice Bear Project in Sydney, so we shall be placing it in the forecourt pre-dawn on June 2nd ready for Mark and his team to carve away. I will keep you posted on progress as the time nears. Put the dates in your diary now, and come and see it if you are in town.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

A non-political project, Ice Bear made its world debut at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009, attracting global attention. Sydney Ice Bear will encourage the public to visit and touch the sculpture and learn more about the impacts of climate change. It will be on display from Thursday 2 June to Friday 10 June 2011.

Sydney Ice Bear has been made possible with the support of the Purves Environmental Fund. Additional support has been provided by the City of Sydney, public and fine art conservators International Conservation Services and social marketing and communications agency Momentum2, as well as Aurora Expeditions. WWF Australia, 1millionwomen and AYCC are partners in the project, and all funds raised locally will go to support these partner organisations.

Visitor numbers as a chart of success

2011-04-04T13:39:00.001+10:00

“Attendance at LA Museums lags behind” states a headline last week in the Los Angeles Times. It’s the familiar issue that, like it or not, those visitors coming through the door are the fundamental measure of a museum’s success. In the article Ann Philbin, the director of the Hammer Museum in LA bravely states in response to a question about visitor numbers: "We care about it certainly, but it is not at the top of our list of measures of success. When attendance figures are overvalued in museums, it can lead to mediocrity in programming".

Nobody disputes the latter comment - it is just that those that pay the bills, whether they are governments or philanthropic foundations like to see visitor numbers on an upward curve.

Check out the article that prompted all this breast beating at the Art Newspaper
The top ten art museums world wide in 2010 are as follows and there are no surprises here:

8,500,000     Louvre Paris
5,842,138     British Museum London
5,216,988     Metropolitan Museum of Art New York
5,061,172     Tate Modern London
4,954,914     National Gallery London
4,775,114     National Gallery of Art Washington
3,131,238     Museum of Modern Art New York
3,130,000     Centre Pompidou Paris
3,067,909     National Museum of Korea Seoul
2,985,510     Musée d’Orsay Paris

And critical to drawing those crowds are the temporary exhibitions. The article details a most interesting range of statistics drawn from a comprehensive survey of exhibitions around the world listed in order of daily attendance including:

The top 30 exhibitions (the top two are both in Tokyo and drew over 10,000 people per day! Not sure what anyone could see at that density)
The top ten Decorative Arts, Antiquities, Impressionism, Old Masters, Mediaeval and Thematic exhibitions
The top ten 19th Century, Asian, Architecture and Design, and Photography exhibitions
The top ten exhibitions in Tokyo, London and Paris
Comparisons with previous years

So it looks as though the blockbuster is alive and well and critical to keeping those numbers up. But before we all get too disheartened about this being the only way forward, bear in mind the phenomena of the response to British Museum director Neil MacGregor’s radio program in the UK. Broadcast three times daily on Radio 4, MacGregor gave a series of 15 minute lectures on 100 objects in the BM’s collection. Not only did this result in an extraordinary 20 million downloads from the Museum’s web site, but attendance jumped by 250,000.

What I particularly love about it is the medium MacGregor chose to use. No visuals, just people’s imagination as he described each object and the history behind it. Perhaps that is what largely drew people to explore the Museum’s collections further

Julian Bickersteth

Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Curators, curation and opinions

2011-03-22T14:32:00.001+11:00

I have been intrigued this week by an article entitled ‘Why curation is important to the Future of Journalism”. Check it out here. It refers to the rise of a new role: the journalistic curator.

For us museum bods, a curator refers to the person holding that critical position of looking after a collection. Indeed the word is derived from the Latin ‘cura’ meaning ‘care’. In Australia it is also used for one who cares for a sports ground, e.g. the curator of the Sydney Cricket Ground. And just to confuse us all, the French term for curator is conservator, e.g. conservateurs du patrimoine or heritage curators.

I have blogged before about the increasingly marginalised role that curators have in museums, and it occurred to me that this article might provide some guidance on what the future for museum curators might look like. I quote:

“Curation (not a term we often use) gathers … fragmented pieces of information to one location, allowing people to get access to more specialized content”.
"Good curators know where to find interesting things, because they know the paths and can provide a knowledgeable voice to make things a little easier to parse”
“Curators help navigate readers through the vast ocean of content, and while doing so create a following based on several factors; trust, taste and tools”.
“Part of the appeal of good curation is that it carries the person’s footprint. Opinion isn’t really a bad thing, and in fact gives the content shape in this context.

It was the last point that particularly caught my attention. I recently enjoyed the excellent Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the MCA in Sydney. I had only thought of Leibovitz as a portrait and landscape photographer, so I was particularly interested in her work in Sarajevo during the Balkan war. As she said she went there as a journalist, but became frustrated by having to be impartial, and chose to take sides as a photographer (i.e. have an opinion) and document Serbian atrocities.

Should museum curators have opinions? Should their curation reflect a particular viewpoint or expect to provide a balanced and impartial view? I am reminded of the National Museum of Australia controversy over their Australia post-1788 exhibition, which espoused the so-called black armband view, that eventually resulted in the non-renewal of the director’s contract. The NMA clearly had an opinion but was it necessarily a bad thing? John Howard’s advisers thought so.

I turned to the latest edition of the UK Museums Journal to check out their exhibition reviews section. In the first review (“Extraordinary Heroes” at the Imperial War Museum, London) the curator does not even rate a mention (and this at a major national museum), the exhibition designer holding pride of place. However both the next two exhibition reviews list the curator above the exhibition designer, the latter being an exhibition on the Chartism movement at the Newport Museum. It praises the exhibition as ‘treading delicately, balancing the exposition of an important piece of social history…succeeding in producing a display that is both respectful and thoughtful in equal measure”.

So it seems that the mark of a good curator in the modern museum exhibition is a) either to be so impartial as to disappear from the name board, or b) to provide a balanced view. It sounds as though the journalistic curator is a different breed. A pity in my view, and perhaps indicative of why the museum curator is a dying breed.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Google Art and the power of the real thing

2011-03-15T10:32:00.001+11:00

I have been playing with Google Art on and off since it was released a month or so ago, trying to get excited about it. Certainly the technology is amazing and the ability to walk round 385 galleries in 17 world museums and zoom in on the paintings within them impressive. But it comes down the same thing I have commented on before namely, the technology taking over from the art appreciation itself. Check out a similar view in the Boston Globe by art critic Sebastian Smee.

But as Smee points out the reason the 17 museums have allowed Google into their hallowed halls is to encourage more visitors to come and see the real thing. Does one naturally follow the other, i.e. does investing in your on-line presence as a museum pay dividends in increasing your visitor numbers? I used to cite ‘French research’ as proving that it did, which was sloppy as I could never actually source that research.

However I have recently come across a study undertaken by IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) in 2008 on precisely this issue. Interviewing over a thousand people on the statement: “The Internet does not kill libraries and museums”, they came to the conclusion “Internet use is positively related to in-person visits to museums and libraries”- I never realized that my museum visiting was actually an ‘in-person visit’, but now I know!

What they really mean is that adults who use the internet are more likely to visit libraries and museums. Indeed they manage to put a figure on it, namely that in 2006 internet access increased adult visits to museums in the US by 75%. They go further by coming to the conclusion that in-person and on-line visits to museums serve important and complimentary roles in supporting a wide variety of information needs. By looking at information needs addressed by the two types of visits (in-person as distinct from on-line) , the study identified that 94% of the in-person visits are about informal learning and recreation (as against formal education or work-related issues) whereas this drops to 83% when on-line. Another interesting fact that came out of the IMLS study is that the more on-line visits that are made, the more that person is likely to visit a museum.

So now I feel better about Google Art! And to add to that, as a conservator, there is no doubt that its ability to provide such detailed analysis of the paint surface is a useful addition to the conservator’s tool kit, when seeking to understand comparable painting composition and potential deterioration.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Remedial vs preventive conservation

2011-03-08T11:35:00.001+11:00

One of the hats I wear is co-editor of the AICCM ( the professional body for Australian conservators) Newsletter. In the latest edition we sought responses from a number of senior Australian conservators on where they stood on the remedial versus preventive conservation debate. This was prompted by an interview in a recent edition of the Getty Conservation Institute’s own newsletter Conservation Perspectives in which my friend Stephen Rickerby of the Courtauld Institute in London was frank about where he stood on the issue:

I had greater faith in remedial intervention. That faith has been lost—for me and, I suspect, for many others in the conservation profession. There’s a global trend toward preventive conservation and site management and away from remedial intervention. While we all still practice remedial intervention, we now have doubts about its efficacy, and we place it in a context of wider conservation measures. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we believe those other measures are going to save paintings. I think there is a more realistic view of what we can and cannot do. The best we can do is to slow deterioration. We’ve hopefully lost a lot of our hubris in terms of what we think we can achieve.

The reality is of course that it is artificial to see the issue as remedial vs preventive, as each serves a different purpose. Remedial conservation is generally about active intervention - ‘doing’ if you like - whereas preventive conservation is about context - ensuring the conditions are appropriate for extending the life of the object as far as possible.

But in asking the question of others it has prompted me to question where I stand. Working in private conservation for most of my life has meant that there has been a lot more doing than preventive work – we get asked to ’fix’ things much more than to consult on their environment. And that is undoubtedly one of the attractions of private conservation. Too many of my public sector colleagues seem disillusioned with the profession, saying they spend much of their time in meetings or on condition reporting rather than working on things.

But as I get older, do I have less faith in our ability to intervene successfully? No, I believe that our interventions continue to be justified, the difference being that the experience of years mean I know more about the likely outcomes. What I can see is that I have less faith in modern materials, or to put it another way, err towards using traditional materials wherever possible as we can predict so much better how they are going to perform.

So what did other senior conservators have to say on the issue? Opinions varied ranging from David Hallam at the National Museum’s forthright comment that “Preventive conservation is a great ‘cop out’ for those who do not have the science basis or practical skill to carry out successful treatment” to Sarah Clayton at the Australian War Memorial questioning the success of some remedial conservation “Over the last 20 years I have seen too many interventive treatments that have not lasted the distance”, whilst David Thurrowgood at the National Gallery of Victoria stated that remedial skills are at the core of the conservator’s work “The skill of remedial intervention, the ability to sensitively and intelligently intervene in the care of an object, is central to what many conservators need to be able to undertake with confidence”.

In all we solicited almost a dozen responses from senior conservators. It confirmed that one size does not fit all, and that different approaches for different objects is vital. It highlighted to me that, like so much in life, experience and perspective counts for a great deal.

In conservation it gives us the confidence to do little or nothing where that really does appear to be the most effective option for long term preservation of an artwork or object. Barbara Applebaum’s seminal book on this issue ‘Conservation Treatment Methodology’ Elsevier 2007 is a must-read if you want to learn more.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Understanding our visitors - the loyalty program concept

2011-03-01T13:43:00.001+11:00

I hope I am consistent in pushing the line that I am interested in technology for what it can do to improve the museum visitor ‘offering’ (to use a good IT word), rather than getting too engrossed in the technology itself. That’s where my interest lies, which is not to down play those who are more focused on the technology, as we need them exploring what can be done with new technologies. This year’s Museums and the Web conference in Philadelphia, judging by the last one I attended in 2009, will be dominated by the latter group, with the value to me being the insights that can be drawn by such people as Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum who is tasked by the Museum to ensure it is at the cutting edge of technological implementation.

And one of my particular interests is seeing how technology developed in larger sectors, e.g. visitor counting and visitor tracking in the retail sector, can be applied to the museum sector. Zoos and aquariums sit in a sector of their own (as do Botanic Gardens), personnel from which we rarely meet at conferences. But not only do they share many common issues, they also draw generally larger numbers than museums – in other words their ’offering’ is more attractive than the museum one.

So I read with interest on how the Cincinnati Zoo has been tapping analytics to improve attendance, as this is an area where museums are not strong, as I have blogged previously. We tend to know a great deal about our web site visitors, through such tools as Google Analytics, but very little about the patterns of physical visitor behaviour. The Cincinnati Zoo happens also to include a Botanical Garden, and is the number one attraction in the city with 1.1 million visitors per year.

Concern about operational efficiencies prompted a review, with a couple of interesting outcomes:

1) Centralisation of revenue operations: Membership, ticketing , food service and merchandise were all operating as stand alone entities, with 16 food service locations and 51 point-of-sale (POS) locations on the site. By consolidating all services using POS software, all revenue generating transactions can be tracked through one point. The result – reduced operational expense and increased revenue by, for example, ensuring staff levels are in tune with actual needs.

2) Understanding member behaviour better: Members are asked to share essential information upon joining the zoo membership program, and then as they visit the zoo they leave a trail of behavioural information by using their bar coded members cards to take advantage of member discounts and special offers. This is analysed to understand attendance and purchasing patterns, and this in turn drives email campaigns based on visit frequency and spending patterns.

Museums obviously have far less of a focus on revenue generation, but retail and catering are an increasingly important part of their operations and their potential for helping the bottom line needs to be maximised.

But it was another feature of Cincinnati Zoo’s focus on a different type of visitor that struck me as having particular application to museums. The Zoo has identified that there are a proportion of visitors who come more than once but are not frequent enough or are averse to becoming members. For these they have instituted a loyalty program, a first, they believe, amongst zoos or museums. By asking for an email address and a post code, they have found a way of getting to know a broader group of visitors and reward good visitors (by discounts and early notification of events) without the upfront cost of membership. The Zoo’s modelling suggests they could gain an extra 50,000 visitors per year this way.

Given that museums typically struggle to build large membership bases, this could be an interesting initiative to watch.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Audio tours - how participatory do we want our visitors to be?

2011-02-21T14:12:00.001+11:00

It would be such a boring world if we all agreed with each other. In museum circles opinions on the level of interaction that we expect between exhibition visitors and with an exhibition itself vary widely. A couple of articles in recent museum magazines highlight this. On the one hand a reviewer in the UK’s Museum Journal commenting on the redeveloped Roman Baths exhibition at Bath notes that “For all the exciting opportunities to connect with audiences through interactive displays and costumed interpretation, audiences are failing to connect with each other… there was a sense of physical isolation and passive participation….at odds with the noisy and lively way in which the baths would have been experienced in Roman times”.

Across the Atlantic the American Museums Association Jan/Feb magazine reviews Nina Simon’s book The Participatory Museum, discussed in my blog last year. The review is somewhat critical of Nina’s goal for museums to “change the dynamic of the visitor from passive consumer to cultural participant, similar to the way YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Wikipedia have transformed our expectations for accessibility, community and interactivity”.

It sounds as the reviewers should have swapped assignments and they would each have been happy! The answer in my view is that it is horses for courses. Some exhibitions are better placed to be participatory than others, just as some visitors choose to be actively involved whilst others not. Check out my blog on the work the Dallas Museum of Arts has been doing on understanding the latter, identifying four types of visitor clusters, namely: Observers, Participants, Independents and Enthusiasts.

However one comment that caught my attention in the Roman Baths article was that passive participation could be attributed to audio guides. Whilst these are providing useful information and increased dwell time, the article says, they are also inhibiting discussion and a shared experience.

This is an issue on which I have had many a robust discussion. Personally I very rarely take audio tours except when I am visiting a museum on my own. I much prefer taking my own time and route and sharing observations and experiences with whoever I am with. Audio tours tend to lock you into your own world and dictate your pace and route (“when the music stops move onto the next exhibit” etc).

That said there is no doubt that audio tours provide a much more meaningful experience to many visitors, and are a highly effective tool to have in the visitor access tool box. What intrigues me is how the next round of audio tour technology evolves. They have developed from clunky cassette players to wands to MP3 players. Surely now they will move into smartphones through dedicated apps, and indeed as I previously blogged, there are signs this is already underway. What I find particularly exciting is the iPad format, as at last we have a way in which exhibit content can be delivered on a big enough screen that it can be shared with others. But this is going to need some logistical readjustment with visitors no longer having to pick up and drop-off an audio tour machine at the entrance, but now download an app onto their own smartphone/iPad either before hand or at the time of arrival. Sorting out the business model around this is going to be interesting, e.g. how is the app charged for, along with coping with current reticence by visitors to use their own equipment.

I see the Museums and the Web 2011 conference program in Philadelphia in six weeks time has a number of papers on this issue, so, as I shall be there, I will report back soon.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Conservation in troubled areas

2011-02-14T09:16:00.002+11:00

As a conservator by training, I cannot help but take interest in heritage events where conservators are involved, particularly where our work is part of a bigger story. The following is a recent selection.

I blogged last year about the Cyrus Cylinder, and ruminated at the time that I could understand the hesitancy the British Museum was showing in sending such a treasure to Iran, and that the reasons given (more research required) were probably a spurious front. I now discover from my British Museum friends, and as reported in The Art Newspaper, that the real reason was that a fragment of the cylinder belongs to Yale University and was on long term loan to the BM. It was deemed prudent to remove the Yale fragment before sending it to Tehran.

However the removal by the BM’s conservators and other conservation work resulted in the Cylinder looking different at the ends, resulting in rumours in Iran that the BM had sent a replica. Not a good look and one that had to be strenuously denied by the BM’s trustees. But all’s well that ends well and the relationship with the National Museum of Iran is so good (and the exhibition has been so popular - 200,000 visitors to date) that the loan has been extended from January to April.

Further south in another trouble spot, Egypt, we are holding our breath that the great Egyptian museums do not suffer the same fate as the National Museum in Iraq, looted as the Americans moved in.

There have been a couple of statements made on the threat to Egypt’s invaluable cultural heritage by Blue Shield, UNESCO, and The Hindu in Delhi has picked up on the issue as part of wider story on challenges confronting Indian museums. In their words, ‘ordinary members of the Egyptian community’ have been standing guard at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to prevent protestors from looting the treasures inside.

Not quite sure how successful they have been, as The Art Newspaper reported on 31st January that looters had got into the Egyptian Museum, ransacked the shop and managed to get into the Tutankhamen galleries, where they turned over some vitrines looking for antique jewellery, decapitating a couple of mummies in the process. Luckily the gold mask was in another gallery and was not reached before the army turned up. However, there is news today (14th February) on ABC Radio of further looting including the loss of a gold statue of Tutankhamen.

And finally a bit closer to home, conservators have been doing a great job assisting Queensland get to grips with cleaning up after the disastrous floods, which were followed by Cyclone Yasi. The biggest collection of historic photos, negatives and cameras in Queensland, owned by Sandy Barrie in Ipswich, went under the water and now there's a huge project underway to try to save what can be saved. Conservators are under pressure to work fast to stop mould and fungus getting into the collection on top of the mud and water, and to date over 200 hours of volunteer hours by both public and private conservators has been put in to stabilise it. Although the damage to collections held by the state museums was minimal, sadly the full extent of loss to smaller local and privately owned collections is only now becoming apparent.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and video games?

2011-02-03T08:54:00.001+11:00

The stunning success of Nintendo's Wii console has confirmed that the video game industry is big business - growing this year by 12% to a $4bn sector in Australia alone.

So in this context I have been fascinated to come across a Virtual farming simulator on Facebook – Farmville from Zynga. Farmville had 62 million active users in September 2010. Facebook users can invite their friends to be neighbours and watch the progress of their crops, and even spend money to buy virtual goods within the game.

I always wonder where professional people find the time to spend playing such games, but there again I am hooked on the iPhone scrabble app, which could be seen as the thin end of the wedge. Indeed the proponents of such point out that the time we spend immersed in professional magazines could well be better spent in social media if we are really trying to understand how to make our museums more interesting and more relevant places.

Surely it is a small leap to creating some form of museum game, where you can create your own exhibitions, compete for government funds based on visitor numbers and use the acquisition budget to bid in virtual auction markets. When the stats are telling us that America teens now spend on average more than 10 hours a week on social media gaming, we need to be thinking how we take this space forward.

BUT, I hear you cry, are this generation likely to be interested in museums to want to game in this sector? A recent article in the Chicago Sun-Times shows they may be. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago sought applicants to spend a month at the Museum, during which they could roam freely, sleep where they like (e.g. in a submarine) and take $10,000 in exchange for interacting with visitors and blogging and tweeting the world about the experience.

Expecting a couple of hundred applicants at best, over 1,500 applied from all over the world. Given each applicant had to be conversant with social media to apply and submit a 1 minute video about themselves, one can conclude they were largely of the gaming generation. And their excitement was palpable, e.g. 'It would be wonderful to be surrounded by all of those achievements of humankind, the combined knowledge of which is staggering. The thought of getting to live there is so exciting for me that I can hardly sleep whilst the selection process is going on' said one hyperactive applicant.

Is this not an indication that a museum video game might have a ready audience?

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums, Smartphones and mobile applications

2011-01-31T08:44:00.002+11:00

Where are apps at? Well the first thing to be aware of is the speed with which take up of smartphones is occurring. New Nielsen figures show 24% of internet users (isn't that the entire planet now?) are considering buying a Smartphone over the next year. Last year a trifling 269.6 million smartphones were shipped worldwide, a substantial improvement over the 173.5 million number from 2009!

And we know that the museum sector is embracing this aspect fast, judging by the rollout of site specific apps for them.

Here are a few:

MoMA’s app, so far downloaded over 400,000 times, offers a selection of audio tours with images and videos and access to one fifth of the museum's collection.
The American Museum of Natural History’s app is neat with the app Explorer allowing you to share finds in the Museum with your own networks on Facebook and Twitter .
The LA County Museum of Art has been an early player in the museum tours using apps.
The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam was one of the first in the world to offer an audio tour in the 1950s, and they also have been early pioneers of app use.
In Madrid the Reina Sofia Museum is focusing purely on audio programing in an effort to keep visitors' eyes on the artworks, providing four audio podcasts that can be downloaded onto smartphones.
The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art allows you to interact with over 200 works of art in the permanent collection. One of the problems of working out whether these apps are any good is finding out quite what their offering is. The Nelson Atkins allows you to preview.
Check out also the Dallas Museum of Art.

Where does the audio tour now sit in all of this? Well one issue is that you normally have to pay for an audio tour either as a stand alone purchase or as part of a special exhibition ticket. App downloads to date cost nothing, although the Stedelijk is considering offering a premium edition for which there would be a charge. This is going to have to change.

And the next issue is that audio tour providers who have had control of this aspect of museum visits are going to need to work out how they embrace Smartphones. Judging by the websites of the two leading players internationally, Antenna Audio is not there yet but Acoustiguide is fast developing an offering for this space.

And finally the MONA experience about which I blogged last week is an interesting one. Although not strictly an app, it is relevant to this issue. MONA has purchased 1340 iPod touches, which are provided free to visitors. No exhibit has a label, with all content delivered via the iPod. Two separate Wi-fi systems are used, one for content delivery, and the other being a real time location system (RTLS). No guidance is given on the basis that visitors should be able to navigate according to their free will. It is an interesting (and I suspect immensely costly in terms of R&D) experiment that we shall all be watching closely. My first use of it, admittedly in the hurly-burly part of the opening, was positive, and certainly the data that MONA can gather on visitors, the path they take, what they like (and don’t) is going to substantially add to the value of these technologies for museum evaluation.

But on that matter await another blog!

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and mobile phone tracking

2011-01-27T08:15:00.002+11:00

I'm off to the Museums and the Web conference in Philadelphia in April. It will be the second time I have been to this annual conference, at which over 800 of the great and the good from this world come together. Judging by 2009 (my last one) it will be four days of total stimulation overload, but at least I am contributing this year, giving a paper on the use of mobile phones for visitor tracking.

One of the great advantages of this technology is its ability to provide the quantative data that is currently gathered by museum guides. Check out an illuminating article on the evaluation process in the Wall Street Journal "The Museum is watching you". It details how evaluation staff spend their time watching how visitors interact with exhibits, driven by museums wanting to know that their investment in exhibitions has been well spent both through engagement and increase in traffic. But gosh it is inefficient, the article citing one observer at the Detroit Institute of Arts spending 2 hours recording a mere 14 observations on his computer of which he discarded 8 because the visitors stayed in the gallery for less than one minute. The critical issue here is a) the amount of staff time being spent inefficiently, and b) the fact that critical information is being discarded, i.e. keep the data about the 8 visitors that only stayed for less than a minute as that provides vital information on over half the visitors that entered the gallery in that time - why did they move on so fast?

What mobile phone tracking can achieve is not only the information that the DIA observer recovered but much more of it. Indeed data can be captured for every minute the museum is open. It also provides a much more complete picture such as the ability to understand where the 8 that moved on went to so their movements can also be understood.

More broadly the use of mobile phones for visitor tracking in museums and galleries can:

Ascertain the sequence of routes followed, and the percentage of the most popular
Work out the most common routes followed
Identify the total time spent in the museum or gallery
Identify the time spent at each stop along the way (i.e. dwell time)
Identify whether the mobile phone owner has visited before, and if so, how many times and the average gap between visits
Identify where the phone is registered thus providing an international visitor profile
Show the impact of promotional events/special exhibitions on traffic movements

We are developing a range of solutions in this field, and are always keen to hear from others working with visitor tracking solutions.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

MONA and the Wow factor

2011-01-25T08:11:00.002+11:00

We have been helping MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, with a whole range of conservation issues over the last eighteen months, so I was lucky enough to be asked to the opening on Friday 21st January.

And my goodness what an opening it was! The morning rain cleared, so the ferry ride from Constitution Dock up the Derwent showed off Hobart at its prettiest (takes c20 minutes and is the BEST way to approach the Museum), and we were then deposited at the pier from which a flight of steps takes one up onto the top of the Museum, rather like going up the side of a pyramid. A scene of great splendour met us assisted by a vast array of fine Tasmanian food, and wine and beer from the adjacent Morilla Winery, including the famous Moo Brew beer. Standing there in the evening light looking out over the enchanting vista of the Derwent River and the hills rising to Mt Wellington, helped no doubt with a glass or two of the Moo Brew, our senses were certainly heightened for all that MONA was going to reveal.

From there a large circular staircase, rather like, but on a smaller scale, than the Vatican Museums staircase carries visitors down to the lowest floor of the Museum to begin the tour. The staircase has been cut into the sandstone, and at its base one passes through a passage way of two spectacular rock faces with shades of entering Petra. And it was quite a spectacle that greeted us. Apart from tables literally laden with food of all descriptions, all beautifully arranged like Dutch still life paintings, the art is everywhere. There is no chronological or thematic sequence, and no labels, and one wanders through antiquities and contemporary art all interposed.

And does it work? – impossible to tell with such a crowd there, but my gut feel is that this is something pretty special that is going to have a major impact on the Australian museum sector. The controversial items, particularly those themed on sex and death, did not seem to me to be as shocking as I thought they might be, but what I did get a feel for was the wonderful use of space and vistas and voids that the architect and museum team have achieved. It is a truly awesome building which constantly appears to have been designed around the art (which I think is what has actually happened in a number of cases).

One particular feature is the lack of labels, with all content provided via iPhone. These are handed out at the entrance (and hopefully collected on the way out, though I did constantly hear the alarm at the exit going off during the evening – absent minded guests?), along with some minimal instruction on their use. Perhaps because of the party atmosphere, no one was particularly listening to the instructions, so I did hear people asking each other how it works and getting somewhat exasperated with their use. When you are in front of an artwork you push the update button and the iPhone works out where you are, and identifies the artworks in your vicinity. The information is a simple image and artist and artwork details, but there are further options to get more information on the artwork and artist, read a quirky view on it (these apparently change so your next visit may reveal something different), listen to some audio, and also vote on whether you like it or not. At some stage to keep the iPhone live, you have to type in your email address, a neat idea for keeping in contact with visitors, sold as MONA being able to keep you updated and also advise how long you spent in front of each artwork. I liked it, but suspect it is going to need quite a bit more refining and visitor instruction to fulfil its potential.

Above all it is a place with undoubted Wow factor. Ignore the costs (reputedly $70m for the building housing a $100m collection) and ignore the questions as to whether some of the offerings are actually art. MONA has moments of taking your breath away. It is a stunning new attraction on the museum scene and one that I would encourage you to visit as soon as you can. Check out a couple of reviews from The Punch and Taste Travel.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Increasing those visitor numbers

2011-01-21T14:13:00.001+11:00

I blogged in April last year on the subject of building museum revenue and cited the Dallas Museum of Art's success in using qualitative visitor surveys to identify four types of visitor clusters, namely: Observers, Participants, Independents and Enthusiasts. The innovative strategies that have been implemented as a result of the surveys has resulted in a 100% increase in attendance, and is about to be published by the DMA with Yale University Press under the title Ignite the Power of Art; Advancing visitor engagement in Museum Experiences.

So what are these strategies?

• Establishment of the DMA's Center for Creative Connections, which encourages visitors to explore their own creativity and introduce them to new ways of experiencing art, ranging from filmmaking workshops to performance activities

• Introducing an Interactive exhibitions based program, by including immersive soundscapes with appropriate exhibitions, adding performances, and artists' talks within a dedicated space within the galleries, and including musical interludes

• Using Smartphone tours, cleverly marketed under the smARTphone label. This is an increasing part of the art museum scene, and DMA have taken to it wholeheartedly to provide access to supplemental information about the works. They cite examples as watching a video of Jackson Pollock painting whilst standing in front of one of his artworks, listening to excerpts from Ovid's Metamorphoses that inspired Jacques-Louis David's 1722 painting Apollo and the Diana attacking the children of Niobe, and discovering the meaning of Aramaic inscriptions that appear in a Roman mosaic.

• Developing public programs, especially after hours tours, during which there are multi-disciplinary events and performances. I particularly like the idea of 'insomniac tours' led by DMA's director Bonnie Pitman, and bedtime stories for the younger visitors.

I am particularly interested in where smartphone use is going in museum and gallery interpretation and will be blogging more about this shortly. Meanwhile the lessons from DMA's success are surely a) get to know your audience well and b) tailor your offering (within reason) to what they want, remembering that it will not be one size fits all.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Art valuations

2011-01-17T09:15:00.005+11:00

The art auction world is one that I must admit to following only peripherally. But there is of course an overlap with the art gallery world, not least with the movement of staff between the two (note the new head of Sotheby's Australia, with the resignation of Tim Goodman, is Geoffrey Smith, formerly curator of Australian Art at the NGV).

However I do find the statistics coming out of the international art auction market fascinating. Try a few of these for holiday reading:

• Last year 1,269 works by Picasso sold worldwide at auction (i.e. this excludes private sales) for an incredible $405,708,629. Just think what the total body of work of Picasso must therefore now be worth!
• The next six artists (by total value of works sold) after Picasso were Andy Warhol ($355m), Giacometti ($238m), Matisse ($196m), Modigliani ($156m) and Roy Lichtenstein ($124m).
• The most expensive painting to sell at auction was Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" for $106m, followed by Giacometti's "L'homme Qui Marche" for $103m and Modigliani's "Nu Assis sur un divan" for $69m.
• The two most surprising lots were "Rubbing" by an unknown artist, which sold for $136,701 against an estimate of $1,500 (7,566% above estimate), and "The North Transept and Choir Chapel of the Saint Janskere, Utrecht" by Pieter Jansz Saenredam, which sold for $2.3m against an estimate of $40,000 (4,820% above estimate). Not a bad result for the vendors!

With the total Australian art sales last year a mere $105.8m, you realise what small fry we are in the world art market.

But in true holiday mode, when the zany can be discussed, check this out.

This details the story of one of the weirdest artworks requiring valuation, namely a Koran written in Saddam Hussein’s blood. Held under lock and key in a Baghdad mosque, it was written using 7 gallons of Hussein’s own blood as a homage to his religion. "What is in here is priceless, worth absolutely millions of dollars," said the Koran's caretaker, Sheikh Ahmed al-Samarrai, who heads Iraq's Sunni Endowment fund.

As an auctioneer once said to me, the value of an artwork is as simple as what someone is prepared to pay for it. Maybe the caretaker is right!

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums post GFC

2011-01-14T08:14:00.001+11:00

Much current museum talk is focused on where the sector is at in the post GFC world. Quite whether we are yet in a post GFC world is a matter of debate. In the US the sector was hit hard early on, due to their reliance on endowment revenue, whereas in the UK and Europe, government subsidies cushioned museums from having to make the extensive cut backs their US colleagues were making. In the UK however, despite some protection of the national museums from government austerity measures, the current situation is pretty gloomy for the foreseeable future, just as the US museum sector begins to show some signs of recovery.
What all commentators agree is that the post GFC museum world is going to be different, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Museum veterans comment that out of adversity museum leaders have an opportunity to frame a new vision for the future.

And as often is the case with such debates, some of the most interesting discussion is amongst the side issues.

Looking at three of these:

1) The shrinking pool of museum quality art and artefacts. With the substantial proliferation of new museums particularly in the Middle East and China, I have been wondering where their contents are going to come from - there is after all a finite amount of historic artistic material. Colleagues that attended the ICOM General Assembly in Shanghai in December commented on this issue, given the rate of new museums the Chinese are building, along with the slightly easier problem to solve of how to find professional staff for them.

For mature museums this is not much of a problem, and indeed one of the sources of these art and artefacts will in the future be the vast storehouses of the major museums of Europe and the US, witness the satellites the Guggenheim has created, and the Louvre and the British Museum are establishing in Abu Dhabi. For a fascinating New York Times article on this.The money being spent on the buildings alone is extraordinary with $800 million on the Frank Gehry designed branch of the Guggenheim 12 times the size of its New York flagship, and $500 million on the Louvre Abu Dhabi, on top of which the government will be paying France $1.3 billion to borrow art.

So my view is that we are moving into a period of more sharing of collections rather than a shortage of artworks to go round.

2) The contested status of many historic objects. This is an interesting issue highlighted by the media attention given to repatriation of indigenous material, the return of Nazi artworks illegally taken, the highly publicised return of Getty treasures illegally exported from Italy and of course the status of the Elgin marbles.

Again my view is that all of these events are ultimately good for the museum sector, emphasising that we hold public collections purely as custodians of the past to hand onto future generations, the exact location of which is not materially significant, so long as they remain publically accessible.

3) The game changing effects of technology. Certainly the game has changed - I like the analogy that we have moved in the museum sector from the age of travertine to the age of terabytes, i.e. that the focus is now on investing in digital infrastructure rather than famous architect designed museum buildings. Given the costs of that infrastructure both in capital and in maintenance, it may not be much cheaper.

But when you see how those who embraced the process early are now benefiting, e.g the Tate who had all their 60,000 collection on line by 2006, the opportunities are very considerable in terms of networking, cross referencing and in depth research.

So indeed it is a different world we face post GFC, but one ripe with new opportunities.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and the Buzz at Otago

2010-11-30T09:01:00.001+11:00

The latest edition of ICOM News contains an interesting article which identifies three aspects to successful museums as follows:

Community engagement, i.e. ensuring that your local community is closely involved with the museum, both within and without
Innovative and unexpected exhibitions – exhibitions that offer fresh perspectives
Doing things well – maintaining high standards in everything from museum design to cleanliness of toilets

I would add a couple more, namely:

A strong corporate culture
A social space, namely a museum where people feel welcome and want to return to, where they are happy to meet their friends

So it’s always stimulating to unexpectedly come across a museum which is eminently successful, and I have just been lucky enough to spend 24 hours in Dunedin, New Zealand at the Otago Museum with the Director, Shimrath Paul and the Director Exhibitions, Development and Planning, Clare Wilson.

New Zealand consistently out guns Australia with its visitor numbers, with Te Papa in Wellington the most visited museum in Australasia at a cool 1.5 million last year. And the Otago Museum is no exception with an amazing 600,000 during a special exhibition year in 2008-09 but still in a regular year over 400,000. This is in a city with a population of only 120,000 and not much more in the local rural catchment area. Compare that with the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney (population currently 4.2 million) on 470,000 visitors in 2009-10.

Has this achievement come from following these criteria for successful museums?

Let’s check it out:

Community engagement. The Otago Museum has a complicated governance model being essentially a regional museum with funding from a number of local councils. Each of these has to be kept happy as rate payers monies are being channelled to the Museum . Last year the Museum was Winner of the Otago Chamber of Commerce Business Excellence Award for Tourism, reached out into communities in Otago with a SciCity based outreach programme, and ran Halloween guided tours round the Museum alongside a fortnightly series of live performances from kapa haka to Irish dancing. It’s noticeable that the museum guides are called communicators in the staff list, reflecting the importance the Museum sees in their role in this area with the community.
Doing things well. The Director did tell me they have discovered a number of people come to the Museum only to use the toilets so that part of the criteria is being achieved! But the Museum does present well with succinct signage, solid looking interactives and clear labelling.
Innovative and unexpected exhibitions. Two particular exhibitions caught my eye. One was a series of mini exhibitions in the foyer as a ’taster’ to the permanent exhibitions , being no more than a large showcase of, in turn, Indian ornate daggers, Macedonian pottery and Sir Edmund Hillary’s personal memorabilia. These change every two or three months. The other was a completely unexpected delight, namely a rainforest exhibition which morphed into a Butterfly gallery with live butterflies. Spectacular and a real draw card for repeat visitors, as the butterflies only last a few days so are constantly changing.
A strong corporate culture. This is where the Museum really does excel – you can feel it in the place just chatting to staff. And they have done this by creating a Strategic Plan into which all staff contributed during an intensive bonding session away from the Museum, and then more importantly actually sticking to what the Plan says they were going to do. Indicative of this is that in the staffroom there is a list of “behaviours we need and respect” and “ behaviours we will not tolerate”. Check out the Plan on their website, where these are listed – it is well worth a read.
A social space. The entrance was redeveloped to reorientate the face of the Museum from a busy road to the local park a few years ago and the result is an airy glass walled atrium which is inviting and full of buzz and people. The café is in this space, and the coffee was excellent – such an important part of museum visitation if people are going to be encouraged to return. Indicative of this, the Director was himself checking out the coffee as a new barista had started the day I was there.

So if you are down that part of the world I do recommend you call in.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Retaining members

2010-11-19T09:04:00.002+11:00

Ensuring that members renew their memberships each year is a key objective for most membership based organisations. For instance at the National Trust of Australia, with which I am closely involved, we know that we have regular core members and then opportunistic ones, the latter being those that either join to support a particular heritage cause or more pragmatically to get free entry to National Trust houses world wide when they are travelling. The core group tend to renew unprompted, the opportunistic ones may need chivvying along. The traditional way to do this is by personally phoning them to encourage them to renew, with the added advantage of getting feedback on the organisation. However this is expensive in terms of resources and may have only limited success.

Most museums and galleries have major membership programs. The highly successful MOMA membership program boasts an astonishing 130,000 members. But in times of economic downturn membership renewals are often the first to be chopped from personal budgets.

A couple of interesting case studies I have come across show some different ways to retain members. ICOM News reports that at the Tate in the UK, membership had risen to 90,000 when the GFC hit in 2008, at which point retention rates, having been around the 90% mark, started dramatically falling. So at what sounds like considerable cost to the management, an external data analysis company, Tullo Marshall Warren was brought in to help solve the problem. Members were broken down into eight segments, based on their propensity to lapse. Particular focus was made on the frequency of visits to the various Tate galleries (Tate Britain , Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives), as it was discovered that if visits start to tail off in the last six months of membership, there is a high chance of lapsing. If a member has lapsed for over 24 months, it was a waste of time targeting them.

It may all sound like the bleeding obvious and Tate themselves acknowledge that there were no major surprises. But what it has helped them do is to work out how better to retain members before they reach the lapsing stage. After three months of membership an email is sent to members, offering a ‘Tate treat’ in the form of a designer travel wallet when they next visit. At six months they are sent a pack of post it notes with reminders of the exhibition schedule and at nine months, just before the renewal process, the ‘Tate treat’ is a free coffee at the Museums’ cafes. Retention rate is back at 90% so it seems to be working.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic at the Whitney in New York, a different route is being employed to retain members, by offering a ‘Curate your Own’ membership. Members can select one of five specialised buckets of benefits to add to the core admission and discount member benefits. Driven initially by falling membership as the GFC hit, the Whitney wanted to find a way of connecting with their members and the experiences they most value at the Whitney, admittedly off a much smaller base than the Tate of 12,500 members. Through focus group work, they discovered five strong attitudinal segments, each of which was developed up into its own package of benefits.

The five are:

Social, for those who enjoy cocktail parties and previews, and social gatherings around cultural events
Insider, for those who like to see behind the scenes and be able to talk directly to curators and conservators
Learning, providing regular lectures and gallery talks, and access to educational programs
Family, providing such benefits as kids passports, stroller tours, and guest passes for family carers
Philanthropy, for those wanting to support the Whitney’s work

Sounds like a great idea, but very labour intensive to organise and deliver. It is also unclear at present if it has helped retain or grow members at the Whitney.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museum statistics

2010-11-08T08:54:00.003+11:00

We all know the Disraeli quote that There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. So I hesitate to draw attention to the latest offering from the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Arts and Culture in Australia: A Statistical Overview
However it does make for interesting reading. It’s just been released (October 2010), but only covers the year 2005-2006. The information is now going to be regularly updated, so that for instance the section on attendance in selected cultural venues for 2009-2010 is due out by next month.

Let me provide a snapshot of what I found to be some of the more interesting statistics, all of which relate to the period 2005-06:

Australians on average spent 0.3% of their time visiting entertainment and cultural venues, which is the same as that spent on religious activities and three times as much as that spent at sporting venues.
3,630,000 people attended art galleries and 3,611,900 attended museums (i.e. almost equal) as compared to 5,699,000 that attended zoos or aquariums (surprisingly high) and 1,508,000 that attended classical music concerts (surprisingly low).
Significantly more females attended art galleries than males, whereas only marginally more females attended museums than males.
The frequency of attendance at art galleries (36% only once, 46% 2-4 times and 17% 5 times or more) was significantly higher than at museums (50% only once, 39% 2-4 times and 11% 5 times or more).
57% of overseas visitors attended a museum or art gallery and 62% visited a historic building or site
State funding of collecting institutions varies widely, an interesting comparison being between the three major eastern states. On the face of it, there is a massive discrepancy between museum spending in Victoria and NSW, with the latter being far more supportive. Likewise in Queensland , it looks as though Archives are being disproportionately supported, though this may be due to capital works.

                                       Art galleries  Museums   Libraries    Archives

                    NSW           $49.9m          $138m          $67.3m          $7.9m

                     Victoria        $43.7m       $46.9m       $85.9m        $15.1m

                    Queensland    $36.2m    $37.1m    $48.8m       $51.9m

Employment in museums and art galleries rose from 5,422 in 2001 to 6,204 in 2006 a rise of 14%, whereas employment in libraries dropped a massive 39% in the same period from 11,451 to 6,986, no doubt partly due to the introduction of technological services

A few thoughts arising from these stats:

What is the offering that zoos/aquariums are providing that attracts so many more visits than art galleries and museums? Is it all about attracting kids?
The significantly increased frequency of visits (i.e. return visitation) to art galleries over museums is in my view due to the better handle art galleries have on creating social spaces, i.e. places where people want to come to socially interact and dwell.
With over 6 million overseas tourists and students coming to Australia each year, the fact that 57% of them visit a museum or art gallery must make us focused on how we cater for them.
There are a large number of unemployed librarians out there.

It is also worth taking a look by comparison at a new UK site that Creative Choices has put out called Data Generator, which is designed to help individuals and businesses access the latest economic and demographic research and analysis. It looks to be a useful online tool that can help with advocacy, strategic decisions, future planning, funding applications and presentations, and if nothing else proves the point that statistics do indeed have a use.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

UK museum cuts and the broader context

2010-11-04T10:37:00.003+11:00

I may have spoken a little too optimistically in my last blog about the likely effects of the UK budget cuts on the museum sector. Certainly the cuts at a national level have not proven to be as severe as was widely feared (and planned for). But the reality of post budget life in Britain is already beginning to hit home, particularly at a regional level, where there are thousands of museums which do not receive DCMS (Department of Culture Media and Sport) funding. Local museums are almost universally funded by local councils and that is where the cuts are really going to bite, with local council funding reduced by 28% as compared to 15% for national museums. The UK Museums Association is running a ‘Cuts Monitor’ which details the reality of this situation - an example already of an award winning local museum having to cut staff from 70 to 15. Meanwhile universities have seen an even bigger cut of 40% to all but research programs and science and technology teaching, which is bound to have a direct effect on university funded museums. English Heritage, which at one stage looked as though it might be abolished and its operations amalgamated into another body, has survived but been hit with cuts of 32%, resulting in pay cuts, and the loss of 8 directors, and this after a 3 year pay freeze.

So are they going to be able to do about it? English Heritage currently generates 25% of its’ income from commercial activities mostly at their 400 historic sites and properties, and they are going to have to look to ways to expand these. I am indebted to my colleague Sarah Jane Rennie of the Museums and Galleries NSW for drawing my attention to some of the other proactive ways in which the sector is looking to help. Sarah Jane has recently been in Scotland and came across a toolkit that Museums Galleries Scotland recently released to guide museums and galleries practitioners through times of drastic funding cuts, Choices for Change. It is aimed at local council museums that need to look at alternative ways of governance and operation to survive, and will have resonance with similar organisations in Australia.

And at another level, there is an interesting article in the latest Museum Practice on how to make loans more economically sustainable, which also has the advantage of their being more environmentally sustainable. Where this is coming from is that loans per se are expensive, and that therefore as the budget cuts hit so loans will fall, as loaning institutions attempt to recover the full cost of making loans (typically an administration fee is charged which in reality does not cover the full costs). The UK Museums Association is reviewing its key principles for loans through its Smarter Loans initiative. This is aimed at reducing costs in areas such as packing and transport by adopting a ‘common sense’ attitude. Not sure what that means but it always sounds like an excellent idea to me.

What I like about this review also is that it is helping to feed into the work that the Eu EGOR group (Environmental Guidelines Opportunities and Risks) are undertaking in looking at how environmental guidelines can be relaxed within certain parameters. This of course has a direct effect on energy costs which are typically 70% of a museum’s costs after salaries have been paid. And that is going to help lead worldwide to a new approach to environmental guidelines. AICCM has currently a taskforce in place which I am chairing to look at exactly that issue, the fundamentals as articulated by the National Museums Directors’ Conference guiding principles for reducing carbon footprints being:

Environmental standards to become intelligent and better tailored to needs. No longer use blanket conditions for entire buildings
Care of collections should not assume air conditioning
Natural and sustainable environmental controls to be explored and exploited
New or renovated museum buildings should aim to reduce carbon footprint as their primary objective

So at least out of the adversity that our UK colleagues are experiencing some good may come.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

UK Museum cuts

2010-10-25T09:12:00.001+11:00

In Istanbul two weeks ago my colleagues who work at the British Museum were telling me that contingencies were in place to deal with up to 40% budget cuts. That would have meant a substantial down sizing of staff as well as a host of other cuts to programs. So amidst the general devastation of nearly half a million civil servants being laid off over the next four years, the budget cuts announced by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osbourne on Wednesday were remarkably supportive of the museum sector. The free museum entry programme in place for the national museums has been maintained, the extensions to the British Museum and Tate Modern confirmed, and even the highly successful Renaissance in the Regions Program renewed. So the cuts that did come in the region of 15-17% were greeted with a quiet sigh of relief.

How has the museum sector managed to state its case so well? My view is that in the UK at least the national museums (on which the strength of the sector is built) have entered a golden age of late, abuzz with visitors from dawn to dusk and frequently into the evening, with strong educational programs, regular talks and concerts, good cafés and restaurants and truly finding a new vocation as space where people want to meet. Let’s hope that they can cope with these cuts with a minimum of effect on the ongoing development of what they have achieved.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Sculpture around town(s)

2010-10-15T08:26:00.001+11:00

Sydney’s public sculptures have come alive in a highly colourful way courtesy of some rather fabulous dressing coordinated by Michelle McCosker. Working with the City of Sydney and us (International Conservation Services) she has dressed 8 of Sydney’s best known public bronzes in highly colourful ways as part of the Sydney Statues: Project! My favourite is William Bede Dalley, a past Lord Mayor of Sydney of somewhat portly form, who is normally known as The Green Man due to the colour of the bronze. Now he looks as though he has walked off the set of the musical ‘Wicked’. Check out more on our blog "Sustaining your heritage".

But wait - there’s more. Our first Aussie saint, Mary McKillop (well almost – the formal sainthood is granted this week end by the Pope in Rome) is already commemorated with a new bronze outside St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. I rather like it. It’s by Melbourne sculptor Louis Laumen.

And finally when I was in London last month I came across the latest Fourth Plinth sculpture which is an intriguing ship in a (plastic) bottle. Yinka Shonibare's Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, apparently celebrates both Nelson's success at Trafalgar and the postcolonial multi-ethnic mix and mingle of Britain today. The spot has become probably the hottest place to exhibit in international sculpture. A short list of 6 artists has just been selected, from which the sculpture to stand on the plinth during the London Olympics in 2012 will be chosen. "It's that time again," said London's mayor, Boris Johnson, "when the art world braces itself for a spurt of bold ideas for what is surely the premier public art spot in Britain. This is the chance for today's most exciting artists to create something in one of the most historic and traditional settings imaginable. We can only guess what they will come up with, but I have no doubt it will get everyone talking."

I am all for using empty plinths in this way. In 2007 we organised the NZ artist Michael Parekowhai to exhibit his ‘bouncer’ on the granite plinth in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney whilst its’ normal occupant, George Lambert’s Lawson Memorial was on loan to the National Gallery in Canberra.

The pictures below show Lawson in position, and then after dismantlement viewing with some disdain the usurping of his position by the bouncer.

Julian Bickersteth

Managing Director

internationalconservationservices

Melbourne Museum Musings

2010-10-08T08:48:00.002+11:00

Last week I was embedded in Melbourne at the annual Museums Australia conference. 600 museos from around the country having a good chinwag is probably the best way to describe it. As always the real value was in the catching up with friends and colleagues, but there were also a couple of stand out papers, most notably from Professor Richard Sandell, head of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester and Professor Stephen Heppell. To get a feel for Heppell check out his website, and you will get some idea what he is like. A man who clearly is at the top of his field in the on-line educational world, consulting to governments around the globe, and a most engaging speaker. As his web site says, part of his job is ‘ horizon scanning’ (I like that term) for the UK Government on future directions for educational policy.

Well he certainly gave us a good snap shot of what he has spotted on the horizon. Let me try and summarise:

our children are growing up as part of the post-Google generation that live in a world of social media, where emails are something that ‘Dad does”
current teaching modes are artificial and directly detrimental to learning. The concept of having 40 minute lessons with a bell at the end and then retuning onto the next subject for the next 40 minutes is vastly inefficient, when compared to studying a single subject for a whole morning
technical journals, particularly those that are peer reviewed are just not keeping up with current trends as the time lag ensures they are out of date even before they hit the newsstands
to understand what museum spaces might be like in 15 years we should look at what is happening on-line now, as this will show us
the future lies more in the ‘doing’ (verb) than the being (noun). It will not be about who we are but what we do that defines us.
taking shoes off for kids has a huge positive impact on their learning ability and concentration (isn't that interesting!)
every turned off mpa/iPod/iPhone device or equivalent represents a turned off child and an opportunity to learn lost

He finished by telling us that we are about to have the most fun ever over the next 10 years, particularly in museums. Every object tells a story - it just needs that narrative released and its’ context revealed.

Bring it on, I say!

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

IIC and Istanbul (2)

2010-10-05T09:17:00.001+11:00

A week in Istanbul for the IIC Congress really provided little more opportunity than to soak up the flavour of the place. There is so much to do and see there, and one gets the feeling that it is an increasingly confident place economically ( though still fragile politically I understand) . One American friend commented that where new furniture in the US used to say Made in China it now says Made in Turkey.

It was therefore particularly opportune that we had a key note address delivered (admittedly by video) by Turkish Nobel prize laureate for literature Orhan Pamuk. I must admit to not having heard of him but am busy making amends by reading his wonderfully complex Name of the Rose type book called ‘ My Name is Red’. Pamuk is probably most famous for his autobiographical Istanbul: Memories and the City in which he sees the melancholy longing of hüzün as the hidden key to Istanbul. Hüzün is a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, “a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.” Pamuk saw in his childhood hüzün manifested by the slow collapse of the once powerful Ottoman empire hanging like a pall over the city and its citizens. Written in 2004, his book reveals how far the city has moved in the last 6 years, and Pamuk’s address to the Congress was all about how in the new confidence that city now shows, there is real danger that the past will be wiped out.

And his key note address was contextually perfect for the Congress as it allowed delegates to get in the space for a number of papers on how fragile is this ancient part of the world especially when assailed by the joint forces of development and tourism. High profile sites whether they be the Pyramids, Petra or the Acropolis will always attract international attention and therefore the support and funding of such bodies as the World Monuments Fund, the Getty etc, but these are but a few of the thousands of heritage sites around the Eastern Mediterranean that need protection and conservation.

We heard about the high profile sites, whether it was control of biodeterioration on the monuments of the Acropolis, or conserving twelfth century illuminated manuscripts at St Catherine’s Monastery, Mt Sinai, a project initiated by no less than the Prince of Wales! But we also heard about many less famous sites, such as entertainment rooms in rich Syrian merchants’ houses of the 17th and 18th century, known as Damascene rooms which display a particularly fine form of painted wood panelling. One of these rooms has now been re-constructed at the Met in New York and another known as the Ottoman Room in the Museum of Islamic Arts in Kula Lumpur. And to set these in context, we also heard from one of the few professional conservators working in Syria about his work trying to conserve the remaining 200 or so rooms that survive in Damascus – a fascinating and ultimately complimentary series of papers.

IIC Congresses are for my part a confirmation of why I work in this fascinating and complex field. Unlike the equivalent conferences run every three years by the Committee for Conservation of ICOM, which are based around a series of working group meetings, these Congresses are not so much about coming away with detailed information on how to tackle one’s next conservation project. They are about a reaffirmation that the conservation sector’s strength lies in our ability to learn from the experiences of other specialists outside our chosen field. Thus we deepen our conservation knowledge, and are able to apply this broad view to the benefit of our next project. We shall meet again in Helsinki in two years hence.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Istanbul and IIC

2010-09-24T16:10:00.002+10:00

I’m blogging from Istanbul, where I am spending a week at the IIC ( International Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works – to give it its full title) biannual conference, of which I am Vice-President. Apart from being in a city that I have always wanted to visit, ever since I studied Aghia Sophia during an Early Christian Art component at university, it is proving to be a most stimulating time in terms of the spread of countries represented.

I am told there are 44 different nationalities at the conference, and for the first time as a conservator I find myself rubbing shoulders in the lunch queue with conservators from Syria, Jordan, Bulgaria, Oman, Qatar, and of course Turkey, along with the usual Western European and North American suspects. The result is an extraordinarily rich dialogue around conservation issues, and encouragingly a very clear common ground about what we are doing, and why we are doing it. The fundamental difference is that we in Western countries are operating in a legislative framework where cultural heritage is genuinely protected, whereas many conservators in this region are lone voices, without any serious government support.

Our opening speaker was Professor David Lowenthal from University College London, who it should be said turned up looking considerably the worse for wear, having had an altercation with a truck three days before. When you are 87 that’s not such a good idea, but having had the taxi in which I came into town from the airport mow down an old lady and her shopping in front of me (luckily she got up again, but I don’t think the shopping did) I could understand where he was coming from. However despite injuries this erudite man gave us a powerful jolt as to why we are doing what we do as conservators.

The author of ‘The Past is a Foreign Country’ , Lowenthal believes strongly in the need for us to embrace the broader conservation debates. His challenge to us as conservators was therefore to enter into dialogue with those around us. He sited how conservators have traditionally been separated from curators, through conservators considering the latter to be scientifically ignorant ( not sure this is the reality). And more strongly he urged us to see care of the wider environment, i.e. environmental conservation, as being critical to cultural conservation. The relationship between the two is vital, he said, especially in terms of the environment’s ability to provide context for culture. We must see posterity as our prime duty as conservators, not worrying about how we do something but why we do it.

Challenging stuff, particularly when delivered in this eastern Mediterranean cradle of civilisation. I will set it in the context of the wider conference proceedings in my next blog.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

In praise of the Victoria and Albert Museum

2010-09-17T16:26:00.004+10:00

The V&A has always been one of my favourite destinations in London ever since as a young furniture history student we used to pore over the rows of chests of drawers and chairs in the furniture galleries. By modern museological standards, such displays would be seen as inaccessible to most visitors and stultifyingly boring in design (somewhat over hyped in the latest Autumn 2010 edition of Bonham's magazine as " the long, doom laden corridors of South Kensington's own version of Gormenghast"), but we loved them.

With the opening of the British Galleries in the 2001, all that changed with the decorative arts collections now combining to tell the story of the development and evolution of British design. The galleries set an international benchmark in intelligent and accessible exhibition design, and visiting this week it was exhilarating to see the Museum continues to raise the bar. I had gone there specifically to see the highly acclaimed newly opened Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, but found myself re-discovering a range of other galleries. The Gilbert Silver Collection has now moved to the V&A from Somerset House and is so much better displayed, sitting alongside the impressively dense displays in the Whiteley Silver Galleries. The showcase, lighting supports and information design is all superb, and the extraordinary painted and tiled interiors of the V&A, not to mention the wonderful garden , are now used to maximum benefit rather than being boarded over.

I also discovered the substantial paintings collection that the Museum holds, including major works of Constable and Turner now in their own dedicated galleries. And if you are after a bit of muscle, the sculpture galleries depict the full story of the development of English sculpture, managing to slip into the story the fabulous Theseus and the Minotaur of Canova and Bernini's Neptune and Triton.

Much of the praise can be attributed to Sir Mark Jones who became director in 2001. At that time the V&A had broken the careers of a series of directors ( Roy Strong, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, Alan Borg) who had been unable to conquer the eccentricities of either the staff or the maze of dark galleries ( see above), or even the diverse nature of the collection. "What is the V&A for?" asked UK Culture Secretary Chris Smith in 2004, which just about summed up common perceptions of the place. So it is great to see it back as a market leader again.

A couple of observations:

1) The US style of benefactor recognition is now slipping in with many of the galleries now personally named, e.g. the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Sculpture Gallery - doesn't worry me, especially if it allows such great results.

2) The provision of computers to allow visitors to access the wider collection was as far as I could see being completely ignored. I saw the same thing at the National Portrait Gallery later in the day. I believe such provision is missing the point. Visitors come to see the real thing and know they can access much of the collection on line so why bother during a visit. Let's ditch this idea.

And the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries? - mind blowing. Do make time to visit them for a wonderful museum experience when next you are in London.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Digitial delusion or a real new age for museums?

2010-08-31T13:04:00.001+10:00

I have been challenged this week by a blog from Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen entitled ‘The Digital Delusion’. Challenged, because I thought I would be blogging to disagree with the blog’s premise, namely that the future for museums does not lie in digitisation, but the more I think about it, the more I actually agree.

Let me explain my position. The concept of getting collection information online by the process of digitisation is one I believe must be supported at every level, so that information can be accessed, cross referenced and understood. I came across a beauty this week at Hortus Camdensis. This is an illustrated online catalogue of the 3300 plants grown by Sir William Macarthur at Camden Park, south of Sydney, between 1820-1860. Combined with garden records of the time, including Sir William’s diaries, essays on laying out an orchard in Colonial Australia, wine growing etc and notes on changes in nomenclature, it is a model of what collection digitisation can achieve in providing not only access to a hitherto hidden catalogue, but also a pile of useful related information.

Beyond this, using technology to provide access to digitised records in an easily accessible way is also something we must continue to explore and promote. There are few better exemplars than the Powerhouse in pioneering the use of on-line collection data. Look for instance at how they use Flickr to provide access to collection information. But also check out how the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) has launched an app to provide heaps more information on objects in the Museum through the use of iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, either the visitors’ own, or provided on loan by the Museum. MONA, the new Museum of Old & New Art due to open in Hobart next January is planning to go a stage further, providing no labels to objects, with all information delivered via a mobile device. Exciting times, especially with iPad use. Its’ larger screen is going to offer all sorts of opportunities for delivery of video, as well as being a unit that a group or family can enjoy together rather than the individual experience of the iPhone or iPod.

So I fully agree with the sentiments of AMNH President, Ellen Futter, when launching their latest app that “the digital age is upon us, and we want to integrate education with technology”.

Why then the digital delusion? Museion’s point is that museums have got carried away with the concept of digitisation for its own sake without really unpacking why we must digitise. The process has been driven by ‘digital immigrants’, i.e. museum people who were not born into the digital world but have become fascinated by the technology – count me amongst them. The result is a mass of digital museum projects, some of which work (see above), but many of which don’t. How often have I seen unused computer monitors in museums provided to allow public access to the Collections – why? Partly because the digital natives, i.e. those born into a digital world, for whom they are largely provided, are not interested because they make such poor use of digital media. The overlap between the world of the digital immigrant and the digital native is only partly bridged.

As Museion points out the future is not digital, in that it is not about digitisation just for digitisation’s sake. It will and must remain real, that is grounded in real objects. Museums have a unique position to display that materiality, albeit using the undoubted power of digitisation and digital media to maximise how that materiality is accessed. We need to sell that unique ability which is only going to become more valuable as the digital world swirls around us.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Brooklyn Museum - and the value of visitor numbers

2010-08-17T15:18:00.001+10:00

I blogged recently on the issue of falling visitor numbers at the Brooklyn Museum, and was politely reprimanded by Sally Williams, the Public Information Officer at the Museum, for not looking at the ten year average attendance as a more accurate statistic.

But it raises a fundamental question as to whether the health of a collecting institution can be measured by the number of people who come through the front door. And it is particularly apt that the New York Times should focus on this issue (and some others) in “Sketching a future for Brooklyn Museum”. As the NY Times says, “For more than a century the Museum has been one of the country’s most important cultural institutions, and for more than a decade it has also caused controversy … By some measures it has succeeded. By others, including attendance goals articulated by the Museum itself, it has not.”

The NY Times asked various experts to comment on issues confronting the Museum including falling attendance, and their responses are enlightening, particularly in the mixed views on the value of visitor numbers. Philippe de Montebello, the recently retired Director of the Met, kicks off, reflecting on the difficulty of positioning the Brooklyn Museum when so many world class museums exist just over the water in Manhattan. He takes the high-brow view that a visit to any museum should be an uplifting experience, whereas the Brooklyn has headed for the popular culture route (implicitly implying a dumbing down of the content). Karen Brooks Hopkins, President of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, has leapt on this popular culture as a key to success, saying that although visitor numbers are down, “the demographics are unbeatable: Brooklyn audiences are young, diverse and adventurous, which has enormous positive implications for the future.”

Rochelle Slovin, Director of the Museum of the Moving Image, has taken the same view highlighting the popular hip hop and salsa Saturdays at the Museum (a recent one on July 3rd drew an incredible 24,000 people) as no different to string quartets at the Met evenings in terms of concept – just a different flavour for a different audience.

Maxwell Anderson, Director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and an increasingly visible museum commentator, posits that with so little revenue coming from admissions (typically 2-4%) the focus should be on evaluating museums on their contribution to research, education and conservation, along with their ability to be a hotbed of creativity.

Peter Marzio, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, takes a different tack, praising the Brooklyn for pioneering a new path and “transforming itself into an ecumenical museum by focusing its collections and programs on the diverse neighbourhoods of Brooklyn”. Interesting use of the word ecumenical – I think he means drawing together in a common space the many different local groups.

Finally into this space has gamely strode the Director of the Museum, Arnold Lehman. No-one particularly likes a panel of experts telling them how to run their museum better, but Lehman has graciously acknowledged all their comments as valuable.

And his response is a simple one, namely that the Brooklyn Museum’s interest is in who is coming to the Museum, not in their numbers. As he states, the Museum’s commitment to engage with the local community, rather than be challenged by it, has resulted in the most diverse and youngest audience of any general fine arts museum in the country.

So who wins this most interesting dialogue (and would that we could have such a discussion in the Australian press)? Unfortunately, despite the feel-good nature of the plaudits that many of the experts heap on the Brooklyn Museum and its international reputation for being innovative, the fact that the article has been written directly results from press around falling visitor numbers. And as Wenda Gu, a Brooklyn artist says, “Attendance is the most important and objective measurement of a museum’s success”.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Conservators discovering the picture

2010-08-05T08:33:00.002+10:00

There is a view amongst conservators that virtually all of the world’s great paintings have now been cleaned and conserved and their secrets revealed, and we are moving to a stage of care and maintenance of these paintings, whilst falling back on the generally less exciting grade two paintings to ply our active conservation skills.

So it is heartening to come across no less than three recent stories of conservation treatments which show we can still get excited about what is being undertaken or revealed.

The first is the discovery of a lost Velazquez in the basement of Yale University Art Gallery, as reported in The Art Newspaper and interestingly, even pictured in the Sydney Morning Herald (everyone loves a story about a lost treasure turning up in the metaphoric attic). Long thought to be by an unknown 17th Century Seville artist, entitled ‘The Education of the Virgin’, conservation revealed the distinctive long brush strokes and sophisticated naturalism of the Spanish master Diego Velazquez.

The second is a good news story about the 1546 panel painting ‘The Last Supper’ by Giorgio Vasari, which was severely damaged in the great Florence Flood of 1966 (also reported in The Art Newspaper). Underwater for 12 hours, the panels absorbed water and swelled, only to crack up as they dried out and shrank. Now thanks to a Getty Foundation grant, a team of panel painting conservators, including those learning these specialist skills, are working in Florence to secure the flaking areas, and remove the legacy of the flood, which includes mud, mould, diesel oil and waste from the overflowing Florentine sewers.

And the third story, as reported in The Guardian, like the first also relates to conservators unlocking a hidden masterpiece. In this case, it is a painting by Renaissance superstar Tintoretto, which hung in a filthy state for decades in Kingston Lacy, a National Trust pile in Dorset, UK. Of doubtful provenance and so dirty the figures could hardly be made out, it hung on the back stairs until finally its turn came for conservation.

Interestingly, whilst the conservation revealed it was definitely a Tintoretto, it also raised an issue as to what the image was about. Known for years as ‘Apollo and the Muses’, experts are puzzled about what is going on. It is currently on its fifth name in the last few months, namely ‘Apollo (or Hymen the Greek God of Marriage) crowning a poet and giving him a spouse’.

The reality is, whatever the title, it’s the artist whose name really matters and the vital role of conservators in revealing and authenticating this is once again confirmed. Great work, folks!

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

MOMA and too much of a good thing?

2010-08-03T15:35:00.003+10:00

I have recently blogged twice about Glenn D Lowry (here and here), the current superstar of the US Museum director scene and his status is justified by a recent article in the New York Observer.

Three million people visited MOMA in the year to the end of June 2010, a new record in its 81 year history. Why the success? On the face of it, because it seems to be doing all the right things in current museological thinking. It’s a participatory museum, it’s a social space where people want to come to see and be seen and it has a dynamic exhibition program of temporary and permanent collections, along with associated media and film. Most notably, it has managed to reduce its typical visitor from a 55 year old woman to a 40-something of either sex.

But of course such success does not come without its critics. At the glitterati end, the opening night parties are frequently uncomfortably packed and amongst the art critics it is seen to be far too crowded to allow for any real engagement or ability for contemplation of the artworks. In the words of Tom Eccles, Chair of Curatorial Studies at Bard College, “the drive to become a social space is more of a fetish in museum theory right now”.

Well guys, you can’t have it both ways. On the one hand, static or falling visitor numbers are bewailed and the need to make museums more welcoming encouraged, and then when the crowds do come it is seen to “compromise” the experience. (I am reminded of the V&A keeper who proclaimed the Museum was at its best when there were no visitors).

Within this context, there’s an interesting new book out entitled ‘Do Museums Still need Objects?’ by Steven Cann (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Cann’s premise is that objects have a diminishing role in museums as people have lost faith in the ability of objects alone to tell stories and convey knowledge. He posits that the move to turn museums into social spaces has been at the expense of the objects, with the focus being on the space itself (witness the architectural statements of Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum or Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim).

I would contend that Cann misses the point. Yes, the number of objects on display may have become less and yes, successful museums are succeeding through creating social spaces where people want to be, but the draw card is always going to be the real object. We know the power of the real over the virtual is compelling. And by having fewer objects on display often their ability to tell stories can be enhanced rather than diminished. MOMA may be too popular for its own good in some people’s eyes, but its success is fundamentally due to the depth of its collections and the way in which it interprets and makes them accessible.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Curators and declining acquisitions

2010-07-22T12:51:00.002+10:00

“Curators are becoming a declining species” is a frequent refrain amongst museum professionals these days (see my previous blogs on curators and curatorship), the most visible effect of which is diminishing curatorial scholarship within museums.

So it was interesting to come across a series of interviews with six curators in a recent edition of the UK Museums Journal. As if to emphasise the declining nature of their position, all had been selected as they were either about to retire or had already retired. Between them they picked up on some of the essence of what curators used to do (and therefore what is being lost), such as:

Intimate knowledge of collections which never gets into publications and indeed often remains in curators’ heads
Narratives that weave together often disparate strands of a museum’s collection that explain how it has come to be
Anecdotal information on the museum’s history and gossip about staff, trustees and acquisition stories (not quite sure why this has been the preserve of curators but thus it has been).

But out of the interview comes also a clearer understanding of why it is that they are no longer the fundamental cornerstone of a museum’s staff profile. This includes:

Widespread introduction of computer-based cataloguing which has resulted in a discipline in collection management that now relies less on what curators used to keep in their heads
Diminution in acquisitions, so that collecting has almost become a forgotten art, when it used to be the very soul of curatorship.

And it is the latter issue of acquisitions which in my view has most affected the role of curators. Whilst the process of exhibition development, once the prerogative of curators, has been increasingly overtaken by museum educators and designers, acquisitions can still only be undertaken by curators. But if acquisitions are not happening through lack of funding, then inevitably the role (and prestige) of curators becomes less fundamental in museums. A recent survey in the UK of 276 museums revealed that only 2% said collecting was their highest priority and 50% said they had no money allocated at all for collecting. That of course does not mean they will not be collecting at all, as so called “passive” acquiring, i.e. acquisition by donation, still ensures collections can be boosted. But it does strike to the core of what curators used to do, namely the active hunt for acquisitions and the funds to spend on them.

It reflects the very different nature of museums in the 21st Century, where they are all about making collections accessible and interpretable compared to the 19th and first half of the 20th Centuries when they were about acquiring collections. And whilst this may not affect the great art and history museums, it is more problematic for contemporary art and social history museums, which by their very nature must keep collecting to be relevant.

None of this sounds too good for curators, so what is their future? My view is that although their role is in decline, they will not die out altogether. The facts are that although the way in which museums are now run may have a primary focus on the delivery of information about the collections and that therefore the public program/education/ design professionals and their colleagues in the IT department may currently top the popularity poles in museums in the way that curators used to, someone still has to be able to provide the back ground knowledge. Now some of this can be contracted out to academics, but depth of knowledge of the museum’s collections beyond the level that the database can provide will still be required. So hang in there curators – some of use still know how valuable you are!

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director

International Conservation Services

How to keep those museum visitors coming back

2010-07-09T15:10:00.004+10:00

Any discussion of innovation in museums invariably mentions the Brooklyn Museum. From being a pioneer in maintaining populist shows such as “Star Wars”, to developing a photography show curated online by the public (see previous blog), we who work in this sector are always attentive of what they will come up with next.
So it is particularly disappointing to read in the New York Times this innovation has not transfered into visitor numbers. From 585,000 in 1998, numbers dropped to 420,000 in 2008 and 340,000 last year. And this is in an environment when the visitor numbers for most other New York cultural institutions are remaining stable.

So what is Brooklyn doing wrong, or more to the point what are the others doing right to keep the visitors coming? Over in Manhattan at the Met under its new director Thomas P. Campbell there is, according to the Financial Times, a “decidedly frisky feel”. Recent Met adverts show couples kissing in front of a Rodin sculpture, three grinning children in front of a gallery of Egyptian mummies, beside their friend wrapped in toilet paper, both with the catchline “It’s time we Met”.

This is all part of what Campbell identifies as two movements that are changing the workings of museums by: (a) shifting the focus from connoisseurship to greater socio-political contextualisation; and (b) no longer only speaking to an elite upper middle class. Both run the danger of dumbing down the museum, more often defined as “popularising”. I have no problem with either movement if it does achieve in making collections more accessible, just so long as behind it all there remains the appropriate curatorial rigour.

And if you want to see what accessibility can really mean go no further than Japan where booming attendances reflect the perception among young people that visiting museums is cool.

The four most well attended institutions in the world last year were all in Japan. The ‘National Treasure Ashura and Masterpieces from Kofuki-ji’ exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum attracted an astonishing 15,960 visitors per day. Rest assured hardly anyone could see anything but that is bye the bye - by contrast visitors to the recent NGA Masters from Paris exhibition complained they could not see anything on days when there were under a third of this number. Overall visitor attendance to national museums in Japan has risen by 200% in 10 years.

Japan’s museum sector requires a study in its own right to understand what is going on, though clearly the concept of museums as meeting places where it is cool to hang out is one of their achievements. All museums should aspire to this as a fundamental starting place to maximise repeat visitation. I noted in my previous blog that MOMA in New York has 135,000 members. On the basis that each of these members has joined because they will visit the Museum more than twice a year (thus justifying the cost of membership) visitation is already guaranteed at over 270,000.

So I think one of Brooklyn Museum’s problems is that a 2008 survey showed half of the museum’s visitors were not only non repeat visitors, they were first time visitors. When your overall visitor numbers are rising that’s not a bad result, but when they are falling as dramatically as theirs are, it’s disastrous, unless you can convince a substantial proportion to come back again.

Julian Bickersteth
International Conservation Services

MOMA - Momentum and Money

2010-07-02T11:03:00.001+10:00

I enjoyed listening to Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the New York’s Museum of Modern Art giving the inaugural Ann Lewis Contemporary Visual Arts Address at the MCA in Sydney last week.

I must admit part of the fascination was seeing the world’s highest paid museum director (a cool $1.3 million per year) in the flesh. And Glenn did not disappoint. He gave an entertaining history of MOMA from its founding in 1929 to the international colossus it now is, describing the challenges of collecting contemporary art.

A former director likened this process to that of a torpedo, always moving forward, gathering art at its front end and shedding art collected in the past that was not standing the test of time. To remain contemporary it only holds onto art that is less than 50 years old. Or that is what I thought Glenn said, though it still holds some of the greatest work of Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Mondrian etc. Not sure how that works but I can understand their reluctance to de-accession such works!

Glenn then moved onto his views on where museums are going. Nothing startlingly new I would say – museums increasingly being used as social spaces, museums no longer being able to go it alone and therefore needing to establish alliances/partnerships with other organisations, museums competing in cyberspace and the importance of building virtual visitors as well as the physical ones.

But it was when he turned to the metrics of MOMA that things got really interesting. Because MOMA is all about money – perhaps not surprisingly given its location. Glenn is building a US $900 million endowment, which currently stands at $670 million. That already generates 31% of their $120 million annual income, (bear in mind MOMA, like most US institutions apart from the Smithsonian, receive minimal government funding). 3 million visitors a year contributes a further 25% of income, followed by 15% of income from their 135,000 members.

By Australian standards these are all mind-boggling numbers, but then it is New York. I came away elated by the benchmark that MOMA sets, and invigorated by the dynamism of its director.

Julian Bickersteth
International Conservation Services

Museums, galleries and their carbon footprints

2010-06-28T11:12:00.001+10:00

The emissions trading scheme may have been shelved in Australia for the near term (though watch this space after the ascendancy of Julia Gillard to the PM’s position) but museums and galleries, just as businesses, need to treat a low carbon and energy efficient economy as inevitable.

And what Copenhagen did achieve, although it appeared to be a failure as a climate change summit, was a global agreement to limit temperature rises to 2 degrees. To meet this target is going to require transformational changes to the world economy, and therefore inevitably to the way museums and galleries operate. The GLAM sector is going to be in a much stronger position if it can take control of its preparedness for this rather than wait for the inevitable government dictate.

And whilst this is partly about the reactionary component, i.e. checking the resilience of museums to the effects of warmer temperatures, heavier rainfall and less predictable weather patterns, and the related risks, it is also about being proactive in reducing each organisation’s carbon footprint.

I find colleagues’ eyes begin to glaze over at this stage, as it all appears too hard. So what can we learn from the rest of the world in this regard? I checked out the UK where they are substantially ahead of Australian thinking on this issue. Museums are looking to establish their carbon footprint and then to do something about reducing it, both to save money and also to be eligible for grants that are available for those that are proactive in this area.

Carbon footprints treat an organisation’s carbon emissions in three parts:

Direct emissions from the organisation which, for museums relate to their own boilers and fuel used by museum vehicles
Indirect emissions from electricity or gas purchased by the museum
Indirect emissions from sources outside the museum’s control, such as staff and visitors getting to the museum, waste disposal and suppliers emissions

The first stage is to establish what these are, and the benchmark for this is the Victoria and Albert Museum, which claims to be the first museum to have calculated their footprint in 2007/08. They found that not unexpectedly 82% of their emissions arise from utilities. However it is interesting to see the breakdown of this, namely 29% of this being for lighting compared to 63% for heating, cooling and control of relative humidity - interesting in that we tend to forget how much energy lights use and then of course how much they contribute to warming up air and thus requiring more energy for cooling. The balance of the carbon footprint at the V&A is consumed by IT (11%), touring exhibitions (5%) and staff travel (2%).

Having established a carbon footprint (and bear in mind that it helps to have sub metering so the breakdown between lights, HVAC and IT use can be identified), then the next stage is to do something about it. This should be about reducing energy use, not about using renewable energy sources or carbon offsetting.

Again check out how the V&A has achieved a 20% reduction in their carbon footprint between 2005 and 2009. They have done this through using low energy lighting on time clocks, low energy environmental controls and a combined heat and power system, known in the business as CHP.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this is how they are implementing ongoing savings as they progressively refurbish the Museum. New gallery projects now optimise the use of daylight, minimise solar gain, use intelligent ventilation and heating strategies and avoid humidification and cooling. It is a model all museums and galleries can benefit from actively considering.

Julian Bickersteth
International Conservation Services

Collaboration and Convergence

2010-06-15T09:05:00.002+10:00

The concept of a division between collecting institutions in the GLAM sector is a 19th century phenomenon. Prior to that, artefacts, paintings, books and natural history specimens were often housed in the one organisation. The British Library, for instance, was only formed out of the Britsh Museum as recently as 1973.

Given the somewhat artificial nature then of this division, it is a logical process that we are seeing on the web as collecting institutions come together to once again link up their databases. I was listening yesterday to Dr Warwick Cathro, the Assistant Director General of the National Library of Australia talk at the Australian National Maritime Museum about the collaboration between the National Library, the National Archives and the National Film and Sound Archive that has resulted in Trove. Managed by the National Library it is a highly impressive metadata search engine for Australiana. A number of the audience confirmed how the speed with which they can identify primary resources for research purposes has transformed their lives.

It confirms a global trend, articulated recently by David Curry at the Future of Museums blogspot, in which he says:

Demand for access to and leverage of primary sources and collections of all kinds drives the need for common strategies around licensing, intellectual property, copyright management, and associated revenue streams. Just as important, GLAMs will have an increasingly common agenda in addressing preservation, access, physical storage, and overall management of primary source content overall, including “born-digital” content

The large and economically powerful “commercial” content market, which is perhaps anchored overmuch in entertainment content at the moment, is a key driver (and definer) for market and community expectations. Apple iTunes, Google Books+ and similar disruptions will increasingly “invade” the GLAM domain, driving the need for common, robust strategies to deal with the velocity and vectors of change.

So I read with interest an article in the New York Times last week, on how the British Museum has begun a collaboration with Wikipedia. My children are always telling me how they are forbidden to cite Wikipedia as a reference in essays, because of the amateur nature of its content. But the BM noted recently that their Rosetta Stone page views were up to five times less than the Wikipedia page on the same iconic artefact. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em goes the phrase, and so that is exactly what they are doing, even to the extent of appointing a ‘Wikipedian in residence’, an Australian no less! Key to his role will be identifying the thousands of artefacts (from the total collection of 8 million), that might be worth having their own Wikipedia article.

It’s encouraging to see the BM doing this, as convergence, the term used to describe in this context the coming together of the museum/gallery sector with the library/archive sector, still struggles in my book to find a model that works. There is the celebrated Puke Ariki in New Plymouth, New Zealand and also attempts by Albury City Council in their new cultural centre, but are we ever going to treat a museum as a library and objects as reference material? My guess is that a new model will appear as the web develops, and we need to be open to all opportunities around it.

Art Theft

2010-06-07T15:34:00.004+10:00

It is the ultimate nightmare for a museum director to have artworks or objects stolen on their watch. So the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris is no doubt not too happy about the theft two weeks ago of five paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Modigliani and Leger from his museum.

What makes it rather worse is that it appears the Museum’s alarm system had been broken for almost two months and there were three night time guards in the area at the time. Apparently they were “dozing” and “saw nothing” (which is what normally happens when you doze). Not that the insurers will worry, as apparently none of the works were insured, being owned by Paris City Hall, which self insures. The stolen art market is something which slips under the radar in terms of its extent, but is actually second only to the illegal drug and arms trades in value, being worth some US $6 billion annually. These five paintings are estimated to be worth some US $125 million and join the 170,000 stolen and missing pieces in the Art Loss Register.

Most of these pieces are stolen from private homes (witness the recent theft of a ₤80,000 painting by the reclusive “guerrilla” artist Banksy from the supermodel Kate Moss’ home in London). But where do these artworks end up? The view seems to be that either:
a) They are stolen by criminal gangs to use as collateral in drugs and arms deals and will eventually reappear on the market; or
b) They are specifically targeted by collectors and will disappear into private collections. As the BBC pointed out after the Museum of Modern Art thefts, if you wanted to start a modern art museum these five paintings would be high on your list of acquisitions as between them they tell the story of modern art’s emergence.

What is the likelihood of a major heist happening in a public gallery in Australia? Realistically, small for a number of reasons. Our major collecting institutions are newer, fewer and less exposed than European ones. They are almost universally in purpose built structures rather than in converted houses in cramped streets with plenty of back windows. And if a theft does take place there is the issue of how to smuggle it out of the country, a process so much easier in Europe with open borders.

But that is not to say it cannot happen, the most famous recent example being Van Mieris’ Cavalier stolen from the Art Gallery of NSW in 2007, and valued at over $1 million. Museums therefore need to be aware of the latest security technology. No one system is going to be foolproof, and the latest thinking combines CCTV surveillance with RFID tagging such as the ISIS Aspects Arts System.

While certainly more effective than dozing guards, if the thieves turn up with a gun however, such as when Munch’s The Scream was stolen from the Munch Museum in Norway, there is not much that can be done to stop them.

Museum cuts and directors’ salaries – are they related?

2010-05-28T12:58:00.003+10:00

An article this week in the Chicago Tribune reported that the Art Institute of Chicago has laid off 65 staff, on top of the 22 it laid off last June. The director James Cuno, one of the giants of the US art scene, has cited the almost 25% cut in endowment income as the cause of such, putting the Art Institute in the same group as the mega rich Getty Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, both of which have laid off staff and cut programs in the last year.

It illustrates the very different form of funding that the US museum/gallery scene lives off, when compared to the UK and Australian situation. Endowments resulting from philanthropic giving have long been the main stay of US museum funding, a model eyed with envy from elsewhere, where there is nothing like the level of philanthropic giving to the arts. But it has a downside, namely when those endowments are linked to the stockmarket and a little matter of a GFC comes barrelling into town.

Across the Atlantic the UK museum sector which relies predominately on public sector funding has fared better so far. They of course are wondering what now happens with the new coalition government in power, but the Conservatives went to the general election proclaiming in David Cameron’s words ‘ Our culture is second to none’. Nick Clegg ( now Deputy PM) had stronger words ‘ Arts funding is a duty not an option for any government’, and even the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne got in on the act speaking at the Tate last December, when he said ’The arts play a vital role in our communities, helping to bind people together and create real social value.’ Whilst it is clear there will be cuts to their funding of as much as 20% , as no part of the UK ‘s public sector will be able to avoid such if the UK £160 billion deficit is going to have any chance of being reduced, there are also ways in which this may be ameliorated. The National Lottery was set up to fund heritage, the arts, sport and charities, and although its funds have been siphoned off to all sorts of other causes given its phenomenal success, there are signs that the government will restore it to its original purpose. There is also talk of a Museums and Heritage Bill which would give national museums greater financial independence.

But there are swings and round abouts with such matters and the result of the massive endowments that US museum directors have to manage means they also (by UK and Australian standards) can earn massive salaries. James Cuno earned US$626,000 last year up 46% from the previous one, no doubt so he didn’t get left behind his colleagues, such as Boston Museum of Fine Arts director, Malcolm Rogers on $719,000 or the Met’s Phillipe de Montebello ( since retired) on $818,000. But they are eclipsed by the star of the show, Glenn Lowry, director of New York’s MOMA, who earned $1.32 million last year ( salary $956,000, ‘retention bonus’ $191,000, ‘performance bonus’ $200,000, pension $262,000 plus rent free condo benefit valued at $336,000) , and this included a voluntary pay cut due to the recession taking his earnings down from, wait for it, $1.95 million the previous year.

So it’s not entirely surprising, returning to the Chicago Art Institute, that a blog comment on the article reads "When the director is making over $700,000 a year, and accepts a pay raise when the rest of the staff goes for years without raises, and scores of employees are losing their jobs, the whole thing seems shameful and embarrassing".

Haven’t I heard that comment from the corporate world recently?

The Olokun Head (and museum fakes)

2010-05-18T13:25:00.003+10:00

The art world is full of fakes, some of which surprise us and are ‘discovered’ to be genuine. Perhaps the most difficult artist to authenticate is Salvador Dali, because it seems clear he himself was helping to create his own fakes. He is thought to have signed some 280,000 sheets of blank paper in his lifetime, and in fact signed his name so many times that it deteriorated to the extent that experts now have great difficult authenticating the real thing.

But fakes in the museum world are much less common (we think!). “Piltdown Man” is perhaps the most famous. Thought to be the fossilised fragments of a skull and jawbone of a previously unknown human when collected in a gravel pit in 1912 in Piltdown, Sussex, it was not until 1953 that it was exposed as a forgery, being the lower jawbone of an orang-utan deliberately combined with the skull of a modern human.

Piltdown is a classic example of academics desperate to find the missing link between apes and humans overcoming sheer common sense. The man now thought to have perpetrated the fraud was Charles Dawson, a local antiquarian collector. Checking his details in Wikipedia I was amazed to find he made an artform of such finds including such wonderfully named items as the Beauport Park Roman Statuette (a hybrid iron object), the Brighton ‘Toad in the hole’ (a toad entombed in a flint), the so called ‘Shadowy figures’ on the walls of Hastings Castle and the Bulverhythe Hammer. Tell me more, please!

On a more serious note the latest edition of the Art Newspaper ( www.theartnewspaper.com ) carries an interesting account of the Olokun Head (“Is the Olokun Head the real thing?”). The life size Olokun head was found by a German anthropologist Leo Frobenius in 1910 near Ife, Nigeria. The bronze is believed to be the head of a king, made about 1400, but at the time of discovery was considered to be too great a masterpiece to have been created by African hands, a reflection of attitudes at the time. It was seized almost immediately by the British Colonial administration on the grounds it was sacred and eventually placed in the Ife Museum.

But in 1948 when it travelled to the British Museum it was declared to be a replica. Was it always a fake therefore, or was the original copied either by Frobenius before handing it over, or before it reached the Ife Museum, with the original sold to a European North American Collector?

However now that it is on show again (“The Kingdom of Ife” currently at the British Museum and due to travel to 4 museums in the US in 2011), there are questions being raised as to whether it is actually the original after all. The BM’s conservators are undertaking X-ray fluorescence and thermo luminescence testing and microscopic analysis to determine the precise metal content, the casting technique, and the form of tools used.

A copy or the real thing? Hopefully all will soon be revealed.

Cultural rights and the future of museum visiting

2010-05-11T08:15:00.002+10:00

It is a given that almost all museums are seeking to broaden their audiences and increase their visitation numbers. Some are more successful at this than others, but the GFC cannot disguise the fact that worldwide in broad terms those numbers just aren’t improving, and indeed may be going backwards. And it is not just our sector of the arts. US statistics from the National Arts Index show that overall attendance at museums, galleries, orchestral, dance, opera and theatre performances declined across the board by about 10% over the last ten years. And a key cause of this can be laid at the door of arts funding which in the corresponding period has dropped in relative terms by c 25%.

So I read with great interest an article in the Spring 2010 Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts on what we might be able to do about this. I must admit to being a very inactive Fellow of the RSA, but a great (tacit) supporter of all it stands for and in particular its’ thought provoking Journal. This article is by Bill Ivey from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

Ivey’s basic premise is that the argument for public investment in culture is unable to compete with education, healthcare and the environment. The old arguments for the value of the arts to public policy have gone as far as they can, and culture is increasingly seen as something governments get around to funding with the money left over after everything important has been paid for.

We’ve seen this most starkly in Australia in WA where the state is riding its second mining boom, and yet the arts, having missed out on any benefit from the first, is now seeing funding cut back further.

So what does Ivey suggest we do about it? Firstly he suggests we start from the premise that artistic heritage and creative practice are at the heart of a wide range of human engagements that are critical to both happiness and the workings of democracy. And secondly we redefine our sector to encompass an arena of human activity that is just as important as healthcare and the environment, namely our 'expressive life'. This has both a past (our heritage) and a present (everything from ethnic and community traditions, and social dancing to amateur music making and arts education in and out of schools).

Expressive life is much harder to marginalize than the arts, as it engages so many components of our daily lives (and therefore our legislative and social framework). Ivey then comes up with an innovative and (I think) terrific concept of a Cultural Bill of Rights that can justify the pursuit of a vibrant expressive life as a democratic public good. It might read as follows:
1. The right to our heritage – the right to explore music, literature, drama, painting that define both our nation’s collective experience and our individual and community traditions.
2. The right to the prominent presence of artists in public life – through their art and incorporation of their artistic visions in democratic debate.
3. The right to an artistic life – to the knowledge and skills to play an instrument, draw, act, dance, compose, design.
4. The right to know and explore art of the highest quality and to the lasting truths embedded in those forms of expression that have survived through the centuries
5. The right to healthy arts enterprises that can take risks and invest in innovation while serving communities and the public interest.

Will it wash with funding bodies? Certainly it would be so energizing to see public debate around the issues, as the current picture is one of minimal debate, and increasing marginalisation in forward funding for our collecting institutions. That in turn is going to do nothing to increase visitation.

Telling stories by conservation

2010-05-03T11:30:00.002+10:00

I have long been an advocate of the power of story telling in both justifying the process of conservation and also in achieving engagement with wider audiences. Conservation per se just to extend an artwork or object’s life in perpetuity may be ethically the right thing to do, but it is rarely going to grab the attention of funding bodies or the public.

Driven by the very real concerns of reducing support for conservation training (both the Textile Conservation Centre and the V&A/Royal College of Arts in the UK closed last year), the International Institute for Conservation ran another in its’ successful series of dialogues in January 2010 entitled ‘Conservation in Crisis – communicating the value of what we do’. This has just been posted on the IIC website. I must admit to some bias on the value of these dialogues as I am Vice President of IIC, and am strongly supportive of the Institute taking a more active advocacy role.

And what comes out clearly from the dialogue is that storytelling is a significant key to engaging a wider audience, and one that conservators continue to be poor at exploiting. Whilst a range of programs providing public access to conservation, including opening up labs to guided tours and having conservation treatments carried out in public galleries, have had some success, as soon as conservators commit themselves to paper, they become dead boring to anyone but other conservators (and let it be honestly said, often to them as well). And this is generally because they focus on the treatment rather than the story behind the object that is revealed.

There is a great example of this given by one of the dialogue participants about a cross that was conserved in Venice. The conservators involved when explaining their work talked at length about the details of the treatment undertaken, yet failed to mention that what was really interesting about the cross is that for two hundred years it was carried before condemned prisoners on their procession to the scaffold, i.e. it was one of the last things such people saw on earth.

I have just attended a meeting of the International Polar Heritage Committee in Punta Arenas, Chile, and one of the speakers was bewailing the focus on the Heroic era and the explorers of the early Twentieth Century, at the expense of the conservation of the heritage of the early nineteenth century whalers and sealers in Antarctica. The simple explanation is that the story telling around the explorers has been much more successfully told than that of the whalers and sealers, and as a result the funds have flowed for conservation work for the former. Admittedly it helps having some substantial huts and their 15,000 artifacts as compared to a few difficult to discern archaeological remains on which to hang them

Blockbuster noise in Canberra

2010-04-28T21:20:00.002+10:00

So the National Gallery’s Masterpieces from Paris on loan from the Musee D’Orsay has finally closed after a marathon all night opening and an incredible 470,000 visitors. It has eclipsed the National Gallery of Victoria’s previous Australian exhibition attendance record of 371,000 for the 1994 exhibition of, you guessed it, Masterpieces from the Musee D’Orsay. I have blogged before about how good this exhibition was, and I am glad to see what a benefit it must have been to the Gallery’s bottom line. By my calculation, given the break even point was c 250,000 visitors (according to Ron Radford in the SMH April 2nd 2010,) the extra 220,000 visitors at $25 a pop must have provided a neat $5.5m gross profit.

But it raises again the question of the benefits or otherwise of blockbusters. I always used to think that blockbusters started with the Tutankhamen Exhibition at the British Museum in 1972, but for an indepth view of how long they have been around read The ephemeral museum: Old Master paintings the rise of the art exhibition By Francis Haskell.

Haskell shows that the first real blockbuster was the Rembrandt exhibition in Amsterdam in 1898, though certainly King Tut at the BM eclipsed all records with an incredible 1.7 million people seeing it over 9 months at an average of 7,000 a day. Other outstanding numbers have come from Monet at the Royal Academy in 1990 (658,000), and Titanic at the Florida International Museum in 1997 (830,000).

In terms of their pros and cons, check out a good summary in a paper that David Fleming ( Director of National Museums, Liverpool) gave at ICOM Seoul in 2004. Fleming identifies the pros as:
1) Lots of people come
2) Visitors get the chance to see things brought together, possibly for the first and only time
3) Blockbusters attract new visitors to the museum/gallery, who hopefully will return
4) They attract media coverage, raising the profile of the museum/gallery, and sponsorship
5) They make money ( not a given, but in the National Gallery’s case, lots of it)
6) They promote creativity and scholastic excellence amongst the museum/gallery’s staff.
And the cons as:
1) Blockbusters present a narrow range of subjects and seldom shed new light on history or art history
2) They lead to a dumbing down of the museum and its message, being developed primarily for entertainment rather than educational/cultural value
3) The necessary sponsorship can have unintended negative consequences for the museum
4) The actual experience of blockbusters is a poor one as success leads to overcrowding – this in turn means there can be no meaningful experience, and may dissuade repeat visits
5) The staff effort in mounting them distracts from their core work
6) Blockbusters create a treadmill, raising expectations amongst sponsors, media and the public which may be impossible to meet (interestingly Brian Kennedy, the previous director of the National Gallery dispensed with them , partly for this reason, having inherited a tradition of blockbusters from his predecessor Betty Churcher, fondly remembered as ‘Betty blockbuster ’)
7) Their success may persuade public funding bodies to reduce their support

I’m a blockbuster fan, I must admit, and I’m glad that the National Gallery can justifiably bask in the media and financial glory of this show. But at the same time they need to be acutely aware of the last two points.

Contemporary Art and Conservation Ethics

2010-04-19T14:44:00.005+10:00

A useful book has hit the materials conservation literature shelf – not a very large shelf at present, reflecting to my mind the relative paucity of thinking around the philosophy and practice of materials conservation. Entitled Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths, (edited by Alison Richmond and Alison Bracker; Butterworth-Heinemann 2009) it has largely grown out of discussions generated within the Victoria and Albert Museum’s conservation department. It includes an excellent chapter by our own Marcelle Scott of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, comparing the very different history and approach taken to the conservation of indigenous cultural material in Australia with that in New Zealand (to the detriment in her view of the former).

It also includes an outstanding chapter from Jonathan Ashley-Smith (former head of conservation at the V&A) entitled ‘ The Basics of Conservation ethics’. It should be a must-read for all conservators. Jonathan always writes well, if quirkily – his short bio gives an indication of this: “Jonathan first wrote about conservation ethics in 1982 when he was young and his views were rigid and idealistic. He is now older.” His premise is that there is not one set of ethics that fits all conservation decisions and that we should tolerate diversity.

But it is the chapters on the ethical considerations around the conservation of contemporary art that particularly caught my attention. What DO you do when trying to ensure the long term preservation of an artwork when it is made out of, wait for it, film, video, photography, self-lubricating plastic, Vaseline and salt (Matthew Barney or parts of a Jeep Cherokee, peanuts, bottle caps, balsa wood, mai tai umbrellas and aspirin (Sarah Sze)? The answer seems to be to establish a different time horizon, i.e. where conservation normally tries to preserve things in perpetuity, the lifespan for such contemporary artworks might be more like ten years.

I was reminded of the conservation dilemmas around the Anish Kapoor molten wax artwork I saw last year at the Royal Academy in London. Kapoor has just won the gig for a 115 metre high major sculpture outside the new London Olympics stadium. Interestingly he pipped Andy Goldsworthy to the post, and Goldsworthy is featured in this book for a clay installation he undertook in 2007 called White Walls, as an example of an anethical installation. Anethical? I think they mean beyond ethics by which to guide the conservation i.e. neither ethical nor not ethical. Doesn’t help me as a word, I must say, but what I love about it is the story.

Goldsworthy conceived of the idea of plastering a large room with c 8,500 kg of wet porcelain clay, the idea being that the room would 'deinstall' itself, as the clay dried and cracked and gradually delaminated from the wall. The clay would then be recycled and reinstalled in future incarnations, thus linking the successive installations and the memory of each activity. What actually happened is that a process expected to take some weeks started immediately and was almost complete in five days. With it the clay also stripped off five and half years of paint layers, revealing traces of previous installations by other artists. Not only did this create a quite different form of art work, but the large lumps of clay falling with a dull thud became a shocking but compelling piece of kinetic art in themselves.

Now there is a conservation challenge.

Building Museum Revenue

2010-04-06T16:20:00.002+10:00

Whilst the worst of the GFC may be behind us, the effects of it are going to be long lasting in the museum sector. No major capital works are in the pipeline, even in the two most likely organizations, the Queensland Museum (now the only Brisbane South Bank institution that has not had major new buildings in the last ten years) and the Western Australian Museum (still reeling from the cancellation of its $450 m Swan River power station revitalization and relocation).
So we are going to have to think more ingeniously about how we drive both capital works and new revenues.
A new book I have come across Museums, Libraries and Urban Vitality; a Handbook (Edited by Roger L.Kemp and Marcia Trotta. McFarland and Co 2008) intrigued me. It gives examples of no less than 43 US urban projects where museums and libraries have been important economic drivers. Particularly interesting is the concept of including museums in broader retail and commercial developments. The Daniel Libeskind- designed wing at the Denver Art Museum includes 56 apartments (known as Museum Residences), and the Newseum in Washington DC also includes apartments and a high- end restaurant. It reminds me of the abortive plan to incorporate a hotel in the new Sydney Cricket Ground grandstand, and then let out the rooms on match days. Whilst that never got off the ground, perhaps this could be one way of funding capital works with our sector, particularly given the location of many of our museums, Brisbane’s Southbank being a prime example.

In regards to new revenues, the buzz word is ‘participation’. Nina Simon of Web 2.0 fame has just released her "Participatory Museum". The forthcoming American Association of Museums conference in LA in May is all about how to get new and younger audiences to interface with museums in innovative, user-generated, participatory ways.

And there is a fascinating new study recently released by the Dallas Museum of Art on the results of a 7 year study on the preferences and behaviours of museum visitors , ‘A Framework for Engaging with Art’. Drawn from 3,400 qualitative surveys, the study concluded there were four types of visitor clusters:
· Observers – those that stand back, having limited knowledge of art, preferring a guided experience
· Participants – those that enjoy learning and the social experience of being in museums and galleries
· Independents – those that are more confident with their knowledge and prefer independent viewing
·Enthusiasts – those who are confident, enthusiastic, knowledgeable and comfortable looking at art, and who are most likely to actively participate in museum programs and be members
What this information has catalyzed is a series of innovative programming strategies and operational changes throughout the Museum resulting in a 100% increase in attendance and motivating over 50% of the Museum’s visitors to participate in its’ programs. Some great revenue creation stuff to build on here.

Curators, curators

2010-03-22T08:27:00.004+11:00

I always enjoy a good obituary, and there was a great one published on March 11th in the Times on Lionel Lambourne, former Keeper of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Lionel was clearly one of the old style of curators that used to make museums such attractively quirky places to work, and sadly no longer exist. To give you a taste of this, Lionel was apparently equally at home discussing the work of Arts and Crafts deisgners (his specialist area), as the history of the circus or the depiction of the giraffe in art. He lectured under the maxim "a good lecture or exhibition ought to contain something to offend everyone". The achievement of which he was most proud was the creation of the V&A staff pantomine. Get the picture?? As the obituary concludes "few great scholars and curators can have left such a legacy of laughter". Vale Lionel Lambourne and all that you stood for. Do dig out his full obituary - it is well worth the read.

And it got me thinking about the role of the modern curator, about which I have blogged before . Gone are the days when the curator was the top of the heirarchical museum pile, with most directors being drawn from their midst. Most curators are now generalists, often changing to positions in other parts of the sector. So I noticed with some amusement a recent article in HK-Magazine entitled the ‘Curse of the Curators’ on how poor musuem attendance in Hong Kong is being put down to the very strict way that curatorial paths progress in Hong Kong, stifling innovation.

I enquired of Andrew Simpson, who directs the Musem Studies Program at Macquarie University how many of his graduates are finding employment in the sector. He replied that at least 60% of post grad students are finding sector work within a year of completion, but the numbers are not so good for graduates. Andrew believes this is partly due to the rapid rise of museum studies programs in Australia over the least decade (second only to biotech degree programs apparently) and also interestingly to some resistance to professionalisation in some parts of the sector. I must explore this resistance more, as apparently there are some papers on it.

In the US there was an article in a recent post-gazette entitled "A fuzzy picture: US jobs projections for curators leave museums scratching their heads". In summary, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest curators are among the professions projected to show much faster than average employment growth. But museum directors cannot see how this growth is going to be funded as their budgets are being almost universally cut. Curators have even been laid off by the Met and the Getty. In addition there is a view that, courtesy of the net, much of the work of curators can now be undertaken from their desk rather than traveling the world researching and organising exhibitions, so if anything, fewer curators are needed. The discrepancy partly seems to come from the fact that the data was gathered pre GFC and was predicated on museums remaining financially healthy and visitor attendance good.

Are museums the lesser for the diminution of the role of curator? Certainly their internal knowledge base is less, but the reality is that it is all a numbers game these days, and if directors do not need specialist curators to keep the visitors coming through the doors, then the curators will get sidelined.

Hanging out in Museums

2010-03-15T08:31:00.008+11:00

I see the issue of Edmund Capon’s retirement from the Art Gallery of NSW is in the news again. Not that Edmund has said he is going to retire, but rather that at 69, the view is that it is probably going to be this year that he feels he has achieved enough. His language indicates this namely "We’re getting to that stage where I think the pace of evolution in the AGNSW needs a bit of a kick up the bottom and maybe, you know, I’m holding that up". The potential successors are already being rolled out from the art gallery director recycling file, including Michael Brand, ex-National Gallery of Australia and Art Gallery of Qld and more lately director of the Getty Museum, from which he resigned 4 years into his 5 year contract last month, Christopher Menz, who recently resigned from the Art Gallery of SA (see previous blog) , Tony Ellwood current director of the Art Gallery of Qld and Timothy Potts, ex director of the National Gallery of Victoria, and currently director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Whilst all worthy candidates it would be good to see a few new faces from the younger generation of art curators being considered.

Edmund’s reign at AGNSW has been a highly successful one, but it was interesting to read of the critics already circling, albeit anonymously. One frontrunner for the job who asked not to be named was quoted as saying "there’s not nearly enough space and there’s too much of an ad hoc approach in which the Gallery tried to be all things to all people". Others argue it is geared to the casual tourist rather than artists, scholars and residents.

I’m not sure I agree with either. Yes there is always the need for more space but by moving the paintings store off site and opening up the space as the new John Kaldor Galleries, there has been a significant increase in exhibition space. And in terms of popularity with residents, there is no doubt that AGNSW is the place to hang out. I was there of an evening last month when the Gallery was open and it was chock a block with an enthusiastic crowd doing everything from exhibition viewing, and eating at the cafe to just hanging out.

And hanging out is an increasingly critical part of why successful museums are successful. AGNSW is lucky with its location – not sure I would like to hang out in Sydney at the Powerhouse or the Australian Museum for example, but that is helped by the way that the main space encourages engagement. It is a welcoming space, unlike, for example the foyer at the National Gallery in Canberra, or the Art Gallery of SA.

Hanging out is part of the social phenomenon of new museum going. James Christen Steward, the new director of Princeton University Art Museum has articulated this well. He believes museums should be a space for everyone, even those without the intellectual curiosity to look at the collections. "We need spaces in which other forms of community engagement can happen, where it’s possible for people from every walk of life to come together to hash out what’s needed to have a satisfying life". Steward identifies the building lay out as critical to this, but has also initiated a series of moves to aid the social process including
- re wardrobing the attendants
- opening until 10pm on Thursday nights
- getting colleges within the university to stage social events in the galleries
- more frequently changing exhibitions

Yes, it is easier for an art museum to do this than a natural history or science/ design museum, but not exclusively. Both the Natural History Museum in London and the American Museum of Natural History in New York have been trail blazers in this aspect of creating a socially welcoming environment.

The Shroud of Turin – a conservation disaster

2010-03-11T09:25:00.004+11:00

As a trainee conservator I was brought up on the story of the ‘ famous’ conservation disaster that the Elgin Marbles suffered at the British Museum in 1938. Famous it certainly was with the media breaking news of the ‘scandal’, followed by extensive questions asked about it in the House of Commons, the furore only really dying down due to the onset of the Second World War.
There is no doubt that serious and irreparable damage was done to the marbles at the hands of a British Museum mason and various labourers working under his charge. Quite who knew what amongst the BM’s keepers (as curators are called there) is unclear, but the weight of evidence is that it was a decision made by the mason himself to ‘clean up’ the marbles. What is clear is that the ‘cleaning up’ involved extensive use of copper chisels and wire brushes over a protracted period (the sculptor Jacob Epstein who first spotted the damage believed it had gone on for 15 months) resulting in loss of essential marks and most importantly the golden brown patination that Pentelic marble acquires when exposed to light over long periods. Luckily at least the mason and his team were stopped before all the sculptures had been cleaned.

Surely such a tragedy could not be allowed to happen again in this day and age. Yes, we may argue over the extent of conservation and how it is approached, witness the Sistine chapel, but such things are undertaken in the full light of international scrutiny. So it was with a sense of amazement and despondency that I came across an article in the latest news e-conservation magazine entitled The “Restoration” of the Turin Shroud: A Conservation and Scientific Disaster By William Meacham.

Amazement that I had not heard about this disaster before (Meacham published a book on it in 2005), and despondency that so recently as 2002 a conservation project on what is one of the great treasures of the world can have been so calamitously carried out. Do read the full story in the on- line magazine, but let me also summarise.

The Shroud is probably the world’s most famous textile. Believed to be the burial cloth of Christ, a sample of it was blind tested by a number of independent laboratories around the world in 1988, and the date of the Shroud identified as between 1260 and 1390 AD. As a result of this dating process, the methodology of which was widely questioned in Italy, a group of five textile conservation experts were brought together by the Catholic Archbishop of Turin to advise on the optimum preservation of the cloth, particularly how to protect it from Turin’s air pollution. Meacham was one of those five. By 2000, however only one of those five remained, the others having all resigned due to differences of opinion on the proposed preservation process, including Meacham.

Sometime between June and July 2002, the remaining textile conservation expert undertook a secret ‘restoration’ of the shroud, which involved removal of the 1532 patches and backing cloth added after fire damage at that time, and cleaning of ‘dust and residues’. Whilst this Swiss textile conservator seems genuinely to have believed she was doing the right thing, her techniques beggar description. Apart from handling the cloth all the time without gloves and beaming strong unfiltered light on it throughout the restoration (bear in mind part of the power of the Shroud is its faded negative image of a man), repairs undertaken by nuns in 1532 with great reverence and golden needles praying whilst they did so were discarded as being of no value, debris and dust, including vital pollen samples, was vacuumed off, and several dozen square centimetres of charred cloth around pre-1532 small burn holes scraped away.

Sadly the Vatican, despite petitioning, has not responded to a call for an international commission to be set up to examine all matters relevant to the Shroud’s conservation.

Visitor participation in museums

2010-03-03T08:20:00.002+11:00

The wonderful Musee d’Orsay post-impressionism exhibition currently at the National Gallery of Australia really is a must-see experience, even for those who have seen the paintings in their home venue in Paris. Apart from so many iconic paintings being in one place at one time in Australia (apparently one wall alone has over $1 billion of artwork on it), one thing that stood out for me was the lighting. It is absolutely beautifully lit. None of that fried-egg-bright–painting-against-a-dark-background stuff. The walls are all washed with light and then the paintings themselves subtly picked out. It is all very unobtrusive until one realises how alive they all seem – apparently the director of the Musee d’Orsay commented on the fact himself. And a tip - go late on Friday or Saturday night as the exhibition remains open to 7pm after the main Gallery closes at 5pm and the crowds are much less.

The Director, Serge Lemoine, also praised the children’s room, saying that he really liked such an approach but it would be frowned upon in Paris as dumbing down the art. Developed by the head of education and public programs at the National Gallery, Peter Naumann, it has been a run-away success. Essentially he has reproduced (some in his own hand) various of the paintings such as the Van Gogh self portrait and Starry Night, and then encouraged children to have a go themselves. So they might create their own portrait, which then gets put in frame alongside the Van Gogh or collage more stars to put in the massively blown up starry night covering one wall. It has a great vitality to it!

And it led me to consider an interesting posting on Nina Simon’s blog on participation in museums. Nina has divided the museum sector into four, History museums, Art museums, Science centres and Children’s museums, and looked at what opportunities and challenges there are for participation. It is worth summarising, as it broadly ties in with my perceptions of such:

History museums
- Opportunities – best of the four for participatory projects such as story telling and crowd sourced collecting. Given the incredible popularity of genealogy also great places for visitor generated projects. And given their social content also good places for community dialogue.
- Challenges – validating visitor stories to ensure they are authentic and do not contain offensive views, and maintaining a narrative thread that is intelligible and enjoyable to visitors.

Art museums
- Opportunities – inspiring visitors to create their own art in response to what is on display (see NGA above). Providing participatory projects led by artists to encourage active social participation.
- Challenges – most art museums suffer from more separation between curatorial and education/public program departments than other forms of museums. Most curators do not want educational/participatory events included as they might distract from the aesthetic experience (see Lemoine’s response to what his French colleague would say above).

Science centres
- Opportunities – subject matter ideal for participatory projects and long history of interactivity, as well as widespread use by school groups as learning places.
- Challenges – can be lack of multiple perspectives offered, and controversial or complicated topics avoided as difficult to ensure they can be fun.

Children’s museums
- Opportunities – generally highly interactive and encouraging of participation to explore new ideas and narratives.
- Challenges – big issues around privacy concerns, taking photos and asking for personal data.

The trials of repatriation of national treasures

2010-03-01T11:10:00.003+11:00

The recent decision of British Museum director, Neil Macgregor, to ‘delay’ the loan of the Cyrus Cylinder to Iran is an interesting one. On the face of it, this is due to the recent dramatic discovery in the BM’s stores of fragments of the same inscription. The Cyrus Cylinder is a clay cylinder dating from 539bc inscribed with a decree from the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great, and discovered in 1879 during an excavation in Babylon (now in Iraq) sponsored by the BM. The new pieces apparently assist with the reading of passages in the Cylinder that are either missing or are obscure, and therefore help to improve understanding of the cylinder, showing the declaration on it is much more than a standard Babylonian building inscription, and probably an imperial decree that was distributed around the Persian Empire. The BM has some 130,000 cuneiform tablets from Mespotamia, so you could say it is not surprising that it has taken this long to find one that cross references.

But the Iranians have been hassling for the loan of the cylinder for some time, threatening to cut off ties with the BM if they do not get it. This press release from Iran has itself shown what strong and complicated views there on the subject from the unreprintable to WHO ON EARTH DO THE IRANIAN GOVT AND PEOPLE THINK THEY ARE? THIS STONE BELONS TO IRAQ, BABYLON IS IN IRAQ NOT IRAN and Are you people kidding me? The British Museum is home to nothing but stolen treasures that remind us all of their horrible history of war crimes, colonization, and the fact that the world would be a much better place if they just stayed put on their island.

That was last October and all seemed to be resolved with a date for the loan finalised in December 2009, until the latest find of comparative material justified more time required for research purposes. The reaction from Iran has now become much stronger with a full scale diplomatic row, and potential downgrading of diplomatic relations. Despite the ongoing protestations from Macgregor that the BM is still committed to the loan happening later in the year, one cannot help suspect that he is seriously concerned that the Cylinder will never be returned once loaned.

Of course the Elgin marble returnees are making merry of his predicament. Websites such as Elginism (‘an act of cultural vandalism’), Marbles Reunited and The International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures (headed by our own ex-ABC director David Hill) show just how much public pressure there is on the BM to repatriate parts of their collection.

I have written elsewhere that I believe the Elgin marbles should now be returned, as their legal acquisition was dubious, their care by the BM initially deplorable, their value to Greek culture immense and their ongoing preservation now assured in the new Acropolis Museum. But what a predicament it is, that you would not wish on any museum director, whose ultimate charge is the preservation and maintenance of their institutions collections not their dispersement to other organisations, however justifiable the reasons. And the demands are going to become greater not lesser as the Cyrus Cylinder has shown – it is not even listed in the BM’s hundred most important objects.

I was reminded of the same issue last week when in Hanoi to discuss the new National History Museum of Vietnam. Housed in a vast and fine new building (yet to be built) the Museum is planned to become the definitive statement about the history of Vietnam. That will surely mean there is demand for objects of their ancient Viet culture to be returned from museums across the world.

Conservators to the rescue – two losses and one find

2010-02-08T08:44:00.005+11:00

We conservators generally achieve our five minutes of fame when one of three events happen – something priceless gets broken (can we fix it?), something valuable is found and needs conservation, and an artwork gets re-attributed whilst undergoing conservation (being no longer a Rembrandt, Monet etc or as a newly ‘found’ Rembrandt, Monet etc etc).

Well, my colleagues at the Met in New York have been in the media this week due to damage to Picasso’s The Actor. Apparently a visitor attending a class ‘lost her balance’ and ‘fell’ into the painting, tearing the canvas in (luckily) a background area in the lower right hand corner. The Museum’s painting conservators have come to the rescue and expect the repair can be achieved ‘unobtrusively’, which in technical parlance means you will have to look very closely to see any evidence of it.

It reminded me of the conservation in 2006 of the three Qing vases at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK. Amongst the Museum’s best known artefacts, they were comprehensively smashed also by a visitor (see below photo). One Nick Flynn apparently tripped on his shoelaces and fell down a staircase before crashing into the vases on a window sill (what IS WRONG with these people??). Rather bizarrely the Fitzwilliam’s response was that they were lucky that at least 9 million people had walked past them before they were broken! However once again conservators to the rescue, in this instance ceramics conservator Penny Bendall, who by all accounts did a fabulous job.

But to happier times, and hot off the presses (media release 5th Feb 2009) is news that conservators are going to work out how to thaw and preserve crates of Scotch whisky, which have been found in the ice under Shackleton’s Hut in Antarctica. This is part of a long term project conserving the huts and contents left behind by the early explorers, for which we have acted as technical advisers. We have known for a few months that the whisky was there, but it was only in the last couple of weeks that the team has been able to get access to the area and discover there are no less than five unopened crates, three of whisky and two of brandy (see photo below). Alcohol freezes at much lower temperatures than water so the sound of liquid sloshing around in these frozen crates is exciting, not to mention the strong aroma in the air during excavation suggesting that at least one bottle has broken. Quite what happens next is being debated, but it will be conservators that work out how to safely thaw them and possibly extract some of the whisky for sampling. But that is where the fun starts as the original whisky manufacturers , Whyte and Mackay , are truly excited about it , describing it as a gift from the heavens for whisky lovers. If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analysed, the original blend may be able to be replicated. Given the original recipe no longer exists this may open a door into history being able to analyse the blend. For more on this, visit this blog.

All in a day’s work for conservators, we could justifiably say

International Museum exhibition standards – what exactly are they?

2010-01-27T08:03:00.004+11:00

I am always intrigued by the statement that a museum is building new exhibition space to ‘international standards’. For instance the UK National Maritime Museum (headed by former Powerhouse Museum director Kevin Fewster, with his deputy director at the Powerhouse, Kevin Sumption now head of exhibitions) is building a new wing which will include an 'international standard special exhibitions gallery'. Likewise the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is creating a major exhibition gallery for Temporary exhibitions, “providing approx. 1000m2 of exhibition space to international museum standards”.

Some years ago we were the conservation consultants for the revamp of the Ipswich Regional Art Gallery in Queensland, which included providing for ‘AAA’ exhibition space. We were never quite sure what this meant, but provided specifications for the environmental controls that ensured they could operate to the tight parameters of international loan conditions, and had a series of alarm and back up alarm systems which identified when conditions strayed from these.
Whilst these environmental controls were not at the time identified with alphabetical ratings, the work of David Grattan and Stefan Michalski at the Canadian Conservation Institute has brought attention to the 5 classes of controls (AA, A, B,C and D) that are delineated in the ‘Museums, Archives and Libraries” chapter in the bible on these issues , the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers Inc ( ASHRAE) Handbook. Thus ‘AA” exhibition space is required to have short term fluctuations of no more than +/- 5% RH off a set point of 50% and +/- 2C off a set point of between 15 and 25C. No seasonal fluctuations to RH are allowed, but up or down 5C seasonal temperature changes are allowed.

So far so good, but what I wondered are the broader non environmental international standards. I turned first to the Museums Australia National Standards for Australian Museums and Galleries. This worthy document is about helping museums get their act together on a whole range of issues, from staffing to storage, but speaks only in generalities about having stable and secure exhibition areas.

So I asked the question of some of my colleagues in the museum/gallery sector. They responded that the details of required standards are locked up in facility reports and loan agreements, and inevitably vary according to the value and fragility of the loans. At the top end, these are goverened by the Federal Government’s indemnity guidelines for high value and high risk exhibitions, covering such things as security, packing, and condition reporting. At a broader level, exhibition areas require appropriate floor loadings, ceiling loadings, fire suppression systems and flexible space to be deemed of ‘ international’ standard.

But at the end of the day, interestingly, there is no document to which one can point where the standard required for an ‘international exhibition space’ is identified.

Curatorship

2010-01-22T09:20:00.002+11:00

I come (just) from the era when curators were top of the pile in the museum hierarchy. And I remember well when Elizabeth Esteve Coll, as director of the V&A Museum, London in the early 1990s took a broom to that hierarchy and restructured the staff, demoting the all powerful ‘keepers’, as head curators were called at the V&A. She was roundly condemned and ultimately hounded out of office, but she had started an inexorable process.

Bear in mind these were the days when there were no visitor services staff, probably no marketing staff or education staff, and certainly no Heads of IT, but today’s museum/gallery curator does not carry anything like the clout he or she would have done 20 years ago. Whilst there remain highly erudite occupants of curatorial roles in collecting institutions throughout the country, there is a move to generalist curators as against the specialist, with the result that technical in-depth subject knowledge is now more likely to be found at a university than at a museum.

So what is the role of the modern curator? I fell upon a recent article in the English National Trust’s ABC Bulletin entitled "The Curator: No-sayer, custodian, interpreter, impresario or host?" particularly as it involved a conversation with the Chairman of the Trust, Simon Jenkins. Jenkins is a most interesting bloke , a journalist and former editor of The Times and author of the popular 1000 Best Churches and 1000 Best Country Houses. He had been somewhat critical of the Trust before becoming Chairman, including describing their curators as "no-sayers, keepers of screens, blinds and padlocks".

But his comments in this article on the role of curators is positively inspiring. I quote: “The Latin root of curator is intriguing, a mix of care, anxiety, management and love. The curator liberates the sprit of a property and is the person most likely to understand its genius. The curator by virtue of background and education brings to a property an educated eye. In the case of fine houses, it must be hard for those without that eye fully to read their genius loci. Only the curator can release their stories. It takes confidence to grasp a room and so present it as to make it a moving experience for a visitor to walk through. Impresario is the right word, implying the skills of stagecraft.”

To my mind this approach applies equally to curators in museum and galleries as historic house museums. Curators are the conduit to the knowledge about the collections for which they care, and it is their responsibility to open up and reveal the stories that these collections tell. Freed of most of the management responsibilities that curators had twenty years ago, they must now be all about maximising access to their collections whether through exhibitions or on-line, and telling their stories.

Museum Directors – changing of the guard

2010-01-18T08:16:00.006+11:00

No sooner have I cited the eminent scholar, Christopher Menz, Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia as an example of a scholar director, than he chooses not to renew his contract after 5 years at the helm. The reason Menz gives is that state funding is inadequate to run the Gallery at a professional level. John Mcdonald (the art journalist and formerly senior curator at the NGA) has picked this up and delivered a broadside at the general paucity of gallery funding in SMH today.

Whilst I am sure John has a good point, I am not buying into that discussion today. Of more interest are a couple of things:
1) The AGSA Chairman, Michael Abbott was clearly put out that Menz did not consult him before resigning and, reading between the lines, is not close to Menz. That may partly be because Menz directly criticizes the Premier, Mike Rann, for not recognising the need for more ongoing funding, and Abbott in his role as a QC is currently representing Rann in a defamation action against Channel 7. That is always going to be a problem for a state/national gallery if the director and chair are not in alignment. The excellent recently published book on the history of the National Gallery, London by Charles Saumarez Smith is a fascinating read about this very issue of director/trustee tension, particularly pertinent as Saumarez Smith resigned as director in 2008 as a result of clashes with his Trustees.
An example of where it works well is the Edmund Capon (director) and David Gonski (Chair) relationship at AGNSW.

2) In regards to his successor, there seems to be a current trend to recruit museum directors in our region from the UK. Just before Christmas Te Papa announced that their new director (after the tragic death last year of Seddon Bennington whilst hiking) is to be Michael Houlihan, Director General , National Museum of Wales. Almost at the same time the WA Museum announced that their new director is to be Alec Coles, Director of Tyne and Wear Museums in the UK. And I understand that the replacement for Craddock Morton at the National Museum is unlikely to be appointed until mid year and is likely to be from overseas.

Let me hasten to add I see nothing wrong with this. Some of our great directors have been from the same source, notably Edmund Capon (AGNSW) and Patrick Greene (Museum Victoria), and it is unlikely the Powerhouse Museum would ever have been built with out the forcefulness and personality of Lindsay Sharp ( who went onto the Royal Ontario Museum and the UK Science Museum).

Vale Thomas Hoving and the role of museum director

2010-01-11T09:13:00.003+11:00

I see Thomas Hoving the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 1967 to 1977 has died (SMH 29th December 2009). I still consider his book about those years at the Met (“Making the Mummies Dance”) to be the best yarn about life at the top of a great museum, particularly as it was written at a time when the Met was flush with money for acquisitions and also coining the term blockbuster exhibitions. It reads like a good detective novel as Hoving jets around Europe tracking down acquisitions and exhibitions with all the related intrigue.

Interestingly he indulged in a fair bit of deacquisitioning (see my previous blogs on this here and here) to fund these, no doubt in the days before the Met had a policy on such being largely at his personal whim. As the SMH Obituary points out he almost lost his job in the process, selling off important modern paintings to fund the purchase of a Velazquez painting.

It’s got me thinking about the role of directors of museums – should they be showmen or scholars? Hoving was a showman, as was largely his recently retired successor Philippe de Montebello. However his successor is an English scholar and sculpture specialist Thomas Campbell. Michael Brand, the Australian director of the Getty is in the same mould of scholar, now overseeing a 25% reduction in the Getty’s operations - not of his own making I hasten to add. Across the Atlantic, the new director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny is a scholar, who succeeded a more publicity conscious (if not actual showman) director Charles Saumarez Smith.

In Australia we see a slightly different type of director in the form of bureaucrat – for instance Dawn Casey at the Powerhouse Museum, Frank Howarth at the Australian Museum and Craddock Morton at the National Museum – all public servants in government departments in former lives. But we also have the showman in the form of the odd sock wearing Edmund Capon at the AGNSW (though he is an Asian scholar of some note), and the scholars with Christopher Menz at the Art Gallery of SA, and Stefano Carboni at the Art Gallery of WA.

Carboni incidentally just to take us back to where we started, came from the Met where he was curator of Islamic Art.

Showman or scholar (or bureaucrat)? Not sure what makes a great director, but probably a mix of all three. What is clear is that great museum/gallery directors are very few and far between.

Visitor trends that disagree

2009-12-21T16:26:00.004+11:00

I have blogged before about the lipstick phenomena and its impact on museums, and also the effect that the GFC and the resulting increase in domestic holidays have had on visitors. Now comes conflicting information from a number of sources on the issue.

AFP reports on 15th December 09 that Madrid’s Prado Museum reported near record numbers for 2009, and the Art Newspaper on 9th December 2009 also reports in its annual survey of major collecting institutions from around the world that two thirds saw an increase in visitors.

However The US Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a downturn in visitor numbers (11th December 09) based on a recent National Endowment for the Arts survey on American art habits. The survey reveals that more and more Americans have stopped going to museums, though before we slit our wrists, let it be clear that we are in the same company as music concerts, opera, ballet and even movies.

To be fair the information is not in conflict. We know there is a short term rise in museum going, but the overall trend is unfortunately negative. And why? The article is well worth reading not just for itself, but also for the ensuing blog commentary. In summary the reasons given are:
· The economy
· Lack of relevant teaching and arts education at primary and secondary level
· Losing our sense of the public sphere – we would rather look at things in the privacy of our own home
· ‘Disneyfication’ of museums (this was in a blog comment) , i.e. too many bells and whistles and not enough real things
· Disallowance of photography in museums (also in a blog comment) thus stopping any ‘fun’. Interestingly the blogger gets the need to limit photography for conservation reasons, but believes ( probably with some justification) that the ban is more about a matter of control over images for reproduction purposes
· And finally Adoration of the internet , i.e. we can get it all on-line, including close ups of all those great paintings – “Who needs to go to the Frick to see Rembrandt’s self portrait when the picture can be had for two easy clicks on the keyboard?”

The last point is interesting. We have consistently said , based on evidence out of French research (though I could not put my hands on it) that the more people look at art museum images on the net the more they want to see the real, but this is now suggesting that is not the case.

Sobering stuff, but at least we now have the ‘metrics’ identifying the problem, so we can plan what to do about it.

Tracking visitor numbers – metrics rule

2009-12-08T09:25:00.001+11:00

‘Metrics’ seems to be the new buzz word around town. Metrics are everywhere. It is increasingly with them that we decide what to read, what stocks to buy, which poor people to feed, which athletes to recruit, which films and restaurants to try. The once-mysterious formation of tastes is becoming a quantitative science. Check out a rather cynical article about their pervasiveness in the New York Times November 20th 2009 edition.

Like almost everything, such matters seep through eventually to the museum and galleries sector. By the way, I used to refer to this as the ALM sector - for Libraries, Archives and Museums with museums of course covering art museums otherwise known as galleries. But the acronym increasingly in vogue seems to be GLAM - for Galleries, Museums, Archives and Museums. I like it and will run with that form from now on.

So where is the GLAM sector on metrics? The answer is two part, as the level of metrics varies enormously between the real and the virtual. Let me tackle each in turn.

On the real, namely how many visitors come through the physical doors, where they go and what they do once inside the institution, there is an embarrassing lack of knowledge. Almost all museums have some form of counting system, either through ticketing, or in the case of free entry museums, through counting systems. However even these are invariably inaccurate. There are many stories of attendants with hand clickers clicking away at random to ensure the visitor quota is achieved. Automatic counting systems give better accuracy, but still have difficulty distinguishing between visitors and staff ( and indeed inanimate objects like strollers or boxes). And once inside the institution there is no tracking of visitor paths, establishment of time spent within the institution or dwell times in front of exhibits quantified. One friend of mine admits that the closest he gets to this is sending staff out with a felt pen and a floor lay-out of the galleries, and tracking the route visitors take by hand. When they dwell in front of a particular exhibit, the felt pen is left on the paper in that spot, leading to a bigger splodge of ink. See my blog from June 2009 on the issue.

On the virtual, things are a little more advanced. We all know the power of Google Analytics, which is giving considerable granularity to web site metrics. But the Powerhouse Museum is now doing great work and mining more deeply into what their visitors do on the Museum’s web site. Read Seb Chan’s most interesting latest thoughts on the matter. Seb reports particularly on the issue of repeat visitations to web sites and understanding who is coming back, how often and why.

All is not lost on the real side of things however. We are looking at a mobile phone technology which allows tracking of visitors (all within privacy requirements) , with the added benefit it can reveal how long each visitor stays in the museum, where they dwell, whether they have been before, and, in the case of international visitors, which country they come from. We need to catch up fast to the same level of understanding that Google Analytics can provide for those web site visitors, and in due course work out the crossover.