Seeking your thoughts: Economic change and long-term shifts

We’re wondering if anyone out there might wish to share observations about how the shift in the economic environment has forced dramatically different thinking about the long-term future for their museums or the field in general.  

We’ve been asked to participate in an International Council of Museums event on this topic, and would love to hear from the field on this point.  Note that we’re not looking for topics such as having to crank back budgets in 2009.  Instead, we’re looking at the kind of fundamental rethinking that’s going on in businesses and households across America about how they’ve been forced to re-engineer hard-wired behaviors, reset their long-term expectations, or realize that reliable past patterns simply won’t hold up in the future.  

If you have any comments on this, please feel free to click on “Comments” below (or if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to this blog, please go to our website to add a comment.  If it’s a sensitive comment that you wish to share with us, but not publicly, please feel free to email james @ reachadvisors.com.  

If this request for help generates enough interest, even if you don’t have a comment to share, let us know as we could always consider scheduling it as an upcoming Museum Conversation conference call for the field.

We realize that this is a different kind of blog post than what we typically send, but thanks for allowing us to call for input on this topic!

Comments

[Bob Beatty]

James/Susie:

AASLH has been collecting some of the things that have been made available on this very subject for a few months now. You can find them at http://www.aaslh.org/ResourcesforWeatheringtheFinancialStorm.htm

I hope this is somewhat helpful.

Bob

[James Chung, Reach Advisors]

Thanks Bob. Those are great resources. Certainly a pivotal period for museums.

[Linda Norris]

James and Susie--

I've just finished four months as a Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine working with museums there (shameless blog plug: you can read about my experience at uncatalogedmuseum.blogspot.com) and your post certainly made me think about whether the experience of Ukrainian museums (primarily state run) has any application to US museums and the financial crisis here. In Ukraine, of course, they've been in a time of significant change since 1992 or so and the current financial crisis is far more critical there.

One thing that was surprising to me about museums there was how relatively few really understood that major, seismic shifts were happening. That's partly because for many museums, easy access to ideas and training is pretty limited. But I think it's also because at heart, many museum people in both countries are fundamentally conservative (not politically, just sort of institutionally and organizationally). For many staff, including directors, it was easier to hunker down, and keep coming to work, doing whatever it is they do, even when they don't receive a paycheck.

It seems to be that the real changes may only be for the brave--those willing to take a leap during difficult times. We might see an increasingly segmented field--and it might not be money and not money, but rather those who really work with communities and those who don't, or the brave and the timid, as it were. I fear for those museums in both countries that struggle to embrace relevance and deep connection to audience. And what's abundantly clear in both countries is that no one is going to do it for you. The government is not going to rescue any of us. That said though, I did see museums there where deeply committed staffs, with very limited resources, were really embracing change and connections. It's almost, in a way, a question of courage.

And as an aside, although deaccessioning isn't enriching anyone's personal pockets, I see some resonance with the issues of corruption in Ukraine--a sort of desperation combined with "everyone's doing it."

In Ukraine, because of the politics of state-run museums, I think the changes may come from the bottom up--as one colleague described it, chipping away at a big boulder. But here, because of the independent nature of museums and other non=profits, each organization has the opportunity to really step all the way back and look at everything they do.

Linda Norris

[Claudia Ocello]

James and Susie,
I got laid off last November and am struggling to find full-time museum work in my geographic area. So part of the shift in my personal thinking has been to start my own consulting business, as a way to stay in the museum field which is my passion, and take a part-time job outside of the museum field - I am working in a furniture store - to help pay bills. So on a personal level, I have had to get the thought out of my head that the only way to work in a museum is full-time, and think differently about working WITH a museum instead of FOR a museum.

I have not yet seen museums go towards hiring consultants to "replace" staff but I am wondering if anyone thinks that is next. I've also counted quite a few colleagues who have approached me asking if I'd like a business partner, or could they join my firm. So I see a lot more professionals thinking, I could be (or already am) next to be laid off, I'd better think about options. This is different to me than saying, "I am looking to move on/move up in the museum world/don't like where I am now" mentality.

AAM did a Webinar a few months ago that you can access on their website about weathering the financial storm, in which I participated. I also have an article coming out in Museum magazine based on that presentation in the July/August issue. I hope you will think about including the personal perspective as well as the institutional one in your research.

Thanks - Claudia Ocello
President & CEO, Museum Partners Consulting, LLC
www.museumpartnersconsulting.com

[Scott]

I'm starting to notice a shift in that museums are seeming to keep on fewer collections staff members. This is a trend that pre-dates the current economic collapse by a few years, but seems to have worsened with the downturn. While some museums are laying off collections staff outright in order to preserve more "visitor services" positions, I also notice museums simply not filling their collections vacancies when they occur. It seems as if the museum field feels that a lot of effort has been put into its collections storage and management over the past 15-20 years and now, in this current climate, one way to save money is to move resources out of collections. Hopefully this is just a temporary trend--otherwise we'll all have to work doubly hard in the future to reverse the harm done in these lean years. To me, it seems like we're robbing from Peter to pay Paul.

[Angelina Russo]

Hi Susie
You might be interested in this posting at Museum3.0 http://museum30.ning.com/profiles/blogs/2017588:BlogPost:11878
I see that you've started a conversation there too! I hope there are some useful insights!
Cheers and good luck with Denver!
Angelina

[Elspeth Inglis]

Here's a real tough one: What will we see in the visitor sector? Our museum has no entry fee, so we get a wide variety of visitors (with a couple of homeless shelters a block or two away, you can guess we get quite a few just trying to stay out of the elements). But, we see visitors who show stress more and more. Just today, we witnessed a mother abusing her child, shouting, dragging him by one arm -- not hitting. That incident raises issues about how/if/when we should intervene. Has anyone else seen more stressed visitors?