Recoding the Museum

Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change

Ross Parry

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134259663
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Commerce
• Categoría: Administration des musées

Why has it taken so long to make computers work for the museum sector?

And why are museums still having some of the same conversations about digital technology that they began back in the late 1960s?

Does there continue to be a basic 'incompatibility' between the practice of the museum and the functions of the computer that explains this disconnect?

Drawing upon an impressive range of professional and theoretical sources, this book offers one of the first substantial histories of museum computing. Its ambitious narrative attempts to explain a series of essential tensions between curatorship and the digital realm.

Ultimately, it reveals how through the emergence of standards, increased coordination, and celebration (rather than fearing) of the 'virtual', the sector has experienced a broadening of participation, a widening of creative horizons and, ultimately, has helped to define a new cultural role for museums. Having confronted and understood its past, what emerges is a museum transformed – rescripted, re calibrated, rewritten, reorganised.

1 Museum/computer

A history of disconnect?

The dilemma at the heart of this book is perhaps captured by these two fragments, from two different speeches, by two different speakers:

the future coordination of digitisation activity [...] with the vision of creating a European Cultural Information space [...] will provide rich and diverse cultural resources [...] to enable digital access by all citizens to the national, regional and local cultural heritage of Europe.

this project [...] anticipates the eventual recording of all museum collections [...] within a single integrated system, it is principally concerned at this stage with designing a national information system for art museum resources which will later serve as a model for compatible ‘data banks’ covering scientific and historical institutions.

Both comments come from individuals working in or with the museum sector, and both of these individuals have an expert and professional interest in cultural heritage. More significantly, here, both individuals are refl ecting upon digital heritage, in particular the possibilities for expanded access that can come from a distributed but co-ordinated digital network of on-line cultural content, be it national or international. Both are presenting a vision of increased accessibility brought about by the thoughtful deployment of network technology. Both commentators, it would seem, could be writing about the same moment. The scenarios they describe could be contemporaneous, part of the same discourse. And yet, the reality is that whereas the first piece is taken from a speech made by the UK’s Culture Minister in November 2005 (Lammy 2005), the second is derived from a paper delivered to a conference in Munich of the International Council of Museums, in August 1968 – almost four decades earlier (Ellin 1968a). We are left wondering, therefore, why it is that we have taken some forty years to realise these visions. Why has it taken the museum sector quite so long to begin to build these integrated information systems to which both speakers refer? Or, to put it another way: why are we still having these same conversations that we began in the late 1960s?

There are, of course, some pragmatic explanations that would no doubt immediately spring to mind for many museum practitioners – especially those involved in museum computing over this period. In times of economic recession, and well before the age of ‘e-government’, political expectations and priorities were frequently elsewhere (Lewis 2007). There was not the anticipation to see computers in the museum as there is today – where now, apparently, ‘visitors expect technology’ (Dierking and Falk 1998: 67). Museums themselves perhaps underestimated the resource and skills needed to go digital.¹ Equally, the software has itself frequently been a barrier – shielded by a counter-intuitive interface, the preserve of the expert (Worthington 2005). In 1992, confronted with many incompatible platforms, and chasing the state of the art, even curators with considerable expertise in the area of museum computing lamented how ‘the technology has not settled down’ (Moffett 1992b: 7). Consequently, for all of these reasons (many of which will be explored in detail in Chapter 7), organisational structures did not adapt, time was not allocated, and money was never readily available. Moreover, not all museum sectors around the world had the infrastructure, the environment or even the justification to accommodate the new computing. Many were confronting, instead, more fundamental aspects of their vision and development (Koujalgi 1974), or freeing themselves from a curatorial practice that belonged to an increasingly irrelevant colonial past (Abungu 2002). In these contexts ‘automation’ was not always the priority. As one early manual on museum computing put it, describing the ‘difficult, expensive and often frustrating process’ of going digital:

today – and for many years to come – our expectations of automated cataloging must be in tune with practical constraints imposed by the limited resources and technology available to museum collections. Further, there is the welter of problems that must be solved with respect to data standards, preparing collections for cataloging, and training adequate personnel for the task of computer cataloging.

(Humphrey and Clausen 1976)

However, this explanation (an explanation largely based on resource, priority, structures, skills, time and money), although difficult to refute, perhaps tells only part of the story. To some extent these may be the symptoms rather than the root cause of why museums responded to the computer revolution in the way they did. In other words, this explanation (this history) might be expedient and recognisable, but it might not acknowledge some deeper reasons as to why computers, during this time, followed a sometimes bumpy and circuitous road into the museum. There may, in short, be a more essential tension at work here between this technology and the institutions into which it has slowly been adopted. What we might call (to reach for a moment for a word from information technology itself) a more fundamental incompatibility² between the concept of a museum and the concept of a computer. Looking beyond the day-to-day and localised obstructions and difficulties, there may have been more inherent problems between museum and computer that might reveal and explain any perceived disconnect. And it is this disconnect that this book will explore.

Museum histories

But before we even begin to tell histories we have to make some decisions, as authors, about history-making itself. Any history – including those of museums, and of digital media in museums – requires a number of assumptions to be made about how history-writing works. The moment we choose to look back, to reflect upon the past, we find ourselves making choices not just about the questions we decide to pose, but also about the places we choose to look for answers. Not only do we privilege and select narratives and theses based on the (sometimes) fragmentary evidence available, but, subsequently, these are filtered further by the medium (the book, hypermedia, television documentary, exhibition) through which we choose to convey these histories (Colson et al. 2003). The preface, for instance, to the sixteenth edition, 1995, of E. H. Gombrich’s canonical Story of Art reviews the changes the author has made to this classic study since its initial publication in 1950. We see that in his original preface, Gombrich (1995: 9) had identified the ‘space allotted to the various arts in this book’ as a contentious issue. He went on to attribute the bias towards painting within his narrative to the fact that ‘less is lost in the illustration of a painting than in that of round sculpture, let alone a monumental building’. As a consequence of this prejudice, some formats (particularly those that are two-dimensional) have arguably been artificially foregrounded in this and subsequent histories of art, whereas others, specifically the threedimensional, have been consciously under-represented. In other words, one of our canonical stories of art is (self-admittedly) constrained by the limitations of its medium.³ Likewise – but some forty years later – Martin Kemp’s survey of optically minded theory and practice in art confronts this same limitation of the flat illustration. Acknowledging how the format of the printed book inevitably distorts readers’ impressions of works of art (particularly in terms of scale), Kemp (1990: 2) apologises for the way in which ‘a great illusionistic room decoration from the Italian seventeenth century appears on roughly the same scale as a Dutch cabinet containing a peep show’. The ‘space allotted’ to the historian for interpreting the past is as important now as it has been to writers such as Kemp, and as it was for Gombrich back in 1950.

Furthermore, to some writers historical certainty remains conspicuously impossible – almost to the point of self-congratulation. ‘I am well aware’, Foucault asserted, ‘that I have never written anything but fictions’; so quotes Hunt (1989) as she laments where we will be ‘when every practice, be it economic, intellectual, social, or political, has been shown to be culturally conditioned’. Consequently, some have worked to turn the attention of historians to the fictional and literary quality of some of their narratives on the past. To White (1978), for instance, historical narratives are but verbal fictions, ‘the contents of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences’. Such are the reservations of modern commentators who, approaching ‘meaning’ as a text to be read, identify an essential contention within attempts to write about a localised knowledge. The description may be ‘thick’, but it is only ever of the here and now rather than the then and there. Amid this high intensity of self-examination, we are, perhaps, becoming more familiar with our histories being fixed within the frames of the present as well as (or indeed, instead of) the past – and more sensitive to the ways in which the historical models we build are of ourselves rather than of a distant historical locality.

Even when they are in their most pragmatic form, when we allow ourselves to admit that the past ‘really happened’ (Evans 1997), our modern sensibilities to historiography continue to sow doubt into what, today, is possible as a historian – what we can genuinely and authoritatively say about events past. To write history today is, it seems, to make choices about the flow of time (and the arbitrary divisions we make within it), the value of representations (and the limits of what can be educed from them), the nature of society and power (and the strata and operators that may or may not work within them), as well as the historical contingency of our institutions, values and world views. Consequently, as narrator, director and stage-manager to these interpretations of the past, historians are also understood to be visible and active in these productions. Both reader and writer are made aware of the inevitability of each historian’s bias to any given array of evidence, and received orthodoxy has it that there are no value-free judgements in the act of history-making. Therefore, just as historymaking in the museum is riddled with decisions and judgements on the use of narrative, the selection of evidence, and the choice of subject (Kavanagh 1990) so, likewise, historicising the museum itself demands a moment of refl ection on how that history will focus and function.

So how will our histories of museums and computing be presented in this book? To answer this question, it might be easier to start by saying what sort of history this book will not be. First, as has already been made clear, this is not intended to be a general or survey history – but rather a specific thesis on compatibility and incompatibility between museums and computers. Second, it is not intended to be a history of museums and technology within a broader narrative of emerging ‘civilisation’. Our narrative here will work hard not to slide into deterministic readings of technology; that is, readings that see technology such as digital media as an external force exerting change on society (Lister et al. 2003). As we acknowledge the ‘transformative impact’ that technology has had on culture (Druckrey 1996: 13), there is a risk, after all, of seeing museums and digital media, temptingly, within this context of progressive, incremental improvement – with the technology itself as the main driver. In contrast, a more constructionist (‘anti-realist’) stance may help us to see, instead, that a technology such as digital media does not actually have a use inherent within it, but rather that this use is always constructed and constantly contested by the society that chooses to use it (Kuhn 1970). For instance, the monumental work of Elizabeth Eisenstein (1980) on the advent of the printing press provides an exemplar of how the synergy between new technology and society can be illustrated. In her analysis of Christianity’s shift from ‘pen to press’ in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Eisenstein makes the case for new technology inciting revolutionary change. Print ended what was understood by some Protestant divines to be a ‘priestly monopoly of learning’, by allowing religious dissent to leave a ‘much more indelible and far-reaching impression than dissent had ever left before’ (ibid.: 305–17). The new technology of printing brought about a higher exactitude of scripture and allowed liturgy to be standardised and fixed for the first time in a more or less permanent model. Eisenstein’s thesis, in other words, is one in which a new technology helps to bring about not only a new learning and erudition, but also new forms of intellectual property rights and new concepts of authorship. Communication technology emerges as a profound agent of literary, spiritual and linguistic change. However, as much as her thesis on the printing press shows the impact of a specific technology on the foundations of a society, so it (importantly) also demonstrates how society and culture, at once, affect this technology. For the cultural uses of the new printing technology added meaning to (and allowed a specific set of meanings to permeate into) the medium of the press, to the extent that Eisenstein asserts that printing revolutionised all processes of transmission. To place something in print was to perform a ‘kind of disruption’ (ibid.: 327). Within this view of ‘cultural technologies’ (Flew 2002) – culture shaped by technologies that are themselves cultural constructs – the relationship between technology and society (digital media and the museum) emerges as something more reciprocal and complex. To take one small, but poignant, example: as the library sector began to work through the requirements and functionality of its new machine-readable catalogue system in the mid-1960s, some commentators at the time had seen human (rather than technical) factors as a brake on the development of the new automation. When considering the way the initial specifications had been overloaded with elements that would satisfy very localised and personalised needs it was suggested (as it turns out, with undue pessimism) that:

They [otherlibrarians] loaded up the Library of Congress group with requirements that today it appears unlikely that the project will ever get off the ground. I am not sure the limitation there is a basic flaw in computerisation; it may be an impassable flaw in human nature.

(Taube 1966: 1158)

We remain mindful, therefore, of the central role human actors (what Taube saw here as the role of personal interest and ‘human nature’) play in the ideation, development and uptake of new technologies. I acknowledge that seeing technology as a ‘prisoner of culture’ can itself be culturally specific and beyond the categorisation by one catch-all model, as writers (such as Winston 1998) are moved to construct. Nevertheless, my assumption here will be that society allows technological progress to happen, that it controls the forming of the idea (the imagination within which the technologist is allowed to think), as well as the circumstances in which the prototype is formed. Crucially, from this intellectual perspective, where technology is not allowed to lead the story, the museum is understood to have greater influence on its own development.

There are also schools of historiography from which my approach here will borrow – particularly with respect to its interdisciplinarity and its choice of evidence. First, informed by the New Cultural History (Hunt 1989), the histories here assume that museums should be seen within a complex array of histories, which are themselves in a state of flux and part of a wide structure of meaning and events. The assumption here is that the concept ‘museum’ sits at the nexus of a number of different histories and discourses – and certainly not just those concerning technology. In one respect ‘the museum’ is part of a history of objects – of material culture, the specimens, artefacts and art that both define, and are themselves defined by, society (Pearce 1995; šola 2004). In another respect it is a history of individuals – of the collectors who bring together these objects, who arrange them, classify them, and give them meaning (Knell 2000; Martin 2004). Similarly, we can fashion the story of museums as a history of buildings–of spaces that provide a framed exhibition and production of knowledge, of thought made three-dimensional and physical (MacLeod 2005; Parry and Hopwood 2004). The history of museums is also a history of institutions – of private societies and national repositories (Cowtan 1872; Crooke 2000). However, museum history can also be seen as a history of society itself – of cultures struggling with their own identities, riding on the ebb and flow of politics, finding ways to socialise, to remember, to play and to learn (Bennett 1995; Hooper-Greenhill 1992). ‘Technology’, therefore, is only one of many lenses through which this book reads the museum’s past.

The narratives I present in this book aim to be aware of these different directions to which we can cast our historical gaze. However, the discussions here also endeavour to remain mindful of the nature and variety of evidence upon which we are able to draw. Here the approaches of the British historian Lewis Namier are a key point of reference. Namier, and the scholars in this tradition who followed him (such as Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe), sought to smash some of the meta-narratives of their predecessors by stressing flux and difference in their histories of British parliament. They did so by demonstrating the power and influence of the individual on a day-to-day basis. In this way, the iconoclasm of their ‘Revisionism’ (Sharpe 1978) was built upon a firm foundation of liberal humanism, in which historical actors (rather than social theories) shaped history. Rather than a history of institutions, what emerged was a history of individuals following a personal agenda, not anachronistic ideologies, in lives characterised by conjunction and chance, not inevitability. Rushing to the archives, the Revisionists offered a plethora of different narratives within the historical localities to which they looked. It is this approach to historiography that informs the narrative of this book. Consequently, from text to hypertext, from theoretical treatises to computer manuals, and from unpublished memoranda and interviews to formally accessioned archival material, the evidence horizon I present here is intentionally broad.

Histories of museum computing

To date there have been very few histories of the technological and curatorial changes that have taken place from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. Museology has been reluctant, it seems, to give the story of museum computing (a story of technological and professional change) the same academic scrutiny as has been bestowed on other parts of our curatorial and museographical past. This may partly be to do with historical distance. Being proximate to these events (perhaps even being a historical actor within them, being part of the story) might make it difficult for us to step out of this timeline or to see these events as worthy of study – leaving events instead for the realm of reverie, anecdote or personal resumé. But perhaps our history of museum computing has now a beginning that is suitably distant from us and, as it enters its fifth decade, an archive that is suitably full, that we can be more comfortable and able to offer it more serious historical treatment. Maybe, until now, we have been too close, too much in the moment itself, to take our vantage point as the historian looking back meaningfully on what has happened. The irony is, of course, that the further away we come from the historical period on which we are writing, the more dislocated we are from that moment, from that locality, and the harder it becomes to appreciate the pressures and the personalities that may or may not have affected events. Equally, there is a danger that our aerial view – on the historian’s hilltop – seduces us into building longer narratives and teleologies, spotting broader patterns that may (or may not) be there.

A number of specific museum computing projects have been given a historical treat ment by authors. Vance (1973) outlined the history of the Museum Computer Network. Katherine Spiess (from the National Museum of American History) had compiled a list of ‘selected great moments from 1965 through 1985’, and Jonathan Bowen (1997) would later describe the birth and development of the Virtual Library museums page (VLmp). We can also find brief histories of Canada’s National Inventory Program and the role of technology in the establishment of the Canadian Heritage Information Network and the Virtual Museum of Canada (CHIN 1992; Dietz et al. 2004), as well as summaries of the work of CIDOC in the area of automation, standardisation and computerisation (Roberts and Light 1980). Most notably, perhaps, there have been some very successful attempts to write the first histories of museums and their use of the Web (Bearman and Trant 1999; Rellie 2006). Sarasan (1981) has sought to understand recurring problems that museums faced in applying computer technology, partly by locating recent failings in a longer context of development and change. Similarly, in his detailed primer for beginners in museum computerisation, David Williams began with an essay outlining key historical developments in museum computing (1987: 1–7). Even if one reviewer did complain of how long was spent dwelling on past difficulties and past technologies (McLaren 1988), this was a valuable and thoughtful way to introduce a step-by-step guide. In recent years, the most ...