This is a continuation of Museums, collections and history – Part 1 of 2

The first cross-institutional exhibition mounted by Museum of Victoria was the ‘Story of Victoria’ which opened in 1984, the sesquicentenary of permanent European settlement in Victoria. Displays combined natural history and technology collections through new display techniques and the social history discipline, contextualising social events from “Aboriginal times” as well as after European arrival.[1]

(Interestingly, in the 1960s McLuhan and Parker had been critical of the tendency toward narrative in displays, and in the mid-1970s Hudson was again asking: “Is ‘telling a story’ the best way of achieving ‘meaningful presentation’?”[2] It seems, in the early 1980s, the Museum’s answer to this question was still yes.)

However, the same new types of research used to produced innovative exhibitions also uncovered issues with the management and documentation of existing collections. Elizabeth Willis writes of the Story of Victoria exhibition:

Research for the exhibition revealed that few Museum collections had a strong Victorian historical provenance. The Science Museum’s collections had been acquired to reflect technological developments, and catalogue entries were often silent on their historical context or social significance. The Victorian provenance of many ethnographic items from the national Museum was unclear or under-researched […] The paucity of historical documentation for material in the collection provided a further impetus for the formation of a Social History Department within the new Museum.[3]

As well as benefitting the Museum, explorations of historical documentation and collections also support the writing of new types of history which draw together objects, documents, biographies and socio-cultural context, as seen in Tom Griffiths’ Hunters and Collectors and, more recently, Philip Jones’ Ochre and Rust.[4]

By the time of Carolyn Rasmussen’s A museum for the people, published in 2001, history and museums had changed considerably. Contrasting with the authoritative directorial voice of Pescott in 1954, Rasmussen was brought on in 1998 as “principle author and organiser of the manuscript”, overseen by a committee and with input from 46 other contributors.[5] The text is filled with social and political context, reference to primary and secondary sources, examination of the socio-cultural background of collections and objects, reflexive critiques of past practice (as seen in Willis, quoted earlier), and discussion of people, organisations, places and events within and beyond the Museum’s walls.

A visit to the Melbourne Museum and Immigration Museum today reveals many of these qualities. But, though there are stories and context to be found throughout, many of the discipline divisions talked about – and challenged – in the past also remain visible, reflecting what Pigott, writing in 1975, saw as the “old system of dividing knowledge into the familiar compartments of the school syllabus.”[6]

In terms of documentation, there are taxonomic labels and associated metadata about natural science specimens visible in many parts of the Science and Life exhibition space but little additional documentation or contextual information about collectors and the formation of collections.

There are exceptions to this elsewhere in the institution. For example, at the Immigration Museum a case devoted to ornithologist John Cotton contains natural history specimens (with tags) alongside letters, playing cards, sketches and biographical text. Collection items from traditionally separate disciplines are drawn together to tell biographical history, with text-based documentation treated as equivalent to specimens, not just context for those specimens.

The John Cotton case reveals an interesting point: that museum specimens, objects, documentation and other material can be recombined in different contexts to produce different meanings and tell quite different stories. If a collector of natural history specimens was also an artist, correspondent and diarist, documenting these collections just as natural science specimens constrains interpretation and limits the ability to readily create a display like that reflecting on the life and work of Cotton. Similarly, documenting the same material solely through the lens of social history potentially limits the discoverability and utility of that material as part of scientific or taxonomic enquiry.

Supporting both requires systems and processes that can capture and hold multiple meanings simultaneously. Interestingly, this was one of the topics of conversation at a session organised by the Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics at Monash University on 8 July 2015. These issues are relevant to the whole GLAM sector, and though there has been some progress there is still a lot of work to do.

 

[1] Museum Victoria, “A History of Museum Victoria,” Museum Victoria, 2008, http://museumvictoria.com.au/discoverycentre/infosheets/a-history-of-museum-victoria/; Museum of Victoria, “Museum of Victoria – Annual Report 1985/6” (Museum of Victoria, 1986), 2.

[2] McLuhan et al., Exploration of the Ways, Means, and Values of Museum Communication with the Viewing Public. Principal Speakers; Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought (Atlantic Highlands, N.J: Humanities Press, 1975), 48; Hudson, Museums for the 1980s, 9.

[3] Elizabeth Willis, “The Story of Victoria Exhibition”, in Rasmussen and Museum Victoria, A Museum for the People, 330–331.

[4] Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors; Philip G. Jones, Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers (Kent Town, S. Aust: Wakefield Press, 2007).

[5] John Coghlan, “History of the Museum Project,” in Rasmussen and Museum Victoria, A Museum for the People, xiv.

[6] Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections, Museums in Australia 1975, 72.