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Training for Tomorrow's Museums by Stephen E. Weil (as presented on September 22, 2001) When Charles Hummel first asked me to serve as today's closing speaker, the question he proposed for exploration was this: what different kinds of training--not "instead-of" training, but "in-addition-to" training--should the programs at Winterthur and elsewhere be offering today to provide the appropriate skills to those who will staff and manage this country's museums tomorrow. Even to begin to answer that question, though, requires some preliminary speculation as to what sorts of places those museums of tomorrow will most likely be. What follows initially, then, is just such a speculation. It is also a speculation that--notwithstanding Edmund Burke's often-repeated admonition that you can never plan the future by the past--takes into account the enormous changes that have transformed our museums over the past century as a guide to some of the ways in which they may continue to develop during this next one. As the Ohio State University historian Steven Conn pointed out in his 1998 study Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926, the soaring intellectual ambitions with which the American museum movement was originally launched--Conn's study concentrates primarily on the great urban museums of the eastern United States founded in the 1870s--were largely in a shambles before that movement was even fifty years old. Underlying those ambitions had been a series of assumptions which became increasingly dubious with the passage of time: that the objects displayed in museums could speak for themselves both to experts and to untrained observers alike; that a carefully classified and systematic arrangements of such objects might--without further mediation by explanatory labels or living interpreters--constitute a narrative readily understandable by visitors of every type; and, perhaps above all, that the museum, open to everyone--far beyond the capacity of the college or university that was open only to a privileged few--could serve as a community's principal agency for the production and distribution of knowledge. Two events--interconnected, as it happens--were particularly damaging to the museum's intellectual ambitions. One was a change in the ways that knowledge was generated. Replacing the close observation of specimens and artifacts were newly developed laboratory techniques in the sciences together with a drift toward more theoretical approaches to the study of history and culture. And serving as the primary site for these developments were the college and universities with their increasingly professionalized faculties and their division and sub-division into ever-more specialized disciplines. As Conn sums up his story: "By the first quarter of the twentieth century, objects could no longer hold the meaning with which they had been invested. In an intellectual world now dominated by theoretical and experimental knowledge produced at dynamic and expanding universities, objects, and the museums that housed them, remained static. When the curtain fell on an epistemology based on objects, museums left the center stage of American intellectual life." In no way, though, should Conn's conclusion--that object-based knowledge was no longer at stage center--be interpreted to mean that objects ceased to play a major role in museums. Indeed, we still have museums--see for example that splendid relic, the Mercer Museum up in Doylestown, Pennsylvania--where virtually nothing is to be found but a staggering and wholly unmediated accumulation of objects. Within the art museum community, or at least within its academic branch, the belief that a museum can be enhanced simply by the accumulation of ever more objects has been voiced by no less a figure than James Cuno, Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. In his Annual Report for 1997-1998, Cuno wrote: "I've said it before, but it bears repeating: the purpose of art museums is to build permanent collections. Permanent collections represent an extraordinary commitment of human, physical and financial resources for the benefit of students, scholars, and the broader public interested in the myriad things one can learn about works of art. Permanent collections comprise the artistic heritage we pass on to future generations , and if we did nothing else but acquire and preserve works of art for the future--that is, if we never mounted a temporary exhibition, published an exhibition or permanent collection catalogue, offered a public lecture, reached out to new and diverse audiences, sold even a single postcard, or opened a website--we would still be doing a very important job. Simply put, a museum's first job is to build its permanent collection and preserve the past for the future." Standing in the sharpest possible contrast to Cuno's proposition that the museum's first job "is to build permanent collections" is a rival conception of the museum, a conception that was first articulated some 85 years ago by John Cotton Dana and which has in the years since, slowly but inexorably, become the dominant way in which museums are thought about, not only in the United States but throughout much of the rest of the world as well. In his 1917 publication The New Museum, Dana--the founder and first director of The Newark Museum--argued that the museum, in essence, had but a single (and, he added, "obvious") task. And that, he said, was to increase the "happiness, wisdom, and comfort of the members of its community." And how were museums to do this? Dana's own prescription could not have been more terse. "Learn what the community needs; fit the museum to those needs." This change in the museum's direction--this about-face from an inwardly-focused knowledge-producing organization centered primarily on the acquisition., care and study of objects to an outwardly-focused service-providing organization centered primarily on the needs of its public--has been eloquently described by the late Kenneth Hudson, one of the museum community's keenest observers. In a reflection on the recent history of museums written for the fiftieth anniversary issue of the UNESCO magazine Museum International in 1998, Hudson summarized that ongoing transformation this way: "...the most fundamental change that has affected museums during the [past] half-century...is the now almost universal conviction that they exist in order to serve the public. The old-style museum felt itself under no such obligation. It existed, it had a building, it had collections and a staff to look after them. It was reasonably adequately financed, and its visitors, usually not numerous, came to look, to wonder and to admire what was set before them. They were in no sense partners in the enterprise. The museum's prime responsibility was to its collections, not its visitors." Let's return then to our earlier question: what sorts of places will the museums of tomorrow most likely be? Is it simply a question of which way the pendulum swings? Will it eventually swing back toward the Cuno model--a museum in which the acquisition, care and study of objects constitutes the museum's basic focus;, or will the swing continue toward the Dana model--a museum in which objects simply serve as one of the means through which the museum pursues its basic objective of increasing the "happiness, wisdom, and comfort" of the members of its community? Or might there yet be a third model, pointing the way toward a still different direction? One person to suggest such a third model is my former Smithsonian colleague Elaine Heumann Gurian. Writing in the summer, 1999 issue of the magazine Daedalus devoted to museums, Gurian envisioned the development of museums in which objects--at least the kinds of tangible objects that museums have traditionally collected--would no longer play a definitional role. Defining the museum instead would be two other characteristics. First, that it be a "congregant" space--a place in which cross-generational groups of individuals could gather safely in order to share a common multi-sensory experience. And, second, that it be a place of what she calls "storytelling in tangible sensory form," a place where objects, like props, might be used to make an implicit thesis visible, to make an idea or a process tangible. That combination, she argues--and not the presence or absence of objects--is what matters. "For it is the story told," she writes, "the message given, and the ability of social groups to experience it together that provide the essential ingredients of making a museum important." What kind of a place will the museum of tomorrow most likely be? My own personal speculation is that it will be an institution largely on the Dana model --a museum in which objects are subordinated to the museum's public service role--with perhaps a steadily increasing tilt toward the Gurian model as well--a museum in which the role of tangible objects may have diminished further still. Let me explain the basis for that speculation. Museums, like all not-for-profit organizations of every kind, are generally shaped by the interests and desires of three sometimes-conflicting, sometimes-harmonious and almost often overlapping groups: those who underwrite the costs of their services, those who actually produce those services, and those who are intended to be the users and beneficiaries of those services. In a fit of alliteration, Bud Cheit, the former dean of the Business School at the University of California, Berkeley has referred to these three groups as "patrons," "participants" and the "public." In the museum's current situation, its patrons, participants and the public, with an unusual degree of harmony, all seem to be pushing it in a similar direction, pushing it toward an emphasis on public service and away from a concentration on collections. Absent some enormous endowment, museums must have "patrons" who can replenish the resources that are depleted each year by the museum's provision of either free or below-cost services. And, among "patrons," who vote with their money, there has been a marked tendency in recent years, particularly on the part of governmental and foundation funders, to evaluate a museum's funding worthiness by evaluating its contribution to the community it seeks to serve. Typical here is the federal government's Institute of Museum and Library Services. IMLS is now requiring its grantees to document the outcomes they achieve as a result of the program grants it makes. Among "participants"--those who are actually affiliated with a museum as staff members, board members or volunteers and who vote with their paid and/or contributed labor--the rhetoric of public service has been pervasive for at least a decade. One milestone, certainly, was the adoption by the American Association of Museum's governing board in May, 1991 of the position paper Excellence and Equity as an official statement of policy. Recurring like a drumbeat throughout Excellence and Equity is the proposition that a commitment to public service is "central to every museum's activity." Finally, among the "public"--those potential museum-goers who vote with their feet and without whose interest and attention whatever else the museum does may simply be done in vain--there appears to be a distinctly greater interest in museums that reach out to their needs and interests than in collection-centered museums that may cater primarily to the interests of their own staff and/or board. Consider the case of the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York. Following the death in 1969 of its patron Margaret Woodbury Strong, an Eastman Kodak heiress, the Museum was created through her bequest of some 300,000 historic objects including nearly 27,000 dolls. For two decades, the Strong's governance and staff tried without success to mold this ungainly mass of materials into an institution that might somehow be of interest to its community. Finally, in the early 1990s--after acknowledging its failure and consulting extensively with a variety of local organizations--the Museum determined to abandon its original focus on Mrs. Strong's collection. Instead, in what turned out to be a highly successful effort, it chose to reorient itself toward the needs of local families and to concentrate on such contemporary issues as bereavement, AIDS, health care, racism, and drug use. In the years following the implementation of these changes, average annual attendance has nearly doubled and membership nearly tripled. As for the Gurian model--the congregant story-telling space without traditional objects--that museum, in one form or another, is now beginning to emerge on every side. Consider for example the Newseum, currently located in Arlington, Virginia but scheduled to move to downtown Washington in several years where it will occupy double its present space. In telling its story, the Newseum relies on only a handful of objects, scarcely any of them memorable. Primarily it uses instead--and very memorably--a range of interactive devices by which the processes involved in gathering, editing and distributing the news can be vividly demonstrated. The same is true of the two major music museums opened in recent years: the Experience Music Project in Seattle and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The objects in those museums are clearly incidental and subordinate to the basic stories these museums were created to tell: stories about a subject without material form: music. Consider also the growth and success of science centers with their constructed and participatory exhibits. And, above all, consider the proliferation of childrens' museums--today the fastest growing segment of the museum community. None of these latter-day museums in any way resembles those object-centered institutions with which the museum movement first began. Which finally brings us to that question that Charles Hummel proposed to start with. Against the background of the kinds of places that the museums of tomorrow are most likely to be, what different kinds of training should the programs at Winterthur and elsewhere be offering today to provide the appropriate skills for those who will staff and manage those museums of tomorrow? Again, this different training is not "instead of" but "in addition to." The Gurian model aside, tomorrow's museum will still require all of the collections-related skills as do today's. It will, however--as a more complex organization than today's museum--require some other skills as well. In my own view, three of these other are rock-bottom critical. Those are, first, a skill at developing and maintaining relationships with the community that the museum intends to serve; second, a skill at establishing and maintaining collaborations with other organizations that serve that same community; and third, a skill in dealing with the growing demand by foundations and other donors that museums expand the traditional concept of accountability--recall, for example, the example of IMLS mentioned earlier--to include some quantitative or similar measures by which the success or failure of their programs can be evaluated. As will be immediately apparent, to a far greater degree than the subjects traditionally included in museum training programs, these skills largely relate to matters external to the museum itself. Taking these skills in order, then, we begin with community relationships. To be recalled here is Dana's prescription for how a museum is to go about its business. "Learn what the community needs; fit the museum to those needs." In that context, let me make a truly far-fetched analogy and compare a museum to a mousetrap. According to a maxim long-attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, "If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor....[then] the world will make a beaten path to his door." What Emerson appears to have overlooked, however--or at least neglected to say--was that any demand for mousetraps must necessarily depend on one prior and particular condition: the presence of mice. In a mouse-free world, a man could still make a better mousetrap--he might, in fact, build the nonpareil of all mousetraps--but, absent any demand, it's doubtful that even a single soul would ever seek his door. As for the world beating a path, forget about it. It's the mice that make a mousetrap matter. In a sense, a museum might be likened to a mousetrap. For a mousetrap to have value, you have to have mice. For a museum to have value, for a museum to be able follow Dana's prescription to fit itself to what the community needs, there must be such a need--there must be what economists would call a "demand" for what the museum is able to supply. In the absence of such a demand, a museum would be like a mousetrap in a mouseless world: a briefly amusing contraption, perhaps, but fundamentally of no worth. And that would be so notwithstanding the splendors of its collection, the outstanding credentials of its staff, the magnificence of its building or the heft of its endowment. In the Dana model, what gives value to those otherwise disparate elements--what activates and ties them together like the "juice" that transforms the otherwise inert elements of an electric motor into a functioning source of mechanical energy--is the opportunity to be of service. For museums, as we know, the potential forms of that service are almost infinite. Across a tremendous range of subject matters and fields of endeavor, museums have the capability to impart knowledge, to stimulate inquiry, to develop skills, to provide aesthetic and other affective experiences, to strengthen communal ties, to kindle individual ambition, to offer perspective, to influence attitudes, to shape behavior, to convey values, to generate respect--and more. To what extent any of those capabilities can be realized, however, must in every instance depend upon the degree to which they can be meshed with the ongoing needs of those whom the museum seeks to serve. In thinking about the resources that a museum requires for its operations, we generally group these in six categories: (1) collections, (2) staff and volunteers, (3) facilities and equipment, (4) money, (5) good will, and (6) information. What this museum/mousetrap analogy suggests, however, is that there is also a seventh and critical resource without which no museum can flourish. There must be a need for its services. Not until such a need has been identified and understood can the museum and community clearheadedly enter into that exchange of values--the basic marketing transaction--through which the community can help meet the museum's need for support while the museum, by way of reciprocity, can help meet one or more of the community's needs. Just as museums are today staffed by individuals specifically trained to manage each of those six other resources--by some with curatorial, conservation and/or registrarial training to deal with the collections, by some trained in bookkeeping and accounting to handle the every day flows of money, by some with engineering and mechanical training to oversee the facilities and equipment, and so on--so too will they need individuals specifically trained to understand and deal with this seventh and equally vital resource: the needs of the communities they seek to serve. Perhaps the first person to suggest the desirability of such training was Leslie Bedford, formerly with the Boston Children's Museum and now Director of the Leadership in Museum Education Program at the Bank Street College of Education in New York City. As Bedford envisions such training, its goal would be to prepare what she has called a "creative generalist." Such a person would have the skills to work directly with the community's leadership and members both to understand its needs and to assess the ways in which the resources of the museum might appropriately be used to meet those needs. At the same time, such a person would be expected to have a solid understanding of how best to use all the myriad means--exhibitions, lectures, films, concerts, programs of formal education, and more--through which the museum could interact with the community. By maintaining such a continuing and proactive contact, the museum would be able to adjust and reshape its programs as the community's own needs changed and shifted over time. The second of these skills--a skill at establishing and maintaining collaborations with other organizations that serve the community--is no less critical. As a recently completed study by the MIT-based Museum Loan Network--The Museum as Catalyst for Interdisciplinary Collaboration--has tentatively concluded, organizations that superficially appear to have little else in common can still collaborate successfully when "kindred values, objectives and practices" are available to be used as building blocks for their relationship. That may explain why collaborations between museums and non-museums--once so rare--are today becoming so common. So long as museums were organized in a collection-centered mode there was little occasion--except, perhaps, for lending objects back and forth among one another--for them to collaborate. With the reorganization of the museum into a public service mode, however, the situation is dramatically reversed. Within the average community, museums are simply one of a broad range of organizations that are basically pursuing a common objective: the well-being of the community. The commonality of that objective is what opens the way to collaboration. Here, instead of a far-fetched analogy, let me insert instead an equally far-fetched fantasy. Imagine two substantial communities--Castle City and Point Alliance--that have demographically similar populations, that are equally affluent and that devote approximately the same level of support (both public and private) to their local cultural organizations. In each case, those include museums of several disciplines, a symphony orchestra, a chamber music group, a dance company, a jazz ensemble, an opera and musical theater company, a poetry circle, a drama company, a film society, and a library. Imagine also this difference. In Castle City, those cultural organizations have always been and continue to be fiercely independent--even competitive--in all of their activities from fund-raising and audience development to in-house programming and community outreach. There is little cross-membership among their governing boards, their staff members have almost no professional contact with one another and each organization has its own loyal cadre of volunteers. Across the board, the presentations of all of these various cultural organizations are highly regarded. Point Alliance presents a wholly different picture. Although its cultural organizations were once as insulated from one another as those of Castle City, their relationship has changed dramatically in recent years. Today, rather than each acting alone as an independent entity, Point Alliance's museums, musical organizations and other cultural groups tend to operate through a series of collaborations. Some of these are community-wide and are intended to be more or less permanent. Fund-raising at the community level is conducted through a United Arts Fund in which they all participate. A Cultural Purchasing Cooperative has been established through which the member organizations regularly obtain such staples as office, cleaning, computer and electrical supplies and also receive payroll and other routine services. A community-wide arts membership provides reduced admission and ticket prices for local residents. At the program level--where the presentations of Point Alliance's cultural organizations are at least as highly regarded as those of Castle City--collaborations tend to be temporary with different partners participating in different projects. Taking note that a number of Cambodian families had recently moved into the community, a "Spirit of Cambodia" program was presented jointly by the art museum, the dance company, the chamber music group and the film society. An exploration of the ways in which the outskirts of Point Alliance had evolved over the past several decades from a rural to a suburban area involved the art, history and natural history museums working in concert with the poetry circle and the library. A production of Carmen presented to celebrate the opera and musical theater company's twenty-fifth anniversary was reflected throughout the entire cultural community by programs dealing with the music, literature and art of nineteenth-century France as well as some programs centered on gypsies, bull-fighting and Spanish costume. First ask yourself this personal question. Everything else being equal, in which of these communities--Castle City or Point Alliance--would you prefer to have grown up? And then ask yourself, as well, this professional question. Everything else being equal, in which of these communities--Castle City or Point Alliance--do you think a greater quantum of happiness, wisdom, and comfort is being regularly provided to the members of the community? Students of collaboration argue that a successful collaboration offers at least three major benefits to the organizations and individuals that participate. First, it allows the participating organizations to leverage their resources in such a way that two and two may actually add up to something more than four. As one science writer associated with MIT's Media Lab has written in this connection: "The goal of collaboration is the creation of value, not merely the sum of individual efforts but, more importantly, value born from the exponential product of the collective interactions among the collaborators. Collaboration describes a process of value creation that our traditional structure of communications and teamwork cannot achieve." Certainly, the several museums of Point Alliance appear to be getting considerably better value for the expense dollars expended on collaborative projects than might be the case were they acting alone. Given the level of effort required to bring new resources into the museum, to fail to get the maximum possible benefit out of existing resources seems foolishly wasteful if not downright imprudent. A second value of collaboration is the degree to which it may provide multiple points of entry into an organization's program offerings. For its Cambodian and Carmen-related exhibitions, the art museum in Point Alliance may well hope to attract not only its regular visitors but also additional ones who are primarily interested in dance or opera but who are also open to exploring how these might relate to the visual arts. Thirdly, for those individuals working inside a collaboration--the collectivity of staff members at the various cultural organizations in Point Alliance--the opportunity to share new and different perspectives about what may be a common subject matter can be both a stimulating and a wonderfully enriching experience. What has proven surprising over the past few years is the range of institutions with which museums can successfully collaborate. While some of these may have been predictable--schools and libraries in particular--others were not. Let me give just a few examples. In Rochester, the Strong Museum--an institution that we visited with earlier this afternoon--invited the local library system to establish and operate a branch right within the Museum itself. Instead of the customary branch library configuration, though--a central reading room lined by bookcases or with stacks off to one side--the books in the Museum's branch are available to browse or borrow in a series of small "book nooks" scattered throughout the galleries and generally containing material pertinent to whatever exhibitions are then on view. As a further convenience for visitors, books borrowed during a museum visit can later be returned to any other branch library in the system. Examples of museum/school collaboration can be found today throughout the United States. In many instances, these are intended to take advantage of the potential "fit" between the informal educational possibilities offered by the museum and the more formal curricular approach offered by the school. In some instances, however, this relationship may be reversed. One case in point is the New York City Museum School--a collaboration between that City's Board of Education and a group of museums in Brooklyn and Manhattan that opened in 1994 and that works with adolescents starting in grade 6--where the pedagogical contribution of the participating museums is characterized in terms that are almost diametrically opposed to any notion of "informal learning." What these museums bring to the collaboration is their methodology, the disciplined and objective scientific methods through which they conduct their inquiries. As described by Sonnet Takahisa, one of its founding co-Directors, the School: "...models the pattern of learning that is practiced by museum professionals--learning that is intellectually rigorous, uses authentic and primary sources, and requires scholarly training, an innate sense of curiosity, and the ability to synthesize and evaluate information from a variety of sources....[The New York City Museum School] seeks to apply this process of museum learning to all aspects of the mandated city and state curriculums." Two final examples--both funded by IMLS--may demonstrate how far the pool of partners available to museums has now begun to spread. One is the Colorado Digitization Project, a state-wide effort to digitize and make commonly accessible the collections of four different types of cultural heritage organizations: museums, historical societies, libraries and archives. Inaugurated in 1998, it now has approximately 50 institutional participants. The aim is to provide a single Internet search engine through which scholars, students or just plain members of the public can access text or images from any of these participants. As explained by the Project's Director, Liz Bishoff: "The project bridges barriers between people and hidden collections in museums' storage areas that no one knows about. It will pop those collections out into the world, so that teachers, students, researchers and hobbyists can see them and use them. We have a passionate belief that all of the cultural heritage organizations can work together and we're determined to figure out ways to make that happen." The second IMLS-funded project is a research one that got under way last year. The intent is to study both actual and potential partnership arrangements among a different constellation of not-for-profit cultural organizations--in this instance, museums, libraries, public radio and public television. As envisioned by the study, what naturally links these kinds of organizations is their common interest in serving as lifelong learning resources for their respective geographic communities. To be jointly administered by the Urban Libraries Council in Evanston, Illinois and The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, this two-year nation-wide study will try to "identify and document multiple models of institutional partnership, together with an analysis of the benefits of various partnership models and outcomes for local communities." This coming November, IMLS will be convening a conference in Washington to explore how it might stimulate more community partnerships for lifelong learning. What should, I hope, be obvious is that all of these collaborations involve more than simple casual couplings between kindred organizations. At the merely personal level, any successful collaboration--whether between a composer and lyricist, a couple of research chemists, or even a pair of spouses--requires a high degree of mutual respect, tolerance and trust. At the institutional level, collaborations can become even more demanding. Not only may they differ in the patterns by which they are structured but they may also vary widely in what they require by way of contributions from the various partners, in how they address day-to-day decision making and other matters of control, in how success or failure is to be determined and in how risks are to be distributed and managed. Collaborations may also present managerial challenges within institutions. Enthusiasm at the leadership level may not always be shared at the operational one. The establishment and maintenance of a successful collaboration requires staff members who have developed specialized skills. As noted before, some training in those skills seems to me among the rock-bottom additions that need to be made to programs such as Winterthur's. The third and last of those three "in-addition-to" and not "instead-of" differences concerns the growing demand by funders that museums expand the traditional concept of accountability in order to permit some readier evaluation of their work. Four points should be made at the outset. First, this demand is in no way unique to museums. Throughout the not-for-profit sector, organizations whose accomplishments were never before questioned are today being asked to demonstrate in some quantitative way that their programs do, in fact, have their intended results. It was recently reported, for example, that 75% of adult Americans favor proposed federal legislation that would mandate standardized state tests in reading and mathematics for all students in third grade through first-year high school. Second, although museums are in no way strangers to accountability, what is different here is that it is outcomes for which they are now being asked to account, not simply their stewardship of resources. Professor Peter Swords of the Columbia University Law School, now retired, refers to this older form of stewardship accountability--the need to show that nobody has taken any money or abused a fiduciary position, that the collection is being properly cared for and that the facilities are being maintained--as "negative accountability." It consists in demonstrating that an institution's management is both honest and prudent. By contrast, he uses the phrase "positive accountability" to describe this more recent standard--the need to demonstrate that the institution is not only honestly managed but is also competent, that it is actually achieving its stated goals and having its intended impact. Third, although most recent discussions of positive accountability have been in the context of external funding--as exemplified, for example, in the proposition that programs that can be shown to produce successful outcomes should be eligible for continued support--there are aspects of this accountability that have important internal uses as well. Program evaluation is one. Properly used, program evaluation can provide a museum's management with the kind of feedback that makes it possible to upgrade ineffective programs into effective ones and to turn already-effective programs into even more effective ones. Fourth, this is an issue over which there continue to be deep divisions. While virtually nobody questions the validity of "positive accountability" in principle, there is considerable disagreement as to whether it can ever be based on truly quantitative measures or whether it must always be to some degree anecdotal. At one extreme are those who argue that such quantitative standards are essential to the proper management of any enterprise and that "if you can't measure it, then you can't manage it." At the other extreme are those who argue with equal fervor that the impact of museums on both individuals and communities is essentially so intangible that the application of any metric yardstick to the museums's performance would, in essence, be an effort to "measure the unmeasurable" A favorite rhetorical device of those who argue this second position is the rhetorical question "Would you really ask a minister how many souls he's saved per pew hour preached?" Some of the perplexities that surround this issue may actually be inherent in the very techniques of evaluation itself. In the July/August issue of Museum News, an article by Jay Rounds of the University of Missouri's St. Louis campus pointed out the almost complete disjunction between, on the one hand, evaluation techniques that are essentially verbal and numerical and, on the other, museum-going experiences that may be primarily visual. Other perplexities stem from the particular nature of museums. To put that particularity in perspective, think for a moment about a literacy program. To assess the effectiveness of such a program, an evaluator might be able to use a relatively short time period--a year, for example--and employ a series of standardized reading tests. The comparison of a September, year 2000 score with a September, year 2001 score might well provide a reliable assessment of the program's achievement. As virtually every commentator who's looked at this problem has pointed out, though, museums are nothing like that. In general, the impact of museums on their visitors tends to be cumulative over time. More often than not, moreover, that impact may be subtle rather than obvious, indirect rather than direct. And, also more often than not, that impact may be deeply entangled with the impact of other community organizations. The best analogy might be to a liberal arts college. No more than you can determine what a student's liberal arts education might contribute to society on her graduation day--it may, in fact, take thirty to forty years for that contribution to become evident--can you necessarily determine the impact of a museum visit on a visitor through an exit interview. Many of us here today may well have had early experiences in museums the importance of which only became clear to us after many years had passed. How, then, are museums to deal with these growing demands for positive accountability? Clear, I think, is that they can't simply turn the clock back to the start of the last century and ask funders to accept their work on faith, to treat them as per se worthy institutions, as institutions automatically deserving of support. At the same time, however, they need to be actively exploring what other means beyond purely quantitative measures might be employed as a means to ascertain their institutional impact. As a matter of course, gourmets judge the quality of cassoulets and other bean dishes by their taste, appearance, texture and smell--not by counting the number of beans they contain. Foundation and other potential bean-counters might be taught that skill as well. The point, though, is that there must be somebody in the museum who is conversant with these issues, somebody who can help the museum develop richer and more persuasive ways by which to document and/or demonstrate the myriad and beneficial impacts it has on its individual visitors and its community, somebody who can better sensitize the museum's funders to the fact that not-for-profit organizations are cast in a variety of molds and that the kind of number-based positive accountability that may be appropriate for a literacy program or a social service agency or a neighborhood health initiative may neither be feasible for nor appropriate to a museum. As a principle, though, positive accountability in some form or other now seems inescapable. As a practical matter, museums must include on their staffs people who are trained to deal with it. To close, then, let me pile a second question of top of Charles Hummel's first one. His was: what new skills might be needed for those who will staff and manage the museums of tomorrow. My second question is this: will the museum workers who develop these new skills also occupy new positions--positions such as community relationship manager, collaborations coordinator or chief of evaluation that don't generally exist in museums today --or will these new skills be folded into curatorial, museum education and other positions already in place? Again, speculation. Nothing in the current funding environment seem so bright that one could readily envision many museums taking on the additional--and, in all likelihood, prohibitive--cost of what could easily grow into not just a series of new positions but, over time, a series of new departments. Museum specialists are like M&Ms. It's hard to have only one. They tend to sprout assistants, then deputies and then even deputy assistants. What seems far more likely to me is the other alternative--that these skills will slowly become blended into positions that already exist. That a museum educator, in planning programs, might use greater input from the community does not seem like such a stretch. Nor would it be a great stretch either for that educator routinely to search for collaborators through whom the scope and reach of such programs might be extended. Nor is it even implausible that a curator--in planning an exhibition--might also be required think about how the impact of that exhibition is ultimately to be assessed. What also seems likely to me is that, in time, a solid understanding of what these skills involve will be among the basic qualifications required of those who aspire to the directorship of museums. Although a successful candidate would not necessarily need a practitioner"s detailed knowledge, she would nevertheless be expected to have--among other qualifications--a solid grasp of the issues that surround community relationships, of the potential rewards and corresponding risks attendant on collaborations, and of the value and appropriate use of audience research and program evaluation. Accept for a moment my basic conjecture, i.e., that the museum of tomorrow will be constructed primarily on the Dana model, that its principal purpose will be to contribute to the "happiness, wisdom, and comfort" of the members of the community, and that--in the pursuit of that purpose--objects will continue to play an important role. What set of skills will be required for the leadership of such a museum? Certainly most--if not all--of those skills required today. But beyond these, the leadership of such a museum--a museum facing outward, and no longer inward--will also require a good measure of those new skills that we have talked about this afternoon, those "in-addition-to" skills that should, in my view, be prime candidates for adding on to today's curriculum.
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Reunion
Weekend and Conference