Themed

Every so often a New Zealand collecting institution - mostly likely Te Papa - will get a bit of a bash in the media for only having X percentage of its collection on show.

Every year, institutions' collections grow. In general, their floor space doesn't. Also - don't tell everyone - these collections aren't made up of 100% bona fide masterpieces and startling evidence of the snowflake-like uniqueness of every member of our species. Rather, all collections include their portion of dross (gifts that had to be accepted; things that seemed good or important at the time - and may seem good or important again in the future; things that are useful adjuncts to more important pieces, but not exhibition-worthy on their own; things whose value is in their potential for research rather than display) and the job of the curator (or exhibition developer) is to winnow their way through the stacks and the boxes, seeking to tell us a story with selected collection items.

I was reminded of this when reading the BBC article 'London museums urged to show more 'hidden' artefacts' recently. The article describes the Museum Association's call for museums to do-more-with-less and get more stuff on the floor despite funding cuts. It also reveals that "A BBC Freedom of Information request found the British Museum had spent £86,280 in 2009 and 2010 keeping 99% of its collection in storage." It continues

A statement from the British Museum said it "maintains a large collection of objects from across the globe from two million years ago to the present day".

"The preservation of this unparalleled collection for current and future generations is a key purpose of the British Museum, we therefore make the safety and security of our storage facilities a paramount aim."

In March 2010, caught up in the (justified) adoration surrounding the British Museum's 100 Objects project, the BBC ran a more sympathetic article about going into the stacks and understanding why the institution holds 30,000 stone hand-axes. The short answer, is, of course, that this is museum's jobs: to create and maintain comprehensive collections of whatever it is they're charged with creating collections of. We as taxpayers and ratepayers and voters have, tacitly, endorsed this.

In one of those coincidences, the Wall Street Journal came out this week with an article about museum storage, this one looking at the major New York museum's offsite locations.

The museums are tight-mouthed when it comes to these art warehouses. They all declined to give The Wall Street Journal access.

"The Met has never—not in my 18 years here, anyway—publicly discussed…its storage facilities, either on- or off-site," spokesman Harold Holzer said in response to a request for access to its warehouse. A spokeswoman for the Whitney said it "doesn't participate in stories on its storage facility mainly due to security issues."

But through interviews with current and former museum employees familiar with the sites, as well as property records and other public documents, the Journal can for the first time paint a landscape of New York's secret Museum Mile. To accommodate security concerns, addresses aren't being published.

Addresses might not be published, but descriptions like this are:

The Met quietly maintains a six-story warehouse near the FDR Drive on the Upper East Side. Steps from a specialty-foods shop and a sports facility, the building hints at its art trove only via two small security cameras and a swipe-card mechanism installed on its exterior.

I have to say, I was unsettled like this. Yes, I'm curious about the parts of collections that aren't on display, and interested in how we, the public, can gain more access to them, through open days, study rooms, publication and digitisation.

But I can't see any benefit to the WSJ publishing this information, and I do see a small amount of risk. Sure, it's unlikely that a dashing international art thief will read visit Midtown, WSJ in hand, and scope the joints. I'm sure the dashing art thief would have far better sources of information. But still - where's the gain?

Embedded

At last year's National Digital Forum in Wellington I met Liam Wyatt, Vice President of Wikimedia Australia and a passionate advocate for better engagement between Wikipedia and cultural organisations.

Let's put all the arguments about the 'quality' of Wikipedia aside, because they bore me. Wikipedia is not just one of the world's most popular research and vague-question-answering tools - it's a vital way, if you're a collecting or 'memory' institution, to share your collections and knowledge, and to attract visitors back to your own websites.

Liam popped up on my radar yesterday with this article in the New York Times, which describes his role as the British Museum's first Wikipedian in residence. Liam is (without pay) spending 5 weeks at the museum, building the relationship between it and Wikipedia. Here's a snippet from the article that gives one reason why this may be of value:

“I looked at how many Rosetta Stone page views there were at Wikipedia,” said Matthew Cock, who is in charge of the museum’s Web site and is supervising the collaboration with Wikipedia. “That is perhaps our iconic object, and five times as many people go to the Wikipedia article as to ours.”

Liam's just started blogging about his residency. As you'll see from that first post, full of bullet points and graphs, it's not something he's taking at all lightly. And fair enough. There are some (kept quite quiet) horror stories out there about engagements between Wikipedians and museum staffers, and Liam's doing his best to make something 'mutually beneficial, sustainable and replicable'.

In another recent example of embedding, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG is blogging from the Canadian Centre for Architecture for two months as part of their Visiting Scholars programme.

I visited the CCA, in Montreal, a few years ago. It was beautiful - the building, the shows, the snow, the light - and the archives were extraordinary. As Manaugh writes:

I will be writing about many of the items in their ambitious collection—films, models, photographs, manuscripts, architectural tools, and more—and publishing the results both here and on the CCA website.

There is a truly mind-boggling amount of material to explore up there, from the archives of Gordon Matta-Clark and Cedric Price to a collection of antique drawing instruments and souvenir models, John Hejduk's Bovisa sketches, photographic plates from English India, Canadian fire insurance maps, speculative proposals for river lighthouses, massive archives of stage set designs and dramatic scenography, and a beautiful manuscript copy of the Plan of St. Petersburg, among far, far more than I could possibly mention in one post. Konstantin Melnikov. Aldo Rossi. Three airports by Frank Lloyd Wright. Travel sketches by Louis Kahn.

Manaugh is framing this project up as a trial of the notion of Bloggers in Residence:

... there are architectural and design archives all over the world, full of astonishing things, but these same collections are often unexplored in their entirety, even by members of the institutions that have collected them. Even more commonly, many of these global collections are open only to scholars who stop by once every five or six years—if that often—to write niche monographs or academic publications about specific aspects of an archive's contents.

But what if you could install an architecture blogger—or a film blogger, a food blogger, an archaeology blogger, a fiction blogger—in an overlooked archive somewhere, anywhere in the world, and thus help to reveal those items to the general public?

I think it's a great idea. Professional and academic researchers use collections all the time for their projects, but I'd argue that whatever their output is, it's more likely to be written for their own objectives/purposes than to engage an audience. Whereas a blogger who sees their role as sharing stuff and getting people excited about it falls more into the traditional areas of outreach - a floor talk that you don't have to stand up through, that's accessible around the world at any time. And (you knew they'd be a segue somewhere, right?) done with sufficient authority, material for lots and lots of lovely Wikipedia links.