Day 7 — New York Historical Society and the American Museum of Natural History
Our visit to the New York Historical Society gave us an overview of the exhibition strategies and recent changes that this organization has undergone. Particularly interesting was the loss of AAM accreditation and deaccessioning of a ‘very small’ percentage of the museum’s collection. AAM does not allow museum’s to save themselves financially through deaccession without punishing via blanket policy, thereby further damaging a museum’s reputation. However, NYHS has persevered regardless of the alliance’s stance and lack of support for this type of difficult decision.
I did appreciate the integration of technology throughout the thoughtfully arranged exhibition spaces — this had the effect of not overwhelming the visitor with too much information at the onset, allowing one to view the collections with relative spacing. Although some of the interactive elements were not responsive (it seems like this is often, eventually the situation with technology).
It was great to see at least one element of a participatory experience in the object voting module, where visitors are encouraged to vote for an object to be added to the collection — items ranged from ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs to AR-15’s.
Next, at the Natural History Museum, we were treated to an energetic overview from two staff members of the digital team, Matt and Blaire. I was interested in their perspectives on working at large institutions, since I have just started working at a large organization for the first time in my career. I really wanted to ask more in depth and painfully specific questions about what systems or project management applications they were utilizing, but there really wasn’t enough time.
Both organizations today talked about slow-moving projects and hinted at the bureaucracy of museums. Matt mentioned the idea of ‘acting like a small museum’ and that is something that I wanted to pursue at LACMA since starting there a few months ago. I appreciated the insight about starting on a well-funded program that had ‘legs’ and how Matt and his team gathered input and buy-in along the way. There seems to be no way to get everything you want in working for museums! Either you are light on resources, nimble, and hopefully efficient, or you are a behemoth, slow-moving, steady ship.
