“Refreshingly Old Fashioned” – Can that ever be positive feedback for a local museum?

Every now and again I take a look at the visitor comments book where I volunteer partly because of my public historian hat and to get a sense of what visitors make of the museum but also out of sheer curiosity. Last time I looked someone had described the museum as “refreshingly old fashioned” and I have to admit I was somewhat taken aback. Is being old fashioned a good thing for a museum to be in this day and age?

http://www.victorianlondon.org/images/unitedservicesmuseum.gif

I look around the museum and have to admit that to me it looks a bit tired and very dated. Don’t get me wrong, what it contains within I think is incredibly interesting and important to preserve, if for no other reason than it provides the local community with a place where they can learn about local history, it’s just of its time. And again, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Contextually the buildings that make up the museum add to the atmosphere and sense of place, I just can’t help but feel that it isn’t “refreshingly old fashioned”, rather more “dated and a relic of a bygone era”. *sharp intake of breath* Did I actually just say that? The museum in question is one I’ve visited numerous times throughout my life and I have real a fondness for it. I suppose that is why I feel that it could be so much more. I just find it odd that somebody would praise a museum for being ‘old fashioned’ when they have to compete with much more engaging and interactive forms of entertainment in order to keep visitors passing through the doors.

I can see why people are attracted to the nostalgic and more traditional museum experience. I walk into my shift and am greeted by that familiar musty museum smell, the dark lighting and dated interior. It’s like stepping back in time and seeing the ways of old through a familiar medium. You know what you’re going to get. There are going to be galleries with glass cases which enclose the artefacts and besides them panels of text. There might be trail clues up on the wall to encourage children to engage with the exhibits but it is unlikely there will be anything to pull or push or to physically interact. You walk around and read, all the while staying quiet so as to adhere to that unwritten rule that enforces silence on museum visitors. I find the whole thing completely bizarre, if you’re going to be reading vast quantities of text, at the very least you should feel able to talk about it! It’s also quite an isolating thing to experience for that very reason. You can arrange to visit in groups but often you will wander at your own pace, stop at the bits that interest you and exchange only a rare word with a companion.

http://chertseymuseum.org/

Don’t get me wrong going to a museum where there aren’t any artefacts or panels of text to read only interactive screens and the like, would be an equally odd situation. I think there needs to be a happy medium between the traditional way of doing things and a way more suited to modern society. The example of the Science Museum springs to mind. It is educational and informative but there are lots of activities to interact with and no one is too worried about talking to each other. I strongly feel that history museums, whether local, regional or national, should be striving for similar results. I agree with philosopher Hilde Hein that museums have become more ‘people centred’ and rather than pine for the old ways, I think museum staff should be embracing that and using it to their advantage, especially as the heritage sector faces budget cuts and they begin to rely even more heavily on visitor admissions and donations. Admittedly, there is a fine line between successful interactive exhibits and ones which ‘disneyfy’ the past, but it is something local museums should be thinking about, even if on a scaled down version.

chertseymuseum.org 

I can’t help but make comparisons between the museum where I volunteer and Chertsey Museum in Surrey. Despite being the museum for the Borough of Runnymede, it isn’t a particularly large site and relies upon council funding, support from the Olive Matthews Trust and donations – there is no admission fee. The two museums are on somewhat of an equal paring but from first hand observations, Chertsey Museum and its staff and volunteers appear to have done so much more with what they have. Huge emphasis is placed on education and the development of educational materials, while the exhibitions play to the museums strength. They are not particularly large but they are packed with history. In one gallery (the Silver one I think) you have glass cases displaying the artefacts but beneath them are a series of draws within which more artefacts are displayed. However, to see them the visitor has to open and close the draws, a simple action but one which forces a visitor in engage and interact with the display. A similar approach has been adopted in the Runnymede Gallery which has also been designed to resemble the outdoors. These techniques appear very simple, but by steering away from putting all objects in glass cases and finding more interactive and aesthetically pleasing ways to present the material, Chertsey has created a newer and more inviting experience for the museum visitor. 

I struggle to see the negative side of this shift in museum design. There is no denying that museums have generally moved towards more interactive and engaging methods of communicating the past - touch screens, oral history, puzzles and games, trials, sound effects and all these things add to visitor experience in some way shape or form. I think we’ve generally come to expect more from museums now and I don’t think that is something that they should shy away from. As Annette Day argues, ‘Multimedia technology is a common mans of communication today, especially among young people. As a consequence, information presented in this way is often more accessible because it utilities familiar routes of comprehension, in addition to the deeper engagement facilitated by physical interactivity’.[1] And in that sense perhaps it is a generational thing. I am unsure of the age of the person who made that original comment, but I think perhaps it was someone more mature, for I would have to admit that I am finding it increasingly difficult to focus my attention on museum exhibitions for prolonged periods of time, especially if they are of your more traditional type.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/

On a recent visit to the British Museum I actually got bored (again I can’t quite believe I’m saying that). This is a national institution (contested yes, I don’t argue with that) but one of those places you feel you should give your full attention, but I couldn’t. There were bits that appealed, yes. The Egyptian mummies for example and the Battersea Shield, Mold Gold Cape, Snettisham Torc – all the sorts of things I learnt about in archaeology, but generally speaking I just found it to be long galleries filled with glass cases full of artefacts. They were well presented, artefacts grouped together and themed, but after a while I became somewhat desensitised to it all. As my companion said, “Once you’ve seen one Chinese pot you’ve almost seem them all”. What I find with the British museum is that it is the sort of place you want to nip into every now and again, not attempting to do it all in one go but segments. I’m the same with the other big London museums, the NHM and V&A for example. They lack the sort of interactive elements that break up the experience and encourage you to spend more time there.

The Museum of London for example, offers a very different visitor experience. Yes there were the more normal type of galleries with artefacts in glass cases, but interwoven around those were clips of oral history, a recreation of a pleasure ground, a prison cell which you could stand in and a Victorian street complex – I would add that sounds effects and even smells would have made this even better, but all of these methods of display were very engaging. There wasn’t time to ‘turn-off’ because you were moving onto something else which required you to interact with it in a different way. The MoL offers something completely different to the local museum I volunteer at, partly because circumstances mean that it can – but I don’t think that should mean that local museums shouldn’t strive for similar results. The fact is, the younger generation are growing up with technology and a desire to interact with those things from which they are learning and a failure to incorporate that into museums, at least to some degree, will alienate them from museums in the future. I think there is a real danger in being labelled “refreshingly old fashioned” for that would not appeal to the majority and it is in their hands that the future lies.

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[1] Annette Day, “Listening Galleries: Putting Oral History on Display,” Oral History 27:1 (1999): 95.