Museum Ireland, Vol 23. Monaghan, N. (Ed). Irish Museums Association, Dublin (2013).

museum ireland 2013

IRISH MUSEUMS ASSOCIATION

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museum ireland 2013 volume 23

IRISH MUSEUMS ASSOCIATION

CUMANN MHÚSAEIM NA HÉIREANN

IRISH MUSEUMS ASSOCIATION

CUMANN MHÚSAEIM NA HÉIREANN

Museum Ireland, Volume 23 Published by the Irish Museums Association Ltd, 2013

Editor Nigel Monaghan

Printed by Nicholson & Bass Ltd, Newtownabbey, Co. Antrim

The IMA welcomes contributions to this critical review. Instructions to authors are available on our website.

Please contact us in the first instance outlining your proposed article or review.

Views expressed are those of individual authors and do not necessarily represent those of the editors or the Irish Museums Association Ltd. Members of the IMA receive Museum Ireland as a subscription benefit. Non-members wishing to subscribe should contact the Administrator.

Potential advertisers should contact the Administrator.

Irish Museums Association, 3rd Floor St Stephen’s Green House, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2 www.irishmuseums.org Telephone: +353-1-4120939 e-mail: office@irishmuseums.org

ISSN 0961-9690

Contents

ARTICLES 4

Command and Control? Managing in the Cultural Institutions Michael Ryan

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The porous museum: making connections: building partnerships Brian Kennedy

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Adapt and Thrive Mark Taylor

29

Engagement and disengagement: Implications for increased partnerships between museums, curators and artists Pippa Little

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Making Connections, Tracing Identities: a Five Year Inventory Project in the Irish Antiquities Division, National Museum of Ireland Claire Anderson

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Accessing our national heritage: adult learners and the National Library Rhonda Wynne and Brid O’Sullivan

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Museum Interactive Learning Spaces: The Education Area at the National Print Museum Greta Halpin

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Our History: PEACE III funded Community History Project at Down County Museum Danielle Smyth

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Waterford Young Arts Critics (WYAC), their story so far Evelyn Power

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Even better than the real thing? Collecting copies of ancient sculpture in Ireland Michael Ann Bevivino

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What the books say – the usefulness of visitor books as a research source Joanne Hamilton

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Board of Directors, Irish Museums Association Ltd, 2013

Contents

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Command and Control?

Managing in the Cultural Institutions MICHAEL RYAN

T

O BE ASKED to speak on a museum topic in memory of James White is an honour and in most times, also a pleasure.1 Less so, perhaps today, as the lecture I had planned to give had to be torn up because of the various decisions about the management of national cultural institutions which emerged last week but I will come to those in due course.

I have entitled my lecture “Command and Control? Managing in the Cultural Institutions” – I chose my title, not because of anything particular that was happening at the time but because of my early experience of working in the National Museum of Ireland (1970-1992) and noticing that the same small number of people ran everything in the world of archaeology and of culture in general which with the remaining traditions of a fairly deferential and respectful society, and certainly a very defensive-aggressive hierarchical one, militated against debate or collegial cooperation. It was very top-down and those on top had serious problems of keeping up with the modern world. I came to the conclusion that cultural power and authority were more centralised than in Stalin’s Russia – apart from the semi-exiled writers who shone an unwavering light on our little world. I really believe that this was so and every year’s harvest of the National Archives seems to bring with it odd incidents; and on the part of authorities of a kind of credulous fear of really

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quite minor eddies in the current of public behaviour and attitudes. It was neither Stalinism nor dictatorship, more the insecurity of an inexperienced and mostly shallow ruling elite, and a deep nervousness of, and aversion to, social and other change that gave us such heart-breaking episodes as turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to the plight of many children, to that of unmarried mothers, to inequality of opportunity and to sheer deprivation in our cities. It also encouraged stagnation in the area of official culture.

On the cultural side, the social ostracism of certain writers, the banning of books that touched the lived experience of their Irish readers in the raw places of their hearts and minds, the censorship of films and all the paraphernalia of a censorious dominant social attitude. This frankly bewildered many of the population who were baffled that officials guarded the doorways to their minds in a manner that seemed ignorant, and obscurantist. The body politic had encysted the infection that came from a few brave political souls and rendered them essentially powerless until a tidal wave of pressure made change unstoppable – I feel our entry to the EEC/EU was the turning point and I have never for an instant regretted voting for it.

The cultural institutions where the routines had not altered since the decade or so after

independence, stagnated. The first modern director of a major Irish museum was James White who had come via business and art criticism to the Municipal and later National Galleries and who did modern, outwardlooking things because those adjectives described him and his mind-set perfectly. I came to know him when I was made – not asked to be – secretary of a revived ICOMIreland in 1971. James was the Chair and together with the Committee we planned and held in 1974 in the National Gallery the first-ever Irish museum conference and one with a deliberate training and development purpose. It was a great success and from it came, inter alia, the first survey of museums in Ireland co-ordinated and published by John O’Sullivan and step by step, the formation of the IMA of which James was first Chair. The infant outgrew the parent pretty quickly to become the established and effective body it is today. Later from 1992 until his death I knew him as a Trustee and Vice-Chair of the Board of the Chester Beatty Library. Although there was a gap of many years between us we got on well and he was a model trustee: secure in his own standing, constructive, supportive and critical without any side. I learned from him and apart from one hair-raising drive with James at the wheel to and from Áras an Uachtaráin, I liked being in his company. I am honoured to be invited to speak tonight in his memory.

And what am I going to speak about? Well last week I thought I knew but I have been rewriting at speed ever since notices appeared on the website of the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht in recent days.

In January of this year I wrote to both Ministers Howlin and Deenihan to express my opinions about the restructuring of the Cultural Institutions which then, in simple terms, seemed to be concerned with merging the National Archives, National Library and Irish Manuscripts Commission the National Gallery with IMMA and the Crawford.

In the interests of transparency, this is what I wrote: “Dear Minister, I am sure that in your ministerial capacity you receive many comments and criticisms while dealing with the crisis which so drastically affects the country. In the course of taking action it is always possible that some decisions will neither advance the cause of reform nor have a significant impact on expenditure. There was been a great deal of criticism of the proposal to merge national cultural institutions when it was first mooted more than two years ago and again recently with the renewal of the idea to amalgamate the National Library and Archives and also the National Gallery with the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Crawford Gallery Cork. It seems superficially neat but it probably will not save any money and may be actively harmful to the work and profile of the institutions.

I would like to make an alternative proposal which may be more effective in the cause of reform as well as cost-control. In France, national museums and galleries, and in several major European cities, all the great municipal museum institutions are grouped in unions which have centralised finance, HR and certain common marketing and promotion functions.

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There is also scope for other co-operation and resource-sharing – common storage for example, common maintenance, some, but not all, conservation-sharing, and IT resources.

The individual institutions retain their autonomy in their specialist areas – they all have distinctly different functions and skill-sets - and they keep their local boards and directorate. They also retain their distinctive ethos and identity which is important to their base of public support and to the harmonious working of their organisations.

They benefit from greater co-ordination and rationally-targeted investment while retaining the loyalty of the public which supports their activities. (The Irish Governing Boards need not necessarily be remunerated – they weren’t in the past. Some members might, on the American model, be selected essentially for their ability and willingness to raise funds for the institutions.)

There are many examples of this kind of organisation – one of the most successful is the internationally acclaimed National Museums of Liverpool which would repay study.”

It was part of the killing of the quangos, which had become a clarion call for frugal government in the financial crisis but one without especial practical meaning. It was a symbol of dynamism and reform but one without much thought or substance behind it especially where the quangos were useful and even important. They may well have become costly in places but the governing boards of the cultural institutions which were new and one of those that wasn’t were all suddenly remunerated a few years ago –

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albeit modestly – and that was their principal cost. Until quite recently Board Members did not receive stipends – indeed it was an honour to serve and people lobbied to be appointed to many of them. Boards worked well almost precisely because they were unremunerated. People of distinction and experience gave many years of voluntary service and brought valuable skills, contacts and sometimes gifts of their own money or artworks to the institutions. Governing Boards were introduced into the National Museum and the National Library under the National Cultural Institutions Act, 1997, as the culmination of a long process of consideration and with a view to reform.

It was a reform – in theory – as some cultural institutions had been in thrall to long-serving heroic directors who established an internal ethos and standard of management which went unchallenged for periods of a quartercentury and more. A situation which was exacerbated by some pretty breath-taking neglect and lack of interest on the part of the parent Government Department – I say parent but I mean the unchallenged absentee owner as the Department of Education was for many years – only James White, with the backing of a strong governing board, broke the directorial mould.

It was not until the transfer of the National Cultural Institutions to his Department by the Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald that the revival of the institutions began. This was simply because the Civil Servants there were of a very high quality and were committed to their tasks while political leadership saw the importance of culture. They also had more

clout with the Department of Finance and they were happy to work with professionals.

(The apartheid which professional Civil Servants labour under is alive and well in parts of the Public Service where a mindblowing ignorance of professionalism is also rife – consider the Department of Finance and economists.) The Taoiseach’s staff sought good advice and they did their best to implement it. It was a revelation for most of us. Things we wanted to do got done.

Standards rose slowly but surely in many areas but there was still a long way to go when the Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition was formed in the early 1990s. This transmogrified into the Rainbow Coalition in mid-term. The work of change and improvement continued in a new Department. The Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, later Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands and later still Arts, Sport and Tourism and currently Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. Each step required new letterhead, new business cards, a reshuffle of Civil Servants, moves to new premises or wasteful dispersal of elements – these tweaks were either an occasional but obviously easily reversible ideological decision or sometimes had been designed to accommodate the portfolio of interests of a strong minister-designate. Clearly, departments become more like Lego constructs in the bargaining that preceded government formation. It seems blindingly obvious that this is much more expensive than the cost of a pro bono board of governance for an institution such as the NMI or NLI. A little medium-term stability in the make-up of government departments would actually be a good and a frugal thing.

One of the issues that I want to stress is that

since the 19th century our National Cultural Institutions (NCIs) have never been the subject of thorough-going analysis by independent bodies. Analysis, such as it has been, was generally done by consultants, some of them knowledgeable like, say, Lord and Partners, some them by Crosby, Stills and Nash or some other trinomial firm of accountants manqué who had fine templates on their laptops – one size fits all – and a tendency to borrow your watch to tell you the time. Some were good, some not. In the National Museum of Ireland (NMI), the report

by Lithberg in 1927 an individual museumscholar from Sweden was influential in the structuring of the business of the Irish Antiquities Division and its later Irish Folklife Division offshoot – an achievement later misattributed to Adolf Mahr. We have never had a major independent review and report with public evidence-taking that the NCIs needed and deserved: nor a public education programme in the public utility of the institutions leading to some pretty breathtaking ignorance by people ostensibly interested in them.

The founding of our NCIs was massively influenced by the debates, lobbying and proposals of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) and the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) which had both created museums and libraries and which both made deposits of huge value to the emerging cultural institutions. The National Library of Ireland is almost entirely the creation of the RDS, the NMI was a joint venture between the RDS and the RIA. The Royal Hibernian Academy, RDS and RIA were influential in the development of the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI). The Irish Museum of

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Modern Art (IMMA) is a modern initiative stemming from the Department of the Taoiseach. The Heritage Council was also a Taoiseach’s initiative arising from a number of streams of advice by the great and the good – not least that of Frank Mitchell with whom I served on an interdisciplinary committee which explored and reported on the scope of a possible Heritage Council. The Council was established first on an ad hoc basis and later became statutory under Michael D. Higgins as Minister in 1995.

It was during that time that the provision of governing boards for the NCIs that lacked them was decided upon. This was to bring them into line with best practice and to give them the autonomy that they lacked. Two of those boards will now be dispensed with – the museum’s and the library’s. It may be that the boards did not work – I cannot say but the principle of arm’s length governance was a good one and if the boards were not working whose fault is that? Blame may lie as much with the board as with the authority that appointed them. Governance is not, in not-for-profit cultural institutions, a complex business – there is at the heart of it the fiduciary responsibility for the institution, the duty to develop policy, put in place mechanisms of review and renewal, and work closely with, but not to micromanage, the Director and staff.

Nothing could be more important than the relationship between Board Chair and CEO – it should be close and co-operative and each should have its respective sphere of action and each must show mutual respect and courtesy. A Director should have a charter of

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operational competence agreed with the Board and a director must advise and challenge it with issues which they need to consider, assist in policy formation and treat the Board with respect and see that it is well-briefed. The Board should respect the area of executive authority and of professional capacity and support the CEO and staff in achieving agreed goals.

Moreover, the Board and especially the Chair, in acting as a spokesman for the organisation should help it to speak truth to power, act as a buffer against inappropriate pressure, political or administrative, but above all representing the institution to government, the world and to business with the authority of holding actual responsibility.

The Director is not a merely functionary, a cipher. He or she and with colleagues, is also a major representative – and in the public eye, the major representative – of the institution and provides leadership, spokesmanship, policy advice, practical development in the fabric and functions of the institution and its programming and knows and understands its work at a level of detail beyond anything that a board member may glean. The Director makes the day- today and long-term management decisions together with colleagues and like the Chair, brings standing and authority to the institution but a Director must be the head of a collegiate museum or library – Frank Mitchell again. If you want a cipher, then you don’t want the institution to thrive and in the case of some institutions a genuine standing in scholarship is essential for the credibility of the Director. Above all, competence in the tasks of the institution is the sine qua non.

I want to make three specific criticisms of the recent announcements because it seems to me they reflect a profound lack of understanding about how certain processes happen. I believe that there are issues of intergenerational good faith to consider also but in making these criticisms, it is essential not to be precious not to wail that it is ‘the end of the world as we know it’, because it is not. There are some useful things also in the proposals and although I would have a different emphasis, nevertheless, I acknowledge that they make a certain sense.

I fear that the proposed shared Advisory Council of nine members for the NMI and NLI combined is a very bad conception. I do not object to smaller boards – they are better than large ones as a rule – but an Advisory Board will never have the standing of a governing board and hence will be a poor advocate. To provide a single board to two such disparate NCIs as the Library and Museum is profoundly mistaken. They do very different things in very different ways and the direct practical overlap between them is actually quite modest despite their historical background of membership of the old Institutions of Science and Art. This proposed board is to have special responsibility for fundraising and for international relationships. Let us take the international relations first. International relations are invariably peer to peer. That is, they grow out of the long-term relationships of professionals within the institutions and the partnerships which they create abroad and seldom if ever do they originate with a board. Irish representation at international

technical meetings has been dominated by administrators rather than the specialists that are so often needed at the table. The results of such attendances have been poorly disseminated or not at all in many cases and opportunities slip by as a consequence. Some attention to professional representation abroad would yield dividends but nothing will replace the contacts and professional relationships of members of staff and especially of a Director or senior curator-manager many of whom enjoy international reputations. There are honourable administrator exceptions to this – but they are few. One of them is present here tonight. Advisory Boards especially one of nine members for two great institutions are unlikely to be of much value in this area beyond occasional suggestions.

Giving the Advisory Board a fundraising role is merely daft. The proposal is profoundly uninformed about the difficult task of raising money for the NCIs – it is intensely hard work: especially in the present climate.

Business is not very much interested in culture and the arts and the wave of Corporate Social Responsibility tries to reassure the public that the hearts of inter alia the Banks are in the right place (they are certainly close to our wallets) but CSR generally precludes our kinds of project.

Institutions funded by the state have the constant problem that businesses and individuals think that the funding should come from the state anyway. It is an uphill task. Even where success has come in getting some business funding for programming, the donations are often very modest. Getting funds from foundations is a lot easier if you

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have a project which is aligned with the aims of the target foundation. Most foundations have very clear guideline and their aims nowadays tend to have a social angle. Grant proposal writing for foundations is a skill. EU grant proposal writing is a dark art. Private philanthropy was briefly a prospect in the Pangur Bán economy but philanthropy in Ireland was never – apart from the generous patrons of the NGI and the harvests that the highly organised university fundraisers have won – on a scale anything like in the US or even sporadically Germany, France, Scandinavia and the UK. Fundraising development is almost never left to Boards: it is rare that a Board Member brings a prospect to the table or is of such high public standing that offers come in. In America such Board Members are more frequently found and some high-prestige boards expect donations from its members. It is vanishingly rare here except, again, where donors supported the millennium wing of the NGI and contributed funds to buy works of art for the collections.

If you develop an opening to ask for funds, who asks for them and when is the ask made? Well for starters, not before highly professional research and careful and often long-drawn out cultivation of the prospect – a highly professional skill. The usual answer is that the CEO and the Board Chair – in partnership – do the asking and demonstrate to the potential donor that they have both the authority to speak for the institution and the capacity to deliver on their promises. This cannot be emphasised too highly. No one gives money to an Advisory Council. A Council advising on two such different institutions with such different needs embodies a failure to understand the central importance of

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identity and coherence both in fundraising and in governance. It is often called a ‘brand’.

Moreover, the proposed Advisory Council seems to eliminate the rights of nomination to the Board of the two NCIs which belong to the RDS and RIA the first of which made the Library and both together, made the Museum. It is such a poorly thought-out proposal that it seems clear that the framers of it have a little understanding of what the two institutions are for and what it is that they do and how they can be helped. The proposal is a turkey (perhaps one designed by the committee which gave us the camel) and no self-respecting member of the great and the good would join it if asked and no self-respecting potential donor would give – what? to which institution? what for? – if approached by a Chair who had to do too much explaining before getting to the point.

A position on that board, including the Chairmanship, “Ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit” as John Nance Garner (FDR’s VP and Speaker of the House of Representatives) advised Lyndon Johnson of the VicePresidency when asked to join JFK on the ticket. Additionally, the prescription of the areas of interest to the Advisory Council looks like a narrowing to an unacceptable extent of the channels of statutory advice on these vital national institutions. In short, in the future neither the Minister nor the Department need be too bothered as many attempts to advise may be dismissed as ultra vires. In a modern age of grown-up citizens, this is simply not acceptable in a Republic.

It seems to me that having drawn back from the misguided attempt to merge the

National Archives and the NLI, some kind of shotgun marriage was needed to appease the gods of Merrion Street and the Museum and Library are the sacrificial victims in this matter of governance or rather the lack of it.

I am equally critical of the intention in all the institutions without governing boards to make the Director statutorily autonomous.

Why? This has been the malaise of many of our institutions and may well be demoralise staff as the directorship is affirmed as a de facto local dictatorship. Or will it be?

Because with Finance and HR in the hands of the Department, what does the autonomy of the Director mean? Not at lot when the chips are down I expect. Is there some numbers game afoot here? The Employment Control Framework may well work in favour of a parent department when the redeployed quango staff are redistributed. I cannot say. But as a matter of principle we need to know who will hold the fiduciary responsibility for the Museum and Library: the directors? – bad in principle as they are employees or the Minister? A minister needs that like a hole in the head. Where is the buffer against improper pressure, against infringement of the trusteeship role that every collecting institution has? Where is the buffer against administrators simply moving money from an institution’s vote for some contingent reason? May I add that the Department makes so many direct grants nowadays that it really needs to use an independent refereeing process to vet them and to protect themselves against all the problems that givers of grants come up against? It needs more advice from outside, not less.

I am also very critical of the proposal to abolish the statutory committees of the Heritage Council (HC) because before that Council was established there were active and important statutory councils – such as the National Monuments Advisory Council on which I served – and these were abolished to make way for the HC but there was a clear understanding at the time that the statutory committees of the HC would take over much of their responsibilities and, with a wider membership than just the Council, would be effective and they were. This is another example of the extinction of statutory advice that I worry about. Happily, the most valuable service of the HC from our perspective is the quality assurance scheme for museums which was established by a non-statutory committee to which Pat Cooke and Eithne Verling gave important guidance all those years ago. Such a scheme must be at arm’s length. Long may it continue.

THE POSITIVE SIDE

There can be no excuse in present conditions, nor has there been for a long time, for not sharing resources or maximising the possibilities of rationalising services which are not site-specific. The process of developing service-level agreements between clusters of NCIs is fair enough under the circumstances although I worry about concentrations of cultural power in fewer hands. I am concerned that the autonomy promised the Directors by statute would be a very qualified one as financial power is one of the principal characteristics of independence, operational or otherwise. I would have preferred a concentration of HR and Finance to be managed by the institutions collectively.

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Sharing other services, storage especially, would be welcome. An initiative to do just that about five years ago foundered unjustifiably on disagreement by one of NCIs. Joint disaster planning has been underway for some time and it is an absolute necessity that it should continue. The new announcement confirms that.

Marketing of the compatible NCI collecting institutions could be centralised for generic campaigns, surveys and analysis but a central marketing arm would be wise to detach staff members to specialise in promoting individual institutions and projects. Speed of response, deep familiarity with what is going on are required for effective marketing. Some of these proposals are broadly what managers in NCIs may wish to endorse because they have been on the table for a very long time and work has already begun.

Outsourcing has been fundamental for some institutions for a long time – legal and financial services, HR, design and presentation all are possible to contract out. Some conservation is also – but there are such differences between conservation needs that no single laboratory will answer all the requirements of the various collections.

Training is an area of great significance and that must mostly be outsourced. One of the

great problems in NCIs is that many staff get no management experience unless they become department heads. Something needs to be done about this. Perhaps this is an area for the IMA to think about. I know you may be leery of the task as your splendid BoardMatch presentation on governance came such a short while before the announced abolition of certain Boards.

But if you have a Board, Governing or otherwise, spend time on them and with them. Training in their fiduciary and policy roles is a must. The standards of behaviour between the parties must also be made plain: no micromanagement by the Board, no blindsiding the Board by management; timely briefings, no staff making end runs around the Director to a Board, no Board members playing favourites with staff members and in small institutions, no staff representative on the Board. No Board member a ‘constituency’ representative.

There should be Board and management insurance as well as public liability cover.

Please note that amongst our most successful institutions, and least affected by the current announcements, are organisations with governing boards with many ex officio members and with, in the case of the Chester Beatty Library, the right to co-opt Board members. These Boards also elect their own Chairs. This is the model to follow.

Michael Ryan was Director of the Chester Beatty Library until 2010

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This article is based on the Irish Museums Association Annual James White Memorial Lecture, November 2013, Dublin.

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The porous museum: making connections: building partnerships BRIAN KENNEDY

INTRODUCTION1

I

HAVE BEEN a member of the Irish Diaspora since 1997. During my art museum career, I have moved from publicly funded national museums in Ireland and Australia to privately funded museums in America, first at Dartmouth College, and now in Toledo, Ohio. Dartmouth is a most impressive institution, an Ivy League university, predominantly an undergraduate college but one with distinguished professional graduate schools. It has an endowment of three and a half billion dollars and just over 5,000 students. That’s $700,000 per student. I recall asking the Dean of the Tuck Business School whether he had ever had one of his MBA students go into a not-for-profit. He looked at me witheringly and said, “Yeah we had one of them once”.

One thing I have learned is that it does not matter how much money you have if you do not have good ideas. It does not matter whether your money comes mainly through government politicians or from private donors, they all react very well to good ideas and to courtship. Our conference theme is, after all, about making connections, building partnerships.

There are some 8,000 museums in the United States today and over half of them

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have been built since 1970. Museum building is to today what church building was to previous centuries. China is on an unprecedented museum building campaign, aiming to construct 1,000 museums between 2005 and 2015. Only one tenth of American museums, about 800, have undergone the rigorous process to achieve the American Association of Museums’ accreditation standard, and of these just over 200 are major art museums. Some of these art museums were founded over 100 years ago, like the Toledo Museum of Art in 1901, because rich industrialists wanted to generate civic pride in their communities and create a body of industrial workers who aspired to make ever better designed products. As in the American Gilded Age around 1900, the so-called One Per Cent in the USA today are enormously wealthy and getting wealthier. The greatest inter-generational wealth transfer in history has just begun. Museums want a part of this. Bequests will be the key to the prolongation of the Toledo Museum of Art’s current financial strength. In consequence, I spend quite a bit of my time with delightful ageing donors.

To give you an idea of what is happening in America in regard to the growth of concentrated wealth, just consider the Dow

Jones Industrial Average Index of major American companies. It took twenty years to rise from 6,000 points in 1996 to 14,000 points in 2007. When the stock market crashed, the Dow took only eighteen months to fall to its lowest point of 6,500 points in March 2009. Now just six years later, it is back over 15,000 points. It has taken only one quarter as long for the rich to get twice as rich as it did before the crash. The Toledo Museum of Art’s endowment - a few hundred million dollars - grew by 15% in 2012. Why mention this? Because there is a lot of money that can enter our museums if we are attractive enough and if we are porous enough. There was a time when Ireland had no billionaires. Now Ireland does! Even after the greatest stock market crash since the late 1920s.

One of the reasons why older museums are not yet porous enough is because they are still run as if they exist more for those who work in them than for those who visit them.

Museums have traditionally been more concerned generally with permanence, that is to say with sticking around, than with relevance. It takes a long time for a big ship to change direction. Museums have traditionally been run by US for THEM. We have been the inner circle and everyone else has been kept outside it. Promoting public access and developing our audiences will require allowing THEM, our publics, to a considerable extent, to run US. It is as if an X has been stamped on our circle. The public has landed at our epicentre. This is really uncomfortable for those of us who grew with the idea that the ‘Command and Control’ model is the standard. The

confrontations will become loud in short shrift in consequence to this dynamic change ahead of us if we do not negotiate with the THEM who have become US. This is what the social media revolution is all about.

This is what the ageing population in many countries is all about. This is what migratory shifts, gender shifts, are all about. For example, does it make sense to have little or no African or Asian art in the National Gallery of Ireland when many who call themselves Irish Citizens now have traditions and backgrounds in these continents? Are there portraits of the new Irish in the Nation’s Portrait Gallery?

What are our dominant logics, those assumptions that are so ingrained that we cannot see them, never mind confront them?

Have we simply too many museums? Are all our museums relevant or are some of them simply relics? Why not sell off collections which are never shown, or have always been in storage, or are of inferior quality? How much heritage is too much heritage? Are we prepared to entertain difficult questions?

One of the best-selling Harvard Business Review articles ever published is John Kotter’s Leading Change.2 He asked “Why transformation efforts fail?” He elaborated eight stages for leading change, the first of which is creating a sense of urgency.

Challenging our comfort zones, engaging risk. Do we in our museums feel an urgency to change today? If so, what is it? Museum leaders are the Chief Futures Officers of their organizations. They need to be focused on what is up ahead, anticipating changes and preparing for them.

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Simply put, our urgency is that museums have a failing business model. They are over-dependent on a single funding source.

In Europe, and Ireland is a fine example, museums are over dependent on public funds. They are overly exposed to the winds of change in national politics and economics. Changing policies and priorities on a national scale can impact museums even though they consume only a tiny fraction of the national budget. In America, most museums are over dependent on private donations and endowment income.

The Stock Market Crash of 2008 wiped 40% off all US retirement and endowment saving funds. The Toledo Museum of Art’s endowments dropped over $100m. The need to spread the sources of our funding is very obvious. So what are museums to do?

First of all it is important to distinguish that there is no one model of museum. Over the past year the Toledo Museum of Art has been involved in a project called The Innovatrium3 with four other large museums – the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Nelson Atkins in Kansas City, and the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh. We each have several hundred museum employees (Toledo has 300) and have somewhat different funding approaches. The High and the Carnegie charge admission, the others do not. In fact one third of major American art museums have free admission to their permanent collections and two thirds charge varying entry prices. The directors of the five Innovatrium Museums determined at the outset that there were five “major models of the Modern American art museum”. You

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might like to consider these to assess which one you think your museum is most like? It is important to distinguish which one you are predominantly so that you can pitch towards its particular qualities and circumstances.

EMERGING MUSEUM ARCHETYPES

The Community Cloud The museum acts as the hub of your city’s artistic community like the iCloud is the hub or your iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro universe, thereby creating a communal emotional connection.

Extraction and Exhibition The objects are like the cast of a Broadway Show. The ‘major geniuses’ variant is about bringing the big name stars – such as Monet or Picasso – to town. The “minor geniuses” variant is about creating a show out of lesser known objects.

Action – Based Learning The idea here is to create a personal emotional connection between the audience member and the works of art.

Want to learn how to blow glass? Want to learn how to see better?

The Destination Resort What if the museum were like Disneyworld? What’s your FastPass? How would you partner with the local sports franchise to entertain dad while mom and the kids went to the museum? What if the museum is like a ski resort? Who are your ski instructors? What is your après ski experience?

Muse du Soleil Zoo Cirque Cirque du Soleil Collected Animals Moving Animals No Animals Collected Objects Moving Objects No Objects Museum Traveling Exhibition ??

museum seeks to mimic best practice in local car dealerships, because they are focused on winning much of their profit on the quality of their after-sales-service. We embrace feedback and want to invite our patrons to have a relational involvement with us, much more than a transactional engagement. Our membership program mimics an airline frequent-flyer program.

One of the pluses of the Innovatrium format was that a group of eight employees from each of five museums came together on several occasions to workshop experiments aimed at attracting the millennial generation. The staff members got to know each other well. They played with each other’s ideas by implementing innovative projects. They failed together, learned lessons together, and had some successes too. Through their experiences, they began to apply lessons to the way they do their daily business throughout their museums.

They learned that Traditionalists (born before 1946) are loyal to non-profits. Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) want to have impact. The Gen Xers (born between 1961 and 1981), are sceptical of causes and need proof. And the Millennials (born between 1982 and 2000) want their experiences to be exciting and customized.4

Directors of museums need to get out in front of their brand, to establish it, burnish it, and constantly improve public perception of it. This is not a question of ego. Most of us would prefer a quiet life, but we must be prepared to be a public face, to be the coach of our team, the commentator on our performance, the conductor of our orchestra, the captain of our ship. We must accept that authority and responsibility. Leadership is, in essence, getting everyone else to do the work and you are responsible. It is different from management in the classic definition – leadership is doing the right thing, management is doing things right.

The five museums’ staff groups also communicated with each other in weekly virtual meetings via Skype. The key to this type of group exercise is to recognize that most innovations involve applying a practice from another business sector to your own.

Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line.

He adapted what he saw in the food processing industry to the nascent car industry. In Toledo today, for example, our

So the key message – collaborate with others and make projects together. Partner with people from within and outside your industry. Look for where the crowds go and work out a way to connect them with your institution’s purpose. In Toledo the crowds are at ice hockey games, at baseball games, in the Convention Center, at conferences and concerts, and in large local mega-churches. Where are the crowds in your town or city and what are you doing to connect your museum’s purpose with them?

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The key questions every museum director, as indeed every business leader, must ask regularly are: n what will we stop doing? n what will we continue doing? n what will we start doing?

These questions apply as clearly to for-profits where quarterly earnings and dividends are a mark of success or failure.

Although museums measure their social benefits over a longer term, they nonetheless need to address these questions. For instance, questions about what we might stop doing can be simple?

Will we stop printing our quarterly brochure and put it online only? Will we have one musical concert per month with a better quality musician, or will we keep having one concert every week? Will we stop using plastic cutlery in our cafe? Or bigger questions. Will we close two days each week? Will we outsource our photography, our marketing, our HR services? Will we stop offering pensions to our staff? Would people really protest if we closed down and sold our assets? Could we think about how our organization would structure itself afresh in order to be truly relevant if it was founded today?

It is vitally important that we seek expertise from outside our own sector. We need to address our Competing Values Framework.

This framework developed at the University of Michigan has four quadrants collaborator, competitor, creator, controller.

It is particularly useful in building teams by constructing them with complementary personality types. Each one of us tends to

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have one predominant marker, and a secondary one. Our friends and colleagues would say easily what distinguishes us particularly. We are either collaborators who want to do things together, competitors who want to do things fast, creators who want to do things first, or controllers who want to do things right.

If we are serious about developing our audiences, we need to determine the nature of the culture of our organizations. We need to determine, above all, our purpose. Once determined, all of our objectives must focus singularly on achieving that purpose. As John Kotter puts it2 we must establish our sense of urgency, form a powerful guiding coalition, create a vision, empower others to enact it, plan for short term wins, consolidate improvements, and institutionalize our process. Most transformational efforts never become institutionalized. Either the leadership leaves or the guiding coalition never changes its culture. What happens within the organization will remain fundamentally the same, before swinging back to a status quo. This is our doomsday scenario. If your culture does not change, you have not been transformed.

In Toledo, we have determined that our purpose is art education. We are an art institution with an educational purpose. This determination has opened up dynamic possibilities and has already led to significant changes in the way we do business. It is showing signs of broadly shifting our funding model to incorporate publicly funded activities.

While at Dartmouth College between 2005 and 2010, I had the good fortune to work with the College President Dr Jim Yong Kim, who later left the university to become Head of the World Bank. Jim was interested in creating academic partnerships and his invitation to me to build links between the university and many academic faculty engendered experiments which have become the foundation for what is now happening in Toledo. Collection-rich art museums like the Toledo Museum of Art have operated most often on the premise that “we have great works of art, come see them!” This works for a lot of people but it is debatable how well it serves art education.

In any event, museums are not exemplars of the so-called virtuous circle of planning - the Plan, Implement, Evaluate model. Museums tend not to spend a lot of money on customer evaluation and feedback, and very often these activities are cut or scaled back during a period of financial crunch.

At Dartmouth, and now in Toledo, our team has been changing the way we describe what we do. We say would you like to learn how to see better? Would you like to learn ways to improve how much meaning you take in from everything you see? The answer from the public, staff and donors, tends to be a strong “yes!” This teaching strategy is called Visual Literacy. It is not the same, though it is somewhat related to Visual Teaching Strategies, a proprietary teaching formula in America.

Museums are especially well placed to teach visual literacy – which is defined as the ability to construct meaning from what we

Figure 1.

Toledo Museum of Art Center for the Visual Arts (CVA). Designed by Frank O. Gehry. 1992. Photo by Richard Putney.

see. We have all practiced many teaching methodologies over the years, each one aimed at focusing on museum objects in illuminating ways. The consequence of a broader Visual Literacy approach is that the museum becomes relevant to a wide range of academic disciplines, not just primarily to studio art, and the so-called fine arts subjects. The possibilities for engagement with the industrial, education, health and social sectors, begin to multiply. The Toledo Museum of Art has been conducting programs with health sector providers, administrators, doctors, nurses, breast cancer diagnosticians, insurance agents, investment bankers, property developers, lawyers, church leaders, architects and engineers, university professors, and of course art historians, art educators, and those pursuing courses in museum practice.

The impact is becoming dramatic already.

You will forgive me telling a good news story, at risk of bragging, because I wish to champion the staff in our museum who do all the work. Our staff have embraced a broad Visual Literacy direction which has

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shifted the direction of our museum’s activities platform. We are now focused on teaching visual literacy within all of our programs. We have bought the available internet URLs in .com, .net and .org formats, and have registered the title “Center for Visual Literacy” as a trademark. We are working to establish a Center for Visual Literacy, the first in an American art museum. It will be housed in the museum and in the building on our museum site designed by Frank Gehry in 1992, which is currently the Center for the Visual Arts of the University of Toledo, with whom we are establishing a partnership memorandum of understanding. The ambitious aim is to provide accredited courses in visual literacy for students from various universities in our region, focused at first on the 21,000 students of the University of Toledo. The course work of the Center for Visual Literacy will engage the art collections of the Toledo Museum of Art. We want to be civic museum that also acts as a university museum. We have already been active with educational initiatives at Bowling Green State University engaging faculty there about visual literacy, with the Nursing Programs of Mercy College and Lourdes University, and with the art history and museum studies courses of the University of Michigan. We had an exhibition this spring George Bellows and New York which was curated by University of Michigan art history students. There have been eight exhibitions curated by University of Toledo students in the last three years, each with works of art drawn from the Toledo Museum’s collections.

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Figure 2.

Garland (2), Henri (3), Jayla (1) and Jaycee (1), Toledo Museum of Art.

Now I know many museums will have done programs like these, but what I wish to emphasize is the necessity for scaling-up and intensity of engagement within your community if a change is to be transformative. We have a significant program of community based exhibitions in in our Community Galleries, focused on collaborations with local schools, community centres, artists’ groups, hospitals, clubs and societies. A program called Wordshop (similar to Fighting Words in Dublin)5 has been using the Toledo Museum of Art as one of its sites, because it encourages young school children living in disadvantaged home circumstances to engage with learning to read text and images by telling stories. Low literacy rates are a severe problem for communities in many Mid-West American ‘rust belt’ cities.

The Toledo Public Library (like the museum it is a beautiful facility), has some 1,400 volunteers engaged in its Read for Literacy programs. At the museum, our large Family Center is renowned for is pre-schoolers program, and its After School programs for children living with disadvantage. The museum also runs 35 art classes, from watercolour to jewellery, and these are held throughout the week and at weekends, as

they have been since the 1920s. The key to this success, being continually relevant over decades, is to constantly seek to provide answers to community needs.

The Toledo Museum of Art is currently examining the feasibility of developing an elementary School for the Arts on a neighbouring site. The local Toledo School for the Arts, a middle and high school, is nationally ranked but does not have an elementary school which would complete their educational pipeline. The Museum has also been active in making itself more sustainable environmentally. In recent years we have installed over 3,000 solar panels on our roof and in a solar canopy in our car park. On a sunny day we get half of our total energy needs from these panels and we have on a number of occasions gone totally off the grid, making more electricity than we need. We installed high efficiency gas turbines for the HVAC system, and are gradually moving our 2,200 lights within the galleries over to LEDs. We want the museum to be beautiful, like a first class hotel, and so we landscape our gardens, and place flower arrangements in the bathrooms. We seek to create experiences, making memories for our visitors. We won a Best Museum Exhibition Award for our recent Manet: Portraying Life exhibition and a Best Museum Event Award in 2012 recently for a sleepover we held in the museum for 1,500 girl guides, in honour of the Centenary of the Girl Scouts Association (the first troop to be charted in the US was in Toledo, Ohio).

We also won acclaim for the Glass Arts Society’s international conference in 2012,

marking the foundation of the Studio Glass Movement in Toledo in 1962. Toledo has been a major centre for glass manufacturing since the 1880s and is known as the Glass City. We believe it is essential to continually evaluate our museum’s efforts, and we use various tools to do this including ‘mystery shoppers’. For the past two years, our visitors have rated our security staff at 91% for friendliness and 86% of visitors gave us 5/5 for museum facilities cleanliness, which means we still have some work to do. Our staff is extraordinary and we work a lot on team play and collaboration. One fifth of our 177 full-time non-security staff are major donors to the museum at the President’s Council level, giving back over $1,000 per year from their salary as a donation to the museum. This group includes all of our building maintenance staff and our groundskeepers.

Toledo Museum has offered free general admission since it opened in 1901 and receives about 400,000 visitors per year, twice our city population and half our metropolitan population. Only the National Gallery in Washington gets a higher per capita visitation among American art museums, and it is majorly frequented by tourists which Toledo is not. Increasing our national and international visibility is important to Toledo. We want visitors to comment about us, as they do on the Trip Advisor website (5/5), and on Yelp (4/5).

Our most recent big exhibition, Manet: Portraying Life, was organized with the Royal Academy, London. In 2014 the International Visual Literacy Association will hold its annual conference in Toledo.

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The key to these developments has been a determined emphasis on our purpose – art education – and a commitment to strategic thinking using the Plan, Implement, Evaluate model. Our active solicitation in Toledo of suggestions for museum improvements has produced over 3,300 ideas. We have been working our way through these, using a traffic light formula, green if the matter is dealt with, orange for being implemented and red for not done yet or that we have decided not to respond to the suggestion.

Some improvements have been small and easy, for example fixing a water fountain that was not working. Others are challenging like how to better use the splendid 1,750 seat Peristyle Theater within our building, home to the Toledo Symphony Orchestra. Thus far we have increased the number of nights the Theater is used from 60 to 70 per year, by introducing jazz concerts and public lectures with distinguished speakers, in addition to the regular classical music orchestral concerts.

It is vital to seek out the expertise available in your own city and region, those experts who can hothouse you about how to innovate and lead change. This can be done by establishing small groups of museums,

like the Innovatrium project mentioned earlier, or by working with national organizations, similar to the convenings organized by the Washington DC based National Arts Strategies, led by Russell Willis Taylor, formerly of the English National Opera. In the past three years, the NAS Chief Executives Program has brought together 95 arts leaders from the USA and abroad. They were invited to come to leading business schools, the Ross Business School at the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin, the Harvard Business School, and to Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, for intensive multi-day sessions, examining how arts organizations should think about major topics like the nature of convergence, competition, money, and relevance. There are numerous leadership tools available on the National Arts Strategies website which can be accessed through any web search engine.

Museums are indeed porous now. We have all moved along way towards André Malraux’s concept of the ‘Museum Without Walls’. Museums need to be active agents for the education of their communities. May I end by inviting intense consideration of how porous you want to be?

Dr Brian P. Kennedy is Director of the Toledo Museum of Art

NOTES 1.

This article is based on a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Annual Conference, The Porous Museum: Making Connections, Building Partnerships, on 22 February 2013, Kilkenny.

2. Kotter, J. (2007) Leading change: why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review.

3. See http://www.innovatrium.org 4. See http://www.bridgeworks.com 5. See http://www.fightingwords.ie

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Adapt and thrive MARK TAYLOR

INTRODUCTION1

W

E ARE ALL having a few difficulties at the moment aren’t we? Locally, regionally, nationally and globally, across all sides of our communities. Obviously museums and galleries, as part of our civil society, are going to be affected.

However, we have had dips before. They are cyclical. They are followed by recovery and good times return. It is part of the nature of capitalism. It therefore follows that for museums, however difficult current times are, good times will return. We all know that certain laws are immutable; museums are there forever, collections are the rock on which they are built; public funding will always be the mainstay of museum finances, visitors will always be visiting and God will always be in his heaven.

All this might be true. Mostly I hope it is, but I wonder. Could it be that the perfect storm of the worst financial crisis since the war and significant changes in social conditions, education, technology and public perceptions mean that things will never be the same again? I don’t know. If I did I would be working for the government on a huge salary but what I present here is the argument that the museum sector, particularly in Europe, is facing the most significant change to its funding, programmes and operations since the late

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19th century when many of our great institutions were founded.

CAUSES OF CHANGE

You don’t need me to tell you the most important factor forcing change – it is money, or the lack of it. For a sector that has long considered itself part of, or allied to the public sector, the reductions in funding begun in 2009 are likely to continue for some time yet. But as a result of the recession, or alongside it, there are other contributors to change.

Perhaps the most memorable way to catalogue these influence is with that old mnemonic PEST – political, economical, social and technological.

Political Government is changing before our eyes. It matters not which side of the political divide they hail from. Squeezed and harangued, they concentrate on what they regard as essential and neglect and reduce the desirable; likewise at regional and local level.

For museums this means reduced funding but, crucially, less empathy, less understanding of the role culture can play.

More insistence on value for money. We live in a world dominated by bean counter and they have their hands on the purse strings

and want outputs delivered in terms of beans that can be counted and immortalised on a spread-sheet – visitors, website hits, income, secondary spend. They are much less impressed by other types of beans – social beans, educational beans or wellbeing beans.

It means added pressure on museums to find new sources of funding, partners and income streams. To do this they need to change their structures, priorities and cultures.

Environmental The issues around the environment have been present for some time but nobody really thinks they will go away. The financial crisis only accentuates the business case on top of the moral case that has been with us for some time.

Museums have always been open to the accusation that they are environmentally unfriendly. Often housed in large energy inefficient buildings, they store and display objects in environmental conditions that are often expensive as well as being unnecessary and they sustain themselves by seducing visitors who travel by plane, train and automobile from far flung parts of the globe.

Energy is never going to significantly drop in price; the pressure to preserve the environment is unlikely to diminish. If museums want to control costs and occupy a respected place at the heart of their differing communities, they have to take note of the environmental agenda.

Social Social issues are obviously heightened by the recession. No person is unaffected by what has happened since 2008 and museums must adapt and react to the change in the circumstances, perspective and budget of the people and communities who they serve and who fund them.

Mobility is reduced, money is tighter, communities excluded and social justice threatened. Museums need to decide where they stand, what part of the community they occupy and what role(s) they can play. At the same time they must consider their product – what it is, what it is for, who it is for and how it is delivered.

Technological This is perhaps the easiest to get our heads around and it has been coming for some time. Not only is it the ability to show and interpret collections to people thousands of miles away but the marketing possibilities, the increasing technological savvy of users and the democratisation of knowledge.

So, are all these factors pushing museums into a new paradigm? If they are, how will museums and the museums sector be different in the future?

Funding Could it be that the dominance of public funding is over? In the future central and local government might be seen as minority investors in museums. Something more like the American model with its varied models and funding patterns.

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For this to happen, private funds need to be attracted in much larger amounts. The way museums and funders think and react with each other needs to change. In Europe the man/woman on the street assumes museums are funded from the public purse.

Therefore they do not think their help is needed. We need to persuade society that their commitment and contribution is needed to supplement tax payers’ money and do not just think corporate here, think individuals. Can we persuade significant numbers to donate modest amounts each month? Perhaps, but that culture is currently not prevalent and might take 20 years to foster.

Governance The changes in funding and the loss of public investment will break up the old model of public sector museums – be they national or local government or university.

Museums might close. Partnerships and merges will develop, trusts will be created, freeing up museums to pursue alternative lines of funding. In line with a new purpose and governance, much of the control and guidance (and so ownership) might be from the bottom rather than the top with more volunteering, local trusts and collaborations with other art forms such as theatre, music, visual arts and, of course, libraries.

Income Generation A sustainable museum is one with diversity of income; one not reliant on one major block of income. It is to be hoped that public funds will still be significant and money raised from private sources will increase but trading, licensing, catering and anything else

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you can think of that generates cash will be central to the core of a museum. In the new world, much of this income may be commissioned work from other providers.

Museums will need to cast their nets wider and this includes other parts of the third sector as well as other government departments that all have so much more money than culture departments.

Purpose Could it be that as museums fight for the declining euro, and morph into new and flexible organisations, they begin to move closer to all sides of their communities? That they begin to strengthen the role they had in the 19th century – contributing to the whole of society’s wellbeing? The Museums Association is currently halfway through its major think piece entitled Museums 2020 which looks at where museums might be in ten years’ time and in particular their social impact.

Central to the thinking is that museums will be with and for their communities. They should play a key role within the community in addressing issues of social concern; from immigrant communities to truancy from child poverty and literacy to mental health and homelessness. In this way museums become of the people rather than for the people; measuring their worth in impact rather than visitors and research, seeing themselves as enablers and canvasses on which to discuss and promote social justice and other issues that concern a community.

This concept, as you can imagine, provokes some controversy among traditionalists and

it is important that other impacts such as economic and educational, are acknowledged and the role of collections is still embedded. But think about how this makes sense.

As times become more challenging it embeds a museum in its community so increasing its support, it engages many, many local people, it diversifies income as it works with and for other commissioning bodies, it puts museums at the centre of society.

What it might do that will be the hardest and most transformational is persuading curators and museum professionals to do the hardest thing – give up power. The power to spend, the power to govern without stakeholder involvement, the power to decide on programming, the power to see the museum as solely a museum and even the power to decide what objects have significance and should be displayed. The readers become the writers and the writers become the readers. Such a change would truly change the nature and role of a museum and its place within society.

Finally, how might this sea change impact on the two key ingredients of a great museum – collections and the workforce?

Collections All this might sound like a major diminishing of the role of collections but it cannot be. All the work I have described depends on the collections. They are our

unique selling point. If we try to outDisney Disney, we will lose. They are better at being Disney. We must keep collections at the heart of what we do but we must use them more imaginatively, more creatively and be less precious about them. All collection work must have an obvious public impact and for this to happen we need to get them out, use them more and make them work for us.

People People are the key. Any transformation of the museum sector depends on people not government, not collections and not even money. Ultimately, it is people who make a museum. You can have a great collection with average people and it will still be an average museum, but an average collection and great people often produce a great museum.

But this new vision needs different people with different skills. They will need to have varied and diverse backgrounds, have energy and entrepreneurial spirit. They cannot be locked in one discipline, be it academic, education or management; they have to be willing to adapt and have the vision to make the museum central to people’s lives. All this with a core of belief and understanding in the role that collections can play in changing people’s lives.

So, all this might be pie in the sky scaremongering. In ten years we will be back to our old funding levels and our comfy lives and all this wittering about a

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new paradigm will seem slightly hysterical.

That would be great wouldn’t it? No thinking about being at the centre of communities, no concentration on impact, no need to diversify income, just concentrate on getting

pictures on walls with labels next to them.

Wouldn’t that be a relief eh?

Or would it?

Mark Taylor is the former Director of the Museums Association, UK

NOTES 1. This article is based on a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Annual Conference, The Porous Museum: Making Connections, Building Partnerships, on 22 February 2013, Kilkenny.

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Engagement and disengagement: Implications for increased partnerships between museums, curators and artists PIPPA LITTLE

INTRODUCTION1

T

HE THEME OF cycles of engagement and disengagement as experienced by artists while making a new artwork for an exhibition and some implications for the museum context form the focus of this article. The increased interest in collections based work with artists and an appeal for an artist focussed approach in contemporary curatorial practice are discussed. Drawing from a research project that explored the artistic process through an empirical study, examples of data relating to engagement and disengagement and the analysis and interpretation of the tensions between the artists’ experiences of the two emotional states are presented. Reflecting on the implications of this model of artistic process for contemporary curatorial practice, some possible strategies for curators in museums in facilitating their work with artists and in enhancing curatorial practice are explored.

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

A qualitative grounded approach was taken to the data collection and analysis. I invited artists to participate in case studies. Amanda Coogan produced a filmed group performance, Spéir Mhná, Neva Elliott undertook Archiving Limerick, Sam Ely and Lynn Harris’ exploration of the Michael

O’Connor poster collection resulted in A Poster by an Unknown for an Unknown, Alan Magee made Impermanent Recollection, Linda Molenaar created an installation, They will become flax, Melanie O’Rourke constructed a poster, Untitled and Alan Phelan produced an installation entitled Information deficit blended-in as a tree.

The artists made work for an exhibition, ‘Fresh: re-imagining the Collection’ for Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) in 2006.

The brief was to make a new work that in some way reflected on the permanent collection at the gallery, to act as a catalyst for their own work. This provided a real world context from which to gather data and analyse artists’ experiences as they made a new artwork.

Multiple sources of evidence were used in the case studies, but they were primarily interview based. The data was examined through individual case studies and then detailed interpretation through cross case analysis took place. The themes and categories were developed from multiple quotes. Four overarching themes were selected as the focus of the cross case analysis, to describe the artists’ experience of making a new artwork and to provide a

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speculative framework for further investigation.

The tensions between engagement and disengagement, a feature of an overarching theme of feelings associated with the artists’ experiences are explored here. For demonstration purposes, quotes that are related to the artists’ experiences of engagement in association with the collections based aspect are provided, alongside experiences of disengagement.

COLLECTIONS BASED WORK WITH ARTISTS

It is not unusual for museum professionals, regardless of specialism, to work with artists on projects aimed at exploring, or promoting accessibility to collections, across subject areas. This may be initiated by the museum, or artist.

Internationally there has been an increased interest in working with artists from museum collections, as a means of supporting interpretation and as an area for

Many of our museum collections in Ireland are under explored. The potential for research into these collections and the

Figure 1.

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academic investigation. The exhibition format of inviting artists to work from permanent collections (notably utilised in the Centre for Applied Research in Visual Arts Education2), establishes that this approach is useful, interesting, may provide interesting insights for audiences, and also supports widening out the use of collections.

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Alan Phelan, Information deficit blended-in as a tree, Metal, wood, papier-mâché, paint, polish, polystyrene and clay, 2006.

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development of exhibitions that make our objects accessible to wider publics holds promise. Notwithstanding the economic climate, there is the scope for progression.

AN ARTIST FOCUSSED APPROACH

There is frequent commentary in the literature in contemporary curatorial practice on appreciating artistic process and indicating the importance of an artist focused approach, from practitioners like Hopps, in an interview with Obrist3, to more recently, Lind4 notes that “I am keen to be an enabler, to create the best possible circumstances for artists”. Taking an artist focused approach requires a deep understanding and appreciation for artistic process.

However, from an examination of the literature in the field of creativity research, artistic process is little understood. Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi5 undertook the first significant study that established an analytically informed explanation of artistic process. Over thirty years later their longitudinal study remains the foundation from which artistic work is understood.

Drawing from this understanding of the flow state, the artists’ experiences of engagement and disengagement are presented. Increased knowledge about how artists feel as they make work, the rhythms and cycles of engagement and disengagement, could increase an understanding of that process and the potential for developing and enhancing it, for curators and for artists.

FINDINGS

The artists’ expressed feelings of engagement and disengagement were categorised from the analysis of the artists’ interview transcripts, describing their experiences as they worked to produce their new artworks. A feature of their participation in the artistic cycle was that undertaking this involves both rewards and frustrations. During engagement the artists appeared to experience a totality of absorption and concentration. At some point each of the artists experienced feelings of disengagement. It was normal and could be both positive and negative.

ENGAGEMENT

Following this study of artists, Csikszentmihalyi6,7,8 investigated flow, an experience of intense engagement, in which the participant is absorbed in the task at hand, almost to the point of being unaware of their surroundings. One of Csikszentmihalyi’s key assertions is that flow takes places between boredom and anxiety.

Crucially, the participant may self-manage achieving the flow state, as it is sufficiently challenging to require total attention, but not overwhelming.

All of the artists in the study talked about feelings of deep immersion and interest in their work at certain stages in the process.

These quotes emphasise the intensity and the individual nature of the draw towards immersion and as previously mentioned, the focus is on the collections based aspect.

Melanie O’Rourke decided to base her artwork on a story that she had discovered about Keating and Orpen, two of the artists whose work she had examined from the

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collection. Both of the artists had moved from Ireland and lived and worked in London. She chose to collect newspaper images from Ireland in London as a parallel to their journeys. She said: “I’m really excited about it, because what I am doing actually is […] Keating and Orpen […] and I got very engrossed in that” (4 March).

Before coming down to Limerick Alan Magee identified in the collection catalogue an interest in the seascapes, which eventually featured in the artwork he made.

He described his experiences looking at the artworks on this visit as: “I’ve infused myself in the permanent collection here” (22 March II).

Figure 2.

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Sam Ely and Lynn Harris had discovered the Michael O’Connor Poster Collection. This collection had been donated to the gallery

by O’Connor and was a diverse personal collection that originated as an accompaniment to Listowel writer’s week.

Sam Ely commented that: “I’ve been trying to not pick my favourite one and really easy for me to be seduced into the” (10 April).

These quotes demonstrate a feature of profound appreciation and interest. In order to begin developing their ideas around their new artworks, most of the artists visited the collection shortly after the invitation to participate. Gathering information and selecting new sources and materials seemed

Sam Ely and Lynn Harris, A Poster by an Unknown for and Unknown, Intervention using Michael O’Connor’s International Poster Collection, 2006.

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to nourish and support their progression of the artwork. The intensity of the language with words like, ‘engrossed, infused, seduced’, provides an impression of immersion, an all-encompassing experience and high levels of concentration.

DISENGAGEMENT

Disengagement too is a typical feature of participating in the artistic cycle. Each of the artists experienced feelings of disengagement at some stage. Positive disengagement could involve retreating temporarily in order to progress with renewed vigour. However, the selected quotes focus on low-level, minor disengagement, with the potential to become more unpleasantly negative and to result in the loss of progression. This provides an insight into some of the challenges of participating in the artistic cycle and the obstacles that might be involved in completing an individual artwork.

Repetition was an underlying feature that appeared to initiate disengagement.

Negative disengagement might be initiated by a particular trigger, when an activity became boring and frustrating to experience.

For example, Ely and Harris’ series of artworks included a film of several hundred of the posters slowly turning. Over an intensive weekend Lynn Harris had processed thirteen drawers of posters, selecting, recording and returning them, and she explained that: “keeping them in order, this was a monumental task” (10 April).

Linda Molenaar makes objects that involve labour intensive, repetitive activities. For They will become flax she hand knitted eleven sweaters. She explicitly described her choice of materials as a means of maintaining her engagement: “I need to have respect for the material otherwise I will not have the patience” (15 February).

Six weeks before the exhibition Alan Magee had decided on the final format for his installation, which was composed of a film with sound and a set of concrete appearance cubes. The cubes took a substantial amount of time to make, but he described his approach to them as: “The cubes pieces I have done before. I’ve used all the materials before, so I’m a little less concerned about that” (11 May).

Once the decision on allocating the time to construct them was taken, familiarity with the process supported reduced attention.

The artists had various strategies for managing continuing engagement over a repetitious task. Their focus was on the goal of finishing the artwork in its entirety and the activities that they were undertaking contributed to this.

The impression of the artists’ enjoyment and appreciation of intense engagement may be heightened through the contrasting experiences of low level disengagement. As they moved from the early to the later stages of the artistic cycle, it was necessary to balance the tensions between the two emotional states.

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Figure 3.

Alan Magee, Impermanent Recollection, Installation, 2006.

DISCUSSION

The emotional aspects of the artists’ participation in the artistic cycle, provides a perspective to reflect on how this research may benefit curators and artists. Curators have frequently identified the requirement for an artist-focused ethos, in order to fulfil their roles effectively. This is an area in which greater understanding based on empirical information provides one means towards an improved use of resources.

Enhanced awareness, both of artistic process and possible multiple curatorial roles, supports informed decision making.

RECOMMENDATIONS

This framework of engagement and disengagement normalises the context and offers some considerations for curators to approach informed decision-making and to

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Figure 4.

Linda Molenaar, Swansneck, Performance, 2006.

establish their priorities when there are conflicting demands on increasingly scarce resources. This offers one means of guidance for curators to devise their own strategies and solutions for the specific dilemmas and tensions involved in contemporary practice.

Flow is highly rewarding state to experience.

Understanding the factors involved in productive engagement allow for protecting it accordingly in everyday life. This suggests that an essential principle for curators to consider in ambiguous situations is to centralise maintaining the engagement of the artist and to discourage the inevitable disengagement.

A WIDER REPERTOIRE OF CURATORIAL ROLES

One implication of this research is that facilitating artistic process is not wholly dependent on budgets, but also involves the added value of a supportive dialogue between the artist and the curator. The roles of coaching, mentoring and advising tend to be less likely to be seen as the roles of the curator. This research suggests that in facilitating the artistic cycle there could be benefits in the curator assuming those roles in deliberate and explicit ways. It seems likely that the emotional articulacy demonstrated by the artists during this research supported their artistic process and that facilitating self-reflectivity through dialogue in a coaching role may support aspects of artistic practice.

FURTHER RESEARCH

While the focus in this study was on artists and their process, it suggests the potential

for applying these understandings. The museum context would benefit from a focus on engagement and disengagement, as a means of supporting practices around learning and the visitor experience. The artists’ experiences related to objects in the museum collection offers insights into developing further research that deepens understandings in these areas.

CONCLUSION

This exploratory study, informed by the experiences of the curator as researcher, has established the importance for artists of their emotions, (positive engagement and the inevitable disengagement) and their management of these and the implications for increased partnerships between museums, curators and artists.

There is an increased need for a renewed emphasis on an artist-focused approach in exhibition making.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank the artists who partook in this study, Amanda Coogan, Neva Elliott, Sam Ely, Lynn Harris, Alan Magee, Linda Molenaar, Melanie O’Rourke and Alan Phelan, for generously participating in research conversations recording their experiences and sharing the understandings, ideas, insights and observations that they had about the ways in which they approached their work as artists. The author would like to thank PhD supervisors, Professor Sarah Moore, University of Limerick and Mike Fitzpatrick, Limerick School of Art and Design, Limerick Institute of Technology.

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This paper was developed from doctoral research that took place through the Shinnors Curatorial Scholarship and LIT internal Research Support Funding. The

exhibition Fresh, re-imagining the collection, received financial assistance from an Arts Council Project Funding Award (2006).

Dr Pippa Little is Assistant Arts Officer, Limerick Local Authorities

NOTES 1.

6.

7.

8.

This article is based on a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Annual Conference, The Porous Museum: Making Connections, Building Partnerships, on 22 February 2013, Kilkenny.

Sekules, Veronica & Tickle, Les (eds.) 1997. Collections and Reflections: the transformative and assimilative uses of art objects. Arts Council of England, Norwich.

Obrist, H.U. (1996) Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps talks with Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Artforum 34(6): 60-63, 98, 101, 104, 106.

Lind, M. (2001) Selected nodes in a network of thoughts on curating. In: Carin K. (ed) Words of wisdom: a curator’s vade mecum on contemporary art : 99. Independent Curators International, New York.

Getzels, J.W. and Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1976) The creative vision: a longitudinal study of problem finding in art. Wiley Interscience, New York, London, Sydney, Toronto.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975) Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1991) Flow The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial, New York.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996) Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Harper Perennial, New York.

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Making Connections, Tracing Identities: a Five Year Inventory Project in the Irish Antiquities Division, National Museum of Ireland CLAIRE ANDERSON

INTRODUCTION1

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM of Ireland (NMI) is currently undertaking an inventory of its core collections as part of an overall Five Year Documentation Plan. The plan was developed on foot of recommendations in two separate reports which pinpointed a requirement, also recognised by NMI management, for a comprehensive documentation of the NMI collections. The project was subsequently established as part

Figure 1.

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of the NMI’s own Statement of Strategy 2008-20122 and detailed in the Documentation Plan 2009-20143. The inventory project is managed by the Registration Department, and is underway in all four curatorial divisions of the museum (Irish Antiquities, Irish Folklife, Art & Industrial and Natural History). This article will deal specifically with the inventory project in the Irish Antiquities Division (IAD), which commenced on 31 March 2009.

The National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology, Kildare Street, Dublin. Photo © National Museum of Ireland.

Museum Ireland Volume 23 2013

AIMS AND METHODOLOGY

In carrying out an inventory of its collections, the NMI wished to establish the scope and locations of the national collections, and to make this information available to the public. Thus the main aims of the inventory project were identified as: n To create a database record for each object in the core collection including register details and a current storage location.

n To make each record available to both staff and researchers on a central NMI database.

These aims are being achieved through: n the scanning of existing paper records and data entry, n checking existing records for consistency and accuracy, and

n checking objects and creating inventory level records according to agreed standards.

All documentation is carried out to SPECTRUM4 standards, the UK museum collections management standard.

SPECTRUM lays down documentation procedures which reflect international best practice for museums. Thus each object requires an inventory level record with verified: n object number n object name

n verified current location The IAD inventory also aims to include original register information, topographical

data and published catalogue references for each object wherever possible. It was decided not to include object photography due to time constraints on the project.

However, repacking and light conservation are carried out as required.

At the beginning of the inventory, the existing IAD collections management system was a customised MS Access database. This was further customised at the start of the project to include inventory-specific functions. For example, the initials of the documentation staff member and ‘validation date’ were introduced. This allowed a monthly total of ‘validated records’ to be made in order to monitor the progress of the project, and also enabled object movements to be tracked more accurately. A ‘History of Location’ field was also added which keeps a record of each storage/exhibition/loan location of an object, further enabling the museum to track and accurately locate its collections.

THE IRISH ANTIQUITIES DIVISION INVENTORY PROJECT

In March 2009 there were approximately 141,000 object records in the IAD database, while at the same time the core collection of the IAD was estimated at 290,000 objects requiring individual recording. The core collection represents objects on display and in reserve storage in Kildare Street, but excludes the modern excavation material for which IAD also has curatorial responsibility.

The latter is estimated at close to one million objects, the majority of which will be stored in the new NMI Collections Resource Centre in Swords, Co. Dublin. The core

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collection was thus identified as both an immediate priority and an achievable target for completion within the five year timeframe. The original project team consisted of one documentation officer and 4 documentation assistants, under the direction of then Registrar, Mr. Paul Doyle.

Mary Cahill and Dr Andy Halpin are liaison curators for the project in IAD, reporting to Eamonn Kelly, Keeper of Irish Antiquities.

The inventory project produces monthly reports and also undertakes twice-yearly audits.

The inventory project began documenting objects in the museum’s reserve collection by bringing drawers of objects from the stores up to the documentation office. Each object has its number and description checked in the database, and is repacked or labelled if required. In some cases it is necessary to create new database records, for example for individual objects in a group which previously had only one record. All storage and display areas within the museum have been assigned location codes, which are now used in the database record and on the object label. Certain objects must be documented in situ in the reserve storage area as they are too fragile to move e.g. prehistoric ceramic vessels, wooden methers and large bronze cauldrons. Objects on exhibition were also documented in situ in their display cases, when the museum was closed to the public. Varied work methods are thus employed to suit the needs of the collections.

The origins of the current IAD core collections can be traced back to the Royal

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Figure 2.

Inventory project staff at work in the crypt of the National Museum, Kildare Street.

Photo © C. Anderson.

Dublin Society (RDS), the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI) and the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in the mid to late nineteenth century. Large private collections from antiquarian collectors such as Major Charles Sirr, George Petrie and Dean Dawson were acquired with their individual catalogues of objects and equivalent numbering systems. This continued in the twentieth century with the acquisition of collections such as those from W.J. Knowles and the Rev. Hewson. In more recent times, the NMI has undertaken archaeological excavations across the country; at Lough Gara, Co. Sligo in the 1950s and of course at Wood Quay, Dublin in the 1970s and 1980s.

The NMI has also acquired various national

treasures for the State such as the Derrynaflan hoard in 1980 and the Coggalbeg hoard in 2012.

Such varied origins of the current collections have led to an equally diverse accumulation of archival material and registration numbers. Indeed, multiple catalogues were completed for the same collection in some cases. For example, both Sir William Wilde and W.F. Wakeman catalogued the RIA collection in the nineteenth century, assigning their own sets of numbers as they did so. This has led to a situation whereby one object could have two or more registration numbers e.g. Wk057 (Wakeman catalogue), W101 (Wilde catalogue) and D209 (RIA catalogue). All of these numbers

Figure 3.

must be identified by the inventory project.

The documentation team have become experts in deciphering antiquarian handwriting and in identifying the types of labels used by various individuals over the centuries!

In addition to the antiquarian catalogues available to the inventory project, there is also an extensive archive of excavation and topographical files in the museum.

Topographical files are opened for each object acquired by the museum and represent the object record in paper form.

The topographical file contains a description of the object, details of find place, the object’s museum registration number, storage location and other relevant

Page (on left) from Wilde’s ‘Descriptive Catalogue of the Stone, Earthen and Vegetable Materials in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy’ (1857) and (on right) from the ‘Royal Irish Academy Museum Register of Antiquities (1886)’. Photo © Claire Anderson.

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information. The documentation team occasionally come across objects which have become separated from their labels. They may have a number or findplace on them, which documentation staff can attempt to trace in the registers, databases or NMI files.

If the object cannot be confidently matched to an original register entry, it is either assigned a temporary number or officially acquired and assigned a new annual acquisition number. A temporary numbering system was devised for the inventory project, which uses ‘1000’ as the year of acquisition. For example, the first number in this register is ‘1000:1’ and so on. The ‘1000’ system was devised as it does not duplicate any other numbering system or annual acquisition number already in the NMI databases. Approximately 7000 such temporary numbers have been assigned up to the end of August 2013. It is hoped that as the inventory project progresses through the collections, these objects can eventually be matched to their original register entry and the temporary numbers thus resolved.

BENEFITS OF THE INVENTORY PROJECT

The inventory project has been able to open the IAD collections up to the general public in a number of different ways. The team has hosted outreach education events such as lectures and workshops to enable the public to engage with the ‘behind the scenes’ work at the museum. The project has also engaged with the press5 and an article has appeared in Archaeology Ireland6 detailing interesting objects discovered during the inventory. The IAD inventory team also contributes to a new section of the NMI website Documentation Discoveries7 in which documentation staff

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from all NMI divisions are publishing short articles about collectors, objects and museum-related stories which have come to light in the course of the inventory project.

The inventory project has also made a significant contribution to the IAD collections databases, which now hold approximately 95,000 additional records.

Many of these were created by the inventory team in the Excavations database, which had previously only existed as paper records. For example, the inventory team documented the older excavations at Lough Gara (c.6,000 records), Lagore (c.3,000 records) and Dalkey Island (c.11,000) records. While each of these sites had extensive paper archives, no database records existed. This made access to the information very difficult for both NMI staff and researchers. The expanded IAD database is now an extremely useful research tool thereby opening up the national collections as never before.

A further benefit of the inventory is the increased ease of locating objects in storage.

All objects documented by the project have their current storage locations updated in the database, and this can be used to track the object if it is out on loan, sent for conservation, out for research etc. The longterm goal for Irish Antiquities records is to amalgamate them with the new museumwide Adlib database, which will enable curators and researchers to search records across divisions. The inventory project is also discovering new types and groups of objects, which will provide fresh material for researchers for many years to come.

CONCLUSION

As of August 2013, the IAD inventory project has documented just over 236,000 objects.

This includes the majority of the reserve storage area in the crypt, and also both floors of exhibition material in Kildare Street. The Collections database now holds c.167,000 validated records and the Excavations database now holds c.69,000 validated records. Validated records are those which have had their NMI registration number and current location confirmed by the inventory team. The remaining database records are ‘unvalidated’ (i.e. have unconfirmed object information and/or locations) but suggest that the original estimate of 290,000 objects to be documented was correct. This estimate did not include ‘modern’ excavation material, which is mainly stored in the NMI’s new Collections Resource Centre in Swords, Co. Dublin.

The Five Year Inventory Project has been very successful for the NMI and has also greatly benefitted museum visitors and researchers. However, the project is scheduled to end in December 2014 and the Irish Antiquities Division has already lost its Documentation Officer due to the public sector moratorium on staff. The challenge for the National Museum going forward, therefore, is to secure the continuation and progression of the inventory project across the museum, in order to maximise the potential of our national collections.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to thank the Director of the National Museum, Raghnall Ó Floinn, and the Keeper of Irish Antiquities, Eamonn P. Kelly, for comments on this paper.

Claire Anderson is Project Co-ordinator (Culture & Heritage Studies LTI) at National Print Museum

NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

This article is based on a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Annual Conference, The Porous Museum: Making Connections, Building Partnerships, on 22 February 2013, Kilkenny.

National Museum of Ireland (2008) National Museum of Ireland: statement of strategy, 2008-2012. National Museum of Ireland, Dublin.

National Museum of Ireland (2009) Documentation Plan 2009-2014. Unpublished report, National Museum of Ireland.

Patsatzi, E. and McKenna, G. (2007) SPECTRUM: The UK Museum Documentation Standard. Museum Documentation Association, Cambridge.

Kenny, C. (2012) Mummies and more: secrets of the crypt. The Irish Times 17 October 2012.

Anderson, C., Flynn, R., O’Byrne, R., Walsh, N. and Weadick, S. (2013) Mysteries of the Crypt. Archaeology Ireland 27(1): 17-21.

Documentation Discoveries. Online at http://www.museum.ie/en/info/about-the-project.aspx

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Knock Museum

National Print Museum

Drogheda Museum Millmount

Lewis Glucksman Gallery

Kerry County Museum

South Tipperary Museum

Donaghmore Workhouse

The Zoological Museum

Museum Ireland Volume 23 2013

Accessing our national heritage: adult learners and the National Library RHONDA WYNNE and BRID O’SULLIVAN

INTRODUCTION1

A

COLLABORATION BETWEEN the Adult Education Centre at University College Dublin (UCD) and the National Library of Ireland (NLI), which formed in 2006, has seen hundreds of adult learners engage with the resources and exhibitions of the library.

This article details how this collaboration emerged, and outlines the roles each partner institution has in contributing to the development and delivery of a range of adult education courses.

THE PARTNERSHIP

In early 2006, the education staff of the National Library responded to a UCD Adult Education advertisement seeking course proposals for their 2006-2007 programme.

The National Library was about to launch a major exhibition on Irish poet and dramatist W.B. Yeats, and was keen to organise associated educational events. Initial discussions focused on arranging a lecture series, but quickly progressed to the possibility of planning a programme which would allow for greater engagement with Yeats and his work. The subsequent course, ‘WB Yeats at the National Library’, ran for the first time in the Autumn term 2006. The course, which ran over eight weeks on a Tuesday morning for two and a half hours, was a mix of lecture/seminar, multi-media presentation, and tailored tours of the

exhibition and library archives. This format was an instant success with students.

The factors which underscored the initial success, and then further development of the UCD/National Library collaboration, included drawing on the existing expertise and resources of both organisations and institutions. Rather than require new personnel or resources, the collaboration worked with the people in place and brought resources together in a new way.

Each institution had a champion, who advocated for the collaboration and worked to promote the evolving programme. The partnership started with one course on a trial basis and then built on its success to add further courses. The key factor in the success of this partnership has been a strong commitment to the wider benefits of learning and an appreciation of the multiple possibilities of adult learning.

Subsequently, further courses on Yeats were developed as well as courses on Drama in the National Library, Literature of Edwardian Ireland, the Literature of Victorian Ireland, Writing Rebellion, Home and Away: Exile in Irish Writing, Uncovering 1916 and the Irish War of Independence. The courses are interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on literary, historical, political and archival materials to illuminate key figures or times

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in Irish life. Students access artefacts, multimedia displays, newspaper collections, manuscripts, prints and drawings, photos, and historical posters. Students also become familiar with online resources on the 1916 Easter Rising2 and on W.B. Yeats3. The courses provide students with an opportunity to consider the people, events, and works that have shaped our country and society. There is a fee for each course (currently €195) but concessions are available.

In developing and promoting these courses, this partnership has drawn on the strengths and skills of both institutions. UCD Adult Education uses their experience of designing and delivering courses for adult learners to devise courses that combine a sound academic basis with participative and engaged teaching methodologies. The UCD tutors, who assist in developing the courses, work in conjunction with the staff of the library to match the academic dimensions of the course to the relevant archives and exhibitions. UCD is also responsible for ensuring each course fulfils university course approvals criteria, recruiting tutors, enrolling students, and processing registrations. At the end of each term, UCD conducts a course evaluation and liaises with the various tutors and the library on the outcomes. Both organisations publicise the course through their websites and publications.

The National Library houses so much original material that is relevant to the course content amongst its printed and visual collections that it is an ideal venue to

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host the courses. In addition, staff have significant experience in the hosting and running of events and the city centre location is convenient for students. Classes take place in the seminar room for two mornings each week for the duration of the courses. Curators and archivists, in conjunction with the course tutors, prepare relevant materials for viewing and inform students about their nature and significance.

This provides curators with an opportunity to showcase items from the collection to a motivated and interested audience who are aware of the significance through what they have learned in class. Visits to the library’s exhibitions also form part of the courses. As part of each course, participants are given an introduction the NLI and its collections.

Students are encouraged to take out library membership which gives them access to the library’s reading rooms and collections.

Students also become aware of and interested in the events programme in the library and become frequent attendees at such events. The social dimension to the programme is facilitated by the library’s Joly café where students can come together to discuss topics covered in an informal way.

THE RESULTS

To date there have been 746 registrations across 27 courses. The scheduling of the courses during the morning in the beautiful and historical ambience of the National Library has been a significant draw. The opportunity to engage with the rich resources of the National Library, in a more sustained way than was previously possible, has been welcomed. The mix of seminars, tours and archival access has been widely

praised by learners who appreciate the opportunity to observe documents, photos, and records not typically on display or available in an adult education course.

Feedback has been very positive with students commenting on how they have particularly enjoyed the sense that they have a ‘behind the scenes’ access to the library.

Class discussions and interaction with exhibits has provided a space to engage student curiosity. The importance of social engagement, both through participative teaching methodologies, and informally at coffee break, has been a consistent narrative across all course evaluations.

Sample student comments include: “The course provided a wonderful insight into the 1916 Rising (and events preceding and following it). It also provided an excellent opportunity to experience the many facilities and resources of the National Library. Stimulating and inspiring.”

“The variety of presentation methods worked very well. The short tours of the exhibition each week reinforced what we had learned during the lecture. I certainly wanted to learn more and spent some time going around the exhibition on my own. I will come back to the exhibition and will recommend it to all my friends and family. The course was excellent.”

“As a person with an idea of W.B. Yeats as a national figure, the course opened up for me the beauty of his poetry, the complex content, the practical

elements and the recent historic perspective – a wonderful experience.”

“I really enjoyed the interaction with the tutors and other participants.”

THE BENEFITS

This collaboration has benefitted not only the committed and enthusiastic students, but also both institutions as it has fulfilled a number of goals. The range of course offerings has enhanced both the UCD Adult Education programme and the education programme of the National Library. UCD Adult Education can now offer a more diverse and dynamic programme, with a new mode of learning in a new centre. As these courses have been consistently popular, and often booked out, registration numbers have been above the average.

The National Library benefits through having more adults engage with their resources and facilities, both as students and also as library members who attend events, sometimes bringing friends and family. Students learn that the National Library is about more than just books as it has a vast and rich collection which is both significant for and vital to our national heritage. The Yeats exhibition4 has won a number of awards (e.g. Association of Heritage Interpretation, Irish Digital Media Awards, and Institute of Irish Designers Awards) for the use of innovative technologies in displaying valuable manuscripts and personal artefacts.

Students have not only had access to these materials but also witnessed how technology can be used to create dynamic interactive multidimensional exhibits.

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The collaboration has had a legacy effect as many students have gone on to attend further UCD courses and have recommended these courses to friends and colleagues. Students who register to the courses acquire a National Library Reader’s Ticket so that they can access the library on a more regular basis. Subsequent to these courses some students have also trained as library volunteers and become actively engaged in the work of the library. A number of students have taken part in the library’s involvement with the Bealtaine Festival, the Irish arts festival celebrating creativity in older age. These students acted as volunteer tour guides during this festival highlighting what they had gained from the course, both in terms of knowledge and through becoming sufficiently confident to share this knowledge with others.

Therefore, they now act as ambassadors for both the library and adult learning.

It is this broad level of engagement, both in learning, and beyond that is a key aspiration underpinning the work of both institutions.

NEXT STEPS

Such collaborations are, as yet, not common in the Republic of Ireland, so this model has been informative in showing how to

combine the resources of two institutions to expand and revitalise their programmes.

Working in partnership has brought both institutions exposure to broader debates and domains thereby providing insights which can inform future strategic planning and programme provision. This model has now been adapted as the basis for a partnership between UCD and the Hugh Lane Gallery, a Dublin city centre art gallery.

The existence of the courses formed through this collaboration makes a strong statement about the importance of multiple modes and formats of adult learning. Such collaborations play both a practical and symbolic role in highlighting the value of adult learning in sites other than formal education settings. In recent times, the dominant discourse equates lifelong learning with learning for the economy, so that learning which enhances employability is privileged. Given the very real resource constraints in galleries, museums and libraries, and within adult education currently, it is necessary to make a case for the impact and value of educational provision which looks beyond the dominant economic rationale. Building up a record of the stories of adult learning and the impact on people’s lives is just one action that can be taken to document the wider benefits of learning.

Rhonda Wynne is Tutor Development Manager at UCD Adult Education Centre Brid O’Sullivan is Assistant Keeper, Education & Outreach, National Library of Ireland

NOTES 1.

This article is based on a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Annual Conference, The Porous Museum: Making Connections, Building Partnerships, on 22 February 2013, Kilkenny.

2. Online at http://www.nli.ie/1916 3. Online at http://www.nli.ie/yeats 4. See http://www.nli.ie/yeats

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Museum Interactive Learning Spaces: The Education Area at the National Print Museum GRETTA HALPIN INTRODUCTION1

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AUNCHED IN MAY 2012 and supported by the Aviva Stadium Community Fund, the National Print Museum’s Education Area aims to afford families and children the opportunity to discover and enjoy the creative world of printing in a free and selfguided manner. The space aspires to encourage family learning and interaction through the provision of a variety of print and paper craft activities and a Junior Library. The Education Area was handcrafted by a local sculptor, Andrew Clancy, and is housed on the mezzanine level of the museum.

This paper will examine the National Print Museum’s reasoning behind and inspiration for introducing the Education Area and will discuss the research, development and design of the space. It will review the foreseen and unforeseen pros and cons of its introduction to the museum’s educational offering, the current development of free guided activities in conjunction with the space and its utilisation for pre-school educational programming.

NATIONAL PRINT MUSEUM EDUCATION PROGRAMME

The mission of the National Print Museum’s Education Department is to preserve, protect and increase awareness of the museum’s collection and its associated educational provisions. It is committed to

providing a wide range of socially inclusive opportunities for the lifelong discovery and enjoyment of Ireland’s letterpress printing heritage and over the past ten years, a successful education programme, for both formal and informal audiences, has been researched, developed and implemented.

The education programme is comprised primarily of guided tours, craft workshops, lectures, demonstration days and training seminars. In conjunction with the latter, the Education Department works each year with a number of external organisations by participating in national events such as Heritage Week, Culture Night, Children’s Book Festival, Bealtaine, Science Week and the Aontas Adult Learners’ Festival.

For families and children, the museum offers family fun days, arts and crafts workshops in printing, book making and paper crafts for various ages, and an interactive family guided tour, with the workshops and tour incurring a small fee. The family tour comprises of three interactive activities, which involves working directly with artefacts from the museum’s collection.

IDENTIFYING A PROBLEM

After a number of months in her position, Museum Manager Carla Marrinan, through general observations and analysis of the museum’s visitor numbers and survey, saw

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that the family tour was not availed of regularly by families visiting the museum.

This could be attributed to fact that there is a cost involved; however, from speaking directly with families a better insight into the reasons behind this was obtained. Most families, particularly those with children under the age of five, did not want to commit to a sixty-minute tour; their chief concern being that their children may find the tour slightly too long in duration and perhaps too difficult to understand. As a result, this can lead to frustration, loss of interest and perhaps misbehaviour. Families, who did not avail of the tour, would typically spend a maximum of twenty minutes in the museum, with most of their time being spent in the Finishing Area of the permanent exhibition.

This area contains a number of interactive stations including a crayon-rubbing table and a perforating machine, with which visitors are welcome to engage.

A second observation, was that families (particularly those living locally) did not return to the museum after their first visit. It was determined that this issue was due to the lack of free, self-guided opportunities within the museum for families to encourage them to return, interact with and use the museum space on a regular basis. Consequently, a need was identified to introduce a self-guided, interactive learning hub or space within the museum, to solve the problem of limited accessibly for family audiences.

2011 - the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco - both of which offer strong family centred programmes and self-guided spaces.

The Louisiana MOMA houses a Children’s Wing, which offers supervised and guided activities for families. The space consists of low tables and chairs, wall space for hanging art works and bright colours throughout; all of which promote a relaxed, informal and welcoming atmosphere.

“Louisiana Children’s Wing offers a range of enriching activities for children and adults to explore together. These include activities free of charge for families with children plus drop-ins and special activities on weekends and on school holidays. The three-storey building features 500 square metres of child-friendly space. Activities in the Children’s Wing use Louisiana’s permanent collection and changing exhibits as reference point for a variety of open studios and classes, and workshops.”2 The San Francisco MOMA houses an excellent multi-purpose space consisting of computers, a mini library, couches and floor space. This space is used by various different audiences, however on the day of her visit; it was in use for a storytelling session. It was this relaxed learning environment and ‘hang-out space’ that the Museum Manager wanted to replicate at the museum.

INSPIRATIONAL SPACES

The Museum Manager drew inspiration for the new ‘Education Area’ project from two international museums, which she visited in

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With inspiration from the latter innovative and creative spaces and being aware of family orientated spaces provided in a

selection of Irish museums, e.g. the Atrium at the National Gallery, the decision was made to develop a family friendly, hands-on, interactive learning hub within the National Print Museum.

FUNDING THE EDUCATION AREA PROJECT

Unfortunately, as many Irish museums can relate to, the museum was not in a position to fully fund the Education Area project.

When researching possible funding sources, the Museum Manager discovered the Aviva Stadium Community Fund Scheme. This fund supports deserving projects in the area immediately surrounding the stadium and in 2007 an annual fund of €100,000 was created.3 To date they have invested half a million euro into the local community. In the first half of 2012 they received a record forty applications, which included applications for funding for summer camps for children, the upgrading of sports facilities, a sensory room for a local school and the National Print Museum’s application for a self-guided Education Area for families and children.

The key driver behind the fund is that all projects are local, community based and of a real and measurable benefit to people in the community. The results of all projects should be a tangible, reusable and a constant resource within the community. Under the rules of the scheme, no project can receive more than 50% of the grant requested and each organisation applying must demonstrate that they are in a position to raise the remainder of the funding. The scheme was well suited to the proposed Education Area project, especially

considering the desire was to create a reusable, long-term and easily accessible space for families in the community. In spring 2012, an application was put together and a subsequent interview took place with the schemes Project Monitoring Committee. The application was successful and in March 2012 the museum was granted 50% of the overall project costs of €3,500.

At this time the museum was in between Education Officers. The Museum Manager was very cognisant of the fact that once the project was complete the space would essentially be handed over to the Education Officer to manage and develop.

The decision was made to wait until the appointment of a new Education Officer before the research and development stage of the project began. I came on board as Education Officer in late March and soon afterward a time schedule for the development of the project was devised and a launch date was set for the 26 May 2013.

EDUCATION AREA DESIGN

For those unfamiliar with the layout of the National Print Museum, it is a small, open space based in the old Garrison Chapel of Beggars Bush Barracks. Lack of space, storage and otherwise, is a recurring issue; however a vacant corner space was available within the mezzanine level (which additionally operates as the temporary exhibition, workshop, lecture space) and chosen to house the Education Area. With an upstairs area chosen, we were very cognisant of the fact that it is

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not accessible by wheelchair. However; we decided to address this issue and create a solution before the Education Area was introduced. A craft table, with a selection of items from the Education Area, is provided now downstairs upon the arrival of a wheelchair user wishing to access the space.

Initially we looked at creating the Education Area by sourcing furniture from Ikea and various educational supply stores; however the idea of a bespoke core-structure was also a possibility. It was the latter that was decided upon by way of a unique design by local sculptor - Andrew Clancy. Andrew is regularly employed by the museum to carry out the installation of temporary exhibitions and during a conversation with Andrew, the Museum Manager learned of various film and theatre props which he had designed and built and was extremely impressed by the high level of creativity and craftsmanship involved. Being aware of the scope of Andrews’s talents, she decided to approach him about designing and building a core structure for the museum’s new Education Area.

After a number of discussions with regard to the type of activities we wanted to make available at the Education Area, a brief was draw up and given, which provided an overview of the latter and the objectives of the space. There were a number of important things to keep in mind when designing the structure – health and safety, the museum’s listed building status, wall space restriction (due to its recurring use for temporary exhibitions) and the need to remain within the parameters of the chosen

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space so not to infringe on the workshop space. Secondary to the latter, it was important that the structure created was durable, easy to clean and easy to move.

Additionally, the brief outlined the structural requirements for all activities including storage space for arts and crafts, floor cushions, library books and activity sheets, hooks for aprons and bins for waste paper.

While the brief was adhered to by Andrew, the design was ultimately his own and he proved to be instrumental partner in the project. As a father of small children he had an extra edge.

When the completed structure arrived at the museum, we were impressed by the clever design elements utilised to fulfil the brief and to create a very child friendly corestructure. The wooden structure is made up of two circular work stations with five individual workspaces outlined by use the use of colour blocking. In the middle of each workstation there is a bin which can be removed with the use of a pulley handle at each side. The workstations are joined in the centre by a light box. The addition of such was Andrew’s idea and it adds warmth to the space that might not have been achieved without its inclusion. Each of the three sections can be taken apart and the entire structure is on wheels. It also contains a number of storage shelving for craft materials. Beyond the core structure the Museum Manager and I sourced a number of additional items to flesh out the space including hardwearing plastic chairs, floor cushions, floor mats, a reading bench and a display stand for activity sheets and library books.

designed with collaborative learning in mind and when adults feel comfortable with the content and experiences provided by the museum.’4

Figure 1.

Education Area in the National Print Museum, Dublin.

EDUCATION AREA ACTIVITIES

I felt it was very important that all activities provided at the area were true to the mission of the Education Department and that each activity had a direct link to the history of printing and its associated crafts.

Using the museum’s collection as a reference point, I included various educational activities that were suitable for an age range of two to twelve and which children and parents could work upon together, hence promoting family learning and interaction. During my research, I drew on Falk and Dierking’s theories concerning Communities of Learners and free choice learning activities in museums.

‘Parents can be effective facilitators for their children’s learning when exhibitions are

I wanted to ensure that the variety of activities available were such that they led to free choice and control by the visitor and gave a certain amount of autonomy to families to navigate the world of printing and paper craft on their own terms. The activities chosen include, but are not limited to, ink stamper printing, origami, activity sheets which relate to the museum’s collection and the history of printing, various alphabet games and a Junior Library.

One element of development of the Education which I thoroughly enjoyed, was researching and sourcing items for was the Junior Library. I was pleasantly surprised at how many publications are available for young audiences with regard to the history of printing and its associated crafts.

FREE GUIDED ACTIVITIES

The Education Area was launched with a Community Day in the museum in May 2013 and feedback from visitors on the day was very positive. After the launch, we began to look at ways in which we could introduce families to the new space. A subsequent series of free monthly weekend guided activities including Storytelling for 4-7 years and Easy Origami for 8-12 years were researched, developed and introduced for this purpose. The latter were and continue to be promoted via the museum’s website and through websites such as Culture Fox and the Dublin Event Guide with the number of families attending increasing month on

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month. The guided activities developed at the Education Area are also available for families to enjoy self-guided and have proved to be a successful and inexpensive way of introducing new families to the space.

In conjunction with the above, I feel it important to provide regular visitors with new self-guided activities, so they do not begin to view the Education Area as static and unchanging; which oftentimes can lead to disenchantment with such spaces. As such, the space is continually diversified with seasonal (Valentine’s Day, Halloween) paper and print crafts.

PRESCHOOL MONTESSORI OFFERING

The Museum Manager and I discussed the possibility of utilising the Education Area for pre-school and pre-school Montessori groups, hence moving from the informal self-guided to a slightly more formal audience. I undertook research of the Montessori Method for the 2.5 – 6 age groups and identified clear links between the key approaches in Montessori teaching and the desired ethos of our Education Area.

More specifically (i) free activity within a prepared environment and (ii) an arrangement of materials and space which allows movement and activity coupled with a limitation of materials, so that only material that supports the child’s development is included.5 Utilising the above research, I developed a workshop style visit for this audience to be conducted in conjunction with the museum’s tour guides at the Education Area. Upon arrival children are invited to put

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on an apron and then to decorate a premade printer’s hat with the assistance of a museum facilitator and their teachers. The chairs are taken away to allow freedom of movement around the space and children are free to choose items with which to decorate their hat. Once complete they then join a storyteller who, using props throughout, tells them a story from the Junior Library.

The Mini Printer and Storytelling Workshop was trialled with the local Lansdowne Lodge Preschool Montessori and feedback was very positive. The teachers did recommend that the workshop be kept to 45 minutes maximum, as the children will get restless beyond this point. The introduction of this new space has provided a previously unavailable access point for this pre-school audience to begin to discover the world of printing at the museum.

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED – EVALUATION

Over the past year the Education Area has built up a steady stream of regular visitors, primarily families from the local area or wider community, who revisit the museum to use the space after school, at the weekends and during school holidays. We repeatedly hear from parents that it is their child that asked to return and they often bring along friends to share their discovery of this new space with them.

Additionally, the Education Area is available for families after they have availed of the family tour, a craft workshop and during family fun days and it is these families, who may not have known about the space prior

to attending a guided activity at the museum, who are returning. We also have had a number of sporadic visits from mother and toddler groups and home-schooling parent networks. Our website and word of mouth are proving to be the strongest mediums for driving families to the space; however we also promote the space within the museum’s bi-annual event guide and through social media.

The feedback garnered from our general museum feedback forms to date has been very positive, with 96% rating the Education Area from very-good to excellent. In June 2013, we began the process of a more targeted and specific evaluation of the space, with a feedback form designed and provided especially for parents and children who use the space. This targeted retrieval of feedback has helped us identify items that needed to be changed, updated or replaced within the Education Area. We feel it is imperative to gather and review such feedback from parents and children to gain an insight into their perspective as the user.

Continued evaluation through feedback forms and conversations with parents will help the space to continually evolve.

One thing we had to accept immediately is that the Education will get messy. On the day of its launch, I found myself having to consciously take a step back and resist the urge to micro-manage the space. By its very nature, the space will get untidy and we want families to feel like they can create a bit of mess. However, we also would like families to respect our Education Area and the subsequent families visiting the space

by tidying up before they leave. As small staff, we cannot devote much time to continually tidying the space and this presents us a constant challenge, which we have addressed while keeping the Kid’s in Museums Manifesto in mind.

KIDS IN MUSEUMS

Kids in Museums is a UK based “independent charity dedicated to making museums open and welcoming to all families, in particular those who haven’t visited before… The Kids in Museums Manifesto and the Family Friendly Museum Award have been incredibly successful ways of encouraging and guiding museums and galleries across the country to make family visits engaging and enjoyable.” 6 The Kids in Museums Manifesto7, to which the National Print Museum has signed up, contains twenty ways to make a visit to your museum family friendly and we try to honour these points through our educational programming. In relation to the new Education Area, the elements we feel we achieve are; (i)

Create a comfy, safe place for children and families. Museums can be havens and make visitors feel better.

(ii)

Be the core of your community, with spaces where families can get together and talk.

The elements of the manifesto which we find a challenge are; (i) Be positive and do away with the word ‘No’. Tell visitors what they can do at the door, don’t pin up a list of things they can’t.

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(ii)

Don’t say ssshhhush! If kids are being noisy, ask yourself ‘Why?’ Is it because they’re excited? Great! Then capture that excitement. Is it because they’re bored? Then give them something meaningful to do.

To address the issue of the space being left untidy, while keeping the manifesto at the forefront of the decision making process, a simple sign was posted which kindly asked families to tidy up after their visit so the next family can also enjoy the space. We noticed the space being tidied more often after its addition; however it did not prevent the problem. Neither did it address a number of other issues were experiencing

Figure 2.

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with the use of the space, including children running through the temporary exhibition space, eating food at the area, throwing crafts items and shouting while other visitors are within the museum. We were very reluctant to pin up a list of ‘Nos!’ so we decided to introduce a sign that speaks to directly to parents and an illustrated sign that speaks directly to children in an endeavour to address the issues outlined above.

CHILD PROTECTION

The National Print Museum has a Child Protection and Welfare Policy in place, which is derived from the Children First guidelines8. The museum’s Child Protection

Child-oriented signage in National Print Museum, Dublin.

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Code of Conduct outlines that children visiting the museum must be supervised by a parent or guardian at all times. A problem we encounter is parents going to the café for a coffee or outside to talk on their phone while leaving children on their own, unsupervised at the Education Area.

Additionally, parents who live locally sometimes allow their children to visit the museum on their own to access the space.

To address the former issue we locate the parent or guardian, inform them of our Child Protection and Welfare Policy, and ask that they return the Education Area to supervise their child. To address the latter, we ask the child if a parent or guardian came with them to the museum today and if not, we ask the child, in an age appropriate manner, to return home and ask a parent or guardian to return with them when they visit next. If we see the same child returning with a parent, we unsure to inform them of our reasons for this request with reference to our policy.

By creating such a welcome safe space within the museum, we run the risk of parents thinking it is okay to leave their child unsupervised; however for us it is important that the space is not treated this way. No staff member is in a position of consent to supervise any child left on the own at the Education Area. As a consequence, we have now posted a formal notice for the parents stating that all children at the Education Area and elsewhere within the museum must be supervised at all times by a parent or guardian and refer directly to our Child Protection and Welfare Policy.

In an effort to address some of the unforeseen issues we experience with the use of the space, we have introduced an illustrated sign that speaks directly to children. We felt it important that whatever we posted to communicate our ‘code of conduct’ to children did not stifle the creative and relaxed atmosphere and ethos of the Education Area. The new animated info graphic was designed by Celine Halpin, a freelance illustrator and animator, and includes images of what makes us happy and what makes us unhappy at the Education Area. Oftentimes we see families stopping to read the sign together before interacting with the space and parents referring back to the sign if their child becomes a bit unruly!

CONCLUSION The National Print Museum is dedicated to providing opportunities for lifelong discovery and enjoyment of Ireland’s printing heritage and through the provision of this new space, we are offering families the opportunity to engage, explore and interact with their printing heritage in a relaxed self-guided environment. Family visits have been greatly enhanced and the level of family interaction and participation within the museum has increased exponentially. In addition, the Education Area got a special mention in the assessor’s notes from the museum’s recent maintenance of MSPI Accreditation.

However, creating such a space is not the final answer to problem identified. It is an on-going project which continually requires dedicated resources, development, maintenance and review.

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Falk and Dierking, state ‘museums are clearly a part of a larger context constituting the family’s free-choice learning activities.’4 We believe the National Print Museum has

and continues to demonstrate this through the introduction of the free, self-guided Education Area for families.

Gretta Halpin is Education Officer in the National Print Museum, Dublin.

NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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This article is based on a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Forum - Education & Outreach, on 7 July 2013, Dublin.

See http://www.louisiana.dk/uk/Menu/Children’s+Wing See http://www.avivastadium.ie/stadium-info/community-grants-scheme Dierking, D.L. and Falk, J. (2000) Learning in Museums: Visitor Experience and the Making of Meaning. Alta Mira Press, Lanham, p. 95 See http://www.earlychildhoodireland.ie/for-parents-childcare-search/choosing-childcare/childcareoptions/montessori-pre-school-education/ - accessed as part of Montessori teaching research in October 2012 See http://kidsinmuseums.org.uk/about See http://kidsinmuseums.org.uk/manifesto Department of Children and Youth Affairs (2011) Children First: National Guidance for the Protection and Welfare of Children. Department of Children and Youth Affairs Dublin.

Museum Ireland Volume 23 2013

Our History: PEACE III funded Community History Project at Down County Museum DANIELLE SMYTH

INTRODUCTION1

I

N 2010 DOWN County Museum, Downpatrick, County Down received funding of £156,000 from the European Union’s PEACE III Programme, managed by the Special EU Programmes Body and delivered by the North Down, Ards and Down councils’ cluster. This enabled us to reach out into our communities, working with a number of neighbourhood, youth and faith groups. The PEACE III project was launched in February 2010 and was split into two parts, Phase I (February 2010 - July 2011) which encouraged participants to explore local history, culture and identity and gain a greater awareness and appreciation of shared history and cultural diversity and Phase II (August 2011 - June 2013) which attempts to challenge racism and sectarianism.

This article will examine the outcomes from Phase II. The aims of Phase II were to create opportunities for community, cultural, faith and youth groups to access training and to work in partnership with each other to produce resources which examine issues of cultural identity and diversity. The project also aims to develop greater respect for the achievements of local people, to contribute to the reduction in sectarian and racist incidents and attitudes and to provide opportunities for cross-community groups to

produce resources to assist other groups with forming cross-community partnerships.

The PEACE III phase II project was split into five distinct strands which are listed below.

n Strand 1 looks at the period from 19001920s and how the legacy of that time continues to be a feature of life today. n Strand 2 looks at religious and cultural identity.

n Strand 3 enables a range of groups to develop intergenerational work through the examination of local history and culture. n Strand 4 looks at diversity and shared heritage in the urban environment of Ballynahinch, a small market town in County Down. n Strand 5 deals with crime and punishment in the past and today.

THE LEGACY OF 1900–1920s

Some of the activities in Strand 1 included an eight week course in Irish history and politics 1900-1920s, which was facilitated by the Open University with over 30 people attending each week. Following on from that we decided to run a series of talks. These talks were promoted to the public and attracted over 40 people to each one. It was interesting to note the very positive response to this series of talks. The purpose of the

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course was to provide participants with an overview of Irish society at the time and with in-depth information on the experiences of County Down people. The course also provided participants with the opportunity to conduct their own research. Some of the research was incorporated into an exhibition entitled ‘Transformations: Politics and Protest in County Down 1900-1920s’ which opened in November 2012 and ran to May 2013.The exhibition was visited by 15,685 people with a further 300 people attending focused presentations on issues raised in the exhibition. The exhibition compared and contrasted what was happening in County Down during the period with what was happening on the national stage. Alongside the exhibition, a book was launched about the history of Ballykinler camp from 1900 to

the1960s. Ballykinler became a WWI training camp, then an internment camp for the IRA prisoners in the 1920s, after which it became an Army camp. In addition to this a series of talks, on related topics, was arranged building on the achievements of phase I. As part of this strand we have also created an online learning resource for Key Stage Three pupils (11-14 year olds) on the period 19001920s, based on objects in the Museum collection. This has been an effective way of increasing access to archived materials in our collection. A number of community groups participated in focused study visits. One of the most successful of these was a visit by cross community youth groups from six different towns who joined together to take part in GAA training and then visited Ballykinler Army Camp. On another day a group of 90 young people visited Dublin to see Kilmainham Gaol, The WWI Memorial Gardens and Croke Park. A youth group of around 30 children from Ballymote, worked on a three month project with Spanner in The Works Theatre Company to produce a script and perform a drama about the WWI Christmas Truce. Study visits for various groups were also organized to the Somme Heritage Centre, the Orange Order museum and to a play about the political life of Sir Edward Carson.

RELIGIOUS AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

Figure 1.

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Panel from Politics exhibition.

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Strand 2 focused on religious and cultural identity. A six week World Religions course with over 50 attendees each week allowed participants to explore the beliefs and customs of Jews, Muslims, Bahai’s, Christians, and Hindus. This course provided

an opportunity to gain real insight into other cultures, ask questions and engage with people from other faiths. The excellent feedback from the course encouraged us to run additional evening talks to allow access to the information provided to different groups of people.

At the end of the six week course, we organised two study visits for the participants to places of worship. We visited the Belfast Synagogue, Belfast Islamic Centre and Indian Community Centre and subsequently we visited different Christian places of worship, including Clonard Monastery (Catholic), Whitewell Tabernacle (Elim), Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormon) and Whitehouse Presbyterian Church. These practical visits put all the learning into context, encouraging greater respect for religious diversity and allowing

Figure 2.

fuller engagement with, and between, people of different faiths.

We also organised a day to visit churches in Downpatrick to increase learning about different Christian faiths in the town and to encourage more cross community contact.

We found that although people are generally aware of the names of different denominations, they are not aware of the differences and similarities in beliefs and customs. In each place of worship, clergy from the churches gave a short talk on how the services are conducted and how their congregations developed. We visited the Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Non-Subscribing Presbyterian and Church of Ireland churches. A very valuable aspect of each visit was the opportunity to walk around each building and to investigate the architecture and furnishings. In a simple way

Study visit to Indian Community Centre, Belfast.

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this raised awareness of shared Christian heritage.

Increased knowledge can help remove fear of the unknown and can combat prejudices.

These church visits proved so popular that we were asked by two schools in the town to organise a similar day for their pupils as part of their Religious Education classes, enabling pupils to put in context what they had learned in the classroom. Almost 200 pupils took part in these joint visits. As a result of the visits these schools now work together to organise an annual ecumenical church service in the town, thus developing their cross community links. On another visit we travelled to the Chester Beatty Library and the Irish Jewish Museum, again increasing knowledge of other faiths.

Over 130 people from various schools and community groups have taken part in multicultural awareness sessions looking at different cultures, dress, music, crafts and customs. A further 80 people attended

Figure 3.

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St Mary’s High School visit to Downpatrick Methodist Church.

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cultural diversity training which focused on developing an understanding as to why we behave as we do (due to our upbringing, customs, and culture) and try to understand how other people behave or think in a different way and encourage us to ask how we relate to each other more positively.

Working in partnership with the Orange Order, a session was organised for a cross community group to visit a local Orange Hall, an Ancient Order of Hibernians’ hall and a Masonic Lodge to hear about these orders and how they operate in the local community today.

The Downpatrick Young Archaeologists’ Group, based at the Museum, spent a year exploring issues around religion and cultural identity. They visited many places of worship from different faiths both relevant to the past and to Northern Ireland today. They worked on an exhibition and book called ‘Digging our Faith: Looking at our religious heritage.’ The exhibition is currently on at the Museum and provides a showcase for the achievements of the group and increases learning about our shared and diverse cultural heritage.

For the museum’s archive and for educational purposes, around 20 Religious and Cultural Identity interviews have taken place to put on permanent record important stories and information about different cultures. Filmed interviews included people sharing information about their membership of the Orange Order or Ancient Order of Hibernians, speaking about managing cross community work of various kinds, speaking as a clergy

member who has been brought up in a different country, exploring the differences and perceptions of Northern Ireland from an outside point of view. This unique resource will add a new dimension to the Museum’s archive and is an important part of involving the local community in recording its heritage.

One of the issues raised in the Cluster’s peace plan was barriers to the integration of the BME community (black and minority ethnic) in the area. Research showed that new immigrants to the area expressed a desire to know more about local history but that there was a lack of appropriate resources. The Peace III funding enabled us to produce a leaflet on the history of County Down in a variety of languages including Cantonese, Polish, Lithuanian, Urdu, Hindi, Portuguese and Slovakian to meet this need.

We hope that these leaflets will help to welcome and settle migrants into our community more quickly. They will be widely distributed across the cluster.

INTERGENERATIONAL PROJECT

The work in Strand 3 enabled a range of groups to develop intergenerational work through the examination of local history and culture. The main focus was a project between three County Down schools which led to the production of a Museum exhibition, DVD and book, entitled ‘All Together Now: Going to School in County Down’.

Pupils from Downpatrick Primary School, Millisle Primary School and Our Lady and St Patrick Primary School, Downpatrick worked with older adults from their communities researching the history of schools in their area and reflecting on their shared

Figure 4.

Pupils from Downpatrick Primary School choosing objects for intergenerational exhibition in Down County Museum.

educational experiences. The schools, from a variety of backgrounds, have worked together to choose objects, write text and research themes which formed the core of the exhibition, book and DVD. Over 18,000 visitors viewed the exhibition which ran for several months. The Reminiscence Network of Northern Ireland conducted interviews with older adults in the communities. During the course of producing the exhibition the pupils from the three schools have worked with museum staff to learn how museum displays are created for different audiences, taken part in workshops about traditional pastimes and attended learning sessions on cultures from around the world.

The project provided a fascinating account of school life and shows the common experiences of children today and in the past and the shared heritage of communities throughout County Down and beyond. One key aspect of this was the retelling of the story of the Millisle community, a seaside town in County Down, which provided a place of safety to Jewish

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children fleeing the Nazi regime in Europe during WWII. This story picked up on the key theme of racism and sectarianism and provided a great learning opportunity for the communities involved. Each school had a workshop on the novel ‘Faraway Home’ by Marilyn Taylor2. It is a fictional account based on this story of the Jewish farm and provides a great opportunity to examine themes of racism and sectarianism in a Northern Ireland and world context. Pupils made comparisons between the Jewish issues and the situation in Northern Ireland.

The opportunity for students to meet the author, who formally opened the exhibition, was a real highlight.

economic climate. An exhibition, book and DVD were produced providing information on the history and detailing how the town has developed since its foundation in the 17th century. The six schools in the town and 10 churches all contributed to the initiative. A number of people from the community were interviewed about their experiences of living, growing up, working or going to school in Ballynahinch. These interviews were then made into a DVD about the changing nature of the town. This element of the project has resulted in greater cooperation between groups in the town and has contributed to an increased sense of civic pride.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

The intergenerational aspect of this strand demonstrated how people can contribute to the preservation and interpretation of local history and cultural traditions, through working with local Museums. With future funding we hope to develop this work by creating a multimedia resource pack which will examine the story in more detail and will focus on the themes of overcoming racism and sectarianism while ensuring this unique story is not lost and is more widely known than before.

BALLYNAHINCH, DIVERSITY AND SHARED HERITAGE IN AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Ballynahinch is an example of how so many local towns in Northern Ireland have been responding to the challenges of life in Northern Ireland in the recent past. The town has experienced two IRA bombs, increased sectarian tensions, a high level of teenage suicides, as well as the current challenging

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The setting of Down County Museum, within the original Gaol in Downpatrick, provided a unique resource for developing work on the theme of crime and punishment, strand 5 of the project. Various groups have developed their understanding of historical and contemporary aspects of this theme by facilitated visits to the restored cells and exhibits in the Museum and by taking part in a programme of talks.

However the project making greatest community impact was a community film: ‘Prisoners of the Past’. This film was produced by clients from Action Mental Health in Downpatrick, working with Matt Curry from Bluebird Media and Peace III staff from Down County Museum. The film is a moving piece of filmmaking, encouraging viewers to reflect on issues of justice and punishment. ‘Prisoners of the Past’ is a challenging short film that tells the story of the prisoners in a thoughtful and sensitive way. The project enhanced the self-

esteem and confidence of participants and supported recovery and wellbeing through participation in the creative process. As well as being shown in the local cinema, the film also featured at the first NI Mental Health Arts & Film Festival in October 2013.

Following a study visit to the PSNI Museum, RUC Memorial Garden, Crumlin Road Gaol and with the local PSNI community branch of the PSNI, a youth group from Ballymote, Downpatrick, worked with Spanner In The Works Theatre Company to perform short dramas on the theme of Crime and Punishment. The project has enabled groups to examine how attitudes to crime, punishment and justice have changed over time and are impacted by social and political change and to explore young people’s experiences of and attitudes to the justice system today and in the past.

PROJECT IMPACT

The PEACE III Project has increased understanding of local history, culture and traditions among participants and the increased respect for diversity is designed to reduce the level of sectarian and racist incidents in the council areas. The project has brought many diverse groups together and has led to better community cohesion.

The practical nature of the activities and

project has meant that the opportunities for mixing were natural ensuring the best possible conditions for improved relationships. The project encouraged greater respect for religious diversity and allowed fuller engagement with, and between, people of different faiths. The local communities seem increasingly willing to engage with other communities. The communities also seem better able to understand how racism and sectarianism can affect their society and are better able to combat this.

The PEACE III Project has enabled Down County Museum to reach members of the public who hadn’t previously visited the museum from the local area and across the county. By involving groups in the creation of exhibitions this encouraged them and their families to visit. The project has created more permanent resources both in the museum and via the internet giving the community increased access to information.

With the increased activity in the museum and organised study visits and workshops, the museum has noticed an increase in recruitment to their ‘Friends of Down County Museum’ organization which will have a lasting benefit to the museum. The museum has used the project as a tool to

Danielle Smyth is PEACE III Project Co-ordinator at Down County Museum

NOTES 1. This article is based on a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Forum - Education & Outreach, on 7 July 2013, Dublin.

2. Marilyn Taylor (1999) Faraway home. O’Brien Press, Dublin.

Our History: PEACE III funded Community History Project at Down County Museum

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Waterford Young Arts Critics (WYAC), their story so far EVELYN POWER

INTRODUCTION1

G

ARTER LANE ARTS Centre presents a vibrant theatre, dance, comedy, music, film, literature and visual art programme.

Funded by the Arts Council, Waterford City Council and the Department of Social Welfare, it is the primary home for the arts in Waterford. Over the past 30 years Garter Lane has presented innovative informal programmes and projects for young people.

Examples of such include ‘Teenage Kicks’ – a live music programme featuring young and original bands, and its past young curator programmes, notably the 1999 project through which eight teenagers curated the exhibition ‘Somebodies’ at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). This was an original youth arts project and the first whereby young Irish people had been invited into a national institution to curate an exhibition, setting a precedent for young curator projects to come.

Since then Garter Lane has continued in this innovate direction and today offers an ongoing formal programme for young people that incorporates a diverse range of arts including film, dance and theatre, providing drop-in or tailored tours, Leaving Cert specific tours and teacher packs. The Centre also offers youth placements for students interested in pursuing careers in the arts which provides hands-on experience and insight into the professional

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arts-world. This school involvement, alongside interaction with youth groups such as Waterford Young Arts (a youth and community arts resource) makes Garter Lane a key arts facility for this age group in the Waterford community. This said however, interaction with youth people outside school hours and beyond community group involvement has been a challenge. Previous efforts to engage this audience as independent consumers have garnered a poor response. Informal youth targeted programming such as silent discos and film screenings failed to attract significant numbers. Discussions with other arts organisations and arts professionals revealed they experienced similar issues in capturing the interest of this age group.

Garter Lane needed to rethink its approach to interact with this important audience but in a more involved way.

In response to this The Centre narrowed its programming focus, reconsidering the teenager as an individual, rather than such a vast target audience. By adding more focus the programming became more relevant to the interests of specific individuals rather than the teen market as a whole entity. The key to achieving this more engaged audience was in building the relationship between Garter Lane and the young people of Waterford through direct communication.

The Centre listened and worked in response

to the requests and insights of this audience as people, “Not to provide for them (young people), because the policy-makers and providers in youth work and the arts do not hear them at all, or because they hear them only as so much noise, is to legislate for a muteness that has dangerous consequences for our arts, for our education, in short for our culture.”2

programme was strong. Comments and general feedback from the surveys proved informative with suggestions such as; “Why not get the school involved in performing rather than watching performances” “I would be interested in a group that meet and talk about music and other things that are going in on Waterford”

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

In December 2012 Garter Lane conducted detailed studies of schools, targeting age 1518 years. The findings showed a strong interest in the arts outside of school, in particular in Music, Film, Dance and Theatre.

When the students were asked if they would be interested in joining an out of schools art project 46% responded they would be interested.3 When asked what type of arts events they would like the responses varied from; concerts, battle of the bands, films, arts workshops, student art/photography exhibitions, orchestras and street art.4 Interest amongst the students to engage with a relevant and interesting arts

“We need more things to do in Waterford after school” “I would like to look at new things, especially more film and music” “To involve students so they could make new friends, learn new things” “I would like to visit a variety of places to experience different forms of art in different ways and mix of people” “I like the idea of getting to know more about local art because you don’t hear much about it” “A mixture of boys and girls our age to share interest and teenage options”.5

Figure 1.

Graph representing the favourite art forms taken from 2012 detailed surveys of Waterford City schools TY- 6th years conducted by Garter Lane Arts Centre.

In response to this insightful feedback, Garter Lane approached the Waterford City Council (WCC) Arts Office to work in partnership on establishing a new youth lead arts group. This group would comprise of 14-18 year olds, who would meet on a regular basis to discuss, attend and engage with a range of multidisciplinary arts in Waterford and beyond. The WCC were eager

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to develop their youth programmes and further cater for young people in Waterford, and jointly supported the new project.

An Open Forum Night was held in April 2012 whereby young people from Waterford were invited to attend and have their say about the arts. The night was facilitated by Nick Kavanagh, Outreach Facilitator who encouraged open dialogue amongst the group. An interesting discussion emerged as the group spoke with energy and passion about what they wanted to see for their age in the arts in Waterford.

Interest was great after the open forum night and the young audience were central in promoting and informing their friends and peers about the new group. A recruitment campaign to attract members to the new group ran through schools, youth groups and local media. It was also

Figure 2.

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promoted on Facebook with a bold ‘We Want You!’ caption and image to get people’s attention. The application process to be part of the group was made as accessible as possible offering young people a range of means of applying along with the opportunity to get creative and express their reasons for wanting to join the group by video, sound, text and paint.

A NEW ARTS YOUTH GROUP FOR WATERFORD

In May 2013 all applications were reviewed with a final group of 11 young people selected to be part of the new group; Sophie Rowe, Shane O Sullivan, Peter Phelan, Cory Barry, Beibhinn Irish Cummins, Bronagh Kelly, Neil O’Brien, Nicole Moran, Alan O Kane, Odile de Leastar and Rose Keating.

These participants were chosen based on the passion and interest they displayed in their applications.

Open Forum Night with local teens and facilitator Nick Kavanagh in Garter Lane Arts Centre.

Photo © Keith Currams.

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“I want to join the group because I’m hoping to attend art school and I think this would be a great way to see others work and be able to give me more confidence.”

“I have recently been thinking about what I would like to do once I leave school. I am interested in media studies and the arts and have decided that when I am older, I would like to work in that industry. Because of this I would like to join the new group so as to gain more experience that I can out to use in the future.” “‘I’ve been sick the past couple of years and music and arts have really helped me through it. I feel like I will be able to get back out there and make new friends who like the same things that I do as I’ve lost a lot of friends since I’ve been unwell. This seems like a great opportunity and a good platform for me to gain back my confidence and it’s something that I’m very passionate about I feel like I would have a lot to offer to the group as this has been my main interest for the last couple of years.”

“The group immediately piqued my interest as it sounds like a great way seeing of what’s going on for young people in Waterford. I hope to acquire some new skills and friends in this group while also indulging in my love of film and theatre, while also reporting back on it!”

“One of my main reasons for wanting to join is because I love to write and I love film and literature. So I put two and two together so to speak. By partaking in the

group, I would like to learn the art of critiquing but also to a wider extent experience the artistic talent that is plentiful in this city”6

This new group established a fun, free opportunity for a diverse group of young people to meet and engage with a range of arts topics and events. In this group they could develop artistic confidence through participation and engagement with the arts in a broad and varied manner. As the group was informal and voluntary with the volume of workshops and events taking place during the summer holidays, commitment was crucial to its success. It was also intended to be a youth led ensemble that would be supported and programmed by Ciara Foley, Arts Administrator Schools Outreach with the Waterford City Council’s Arts Office and myself. The term was split between guest organisations, groups and artists talks, attending arts events and group discussion sessions.

Over the next four months the ensemble engaged in a wide range of art forms attending and discussing their outcomes.

Nicholas Kavanagh facilitated the initial meetings. They acted as ice- breaker sessions that encouraged the group to bond and set out plans for projects. It gave the group members an idea of what would be required and provided them opportunity to include their interests and ideas. Under the guidance of Nick as facilitator the group drafted up their set of rules and decided on their name; Waterford Young Arts Critics WYAC for short. Along with the talks, events and activities (outlined below), each week

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the group met to discuss and listen to each other’s thoughts and ideas in three main venues; Garter Lane Arts Centre, the Arts Office and the Waterford Central Library.

These spaces offered the WYAC comfortable and safe locations to hold their meetings.

THE WATERFORD YOUNG ARTS CRITICS SUMMER TERM

The first arts workshop focused on introducing the group to Theatre and critiquing with Dr Siobhan O’Gorman, Trinity College Dublin and Irish Theatre Magazine.

Siobhan discussed the various parts of theatre before opening the workshop out to the group to respond through open dialogue and questioning. The workshop preceded a trip to see ‘Guaranteed!’ by Colin Murphy, presented by Fishamble (The New Play Company). This gave the group useful pointers and guidance when they watched the play. Although the content was difficult and challenging the group were able to critique the play intelligently looking at all aspects of the performance (not just the theme). Over the course of the term the WYAC went on to attend several other plays such as ‘Alizar Tree’ by Little Red Kettle, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ by Shakespeare’s Globe and ‘Silent’ by Fishamble.

The WYAC were given an invaluable introduction into print media through mentor sessions with Michelle Clancy, Encore and Entertainment Editor from the Munster Express and Darren Skelton Entertainment Editor from Waterford News and Star. Both editors spoke with the group about their career paths to becoming reporters. These workshops were especially

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relevant to the group as each editor explained how to send in to papers their reviews and press releases. Both the Muster Express and The News and Star worked with WYAC over the term printing numerous reviews by the members. Furthermore WYAC created a close link with Beat 102-103, Ireland’s only station licensed that targets 15-34 year olds in the South East of Ireland.

Beat offered the group regular slots on the station to review films, plays and other arts events throughout the summer.

In one of the early workshops the WYAC met with Mark Graham, blogger extraordinaire who set out on a quest to attend at least 3 festivals a week in Ireland, for a year. Mark then reports weekly providing on each festival he has attended on his blog ‘A Year of Festivals’ and in his ‘Festival Fit’ column every Friday in The Ticket supplement of The Irish Times. In this intensive workshop the group discussed on all things blogging, with Mark giving invaluable tips and advice of the dos and don’ts when blogging and setting up their own blog http://waterfordyoungartscritics.com. One group member, Bronagh, was already an active blogger on her site ‘bloggingtothefourwalls’, which on meeting Mark prompted the two appearing together on Beat 102-103 ‘Sunday Grill’ with Orla Rapple where they chatted about their experiences as bloggers.

Along with visiting a variety of exhibitions between Garter Lane Arts Centre, Greyfriars Gallery, The Index Gallery and HIVE Gallery over the summer, the WYAC also got an insight into Waterford’s foremost

Figure 3.

First meeting of the Waterford Young Arts Critics with leaders Evelyn Power, Ciara Foley and Nick Kavanagh

contemporary exhibition spaces, SOMA, when they met with its current artistic director Jacquelyn Johnson for a tour and a talk on ‘Sensorium’, a new exhibition by Dublin based artist Robert Forrest. The WYAC also got a special taster of contemporary dance when they previewed the ‘TRACES Dance Ensemble’ new production ‘Truth or Dare’; a production showcasing this unique Waterford based Dance Company, who’s work challenges perceptions about dance and disability by creating and presenting work that communicates potent messages of empowerment and identity. Key to the creative processes are the dancers own reflections, their personal challenges and their roles as advocates for human rights and inclusion of people who have Down Syndrome under the guidance of Libby Seward.

Over the course of the summer the Waterford Young Arts Critics became the youth presence and voice on the ground at festivals. They documented ‘AVENUE Festival 2013’; a celebration of Waterford visual arts spaces and venues, and were invited for a tour and talk of the festival with the event organisers. They played a key role in ‘Spraoi’ 2013 and were also invited for a pre-tour of the ‘Spraoi’ warehouse where they got an insight into programming such a large scale festival and a special preview of the 2013 parade. And in August 2013, they headed to cover the ‘Kilkenny Arts Festival’ attending events such as the ‘Miracoco Luminarium’, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ by Shakespeare’s Globe and ‘Art Makes Children Powerful by Bob and Roberta Smith (aka Patrick Brill) at The Butler Gallery, meeting the artist Patrick Brill on the day for an in-depth conversation on his exhibition. The group also met with

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their Kilkenny youth arts counterparts, the Kilkenny Red Square, discussing the arts and everything in between over an informal cuppa hosted by Bairbre-Ann Harkin, Education Curator with the Butler Gallery.7 OUTCOMES AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Term one of the Waterford Young Arts Critics finished in late August 2013. Some issues arose during the duration of the project. We found it at times a difficult task to organise the group meetings and activities. This was understandable as the group ran over the summer holidays so disruption to full numbers was unavoidable. A clear schedule helped keep everyone on track and focused.

Communication was another area that changed and adapted as the project developed. We found telephone, email and text were less effective when contacting members. Facebook proved to be the best means of liaising.

As a whole, the project demanded a lot of time and energy during and outside of work hours, however this was greatly outweighed by the many positive outcomes achieved over the four months. The final group exceeded initial plans as they developed in to an enthusiastic multidisciplinary arts ensemble that actively attended arts events, talks, workshops. Their artistic knowledge and understanding developed immensely through practical arts experiences, participation, discussion and dialogue. They interacted with a range of organisations and artists strengthening and forging creative partnerships both in Waterford and beyond.

They opened a dialogue about the role of

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young people in the arts and became a recognised arts ensemble locally. They formulated new arts ideas and commenced exciting and innovative artistic ventures and documented their artistic outcomes in local print media (printed in local newspaperspresented on radio), national media, online (created blog and social networking sites).

The group’s end of term feedback truly encapsulates the success of the project; “I love the way it’s given me an opportunity to work with papers, radio, a blog, etc, whilst simultaneously allowing me to meet new people and view art. It’s a great mix!”

“It was a great chance to make new friends who share my interests. It was also a brilliant opportunity to learn how to critique things, and just to get out and see more of what was happening in the local theatres and exhibitions. I absolutely loved the whole experience, Kilkenny was especially wonderful. I feel that this has really helped to expand my knowledge and interest in the arts. I love how we are just beginning this organisation, and going into new territory with our blog, starting a shelf in the library and organising an event for culture night.

We have plenty of great things going on, and you can really sense that everyone in the group wants to be there, and everyone shares a great interest for the arts. It’s really been a great experience to work in something I love with such a wonderful group of people.”

“I loved everything we went to see, and I would have never seen the art if it wasn’t for

the critics. I think we’re going well with what we’re seeing/doing!”

“I think that we went to great variety of things; shows, exhibitions, festivals, movies and also read and reviewed books on the side. I was away for a chunk of it so I’m not sure what sort of events I missed, but I do know that the variety of things that I was around for was superb!”8 WATERFORD YOUNG ARTS CRITICS NEXT STEPS

Upon completion of the summer term, the group expressed a strong desire to continue and to develop their skills to programming and in September 2013 the WYAC went on to curate an event as part of Culture Night in Waterford. The WYAC (now event planners), involved a wide variety of performances with local talented teenagers, whom they selected. The night was a huge success with a pop-up coffee house feeling where all ages came along to chat with friends and watch the live acts. In addition to their Culture Night, the WYAC were invited to the Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) in November 2013 to take part in a ‘Youth in Galleries’; a forum of gallery young curator/ critic groups. They explored the issues, challenges and benefits for young people engaging with public galleries and visual

arts spaces and got a youth led tour of the exhibition ‘I Go to Seek a Great Perhaps’ by LCGA group. They worked with Jessie O’ Connor, Director of ‘Teen Tasks’, discussed their experiences and perceptions of galleries and spoke about the challenges and the benefits for young people in engaging with the arts. They also gave their ideas for improving youth accessibility to public galleries and arts spaces.

The Waterford Young Arts Critics will recommence in February 2014. From the group’s feedback after term one, term two will focus on building knowledge and skills across art forms. The first sessions will look at Theatre, where the group have been given a unique behind the scenes opportunity in to new play ‘Dreamland’ by Jim Nolan. The Critics have also been invited to form part of the ‘Waterford Writers’ Weekend’ in March 2014, speaking in conversation with Gemma Tipton on the topic, ‘How to look at art and why should you?’ As this new term will run during school period, some exam year members have opted to put their place on pause until the summer, thus opening a few spaces for new recruits. 2014 presents an exciting new time for expansion and development as the next phase for the Waterford Young Arts Critics continues.

Evelyn Power is Visual Arts and Outreach Manager, Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford

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NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

This article is based on a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Forum - Education & Outreach, on 7 July 2013, Dublin.

See http://www.youtharts.ie/sites/youtharts.ie/files/Youth_Arts_Research.pdf accessed 18 Jan 2014 Q4 statistic taken from 2012 detailed surveys of Waterford City schools TY- 6th years conducted by Garter Lane Arts Centre Q3 Student ideas taken from 2012 detailed surveys of Waterford City schools TY- 6th years conducted by Garter Lane Arts Centre Q4e Student quotes from 2012 detailed surveys of Waterford City schools TY- 6th years conducted by Garter Lane Arts Centre Selection of responses from young people from open call for new arts ensemble compiled through www.surveymonkey.com application form See www.waterfordyoungartscritics.com for all reviews and blogs by WYACs Selection of responses by Waterford Young Arts Critics from the post evaluation /feedback surveys compiled through www.surveymonkey.com

collect exhibit

engage

Highlanes Gallery, Laurence Street, Drogheda, Co. Louth, Ireland

T. + 353 (0)41 980 3311 W. www.highlanes.ie E.info@highlanes.ie

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Even better than the real thing?

Collecting copies of ancient sculpture in Ireland MICHAEL ANN BEVIVINO

INTRODUCTION1

“

T

O STUDY THE history of attitudes to ancient art would be to study the history of European culture as a whole”2

This statement, from Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s seminal work Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500– 1900, serves as the basic premise for this paper. Although brief, it provides the raison d’être for studying the classical past today.

This essay looks at Irish attitudes to a particular type of art – casts and other copies of classical sculpture – and what they can tell us about the history of European culture. Just as in other parts of Europe, Ireland witnessed the proliferation of copies of sculpture from the antique that began in the eighteenth century and ended in the twentieth.

Copies of works of art can be enigmatic: to some, they represent nothing more than debased replicas with no inherent value, or the remnants of times past; to others, they are heritage artefacts in their own right.

They must therefore be approached on a number of levels – as commercial objects, as artefacts, and even as political vehicles – in any attempt to assess their significance.3 Across Europe from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, ancient sculpture was

critical to the formation of culture. A knowledge and understanding of classical sculpture was perceived as being of paramount importance to education, and fundamental to all claims of sophistication.

A limited number of sculptures were accorded canonical status, and it was against these sculptures that other art was judged for the next three hundred years or more.2 Canonical status generated demand, which eventually led to reproduction, and a system in which sculptural copies flourished.

This canon of works that were “upheld as moral and philosophical exemplars not only for their artistic merits but also because they were perceived as the most absolute physical manifestation of the abstract concept of ideal beauty”4 was beginning to take shape as early as the sixteenth century.

They included the Apollo Belvedere (Fig. 1) and the Laocoön (Fig. 2), both of which now reside in the Vatican Museums.

For a long time, originals of outstanding quality could not be viewed outside of Rome, where most of them had been discovered. Due to the esteemed status of the statues, the royal courts of Europe began to collect copies. Trends such Neoclassicism, and along with it the Grand Tour and the building of country houses, led

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Figures 1 and 2.

The Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön group, two of the most commonly reproduced and best-known classical sculptures (Images © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons).

to further demand for copies of sculptures.

Around the same time, casts became an integral part of an artist’s education with the development of art academies.5 The copying of three-dimensional sculpture to twodimensional drawings and engravings “taught students the “correct” way in which to interpret the antique, in terms of the viewpoint, the treatment of line, tonal values and the figure’s structure”.6 The trend spread from Italy to the rest of Europe: to Germany, Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands and England, each of which developed academies of their own.

By the start of the nineteenth century, a new sort of copy assemblage was beginning to take shape in the form of university cast museums. In Germany, university collections of casts flourished alongside museums with casts at their core; the Berlin Kunstakademic alone had two thousand casts in its

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collection by 1885.7 Contrary to the elitist, prestige-oriented collecting in the previous century, however, the aim of this period was to create full collections that could be used to teach archaeology to a wider audience. A rise in the commercial sale of casts also occurred, with companies like the Londonbased Brucciani firm leading the way.

Particularly in England and Germany, the century “opened and closed with a more altruistic desire to obtain casts for public delight and instruction”.8 This marked a major shift from private collections to public institutions that was tempered by early nineteenth-century political and social reform which emphasised that “those in the manufacturing industry, including the working classes, should have opportunities to extend their knowledge, particularly in the arts and principles of design”.9 There is no better expression of the mood of the nineteenth century than the Great

Exhibition, held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851, and the other ‘world’s fairs’ and exhibitions throughout Europe during this time.

Despite all of this activity in cast creation and collection, by the end of the nineteenth century the supremacy of ancient art was being questioned by new artistic movements and social changes in Europe and America. F.T. Marinetti, one of the founders of the Futurist movement, summed up his feelings, and those of many others, with the following: “Museums: cemeteries! ... Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other ... Smash them ... pitilessly”.10 These modern movements gained strength and, before long, plaster cast collections fell from favour, and many were even destroyed. By the time the above words were written, and certainly by the First World War, classical sculpture had well and truly been displaced by modern art.

These feelings were not exclusive to artists, but were indicative of the cultural mood in much of Europe at this time. On the back of the modernisation of the Industrial Revolution, and in the face of a dark period of international conflict, it became harder for the public to associate with pure, white statues that depicted ancient subjects, and one could find widespread dissolution in the glories of ancient art. With this cultural shift came an emphasis on originality, and museums sought out original objects only. In this new twentieth-century regime, plaster casts were no longer desirable objects, and they were no longer produced in the massive numbers of the previous century.

Any casts that were still being made were for purely educational purposes.

Plaster is a notoriously difficult material to maintain, and is particularly vulnerable to dampness. As “popular enthusiasm drifted away from classical statuary, and the graffiti of art students lent an air of decay to collections that, because of their medium, cannot grow old gracefully”,11 the cast collections of Europe were dispatched to dank basements and dark storerooms, or were simply destroyed.

IRELAND AND THE CLASSICS

The classical tradition has played a role in Irish life for over 1,500 years, particularly in literature;12 indeed, some of Ireland’s greatest authors owe a debt to the Greeks and the Romans. The material culture of the Classical past has also had a great impact, although less scholarly attention has been paid to this.

In many cases, cultural developments in England (such as the creation of the Royal Academy in 1768) were practically duplicated in other parts of the British Empire, sometimes in explicit acts of empire-building. Cultural boundaries that may exist today were often blurred, particularly in the upper-middle classes (that were responsible for much of the collecting and dissemination of copies after the antique). Indeed, the identity of the collectors is usually not black and white; aristocrats like Viscount Powerscourt (and the artists working for them) would have been likely to spend as much time in London as in Dublin.13 The aristocrats would often

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have viewed themselves as ‘British’, rather than simply ‘Irish’ (of course, the exact definition of these terms depends on the political milieu of the time in which they were being used; these definitions do not necessarily correspond to modern ones).

This mentality crept into a number of preFree State cultural institutions, and it is impossible to group them into either category. Rather, this dual identity created a unique form of institution that was, in many cases, dependent on the British government but that maintained some form of Irish character as well.

Due to these close links with Britain, Neoclassicism developed quickly in Ireland.

Like the English milords, young gentlemen from Ireland were sent on a Grand Tour, and many brought back pieces of ancient sculpture (or copies of them) to enliven the interiors and gardens of their grand houses.

Unfortunately, few of the copies remain in situ today. Two notable exceptions are Russborough House, Co. Wicklow, and Powerscourt House, Co. Wicklow. The Powerscourt collection includes the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere and the Diana of Versailles, among others.

Private collections and those found in country houses may often be more representative of the particular collector’s tastes than those of society as a whole.

What, then, do the more institutional collections say about the society that they aimed to represent?

Most large collections in Ireland, including (but not limited to) those of the National

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Museum of Ireland, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Crawford Gallery, University College Cork, University College Dublin, the National College of Art and Design, the Royal Dublin Society and the Royal Irish Academy, had a collection of copies of classical sculpture at some point.

Ten years ago, in this journal, Jason Ellis contributed a piece entitled ‘Plaster Cast Collections and their Conservation: Some Irish Examples’.14 His article highlights a number of collections of plaster casts in Ireland and discusses their recent conservation. I have tried to focus here on collections not discussed in detail by Ellis in 2004.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF IRELAND

The National Museum of Ireland was created with the passing of the Dublin Science and Art Museum Act of 1877. Under this act, material from the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Dublin Society and other institutions was subsumed into the umbrella of the Department of Science and Art based in South Kensington, London. Its first official title was the Dublin Museum of Science and Art. In her book, Politics, Archaeology and the Creation of a National Museum in Ireland, Elizabeth Crooke sees South Kensington as “a government instrument, a tool for the state to retain direction over that which generates self-education and self-regulation throughout Britain”.15 She goes on to say that, “as a consequence, the state, by way of the establishment of museums, spread its power throughout Britain and into Ireland”.

If these observations are correct, then it becomes clear that the Dublin museum was

inextricably tied to the Victorian mentality that, influenced by the Industrial Revolution, was responsible for the development of so many museums throughout Britain. These museums, with the one in Dublin as no exception, were primarily concerned with the instruction of the public in matters of taste.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the newly founded museum was outfitted with a series of plaster casts after the antique, as these objects were a necessary part of any public collection at this time. The majority of casts in the museum came from the South Kensington Museum itself, in line with the

Figure 3.

director Henry Cole’s directive of using it as “a storehouse for circulating objects of science and art throughout the kingdom”.16 These casts were used to “fill gaps in the museum’s collection”17 and were displayed prominently in the new building on Leinster Lawn, both in the entrance rotunda and in the main hall (Fig. 3). By 1908, the General Guide to the Art Collections of the Museum noted that seventy-seven casts were displayed in the building rotunda alone.18 Scholars including Richard Hingley and Frank Turner have discussed the use of classical antiquity as a symbol of British heritage. There is a long tradition of looking

National Museum of Ireland, rotunda interior, showing the Hermes and the Infant Dionysos, Cnidian Venus and the Diadoumenos, among others (reproduced by permission of the National Library of Ireland).

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to the Greek and the Roman worlds for inspiration for modern Britain, particularly in relation to the expansion of the British Empire. While there is a very strong tradition of classical scholarship in Britain, perhaps the independent Ireland of the early twentieth century was keen to distance itself from symbols associated with the British Empire, and the casts after the antique that were held by the museum fell into this category. When the (Free State) Department of Education made changes to the museum in 1928, the casts of non-Irish material were removed and parcelled out between various institutions, including University College Dublin, the RDS and the School of Art. At the time of writing, it is not clear which casts were distributed, or which remain today, but the massive numbers that were parcelled out (over 440) gives some indication of the size of the museum’s collection. At this point, the exhibitions in the museum were reorganised to emphasise the Irish material, one of the key objectives of the new, officially national, museum.

Exactly how much the removal of the casts of antique sculpture has to do with the political atmosphere of the time is unclear, as museums all over Europe were replacing copies with originals. But there is no doubt that the focus on displaying genuine Irish antiquities meant that other objects would be relegated to storage and distributed to other organisations; perhaps it is no coincidence that copies after antique sculpture that had been considered so important by the British government were among the first to go.

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NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND19

Ireland did not possess an art gallery on a national scale until the 1850s. Based on the extremely positive reception of the Dublin Exhibition of 1853 (which piggy-backed onto the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 in London and other exhibitions like that held in Cork in 1852), which at least one million people attended, it was decided to build a permanent exhibition space for works of art in Ireland.20 It is during this period that similar institutions were being founded; for example, the National Gallery of Scotland was being developed and was promised substantial aid from the British Government at this time.

Figure 4.

Richard Thomas Moynan (1856–1906), Taking Measurements: The Artist Copying a Cast in the Hall of the National Gallery of Ireland, oil on canvas, 1887. (© National Gallery of Ireland, NGI 4562).

As the first director of the National Gallery of Ireland, George Francis Mulvany acquired not only paintings but also casts of antique sculptures because it had now become firmly established to use plaster casts to cultivate public taste (Fig. 4).21 Mulvany proceeded to order casts from none other than Domenico Brucciani, official formatore to the British Museum and proprietor of the extensive Covent Garden salesroom of casts. By 1860, a letter to the Treasury in London noted that “it is intended to occupy with sculpture the principal saloon and the ground floor ... a collection of casts as will not only educate and please by the exhibition of the most perfect models of form, but will illustrate the history and progress of sculptural art”.21 This selection sums up the feeling of the time: casts were being used, all across Europe but particularly in Britain, for the education and enjoyment of the general public. One year later, the casts had arrived in Dublin, and by the opening of the gallery in 1864, one hundred and six casts were on display, making the Irish gallery “distinct from either that of London or Edinburgh”.22 The collection was augmented over the next years, and was displayed in a prominent location in the gallery for at least eighty years. In the 1930s the casts were moved to a storeroom not open to the public.23 They were still accessible to students, but it is unlikely that they were visited very often; others were “placed out in the wind and rain ... others were broken”.24 Sadly, the remaining pieces were in such bad condition that, as recently as 1990, the Director requested the permission of the Board to dispose of them. The minutes of 9 February state that the Board had agreed on

“1) those in ruinous condition to be destroyed; 2) those in good condition to be retained; 3) those in poor condition to be offered to another institution”.25 According to Marie Bourke, Keeper and Head of Education at the Gallery, around fifteen casts remain in the collection.26 The original purpose of this collection is quite clear: it was begun as a Victorian institution with the primary aim of educating the public and improving their taste by using antique sculpture. It therefore mirrors the large British institutions of the time like the South Kensington Museum.

CONCLUSION

As mentioned above, there were numerous other copies throughout Ireland and many of these still exist in one form or another; unfortunately an article of this length does not allow for discussion of these. It is clear, however, that more work is needed in this area, especially since there has been a relatively recent resurgence of interest in copies across Europe, resulting in a variety of publications and conferences on the subject.27 Examples have been on display in prominent locations in Ireland in the last number of years (such as the casts of Irish high crosses exhibited at the National Museum of Ireland in Collins Barracks and the Canova casts displayed in the Crawford Gallery, Cork). On the whole, however, they remain a relatively unknown quantity to many museum professionals, archaeologists and artists, and they are certainly not familiar to the majority of today’s museum visitors.

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Michael Ann Bevivino completed her master’s thesis in University College Dublin in 2010 NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

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The majority of this research was undertaken as part of a master’s thesis completed in University College Dublin in 2010. Thanks are due to my supervisor, Christina Haywood, and to the following museum specialists for their help and advice: Lynda Mulvin (Lecturer, School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin); Marie Bourke (Director of Education, The National Gallery of Ireland); and Raghnall Ó Floinn (Director, The National Museum of Ireland).

Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny (1981) Taste and the antique: the lure of classical sculpture, 1500–1900, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, p. 8.

Many of the ancient works discussed here are, obviously, copies themselves (often of older bronze originals that have been lost). For clarity, ancient works are here referred to as ‘originals’.

Martin Postle (1997) Naked authority? Reproducing antique statuary in the English Academy, from Lely to Haydon. In: Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft (eds) Sculpture and its reproductions. Reaktion Books, London, p. 80.

The French Academy in Rome is often considered the first modern academy to use casts to train students. See Haskell and Penny (1981) p. 17.

Postle (1997) p. 81.

Haskell and Penny (1981) p. 122.

Peter Connor (1989) Cast-collecting in the Nineteenth century: scholarship, aesthetics, connoisseurship. In: G.W. Clarke (ed) Rediscovering Hellenism: the Hellenic inheritance and the English imagination. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 187.

Geoffrey Lewis (1992) Museums in Britain: a Historical Survey. In: John Thompson (ed) Manual of curatorship.

Butterworth-Heinemann, London, p. 27.

F.T. Marinetti (1909) Futurist Manifesto. Le Figaro, 20 February 1909.

Connor (1989) p. 229.

W.B. Stanford (1984) Ireland and the Classical Tradition. Irish Academic Press, Dublin, p. 8.

Paula Murphy (2010) Nineteenth-century Irish sculpture: native genius reaffirmed. Yale University Press, New Haven, p. 1.

Jason Ellis (2004) Plaster cast collections and their conservation: some Irish examples. Museum Ireland 14: 97–102.

Elizabeth Crooke (2000) Politics, Archaeology and the Creation of a National Museum of Ireland. Irish Academic Press, Dublin, p. 105.

Quoted in Lewis (1992) p. 29.

Lynda Mulvin (2006) Roman & Byzantine antiquities in the National Museum of Ireland: a select catalogue. National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, p. 14.

Mulvin (2006) p. 17. Raghnall Ó Floinn and others have recently undertaken interesting research on the replication of Irish antiquities, especially those created during the Gaelic revival. While the work here is focused on copies of classical art, I hope in future to look at these in relation to the Irish antiquities.

For a detailed study of the origins and history of the National Gallery of Ireland (and other Irish museums), see Marie Bourke (2011) The story of Irish museums 1790–2000: culture, identity and education. Cork University Press, Cork.

Catherine de Courcy (1985) The foundation of the National Gallery of Ireland. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, p. 3.

Peter Somerville-Large (2004) 1854–2004: the Story of the National Gallery of Ireland. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, p. 96.

For more details on these, see Somerville-Large (2004) pp. 96–7.

Marie Bourke (pers. comm., 2010). The Gallery had, prior to independence, been controlled under the auspices of the British government and its Treasury; it is possible that, with the shift to the new departments of the new government, that the galleries were rearranged as part of this. More research, however, is needed in this area.

Somerville-Large (2004) p. 338.

Somerville-Large (2004) p. 438.

Marie Bourke (pers. comm., 2010).

An outstanding example of this is Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (eds) (2010) Plaster casts: making, collecting and displaying from classical antiquity to the present. de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. The Association Internationale pour la Conservation et la Promotion des Moulages (www.plastercastcollection.org) provides an international forum for scholars and professionals interested in the history of sculptural copies.

Museum Ireland Volume 23 2013

What the books say – the usefulness of visitor books as a research source JOANNE HAMILTON

INTRODUCTION

T

HE NATIONAL MUSEUM of Ireland – Country Life (NMI-CL) is located at Turlough Park in County Mayo on the West Coast of Ireland, it opened to the public in September 2001. The Museum is one of four branches of the National Museum of Ireland and the only one situated outside of the capital city. It houses the NMI’s collection of Folklife material representing Irish traditional life during the period 1850-1950.

The collection is made up of objects that signify traditional customs and festivals,

Figure 1.

religion, trades and crafts, farming and fishing and everyday life for ordinary people of the times. This material is supplemented with original video footage, images and oral recording that form part of the Folklife archive.

In addition to the purpose built galleries that house the main exhibits, the museum complex also has extensive mature gardens, a lake, walking trails and an impressive Victorian house. This was the ancestral home of the Fitzgerald family who were the

The National Museum of Ireland – Country Life at Turlough Park. Photo © National Museum of Ireland.

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local landed gentry. The original library and drawing room of the house have been recreated to reflect how they may have appeared in the 1900s and are opened to the public. Entrance to the museum and its grounds are free as they are publically funded.

VISITOR BOOKS AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF IRELAND – COUNTRY LIFE, 2001-2011

Since its opening, a visitor comment book has sat quietly, and somewhat inconspicuously, by the reception desk where visitors enter and exit the museum.

The comment book provides visitors with an opportunity to fill in their name and address and leave a short comment about their visit to the exhibition galleries. There are no prompts or questions asked. Visitors are free to reflect their own thoughts and opinions of their museum experience. In addition to the books visitors can also record comments on individual comment cards that are available in various locations throughout the museum. The cards were not examined for the purpose of this particular analysis however.

When I began to explore the contents of a selection of the visitor books in more detail I was struck by the various themes that emerged from their pages. The depth and range of the experiences that some visitors encountered during their visits was equally unexpected. It became apparent that the books were not just a static medium for visitors to record their names and addresses.

For some people they represented rather more, a space in which they felt they could

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express the deep impact that the museum visit had on them personally.

With this in mind I began to look more carefully at some of the books that had accumulated since the museum opened, with a view to further investigating the rich, unexplored treasure they might hold. Within the pages of the various volumes there was, time and time again, uncontested evidence of the effect the museum and its exhibitions has on visitors who recorded comments. In a number of cases visitors felt able to freely, and indeed eloquently, express what the museum visit meant to them personally. The result was a wealth of written evidence regarding the effectiveness of the museum exhibitions.

There are a number of recurring themes that were identified throughout the books. These themes permit the museum to gain an insight into how it is already engaging audiences in a positive way. In this sense one of the more interesting themes to emerge was the ability of visitors to create links between their own prior life experience and what they see and experience within the museum exhibitions. Such a connection has been recognised in the field of contemporary museum studies as a key way in which museum audiences can learn from their museum experience.1 Accordingly, it can be concluded that the ways in which the exhibitions and objects are presented at NMI-CL, and indeed the range and scope of objects on display, allow the audience to construct their own meaning based on their own knowledge and experience. In turn this information could be used to provide a

tangible reference point for the development of new exhibitions and museum programming in the future.

While the examination of the visitor comment books yielded largely positive results, there were some occasional critical comments recorded too. These generally related to practical issues such as malfunctioning audio visuals, the ban on flash photography, and in particular, requests for written material in additional languages. Other comments focused on the perceived exclusion of particular interest topics; stone masonry and coffin making were two examples of these. Overall negative comments accounted for a very small proportion of the total comments recorded in the books I examined.

It must be pointed out that using visitor comment books for research in this way can be somewhat flawed. It could be surmised that visitors have a tendency to copy, or to be directly influenced by, comments or opinions written by other people in the book. I was aware of this as I examined the books and while there was a little evidence for this practice, it was the more detailed comments that provided the best sources of information for this study. In addition it must also be remembered that not all visitors did write in the books. Some may have filled in separate comment cards while others may have chosen not to write in either, or were even unaware of the books and cards.

Owing to the large amount of visitors that appear to fall through the net, by not writing

comments in the books, they cannot be considered as a definitive source when analysing visitor opinion. Nonetheless, in the absence of a more systematic methodology of regularly gathering visitor reaction, they represent a good starting point on which to build from. Equally, the information gathered from the books can be used as a solid foundation for collecting further visitor information, through exhibition-specific questionnaires, focus groups or detailed visitor interviews.

FRAMEWORK FOR USING VISITOR BOOKS AS A RESEARCH SOURCE

Visitor comment books tend to be an underutilised resource in terms of museum visitor research, often overlooked in favour of other more targeted research methodologies. In the few cases where these types of books have been used they have proven to be fruitful in terms of enhancing our understanding of visitor experiences. One such case is the study carried out by Sharon McDonald2. Although McDonald’s exhibition subject matter of Nazi Germany, is markedly different than that of rural life in Ireland, the principles she applies to the interpretation of her data can have a similar application for all types of museum visitor book analysis.

Interestingly, despite the very different subject matters of McDonald’s chosen exhibition compared to The Museum of Country Life, there were some fundamental corresponding starting points between both.

First, McDonald observes that the visitor books were positioned in a fairly inconspicuous location, as with those at

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NMI-CL. Similarly, she noted that, while a number of visitors leafed through the book on entry or exit to the exhibition, only as little as 20% of these actually wrote comments into the book.

the comment book, or what McDonald calls the “imagined receivers”.6 This trend of selfpositioning was detectable to an extent in some of the comments from the NMI-CL books.

While there are no precise statistics for how many people leafed through or actually wrote in the visitor comment books at NMICL, it can be surmised that it was substantially less than the overall numbers, estimated to be over one million visitors, who have visited in the first ten years of its opening.3 Using a basic system I was able to make a rudimentary estimate of how many visitors on average signed the books over the period 2001 to 2011. The resultant figure of 1% was significantly lower than that for McDonald’s books and is designed to be used only as a guide figure.4

McDonald suggests that comments can be evaluated further by dividing them in terms of their style or in terms of their content, as was done with the NMI-CL comments.

Comment styles fall into two broad groupings as she sees it; the short evaluative comment, which ranged from one word to one line and was the most common entry, and the longer reflective comment which could be up to several lines long. The second type of analysis, by content, would appear to yield a greater wealth of information, as was apparent in my examination of visitor books comments from the NMI-CL.

McDonald was able to make a number of assumptions from examining not only the actual comments recorded in the German books, but also from the context and style in which these had been written. She explores the idea of self-positioning or “how commentators position themselves”5 when making their entry and how this influenced the tone of their comment. For example being from Nuremberg or the local area was significant, stating their age, especially if they were a child during the war was deemed important; some positioned themselves by stating their profession, being a history teacher implied a particular knowledge or insight into events in this regard. The idea of self-positioning was further influenced by whom the visitor believed he or she was addressing through

With all this in mind and using McDonald’s work as a comparative framework, I began to look at the possibilities within the NMI-CL books. I quickly recognised that the material was quite significant and warranted a more systematic analysis. Not only that, but it also became obvious that much of this data was linked to modern museum learning theory, such as that espoused in the writings of Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, George Hein, John Falk and Lynn Dierking,7 and therefore should be evaluated within that contextual framework. The implications of using such a contextual structure as a reference point would prove central in determining the impact the NMI-CL has had on some of its visitors. The work carried out here is designed to act as a starting point or basis for identifying positive reaction, recurring

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patterns of themes and overall levels of visitor engagement and interpretation at the museum. The material available within the visitor books provides scope for an even further detailed evaluation in the future, particularly as the books continue to accumulate and be used by the public on an ongoing basis.

METHODOLOGY

The starting point for this study was to make a comprehensive examination of all the visitor comment books available to me from the opening date of the museum.8 Each of the books tended to bridge a period of two chronological years for example 2002-2003 or 2006-2007. The first step I took was to categorise the comments in terms of those that seemed to be of significance and those that fell into the more generic type of comment. Generic comments were ones that basically recorded the visitors name and address and gave a relatively simplistic oneword comment such as “good”, “excellent” or “interesting”. In some cases the visitor recorded no more than their name and address in the space provided; as a result no information was provided apart from the ability to identify the provenance of the visitor. There were occasional spoiled comments to discount; these appeared to be mainly the work of children judging from the handwriting. However such incidents rare enough, probably due to the proximity of the comment books to the museum reception desk deterring visitors from engaging in this practice.

When these generic and spoiled comments had been eliminated, I was able to begin in

earnest identifying those which contained the information of value. I took note of the page and the comment content and began to list those I found to be of significance.

Once I had completed this process for a number of books I was able to detect patterns of comments emerging. From there I developed broad thematic categories into which each comment could be grouped. The categories that developed to classify the comments included reminiscence, emotional response, ownership and identity. These were not generated in isolation, but were deeply rooted in contemporary museum and learning theory, allowing for an appraisal of how the NMI-CL performs in relation to these principles. Once the primary categories had been established, the easier it was to allocate comments to a group. In other words, while individual comments did differ in ways to an extent, generally the underlying context could still be classified under one of the headings.

While identifying the theme and underlying context of a comment was of primary importance in evaluating the impact that a visit to the museum had on the commentator, there were other factors that were equally pertinent to the study. Taking note of the provenance of the visitor was significant in terms of assessing their particular comment, and in some cases this seemed to influence their point of view. A broad range of visitors wrote in the books, from the local, to national and international.

In a number of cases the international visitors were of Irish descent or were born in this country but now lived in another country, most notably England, the USA or

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Canada. These types of commentator tended to write perceptive, insightful, and poignant comments that were very useful to dissect for the purposes of the study.

Many of the comments recorded by local and national visitors were equally insightful because of their ability to relate personally to exhibition topics and objects. There were also examples of written evidence of the strong sense of pride in, and ownership of, Irish heritage and of the physical museum itself. The ability to link these underlying themes into contemporary museum theory helped provided an analytical structure for evaluating the performance of the exhibitions. This was particularly true with reference to their learning and interpretation values for its visitors.

THEMES THAT EMERGED

There were a number of strong themes that emerged during the examination of the visitor books. Many of these had common threads running through them, and there were elements of crossover evident between all at some level. Collectively they can be defined as falling into one of two key fields; the first being that of reminiscence and emotion, and the second that of identity and ownership. Here I will look more at each individual theme with reference to some of the specific types of comments that were recorded in each.

REMINISCENCE AND EMOTION

The two categories of comment outlined here are concerned in some way with remembrance and its subsequent ability to elicit a level of emotional interpretation on

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the part of the visitor. The first category is defined by the ability of the visitor to have had experience on a direct personal level, with themes and objects in the exhibitions, or indirectly through related memories often of, or from, family members particularly parents and grandparents. In both of these cases, it can be inferred that the visitors possessed the ability to make meaning from their own individual life experiences. This is often described as a cornerstone for harnessing museum learning potential by the likes of Hein, Hooper-Greenhill and Falk.

Some of the comments were recorded in a factual manner, but in others there was a level of emotional input involved, and this was reflected in the comments written.

Direct and indirect connection to the past Some of the visitors who commented on the exhibitions in the books had a personal resonance with many of the physical objects on display. This was reflected in comments like “so many familiar things from my childhood”, “I remember [too] many of the items on display”, and “we have seen a lot of the objects in use”. These visitors seem to have had direct knowledge of using the objects on display within their own lifetime. Such familiarity has enabled them to make deep connections between what they seen in the exhibitions and their own personal life experience. Interestingly, these personal associations with the exhibits and their objects were not only limited to Irish visitors, one Canadian visitor reflected that they were able to make comparisons with rural life in Canada, while a French visitor who was born in Normandy in 1946 wrote that many things reminded him of his own childhood.

In a similar vein, there were comments generated by visitors who appeared to be recalling memories indirectly through the themes and objects they encountered in the exhibitions. Often there was particular reference to parents and grandparents with these types of comment. In such cases, it would appear that the visitors engaged in a process of reminiscence through recalling memories of these people, rather than their own direct experience. The word ‘evoke’ was used by some to indicate a strong sense of memories being brought back to life once again. Comments such as “memories of stories told to me by my father”, “brought to life all the things my grandmother talked about” or “brought me back to my Grannies in the 1970s” were evidence of the commentators’ experience of personal reminiscence. A number of these type comments were also accompanied by sentiments such as “wonderful”, “interesting” and “excellent”. It seemed that these visitors experienced a sense of nostalgia from the exhibitions and this was usually described as having a positive effect on them.

Emotional reaction A number of comments were surprising in that despite their brevity, they managed to convey a depth and spectrum of emotion, from happy to sad. Comments ranging from “I could cry over the hard life of my ancestors”, to “made me feel sad”, and “so many tears in my eyes”, were all phrases inscribed by visitors to record their strong emotional responses to the exhibitions. By contrast, one visitor describes his experience at the museum as “a very happy day”, another writes that the exhibitions as “bringing back

so many happy memories” while a visitor from Co. Down wrote that the exhibitions “lifts the heart and restores confidence”.

These differing emotional responses recorded in the books would seem to imply that some visitors do engage deeply with the exhibitions, and demonstrates how this can provoke a raw emotional reaction on their behalf. In some cases the visitor simply just used the word “emotional” or “moving” to describe their visit, again indicating the impact that the exhibitions had. Research has identified that there is a symbiotic relationship between emotion and cognition in free-choice learning environments such as museums, which subsequently can have a positive influence on visitor learning experience.9 Taken within this context, the information from the visitor books regarding emotion would seem to suggest that the museum is well positioned to initiate learning for the visiting public.

Identity and ownership This category of comment was bound up in the visitors own sense of personal history and the notion of self-identity.

Commentators in the books have taken aspects of their own identity or history and linked those to what they see and experience in the exhibitions, subsequently encouraging a sense of self-validation. This helps to cement the visitor’s interpretation of who they are and where they have come from, which in effect allows them to create a more personal narrative around their experience of the exhibitions. John Falk has described this type of behaviour as the fulfilment of self-identity and self-

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interpretation related needs within a museum context. Such actions allow “people to achieve an understanding of themselves … which in turn influences their subsequent perceptions and behaviour”10 and this trend was reflected to a degree through these particular comments.

Identity and personal history A certain number of people who wrote in the visitor books did so to record their own specific links to Ireland. This pattern was particularly true for many of the international visitors who signed the books.

In these comments, references to an ancestor or ancestry were made regularly.

Comments like “my ancestors were from Co. Waterford”, “my parents are from Ireland”, “helped put me in touch with my Irish family”, signify the need to express the visitors own sense of identity or belonging within an Irish context. They have used the books as a means of recording these links with their Irish heritage and there is a sense that the exhibitions enhance their understanding of where they have come from, even if it was in the distant past.

One visitor from Canada describes the exhibitions as “a great tribute to our ancestors” while another one comments that his visit is “like coming home because [my] parents were from Ireland”. There is a feeling that these visitors, who may have no direct knowledge of Irish rural life, feel genuinely connected to what they see in the exhibitions. This has facilitated them in creating links to their own personal history.

Others use the books in this context to record specific familial connections to Irish

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history. An American visitor writes that his Dad grew up in Parke, Co. Mayo and that his family are buried locally at Turlough cemetery. Elsewhere an Australian visitor records having copies of letters written by family in Cork and Sligo to family in Australia from the period represented.

Identity-related comments like these are very significant in terms of the information they provide about the actual visitor themselves primarily, but also for the insight they provide regarding the deeper psychological interactions that occur with the exhibitions space.

Ownership and pride While the need to record a sense of identity and personal history was prevalent across the range of visitor books examined, so too was a related pattern of comments portraying a sense of ownership and pride. These expressions of pride and ownership were principally towards Irish heritage itself, reflected in comments like “proud the state has invested ... kept our history accessible” and “it makes me feel proud of our heritage”. This also extended to an expression of national pride with one commentator simply writing the words” so proud to be Irish”.

Another variation of this theme was visitors who wrote comments regarding their pride specifically in the museum itself, or of being proud to bring family and visitors to the museum. These comments were often quite short and precise like “very proud of the museum” and “proud to bring visitors here”. Others took the opportunity to describe the museum as “a gem” and “a national treasure”.

When categorising these types of comments, it was the recurring use of language like “our history”, “our heritage” and “our past” that signified to me the visitors sense of ownership. Some comments of this type were accompanied by an expression of thanks for representing or preserving this particular history, or indeed for the museum galleries and buildings themselves. “Thank you for showing us how our ancestors lived” and “Thank you for keeping and presenting the objects of our beloved Irish life” were just two comments characteristic of this trend. These comments embody the visitor’s appreciation of what they have seen, combined with their sense of ownership of Irish history and heritage as discussed earlier. Interestingly, both of these comments were recorded by visitors from the United States; it is apparent by their reactions that they engaged deeply with what they experienced at The Museum of Country Life.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

The ability to detect distinct patterns of comment across the visitor book and to divide them into the two key thematic fields of reminiscence and emotion, and identity and ownership, has had significant implications for analysis and interpretation of the written material. Firstly, it permitted visitors to be recognised as active, rather than passive, participants within the exhibition experience itself. Seeing the visitor in this way ties in with the view put forward by Sharon McDonald in her study of the German visitor books. She advocates that museum audiences must be seen as active participants and this “perspective

seeks to access visitors’ own active meaning-making, and the assumptions, motives, emotions and experiences that this may involve”.11 Once we understand the visitor as an active participant within the exhibition process, particularly in terms of their ability to make their own meaning, we can go about enriching their museum experience further.

In keeping with the notion of the visitor as an active participant, the visitor books also revealed that some visitors do have the capacity to create meaning in their own specific ways. They would seem to be using their own inherent systems, to build association between what they already know or have experience of, and that which they encounter within the exhibitions. In some cases, it is associations with the physical objects on display, while in others it is with familiar ideas or concepts such as farming, fishing etc. These are not necessarily always concepts or objects which the visitor had a direct association with, but they can also be recalled indirectly through a series of reminiscence and remembrance for example from parents and grandparents. This trend was reflected by written comments such as “saw things that my father used for farming and blacksmithing”.

The outcome is that some of the visitor book commentators can be seen as active meaning makers within the exhibition space. Museum learning theorists John Falk and Lynn Deirking believe this ability is a fundamental part of museum learning. They understand it to be “a long-term process of

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making meaning and finding relationships”12. Such a concept is also supported by Hooper-Greenhill who says people make their own meaning rather than receiving, accepting or encountering meaning. Hooper-Greenhill also believes in the concept that visitors will write their own meaning using prior knowledge and experience as a starting point.13 George Hein described the idea of links between objects and concepts which are familiar to the museum visitor as being crucial in encouraging them to write their own meaning, thereby enhancing their inherent learning potential.14 Comments that fell into the reminiscence category of this visitor book study characterised the tendency of some museum visitors to use these particular systems during their visit.

Devising ways to manipulate the capacity some visitors possess to make their own meaning in this way could work to supplement learning within the exhibition context.

In common with McDonald’s notion of selfpositioning, the visitor books revealed the ability of some visitors to position themselves within the narrative constructs of what they encounter within the exhibitions. Doing so enables them to establish links between the exhibitions and their own personal narrative, similar to Falk’s notion of the realisation of selfidentity and self-interpretation needs.

Discussing narratives and memory in the context of history museums Rowe (et al.) has described them as “potentially ideal public spaces where personal, private or autobiographical narratives come into

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contact with a larger scale, collective or national-narratives”.15 These differing narratives reflected through the prism of the museum gallery are also referred to as little (personal) narratives and large (national or collective) narratives by Rowe (et al.). Public engagement within the museum space is an important factor in order to create these visitor narratives. One comment like “I was born in this village 1932” and another “spent 6 months in Knockranny, Bohola (with grandparents) attended school and church functions” were indicative of two visitors stitching their own personal narrative into the larger collective one that is represented in the exhibitions.

This trend was particularly reflected by comments classified in the self-identity category, where the commentator tended to place him or herself within the contextual framework of the exhibition narrative. The description of particular personal or familial connections both locally and nationally was a common factor in these comments, as was the use of language such as ‘ancestors’ or ‘family’. This language could be construed as visitors engaging in a level of ‘identitybuilding’ within the confines of the exhibition, which Falk has highlighted as being a specific motivating factor for some museum visitors. He also refers to this sense of self as being “strengthened, modified and or extended” by a tourism experience.16 Establishing that some visitors to the Museum are partaking in visits that are either primarily identity motivated, or have identity related secondary consequences, could be vital. Falk has suggested that “the

quest for identity enacted through leisure will continue to be a dominant theme”17 for the future in centres like museums.

Recognising the identity related agendas of many visitors, puts the NMI-CL in a strong position to influence learning and interpretation potential for such audiences.

The visitor books also revealed the part that emotion played in the various comments recorded, indeed the strength of some of these comments was, in parts, surprising.

Research carried out by Falk and Gillespie into the field of emotion and its role in cognition, particularly in free-choice learning environments like museums, has revealed that memory of facts improves when it becomes emotionally arousing information, as compared to when it involves neutral information. Not only that, but emotion may even be responsible for sustaining the necessary interest for learning to take place and “even the laying down of memories subsequent to the experience”.18 Acknowledging that powerful emotional reactions are generated as a byproduct of some visits could be a significant factor in enhancing the overall visitor experience. It could also be an interesting starting point for carrying out more detailed visitor studies into the topic of emotion and cognition.

Similarly, written evidence of visitors expressing a sense of ownership and pride in Irish history, heritage and the Museum itself, may be indicative of a degree of emotional interaction as well as an expression of identity-related needs on their behalf. Looking at this in conjunction with

the possible link between emotion and cognition, it could be surmised that such reactions would have positive consequences for the visitor’s museum learning experience.

CONCLUSIONS

John Falk says: “Today’s museum has no choice but to think seriously about who their visitors are and why they come…Visitors are at the heart of the twenty-first century museum’s existence. Understanding something about museum visitors is not a nicety, it is a necessity”.19 Often the humble visitor book is overlooked as a valid way of gauging visitor opinion. McDonald says that these books serve as “inscriptions of visitor interpretation and thus provide access to aspects of visitor meaning construction”.20 She also notes that, because they are not shaped by a researcher agenda, they are more likely to elicit unanticipated visitor responses. The data gathered from this ten year sample of visitor books from the Museum of Country Life was reflective of this process. It confirms that museum visitors cannot be seen as a blank canvas, but that they are already preconditioned by their own set of life experiences, beliefs and prior knowledge when they come to visit a museum. Awareness of this fact can enable the museum to facilitate, not just existing visitor interest, but also to promote learning and interpretation values for new audiences.

Analysis of the comments from the books would suggest that the museum has, to an extent, already integrated certain systems recommended by leading museum theorists.

Primarily these systems engage visitors by

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acting as hooks to attract their attention in the first instance. Subsequently it appears they can also work by supplementing learning and interpretative values as a secondary outcome. The material gathered here can provide a solid foundation for developing a more advanced research agenda with regard to investigating these outcomes. Systematic strategies like detailed pre- and post-entry interviews and questionnaires based particularly on the themes of reminiscence, identity, emotion and visitor motivation could be used for this purpose. Establishing visitor motivation, whether it be leisure, learning, identity related or part of an altogether different agenda, would be very beneficial for the future. The visitor comment books give us a glimpse into the variety of different, yet in some cases thematically similar, experiences people have from their museum visit. The information that has emerged can serve as an excellent baseline reference point for carrying out this more targeted visitor research when the resources become available.

While this analysis proves largely positive for the NMI-CL, it must be tempered with the caution that although visitor books can be seen increasingly as a valid research tool, they only represent a sample of all visitor opinion. As writing in them is optional, it can only be roughly estimated how many people do sign them and how many do not.

Neither do they provide any supplementary information related to the visitor demographic, apart from name and

provenance. So as to create a more comprehensive picture, it is necessary to gauge opinion from the wider museum audience, and not just those who comment in the books. Equally, it would be as relevant to survey sections of the public who do not visit the museum and discover the reasons they do not. It is also advisable to remember that not all visitors learn in the same ways or even at the same rate. The conventions used in the exhibitions at the NMI-CL may have been largely successful with visitor book commentators, but there may have been other visitors who did not feel their particular needs were fulfilled in the same way. For a more balanced view and to make exhibitions that appeal to the widest possible audience, such issues would have to be appropriately addressed.

Exploring a sample from the ten years of comments from the visitor books at NMI-CL has demonstrated the undervalued nature that such books have as a medium for recording visitor opinion. From the brief analysis carried out here, it seems that they are a worthwhile resource for capturing the often insightful and perceptive reactions of our visitors within the context of museum environment. It provides a starting point by bringing to light the existence of a number of interesting themes and potential relationships that are worthy of more detailed exploration. Perhaps in time and used in a more strategic manner, these books may come to be viewed as a fundamental tool within the exhibition planning and subsequent evaluation processes.

Joanne Hamilton is a Documentation Assistant in the National Museum of Ireland – Country Life

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Falk, J.H. and Dierking, L.D. (2000) Learning from museums: visitor experiences and the making of meaning. Altamira, USA, p.87 McDonald, S. (2005) Accessing audiences: visiting visitor books. Museum and Society 3: 125 On 26 August 2010 the Museum of Country Life welcomed its millionth visitor, this was almost exactly nine years since it opened on 10 September 2001.

An estimated figure of approximately 10,000 visitors wrote in the comment books for the ten years 2001-2011 based on taking an average figure of 1,000 per year over 10 years. In order to estimate how many people wrote in the visitor comment books over the ten years from 2001 to 2011, I counted the number of comments written in one visitor book representing a single calendar year. This gave me a figure of 983 comments, which I rounded up to 1,000. Using this figure as a guide for one year I then calculated across the ten years, the resulting figure was 10,000.

The figure arrived at is only to act as a guide. It does not take into account fluctuations in the levels of comment in the books, e.g. if there was an event held at the Museum such as an exhibition opening, more people may have signed the books on such occasions.

McDonald, S. (2005) Accessing audiences: visiting visitor books. Museum and Society 3: 125 McDonald, S. (2005) Accessing audiences: visiting visitor books. Museum and Society 3: 126 Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1998) (ed) The educational role of the museum. Routledge, London; Hein, G. (1998) Learning in the museum. Routledge, London; Falk, J. and Deirking, L. (2000) Learning from museums; visitor experiences and the making for meaning. Altamira, USA. Visitor books were not available for every year since 2001.

Falk, J.H. and Gillespie, K.L. (2009) Investigation the role of emotion in science centre visitor learning. Visitor Studies 12: 112 Falk, J.H. (2011) Reconceptualising the museum visitor experience. Who visits, why and to what affect? ICOFOM Conference paper, p.9 McDonald, S. (2005) Accessing audiences: visiting visitor books. Museum and Society 3: 120 Falk, J.H. and Dierking, L.D. (2000) Learning from museums: visitor experiences and the making of meaning. Altamira, USA, p.12 Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1998) (ed) The educational role of the museum. Routledge, London. p.22 Hein, G. (1998) Learning in the museum. Routledge, London. p.77 Rowe, S.M., Wertsch, J.V. and Kosyaeva, T. (2002) Linking little narratives to big ones: narrative and public memory in history museums. Culture and Psychology 8: 98 Falk, J.H. (2009) The learning tourist: The role of identity-related visit motivations. Proceedings of the 6th International Congress on Costal and Marine Tourism, p. 41 Falk, J.H. (2009) The learning tourist: The role of identity-related visit motivations. Proceedings of the 6th International Congress on Costal and Marine Tourism, p. 42 Falk, J.H. and Gillespie, K.L. (2009) Investigation the role of emotion in science centre visitor learning. Visitor Studies 12: 113 Falk, J.H. (2011) Reconceptualising the museum visitor experience. Who visits, why and to what affect? ICOFOM Conference paper, p.1 McDonald, S. (2005) Accessing audiences: visiting visitor books. Museum and Society 3: 122

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Board of Directors, Irish Museums Association Ltd, 2013

Brian Crowley IMA Chair William Blair IMA Director Dr Elizabeth Crooke IMA Director Ken Langan IMA Treasurer and Secretary Paul Doyle IMA Director Anne Hodge IMA Vice-Chair Dr Hugh Maguire IMA Director Dr Emily Mark-Fitzgerald IMA Director Carla Marrinan IMA Director Nigel Monaghan IMA Director Aoife Ruane IMA Director Rosemary Ryan IMA Director

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