“Public curation” is a wonderful and exciting tool that museums across the country should be looking forward to engaging in. To me, public engagement should be a number one priority and something that all museums strive for. While museums celebrate the history of everyday life, they can also be extremely personal to anyone walking through the doors. Encouraging everyone to participate in some way in their local or non-local museum is an important idea.
I especially enjoyed Nina Simon’s strong stance on proper feedback by museums. She explains extremely well why museums and their participatory efforts fail due to the lack of proper feedback by museums. Museums cannot simply open up voting on galleries or encourage gallery ideas and not give the participators a response or turn their suggestions into action. Keeping the full engagement of a community is especially important for museums. If the community engages and participates and the museum does little in return to show that that participation is valid and useful, the community will turn away from the museum.
Matthew Fischer’s perspective on audience curation and participation fascinated me immensely. He talks about how historians have a huge job of interpreting history and telling a story through detective work, curation, and editing. He believes that non-historians should be able to share in this work as well. I find this extremely insightful. I think that historians have such a huge task of producing engaging and challenging historical research but have such few avenues to share their work. By letting the public share in this through technology, the work of historians can be strengthened. This perspective ties in nicely with Nancy MacLean’s perspective on how museum curators and the museum experts should embrace views of the public. She talks about how museums and staff need to learn with their community and embrace change. This kind of give and take should be important to all historians in any field as well as curators.
Since history is so personal, I think that museums and historians should be encouraging public perspective and participation. If the study of history and the physical space of a museum is to continue, the public must be included, encouraged, and listened to. This isn’t some alien past, it’s everyone’s past and everyone’s history.
I am sorry I forgot to mention Nina Simon’s piece regarding feedback as one of the articles I was most interested in. Collecting information about which exhibits are or are not of interest to people is useful and her article offered some wonderful ideas.
I never understood having a suggestion box and then not doing anything with it. It seems like a waste of space and paper to me. I like the idea that exhibits should be useful to the public, and that visitors should be able to express which areas were most useful to them. It also makes me a bit nervous, as I don’t think that equally factual exhibits should necessarily be removed if they aren’t frequently talked about as they could be challenging perspectives that some people don’t want to have to think about. It’s definitely a difficult balance to achieve.