Museum Priorities

Abstract

This editorial is being written as the first terrorizing wave of a global pandemic, known as COVID-19, is washing across the world. Government agencies are struggling to stay ahead of the infection rate and asking citizens around the world to withdraw from civic gatherings, to stay at home, and to limit our social contact. The museum community is matching this call to action, canceling events and closing their doors, sending most staff home and maintaining themselves with skeleton maintenance and security services. A few innovators are using this opportunity to provide access to virtual tours, lectures, and activities as ways to help people sheltering in place with respite from the daily deluge of data. We are still early in the pandemic but the devastation this virus will cause to our spirits and the economy will echo for years to come. When we first assembled this issue, the museum sector was healthy, debating large budget museums and how the non-profit sector operates in a robust global economy. But today we face a completely changed future. It seems that this crisis has surfaced some critical issues that can be the foundation for scholarly study, and just possibly some time to think about how a new vision for the museum sector might emerge as our communities make the slow return to civic engagement and public life. In this issue, and prior to the pandemic, Associate Editor, Vince Dziekan curated a series of reflections on the tension between art and archives. The first of two sets of papers that organized around the idea that museum experience is motivated by a continuum thinking approach that accepts intersectional narratives. That is, that the archive will soon cease to be a a static catalogue, replaced by a relational dataset that can be rewritten. What was once difficult for archivists to develop in past eras is now a common affordance of digital tagging and representation. As we reviewed these papers on this emerging trend in knowledge (re)construction, I believe the concept is particularly useful for rethinking our natural history assets, city museums, the role museums of conscience play in shifting social perspectives, and how science finds representation in museum contexts. Indeed, the opportunity to explore new relationships in the record of material culture and natural history assets might help us recraft our relationships with the world around us. We welcome manuscripts that focus on how our community is coming to terms with past oppressions and exclusions. In Volume 63 issue 1, we introduced our first Curator: The Museum Journal/Knology Writing Scholars Workshop for emerging or mid-career museum professionals in the USA. Participation in this workshop made possible through a 50% matching grant funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (award #MG-50-18-0044-18). Since they joined us in December 2019, the scholars have been hard at work exploring our archives to develop virtual issues that explore emergent questions facing the museum sector. With the global pandemic leaving many museum workers in their homes, we’ve now partnered with Wiley to release seven of virtual issues and the framing papers developed by our scholars as open access for the next six months. A new virtual issue will be released every two weeks between April 8th, 2020 and the middle of June. All of these issues and the introductory essay will be released as open access on both CuratorJournal.org, our social media site, and on Wiley’s Curator: The Museum Journal’s web page: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/21516952 We invite museum scholars around the world to share these resources widely, and to take this time to reflect on where we can go as the world moves in to a post-pandemic recovery period. We may be facing radical economic stresses as we move into the recovery cycle. We hope that our resources offer some support for the new museum sector that is bound to emerge from this challenge the coming decades. John Fraser (johnf@knology.org), Editor. John Fraser is President & CEO of Knology Ltd., a social science research institute based in the USA, and the 2019–2020 Past President of the Society for Environmental, Population, & Conservation Psychology, Division 34 of the American Psychological Association.