University museums and the community

Abstract

This paper summarises the main themes of the UMAC 2008 conference, noting some of the challenges and opportunities facing university museums at the start of the 21st century. The idea for this conference grew from a recognition of the increasingly important role that university museums now play in engaging with a wide range of communities. For much of their history, universities were elite learning environments, often deliberately exclusive to all but staff and students. Over the last fifty years or so, their focus has shifted somewhat and universities have been playing an increasingly important role in their local and regional communities. University strategies increasingly acknowledge their wider economic, social and cultural roles: most are major employers; many play a significant role in the economy through knowledge transfer or their contribution to tourism. In addition, one of the major ways in which universities make a contribution to their communities is through their cultural provision. Many universities operate theatres, concert venues, parks, botanic gardens, observatories, museums and galleries. Increasingly, university museums and galleries have become a vital link between universities and their communities. They are important sources of learning outside the classroom for schools and colleges, as well as places of informal learning for visitors of all kinds; they are vehicles for public engagement with academic research; and increasingly they are becoming places where the university can listen to the community and its views on the issues studied by academics. The conference therefore addressed one of the most pressing issues today for university museums; how they can best function as places of interaction between the many communities they now serve, both internally and externally. Internal communities will include staff and students at work and at leisure. External communities will vary for each museum but are likely to include teachers and schoolchildren, families, adult learners, communities of origin and 'virtual' communities online. One major area of discussion throughout the conference concerned the difficulty of prioritizing audiences. Many universities have yet to formally identify their key target audiences, leaving university museums to define their own, at risk of operating both unstrategically and unsustainably. As audience research conducted at Yale (PICKERING) demonstrates, potential audiences for the museum may well be deterred by the physical and psychological barriers presented by the university as a whole: aligning audience development initiatives with wider university priorities is critical. Working this strategic thinking into day-to-day activity can also be a challenge; many university museums struggle to find a balance between time spent with ‘traditional’ academic communities supporting teaching and research, and time spent serving new external audiences. At Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum, all staff were involved in trying to establish what this balance would mean for them, and all are involved in ongoing evaluation of whether or not it is working (BIANCO). When thinking about academic communities, most university museums – with their roots in subject specialisms – tend to work most closely with staff and students from their own disciplines. Yet as universities champion cross-disciplinary working, university museums can no longer assume that all academic users will be subject specialists; or that all will be using the museum for research and teaching. Informal activities to build internal audiences can be most effective in challenging disciplinary barriers and in generating whole-institution support (ASHBY, HERUC).