Reading the Newspaper with a Public Historian's Eye

Newspapers. I'm my house, they're everywhere. They lay on the floor in my entryway, folded neatly and encased in coloured plastic. They're piled precariously on chairs and stairs by our side door. They overflow the blue recycling bins in the garage. They litter our kitchen table, the family room table and even the living room table. Articles are clipped, highlighted and/or written on and stuck on the fridge, filed away for future reference or slipped under my bedroom door as I sleep. As a three-newspaper family (receiving The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and the Whitby This Week on a regular basis), it's quite possible that we are single-handedly responsible for creating a very large hole somewhere in the Amazonian jungle.

So, this morning when I went downstairs for a cup of coffee and some breakfast, I was not at all surprised to see various sections of The Toronto Star covering nearly every square inch of the kitchen table. Nor was I particularly shocked to see that my father had "conveniently" left the paper open to an article announcing that the "Spadina House [had been] restored to its glory days." Yeah, my father's about as subtle as sledgehammer, but I was intrigued enough to pick it up and start reading.

At first I read the article like I have always read articles of this type: I skimmed the story, interested to learn a little more about Toronto's built heritage (e.g. Spadina House was built in 1866 by James Austin, one of the founders of the Dominion Bank and later, a president of Consumer's Gas Company) and intrigued by the more minute historical details (like the fact that different quadrants of the city used to have designated days on which the muckety-mucks could fashionably receive visitors). I was also mentally adding Spadina House to my ever-growing list of places to visit in Toronto.

But, as I finished reading the article, my inner public historian started to work...

I found myself looking critically at the photograph which had accompanied the article. The photo shows one of Spadina House's newly refurbished rooms in all its glory. With its cheerfully striped furniture, luxurious silk wallpaper and dramatic chandelier, the house looks beautiful and the care that the museum staff put into the new renovations is evident. That said, I couldn't help but cross my fingers and hope that the photographer had restricted herself from using a flash. Heaven forbid we overly expose the new furnishings to intense lighting.

Next, my eyes turned to the title of the article and I just couldn't help my knee-jerk reaction: Glory days? What glory days? Why does everyone always assume that the past was more 'glorious' or simple than the present? And what good does idealizing the past at the expense of the present do for a historical site or for the historical knowledge/consciousness of the public at large? I know, I know... I'm being nit-picky, but that sort of oversimplification drives me batty.

The final paragraph of the article briefly related the types of public programming that the newly reopened heritage site would offer. As someone interested in museum education, I was pleased to see that the site was going to offer three types of tours, "Meet the Austins" for those that are more interested in the history of the family, "It's a Kid's Life" for school-aged children, and a restoration tour for those visitors more interested in the architectural significance of the house and the process that went into repairing one of Toronto's historical gems. It really seems like the staff at Spadina House has thought about their site and their visitors and have made significant attempts to appeal to and service the widest possible audience.

Of course, all of these 'criticisms' are relatively minor and more than a little tongue-in-cheek. In fact, I've only included them in this posting to illustrate a small bit of the thought process which sent me into this metacognitive spiral of a blog post. I have to admit, it's a little disconcerting to wake up one day and suddenly realize that a single year of school has significantly changed the way that I do a task I've been doing since the fifth grade.


* Photograph is for dramatization purposes only and does not represent the actual condition of this blogger's home. :)

If I Had a Million Dollars... Camp X Artifacts Up For Sale

The Camp X Exhibit at the Oshawa Airport is full of neat stuff: a dagger hidden in a lipstick case, a fountain pen that shoots poisonous gas and a revolver concealed in a hollowed out book, to list but a few items. As Toronto Star reporter, Carola Vyhnak, points out in her March 4th article, this is the stuff of fiction. In fact, it's exactly these type of gadgets that you might expect to read about in a James Bond novel.

This comparison between fact and fiction is hardly surprising when you consider that Bond author, Ian Fleming, spent part of WWII in Camp X, a spy training facility on the Oshawa-Whitby border near the shore of Lake Ontario.

The collection, which was compiled and largely owned by history buff Robert Stuart, has spent the past 33 years exhibited to the public, most recently in the Ontario Regiment building at the Oshawa Airport as part of the Robert Stuart Aeronautical Collection. Poorly advertised and rarely open, I only discovered the existence of this collection 3 or 4 years ago. Since then school, work, and a year spent in Korea has kept me from visiting the exhibit. And now, the opportunity may be lost to me forever - a pretty harsh lesson in "(s)he who hesitates" for an historian to learn.

On February 24th, historian Lynn Philip Hodgson (mentioned in my February post on the Battle of Bowmanville at Camp 30) contacted local papers after discovering that the entire collection of Camp X artifacts were poised for an internet auction block. Since then, a flurry of controversy has surrounded this usually obscure collection.

Since Stuart's death nearly seven years ago, the collection has been privately owned by his wife, Lois, and his daughter, Deidre, two women who are about to become responsible for selling off a significant piece of Durham Region's (and Canada's) rich wartime history "for personal reasons."

Like many private collections, the Camp X artifacts came together relatively organically over a period of several decades, with many of the pieces attained through private sales and auctions. Other items were accessioned into the collection through donations or long-term loans from veterans or the families of those that had worked at the Camp. Many of these donations and long-term loans were made in good faith in the form of a "gentleman's agreement" and a handshake between Mr. Stuart and the donor. Little, if any, paperwork was ever completed to outline the terms of these transactions.

Now, with the impending sale of the collection, a number of donors and family members have come forward to demand their family heirlooms back. As far as they were concerned, the items were on loan only so long as they were being displayed locally and in a respectful manner; they never intended for the Stuart family to profit off of their history and memories.

Deirdre Stuart has little sympathy for the people who donated to her father's collection. In an interview with the Toronto Star she was quoted as saying, “[i]f you didn’t put it in writing, you pretty much gave it to us... Like, hello? How stupid are people. We’ve had this museum for 33 years. It’s ours.”

Clearly, Ms. Stuart is no gentleman.

Although the loss of local history that would accompany the sale of this collection is immensely disturbing to me and it saddens me to say this, it is my understanding that the Stuart family is well within their legal rights to sell the artifacts however they see fit (provided that they adhere to all applicable laws concerning the sale of cultural artifacts). Public museums are legally restricted from selling artifacts unless they can provide extensive paper records proving their ownership of the item(s) (e.g. a receipt of purchase or a deed of gift). In instances where items are found in a collection but lack proper paperwork, these museums are legally required to keep and care for the artifacts for several decades before they may deaccession them. Unfortunately, private collections are not bound by the same standards. And, since theirs is a private museum, the Stuarts, in the absence of paperwork, have implicit legal right to items in their possession.

Thankfully, it at least seems as if the Canadian government isn't going to let this collection leave the country without a fight. As of March 20th, the Canadian Department of Heritage has "opened a dossier" on the artifacts and is looking into whether some of these items may be able to be protected from international sale under restrictions outlined in the Cultural Property Export and Import Act. For Canada's sake, let's hope this is so. Better yet, let's hope that a Canadian cultural institution (*cough* Canadian War Museum *cough*) steps up and buys the entire collection so that Ms. Stuart is not allowed to break it up and sell the unprotected items piece by piece.

On a local level, Hodgson and other concerned members of the community (including a number of local veterans from the aptly named Sir William Stephenson Branch of the Royal Canadian Legion) have stepped forward to coordinate fundraising efforts in order to save the collection. The Legion is currently accepting donations that will be used to purchase and house the collection permanently in Durham Region (an outcome that I selfishly find most favourable). If the campaign is successful, not only will the collection remain in Canada, but it will remain in Durham Region and on display to the public.

If you'd like to donate and ensure that the collection stays together and in Canada, you can do so by sending the Legion a cheque with "Save the Collection" in the memo section (see their website for more details). You may also want to follow this issue as it develops via the Save the Collection group on Facebook.


Sources by order of publication:

Whitby This Week - "Camp X artifacts up for sale"
The Toronto Star - "Historian fights to keep WWII spy-school collection in Canada"
--- "Veterans families angry over bid to sell wartime artifacts"
Canwest New Service - "Sale of historic espionage gear draws Ottawa's attention"
National Post - "Selling Secret History"

Too Rich For My Blood

In September 2009, our Public History class was introduced to Adam Crymble of NiCHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment), Eve Duchesne of EcoKids and the major group project that we would be working on over the course of the upcoming year: that is, conceptualizing, researching, planning and completing several environmental history lesson plans which would be compliant with the Ontario elementary school curriculum and fit for online display in the teacher's section of the EcoKids website. The idea was to create engaging, informative, interactive and historically nuanced lessons plans that took into consideration both multiple intelligences and different learning styles.

For our part of the project, Shelagh Staunton, Tim O'Grady and I chose to focus our efforts on creating a lesson plan about Samuel de Champlain's contact with the Hurons for the 6th grade Social Science unit on First Nation Peoples and Early European Explorers. It has taken us seven months of blood, sweat and tears, but I think the end result is that our group has put together a pedagogically sound lesson plan for teachers which is engaging for students and accomplishes the stated goals of both of our clients.

But, with just over two weeks until the final project deadline, our group is struggling to put together the copyright permissions for the images that we need to supplement the written materials of our lesson plan. Our difficulties with this aspect of the project are two-fold: 1) since the copyrights for our desired visual materials are held by third-party cultural institutions we are at the mercy of their schedules (which is not nearly as pressing as ours, it seems) and 2) some of the best images are prohibitively expensive and we're being forced to seek cheaper and somewhat less authentic alternatives, a solution we feel has the potential to compromise the integrity of our end project.

Although difficulty #1 is frustrating, it's also understandable - archives and museums are busy, chronically understaffed institutions which likely have more pressing in-house concerns to attend to than completing our image requests. Difficulty #2, however, is another matter entirely.

In order to give our students as much exposure to primary sources as possible, we decided to utilize a large number of photographs of Huron artifacts from the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. Unfortunately, when it came time to get copyright permissions for these items we hit a rather large brick wall: the price of purchasing the permission to show a single image that had already been digitized on a website was $50/yr (or $200 for 5 years). That's INSANE! Since our group originally wanted to use 6 or 7 photographs from the Museum on the EcoKids website indefinitely, that meant that our copyright costs were going to be upwards of $1500 for the first five years alone! That's highway robbery!

Because EcoKids is a not-for-profit organization and we are intending to use the materials for educational purposes, our group approached the Museum of Civilization again a few weeks ago, explaining the situation to them and received a second quote -- this time they were willing to 1/2 their original price, but even that is way out of our budget.

Now we are being forced to seek alternatives to these images, a situation which has the potential to put the integrity of our lesson plan at risk.

What I don't understand is how a national museum, like the Museum of Civilization, can get away with charging a non-profit, educational organization such ridiculously high fees for using images from their collection. Aren't two of the main goals of any museum to educate and serve their public? And aren't the teachers and students who use the EcoKids website considered part of the Museum's "public"? Therefore, shouldn't the rights to these images be more realistically attainable to these sectors of the public?

I'm not saying that the Museum should just give away its copyright permissions. I understand that there were some original costs incurred by the museum in order to photograph these artifacts and a small subsequent cost to host them on the museum's website. But these costs are minuscule compared to the cost of using a single image for a year at the Museum's regular price.

Somehow that just doesn't seem fair.

Museum London Goes Digital (and It's Not On The Web!)

While working on my museum visit report for Museology I stumbled across a special event going on at Museum London this week that I thought might be of interest to some of you considering the content of our Digital History discussions over the past few weeks.

This Thursday, October 22nd at 7:30pm, Museum London is showing RiP! A Remix Manifesto as part of their film series.

The following is taken in its entirety from the Museum London website (although the hyperlink emphasis is my own):

"In RiP! A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor, 2008, 86 min, 14+), Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and breaking down the wall between users and producers. The film's central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film."

Admission for the movie is free, but Brett Gaylor has also set up a pay-what-you-want approach for US residents at ripremix.com. It's nice to see that not only is he walking the walk, but he's talking the talk as far as open source and accessibility go.

Fee-Free Museums a Good Idea?

This past weekend was Thanksgiving, and for me that meant coming home to Whitby to see my family, gorge myself on turkey and mashed potatoes and get my hot little hands on the newest issue of The Beaver.

Although the magazine’s front cover promised me an article about Canadian spies outwitting the Nazis in WWII (always a fun time), it was a smaller article by Christopher Moore entitled “Land of the free museum” that initially caught my attention. Just a few hours before, we’d been discussing the cost of entrance fees in our Museology seminar and Professor Sendzikas had raised the question of how much we were willing to pay to go to a museum. We all answered the question in dollars and cents (in case you’re wondering, my threshold is around $20 before I really start to question my desire), but I think the discussion should have been bigger than that. Perhaps what we really should have been asking was: how much is our history worth to us (metaphorically speaking, that is)?

Moore’s article started out in generally the same way that our class discussion did – in terms of cold, hard, cash. He went through a list of Canadian museums and galleries and quoted the prices for a family of four at each of the institutions; they ranged from the relatively inexpensive ($18 for the National Gallery) to the moderately expensive ($47 for Fort Henry) to the exorbitant ($74 for the ROM... before the addition of any of the “blockbuster” exhibitions).[1] Moore’s next step was to compare our entrance fees to the entrance fees at even more prestigious institutions in the United States and England. I have to admit, I was intrigued. Canada has some amazing museums, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that any of them are in the same league as the Smithsonian or the Tate Modern.

Do you want to take a guess at how much admission costs for a family of four at the Natural History Museum or Museum of American History in Washington, DC? How about at the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum or the British Museum in London, England? You could guess, but you’d probably be wrong. There is no price; admission at all of these truly remarkable museums and galleries are free. [2] That’s right – zip, zero, zilch, nada.

I was floored when I saw these figures (so much so that I went to all of their websites and double-checked Moore’s data. For the record, it’s accurate). How can those museums afford to offer their visitors free admission?! How do they pay their staff, maintain their collections, or acquire new artifacts? The more I thought about it, however, the more I began to wonder how we, as Canadians, can afford not to do the same.

As I see it, high admission fees aren’t really in keeping with the values of our society. With our ridiculously expensive ticket prices, the museums and galleries in Canada have managed to commoditize our history to an extent that puts seeing and experiencing much of it outside the reach of a large number of Canadian citizens. This fact doesn’t sit well with me. Think of the message that this prohibitive pricing is sending to Canada’s poorer sections about their present and future worth in our society. Moore even suggests that museums teach people to appreciate their country and be better citizens. Do our high fees suggest that Canadians only care about middle- and upper-class citizens becoming “good” citizens? Possibly.

What real purpose do high entrance fees serve, anyway?

Although they contribute to the running of museums and galleries, the majority of funding for these institutions comes from government grants and private donations, not their admission fees. And if American and British museums have found a way to make up the shortfall caused by free admission, why can’t we do the same?

Some would argue that paying a higher entrance fee creates a perceived value of the contents of a museum in the mind of its visitors. This view may have some validity, but I would argue that those that visit free museums still appreciate them as repositories of our history and culture. It’s not like anyone walks away from the Smithsonian going, “Man, that sucked. If only they had made me pay to see it....”

Sources:

[1] Moore, Christopher. "Land of the free museum." The Beaver, October-November 2009, 13.
[2] Ibid.

The Rise of the "Starchitect"

This week in museology we briefly discussed the idea of the “starchitect” in response to mixed emotions surrounding Daniel Libeskind’s design of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal addition to the Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) original buildings in 2007.

As I understand it, a “starchitect” is an architect whose work has made them a celebrity in their own right (Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry come to mind). The argument that has been made by some is that in seeking to hire these celebrity architects, museums are placing a greater value on the aesthetics of the buildings that house their collections and the publicity resulting from the attachment of a famous name to their project, than they are on the ability of the new space to function as a museum.

Oftentimes these new museums (or additions to existing museums) are visually striking creations of glass and steel, full of clean lines or sinuous curves. As a fan of modern architecture, I have to admit to finding many of these buildings both beautiful and intriguing. And I have been known, on occasion, to take planes, trains and automobiles just to be able to see the outside of one of these buildings. [Note: The photo to the right is one I took of Frank Gehry’s Dancing House in Prague – affectionately nicknamed the “Fred and Ginger Building”]

Unfortunately, architects are not museum workers and their designs often reflect this fact. One of the biggest criticisms of “starchitecture” is that while beautiful (or an eye-sore, depending on your point of view) they fail to take into account the practical day-to-day concerns of museum staff, such as excess natural light, heating and cooling, the feasibility of easily mounting paintings or displaying their artifacts, office space, collections storage, etc.

Considering the brouhaha surrounding The Crystal, I was curious as to the approach that went into choosing the design for the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights that is currently being built in Winnipeg. Upon a little research, I discovered that Antoine Predock’s design was chosen by “an international Architectural Review Committee (ARC) comprising architects, distinguished Canadian public servants and representatives of Friends of Canadian Museum for Human Rights Inc” (none of which are explicitly museum professionals). The objective set by the committee for the architects to guide them in their creations was for them to create “an inspirational building that achieves a complexity relating to the diversity of human experience.” If this was the only criteria that the architects vying for the job were given, then it seems that Predock’s design is a worthy choice – the building certainly looks complicated enough.

But where's the consideration of the building as a museum!? I realize that the CMHR is planning on focusing on technology-based exhibits as opposed to collections-based ones, but where's the consideration of light, or office space or any of the other countless concerns that I, as someone who has never worked in a museum, couldn't possibly fathom?

As the building is not due for completion until 2012, perhaps only time will tell how functional the space is as a museum. I’ll be interested to follow this museum as it develops.

Oh, and if you would like to follow the museum as it develops, be sure to check out the museum's website, where the progress at the construction site is taped 24/7 and then edited down to a 1 minute clip that is posted once a week. It's a bit like watching paint dry at the moment, but it'll be interesting to see the changes made to the site over the next two years.

Source of Quotations:

http://www.dexigner.com/design_news/1739.html