In Praise of Low-Tech Approaches to Visitor Engagement

Ghost House frame constructed by AmeriCorps River 4 Team at the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa

In just a 30-day period this spring I will attend three museum or archaeology conferences – the Tennessee Association of Museums, the Society for American Archaeology, and the American Association of Museums.  An aspect of these annual events I enjoy are the expo and poster sessions.  They offer an opportunity to engage with a range of ideas and to interact one-on-one with folks.  These experiences go beyond listening to papers, that while often are very interesting, tend to be more monologues where one could just as easily read the book.  Expo events provide the opportunity to see the latest gadgets and digital wizardry in the field.  I am curious about how I will react to these displays this year – particularly since over this past year, when I have focused on the idea of building engaged and sustainable programs.

At the recent Tennessee Association of Museums meeting, I organized a session The Participatory Museum: More Than Just a Hands-on Gig.  In my introductory paper for the session, the prime example of a sustainable and engaging museum I presented was one I have blogged before about –  The Pearl Button Museum in Muscatine, Iowa.  I used this museum as an example in part because the institution is ridiculously low-tech – there is not a touch table, video monitor, audio tour, and as of when I gave the paper, no mobile app for the museum.  The Pearl Button Museum demonstrates that building sustainable and engaging institutions does not require increased funding for the latest in digital technology.  My earlier post explores what makes this place so engaging and participatory.

The Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York strikes me as another prime low-tech high impact cultural venue.

African American students who created an exhibit on their neighborhood for the C.H. Nash Museum in 2010 made a similar observation.  During the five weeks of the project they visited several area Memphis Museums including the Pink Palace, the Brooks Museum, the National Civil Rights Museum, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, and Davies Manor Plantation.  I was surprised that for many of the students their favorite museum visit was Davies Manor.  At Davies the sole “digital” exhibit is an eight minute intro video shown on a small television monitor in a cramped reception room.  One of the students, Jasmine Morrison, explained that what was so powerful for her during the visit was standing in the big house on the plantation where her enslaved ancestors would not have been permitted to enter.

This past week the AmeriCorps Team now stationed at the C.H. Nash Museum erected a ghost house out of bamboo on top of one of the prehistoric mounds.  We decided to erect the house as a no impact, easily built structure, that used materials already on site, as a representation of a house that would have stood atop the prehistoric mound in prehistory.  This past Saturday I was pleased that this rather simple structure proved to fulfill that purpose for our visitors.

What these low-tech solutions teach me is that we do not need to fall into a trap of thinking that we need high-tech digital solutions to carry out our mission or attract visitors.  We must first allow the visitor to be filled with the sense of time, place, and meaning of their surroundings.  With such engaging programs in place, we then can move to consider how digital technology might enhance the presentation.  Pragmatically, as low-tech solutions are often the most readily employed by cultural institutions already on a shoe-string budget, for that reason, they also remain an excellent starting point.

How do you use low-tech solutions to tell your story?

A Retired Collections Manager Turns Volunteer Extraordinaire

Ron Brister at the Pink Palace Family of Museums' Coon Creek Science Center

The C.H. Nash Museum benefits from a host of volunteers who bring their diversity of skills to Chucalissa.  Perhaps no one exemplifies the spirit of volunteerism more than the President of the Friends of Chucalissa, Ron Brister.  Ron not only volunteers at Chucalissa two mornings per week and assists with all of our special events, after 37 years as Collections Manager at Memphis’ Pink Palace, he brings an incredible amount of experience as well.  Below, in this week’s guest column, Ron talks a bit about what got him interested in archaeology, museums, and offers some advice on volunteerism today.

I had a fairly normal middle class childhood in Memphis. Both my parents were teachers so my two brothers and I grew up in a house full of books and magazines. My father taught history and loved philosophy so we were exposed to the past from our earliest years. Summer vacations were planned around historical sites. My maternal grandparents reinforced this with their tales of late 19^th and early 20^th century life in an isolated log farm-house without electricity or plumbing. My great-grandmother was born in 1852 in a covered wagon on the trip from Virginia to West Tennessee. History doesn’t get much better than that!

My interest in archaeology developed from visiting Chucalissa Indian Town, a local reconstructed prehistoric Indian village, during middle school. Three friends and I formed the Sherwood Junior High Archaeology Club. We went on field trips to Chucalissa and attended a lecture by the Chucalissa archaeologist at another local museum. We read what little there was available in the school and public libraries. Scout hikes over Civil War battlefields awakened our interest in artifacts and how they can be used to interpret the past. We didn’t last long as an organization, but our individual passion for archaeology continued.

College opened a vast new world of to me. As a sophomore history major, I took two summer archaeology field school and two museum operation classes for fun. It was fascinating – a scientific detective story. Archaeology was the only discipline that incorporated my favorite subjects of biology, geology, and history. I was hooked. Then came one of those little quirks that make life so interesting. A work-study position came open at Chucalissa and I was hired! I was actually being paid to work in an archaeology lab instead of a department store. Life was good. I added anthropology to my geology minor earning a BS in history and MA in Anthropology from the University of Memphis. My academic specialties are archaeology, paleontology, history of 19^th and 20^th century medical, agricultural, and domestic technology, and local history. I have remained in archaeology and museum work ever since.  Personally, I love Mozart and alien/giant insect movies.

The Friends of Chucalissa was created to counter an attempt by the university to close Chucalissa in the 1990s. We raised over $50,000 for the museum and served as a vocal advocate of the value of Chucalissa to the University and the community. A former Memphis city official once remarked to me that citizen advocacy groups are a power influence to politicians, especially when they can help pay for the issues they support. The Friends of Chucalissa is not the greatest fund raising group in the world, but we are successful at rallying public support. In addition to advocacy and fund raising, volunteer support groups strengthen an institution by representing the community.

I have been heavily involved in museum volunteer work since retiring four years ago. I do it to remain intellectually active, keep physically busy, and to serve my community. I offer a set of museum governance, collections management, education development, and exhibits design skills that many small museums desperately need but can’t afford. When I began museum work 40 years ago, volunteers, mostly college educated housewives, were plentiful. Our changing economy has forced many in that volunteer pool to go to work. Today’s volunteers are families with children, retired folks, and some stay at home moms. The volunteers are as dedicated and good as ever, but fewer in number.

My advice to a volunteer coordinator:

• make the volunteer feel like a valued part of the museum staff

• provide solid basic museum and subject matter training, a comprehensive manual, good communication, and continuing education through lectures, workshops, and visits to other museums
• volunteers want to feel needed and appreciated. Have meaningful projects for them and thank them sincerely and often. Volunteers enjoy physical tokens of appreciation like a plaque, pin, or certificate.
• retired people and students are a good source of volunteers. They are already interested in the subject and want to help
• scouts and other community service organizations are excellent sources of reliable labor.

My advice to a new volunteer:

• to be patient and keep a sense of humor because we’re making up a lot of this as we go along
• constant change in the number of volunteers and their skill sets requires both supervisors and volunteers to be flexible
• be sure to communicate with your supervisor if you have a problem. She can’t fix what she doesn’t know about. Everyone is working toward the same goal.
• Don’t badger the supervisor with “what do you want me to do now?” Just let her know that you have finished and she will be with you as soon as possible. Supervisors often have lots of folks to oversee.

 Contact Ron at bristerr@bellsouth.net

Students as Practioners – Community Service Learning

University of Memphis undergraduate Brooke Mundy with exhibit she helped create during her internship at the C.H. Nash Museum

Whenever I welcome educators or visiting groups of students to the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa, I emphasize that other students created almost everything the visitors will see at the Museum that is less than five years old.  This includes our introductory video, Drumming Across Cultures musical program, herb garden, and much more.  From 2008 through 2011, students completed over 35 projects at our small museum.  The students include both graduate and undergraduates participating as interns, graduate assistants, for Masters level practica, and for class-based projects.  The projects include exhibit creation and design, program creation, collections projects, event planning, to name a few.  The University of Memphis applied academic programs support this work.

Students in the University of Memphis  Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program also complete many internships and class projects in other area museums.  Conceptually, this work allows the student to apply what they learn in the classroom in a real-time situation.  For many of the smaller museums and cultural heritage organizations in West Tennessee, these student projects have made a significant impact over the years.

The above are excellent examples of community service learning.  Paul Shackel notes:

“There are at least 147 known definitions of service learning; however, they all seem to have a common denominator that is important for any community program.  Service learning is not about volunteerism, where people with resources come into a community and provide resources and volunteers to  help solve other people’s problems (Kendall 1990).  Service learning is about doing things with others rather than for others.  The needs of the community define the service tasks.  Therefore, it is important that archaeologists create a dialogue with the community before they plan any work and determine tasks.  The community must also have the opportunity to participate in the teaching and learning process.  Communities should be seen as assets that can benefit the students.  This reciprocity allows students to develop a greater sense of belonging and responsibility as members of a larger community” (Paul Shackel, Civic Engagement and Community Service Learning, pp. 216-217.  In Archaeology and Community Service Learning, edited by Michael Nassaney and Mary Ann Levine, University Press of Florida, 2009.)

This relationship between the student and community also helps each partner to have a reciprocal stake in each other.  For the small museum, the University becomes a resource to carry out their community needs.  For the student the small community museum takes on a part of their creative experience. The process forms a relationship that can continue beyond the end of the semester.

I am engaged in two very exciting community service learning projects at this time.  First, we are hosting an AmeriCorps team at the C.H. Nash Museum for one month this spring.  This coming Thursday, our museum will partner with the AmeriCorps team in constructing a ghost house to represent a structure that stood in prehistory at the Chucalissa mound complex.  The AmeriCorps team has construction experience, at the museum we have ideas, and an anthropologist/architect has drawn up some tentative plans for the structure.  Stay tuned for more information on this process.

My Applied Archaeology and Museums class this semester is also participating in a community service learning project.  The class is working with the Public Education Committee of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) to upgrade their Archaeology for the Public webpages.  The webpages were created a few years ago and are a primary source of public information in North America on all things archaeological.  The students are challenged not just to do the technical tasks such as finding broken links, but also to think about the SAA’s mission, what they have learned this semester in class, and apply it to the revision process.

I will also appreciate your reviewing the Archaeology for the Public webpage of the SAA and send along any recommendations for revision.  Do you know of go to websites/blogs/databases to be included in the updating process?  Do you have recommendations for how to better organize the information on the pages?  new topics that need to be considered?  Please send any recommendations to me at rcnnolly@memphis.edu

How does your institution form reciprocal relationships through community service learning?

Response to American Digger, Part II

This semester I lead a seminar in Applied Archaeology and Museums at the University of Memphis.  The first point of discussion in this past Monday night’s class was responding to comments made to my blog post on the Spike Network American Digger program.  The comments were equally divided between those who opposed the concept of American Digger and those who believed the program is a legitimate response to the inability of the government or the archaeological community to address individual interests or preservation needs.

At first students commented that the supporters of American Digger need to be better informed on the importance of context and provenience for recovered archaeological materials.  They also saw the need for education on why cultural heritage should not be for sale to the highest bidder.  They suggested that the supporters should volunteer at an archaeological site to better understand proper excavation techniques.  While these suggestions were of much value, the responsibility was laid only at the feet of the American Digger supporters. I was surprised that the students did not consider the legitimacy of the concerns expressed by American Digger supporters.  I raised examples of what I perceive as a disconnect of archaeologists from the public they serve:

•  Last year while visiting a large archaeological site during a public “Archaeology Day” event, I walked up to one of several excavation units and asked the student excavators a question about their work.  They responded they did not know what they were excavating, they were just told to dig there.  The student excavators returned to chatting about their social plans for the evening.  The four archaeologists I recognized on the crew were busy scurrying about doing other things.  I asked the seminar class, were I a casual visitor to the “Archaeology Day” event, what would my takeaway be?  The obvious answer is that despite the invitation for the public to visit the excavations, the archaeologists and students involved were not really interested in engaging the visitor.  Was this an isolated incident?  That is irrelevant to the visitor.
• During a long ago class lecture in my BA program, the Dr. PhD instructor stated he would no more deal with an amateur archaeologist than he would an amateur medical doctor.  What is the takeaway of the students to that class lecture?
• etc. etc.

After a bit of discussion along these lines, the class concluded that those who support and oppose American Digger could dredge up horror stories of past and present activities ad nauseam to defend their positions.  The class then turned to consider how to preserve material culture while accommodating the public desire and interest to engage in archaeological research and antiquities.  Here are some solutions we came up with:

• We agreed on the need to acknowledge the stated concerns of the blog comments of the American Digger supporters, but not their solutions.
• The gentleman who wanted an archaeologist to look at his property prior to construction and grading presumably wanted the work done at no cost.  Likely, lack of response from “the local archaeological departments” resulted in part from a lack of resources to conduct the investigations.  There is a catch to such public expectations.  If the gentleman contacted a private consulting firm, then he should expect to pay for the services in the same way as for the services of an architect or construction company.  If he contacted a public entity, then either the institution is adequately staffed for such work but is not doing their job, or the institution is short-staffed and cannot respond to noncritical situations.  If the latter case is true, then the landowner has a responsibility to ask why and the institution has a responsibility to explain.  In many cases, in this era of “no new taxes” the voting public has simply refused to fund cultural heritage services.  If the voting public does not fund those services, they cannot expect those services to be performed.  Education around this point is critically important.
• The class also discussed the need to promote the public work of community based archaeologists.  For example, one of the favorite parts of my job with the Louisiana Division of Archaeology was the two weeks each year spent on the road speaking in small parish libraries and schools throughout the state.  The Arkansas Archaeological Survey hosts a suite of programs that are excellent models for community engagement.  The seminar students pointed to one of our course readings, a profile of Linda Derry, Alabama community archaeologist extraordinaire, published recently in the Society for American Archaeology’s publication the Archaeological Record (p. 19).  A Boy Scout merit badge in archaeology requires a minimum of 8 hours training by a professional archaeologist who receives no compensation for their services.  These examples only scratch the surface of public outreach by professional archaeologists.

The seminar students concluded that productions such as American Digger do not spring up out of thin air.  Yes, some archaeologists can be elitist and focused solely on their own research interests.  In the same way, there are irresponsible pothunters such as those who created the debacle at Slack Farm.  However, the majority of archaeologists and landowners want to see cultural heritage preserved and available to all.  We need to develop a norm where cultural heritage is preserved, not just when it impinges on an archaeologist’s pet research project or only when in the personal interest of an individual landowner.  Cultural heritage value must be considered an important part in our quality of life and not as a discretionary point that is last funded and first cut based on fluctuations in the economy.  Cultural heritage professionals must be accountable as public servants charged with preserving and providing access to the cultural heritage of their community.  At the same time, that public must fund the professionals to perform those tasks.

National Archaeology Day, October 20 2012, is an opportunity to engage in that conversation.  We have the luxury of six months to begin discussions and engage with the entire public to build toward the event.  If we take advantage of this opportunity, we can launch a movement that will extend beyond October 20th and plant the seeds for a rejuvenated national campaign toward valuing a public cultural heritage.  To the extent such a movement and consciousness grows, the dollar based American Digger mentality will be replaced with a public responsibility, appreciation and passion for preservation of our communities cultural heritage.

Reflections on 101 Blog Posts

My buddy Buddy and me relaxing pool side after a hard ride.

This is blog post number 101 to Archaeology, Museums and Outreach.  My initial intent for the blog, as reflected in my first post in December of 2009, was to offer a platform for discussing innovations and experiences in public outreach around cultural heritage.  That intent came after attending a session on community outreach at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in November of 2009.  Many of the session participants expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of professional support given to the subject.  I viewed this blog as a response to that concern for like-minded individuals to exchange ideas.

Here is some stuff I learned over the two-year period this blog has been up:

• For better or worse, Archaeology, Museums and Outreach seems to fill a niche.  There are lots of websites that promote an individual institution’s archaeological outreach projects.  However, there are few others, if any, focused on outreach in general.
• I have not put much effort into growing this blog, and maybe I really should.  On analytics in general, between followers, searches and direct referrals, I generally run 500 to 700 hits per post, with a consistent increase over the two year period.  You can easily increase hits with blog tags.  I posted one entry  with the title of Measuring Program Success and soon realized that I unintentionally hit on a key search engine phrase.  That single post accounts for 20% of all of this blog’s hits ever!  So it is not difficult to drive traffic to your blog, but what does the reader find once they get there?  To tag every post with “Measuring Program Success” would dramatically up the blog hits but also seems the equivalent of spamming.  What is more important than growing the number of hits is staying on topic.
• At first, I was surprised by the limited number of comments made to my blog posts.  For most posts there are no comments.  The 120 or so comments received over a two-year period are from about 50 of the posts.  But . . .
• a rather pleasant surprise from the past two years is the amount of interaction/networking I have done with others in my field I have met through the blog, none of whom commented on a post.  For example, I routinely run into or receive email from colleagues and friends who in-person comment on specific posts, or note that they enjoy the blog.  Excerpts from three of my book reviews are cited on the publisher’s website. The websites of professional organizations and individuals link to this blog.
• Of particular interest to me has been the role of blogs in academics.  One might expect a tenure and promotion committee to dismiss the energy I expended in the 70,000 or so words I have written for this blog to date – noting that amount of words would constitute at least 3 peer-reviewed articles in top line journals.  Peer review publication is supposed to be the primary indication that the colleagues in one’s given field acknowledge the suitability and worth of your scholarship for publication.  However, as Mr. Dylan noted The Times They Are a Changing.  The change in academia is reflected  in a recent article on the importance of academic blogging in general and for the dissemination of research.  My blog posts to date resulted in invites and publication of two peer-reviewed articles and appointments in the professional organizations to which I belong.  In this new reality, blogs also become an indicator of scholarly research.
• Finally, I really enjoy writing this blog – the dialogue and ideas that result.  That dialogue is also the reason that I enjoy the classroom setting – the opportunity to engage with students and get their good ideas.  So on the assumption that blogging does not go the way of My Space, Geocities, and Friendster, I look forward to putting together another 101 posts.

Grow where you are planted

There is a lot of doom and gloom about the fate of museums.  This week American Association of Museums President Ford Bell sent out an email to the membership about pending national legislation that will adversely impact museums.  News articles abound that deal with the financial shortfalls and shifting museum demographics, along with reduced visitation.  The National Trust for Historic Preservation offers a survival kit to cultural heritage institutions for getting through the current tough economic times.

Into this climate comes the Spike TV American Diggers and National Geographic programming that I posted about last week. I believe our response, in large part, should be to make our cultural heritage institutions more relevant to the public we serve.  In every museum related course I teach these days, on the first class meeting we watch the 2009 video interview with Robert Janes on this very issue.  When the Governor of Florida, Rick Scott, argued that anthropology programs were a poor use of higher education funds, students at the University of South Florida issued a response that spoke to the issue of relevancy.

At the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa, despite national trends, for the past year, we saw a dramatic increase in our school group visits.  We attribute the increase to our revamping of all programs, now tied directly to curriculum standards, to become more relevant to the public we serve.  An experience this past November illustrates this point.  The lead teacher for a visiting school group of nearly 200 was particularly enthusiastic in her praise for the student experience during their three-hour visit.  She confessed that she was somewhat reluctant to schedule the visit as other teachers in her suburban school cautioned her that Chucalissa’s meagre offerings did not justify the transportation cost for the students.  After her school’s visit, she strongly disagreed and intends to correct the misperception in her district.  In essence, we were able to show our relevance to her students educational needs.

I originally wrote the sentence –  we are a very visitor focused institution – but changed that to user focused.  As a University based facility, we host many internships, student research projects, class visits, and more – again, demonstrating relevancy to our governing authority.

Relevancy can be demonstrated in many simple ways:

• We have over 800 followers on our Facebook page and 1700 subscribers to our e-newsletter with whom we regularly communicate.  These two outlets can be platforms to present an alternative to the American Diggers mentality.
• For our weekly staff meetings, each fall we begin with Chapter 1 of Stephanie Weaver’s Creating Great Visitor Experiences and get as far as we can by the end of April.  We have yet to get through the book in the academic year.  This has been a fantastic opportunity to place ourselves in the shoes of our visitors so that me might better live into our mission of supporting them.
• Our Volunteer Days where visitors are able to work with cultural materials curated in our repository can be promoted as a counter to sitting on the couch and watching American Diggers, by actually engaging in archaeological research.

In the above examples, we live into our Mission statement to ”protect and interpret the Chucalissa archaeological site’s cultural and natural environments, and to provide the University Community and the public with exceptional educational, participatory, and research opportunities . . .”

Let me close this rather self-congratulatory post by noting that as a small institution we have the luxury to focus on the nuance without the concern of generating funds for multi-million dollar payroll and other operating expenses.  In so doing, we do not attempt to reinvent the wheel or come up with a new gimmick to attract visitors.  Rather, we strive to grow where we are planted in seeking relevance with the public that we serve.  Such an orientation seems our best response to not just economic woes, but the destructive methods and mentality of American Diggers.

How do you demonstrate your relevance to the public that you serve?

Using National Archaeology Day as a Response to American Digger

Looter trenches at Slack Farm, 1987 http://www.mesacc.edu/dept/d10/asb/anthro2003/archy/pothunting/

The Spike network is launching a reality series called American Diggers.  National Geographic has a similar reality series called Diggers.  The upshot of these programs is that they are treasure hunts.  The professional archaeological community responded with formal letters of protests and blog posts.  Petitions, newstories, and numerous blogs of outrage are up.

For their part, the Spike network responded saying:

“If property owners sign off, then it is legal–landowners can do whatever they choose with artifacts found on their land. That’s the argument Shana Tepper, spokesperson for Spike TV, made to Science Insider. “Our show is shot on private property,” she said. “They’re getting artifacts that are otherwise rotting in the ground” cited from here.

The private property rationale is reminiscent of the Slack Farm debacle of the 1980s. Of note, National Geographic prominently exposed the Slack Farm looting. (See “Who Owns Our Past?”, by Harvey Arden, National Geographic, Vol. 175, no. 3 (March 1989), pp 376-390.)

I wholly agree with the outpouring of protest against these latest attempts to loot the cultural heritage of the U.S. for profit.  The reality shows are not even about mystery and intrigue ala Geraldo Rivera opening the Al Capone vault.  They are about profit pure and simple.  American Diggers and their ilk flow logically from other reality shows such as PBS’s Antiques Roadshow, along with the History Channel’s Pawn Stars and American Pickers.  Antiques Roadshow format goes – is it real? how old is it? and what’s it worth?  Although price is ultimately the punch-line for the two History Channel programs, American Pickers has a good bit of discussion on appreciation of the object along with temporal and personal context.

The public presentation of antiquities must move beyond the money.

In 1987, I enrolled in a field school class at the University of Cincinnati taught by the late Patricia Essenpreis.  Ten percent of our course grade came from how we interacted with the public.  Pat was adamant that we be able to explain the relevancy of what we were doing to anyone who asked.  She argued that if we could not justify how archaeology was relevant to the lives of folks today, we might as well stay home.  I struggled with this mandate for a long time.  I had a difficult time getting my answer to the relevancy question beyond a general interest and curiosity that folks have in a prehistoric landscape.  At the same time, the descendants of the women and men who lived on that landscape often prefer that we not excavate on their ancestral homelands.

Over the past 25 years, Pat’s question has always been on my mind.  I can now launch into a pretty long monologue about how archaeology, particularly in its applied or public form, can be a source of empowerment for descendent peoples, educate on respecting and celebrating diversity, and more, along with acknowledging the value in a more casual curiosity and desire to know about the past.  To present that total perspective takes a good bit of work from those of us in the museum and archaeological professions, but it is our mission to the public we serve.

As a profession, archaeologists seem to expend an above average amount of time and effort in public outreach.  That television offerings like Spike’s American Diggers and the venture of organizations such as the National Geographic Society into this genre of media suggests that we have a lot of work left to do.  So, perhaps when we sign the petition protesting American Diggers, we should also be writing to PBS about Antiques Roadshow, and be certain to take the time to respond to the teacher wanting a speaker on career day at their school, etc.

The Archaeological Institute of America has set October 20, 2012 as the second annual National Archaeology Day.  This date can be an excellent opportunity to tell our side of the excavation story.

There is plenty of time to plan!  How will you celebrate National Archaeology Day?