>Linda Tanaka:
>
>What a situation to find yourself - my sincere sympathies! I have been
>following the convolutions of the strike with great interest over the past
>months. I do hope the redefinitions of positions can be done humanely, but
>with the Board you are dealing with - well, I won't hold my breath.
Dear Barbara:
What seems to have gone wrong with museums in Canada at least is the
election of bottom-line boards. I have, however, been at Board meetings
where the members have expressed a keen interest in how our museum is
serving the needs of the community. So, I don't really know if the seemingly
public perception of our board is a bum wrap or not. I do know that with our
visitorship down to ca.50,000 from 180,000 we need to find out what the
problem is with our presentation. Sometimes a major shake-up is required.
We are looking at new ways of delivering our information to the public. The
public is not coming to us any more so we have to go to them and I am
proposing to do with on-line services. I have been following the list for
the discussion about whether on-line catalogs increase visitorship and I
have concluded that it does.
You probably don't know but the Vancouver Museum has just as good if not
better collections of First Nations materials than UBC. Unfortunately,
people go there first because they are always touted as "world-class".
I say this because I want you to know that what we have to offer people is a
wealth (100 years) of collection information that has never been adequately
recorded. The new Information Manager position will be responsible for
packaging that information into on-line services or at least whip it into
the CHIN databases so that we can persue on-line services in the future. We
have only 40,000 records on CHIN now and 1,500,000 artifacts.
The strike has been about contracting out, but sometimes I think that maybe
that is a better way to achieve our goals of information gathering.
Specialists in each field doing what they do best, gathering and recording
information. Because our collections management position is a union job we
have not been able to dislodge anyone who is incapable of doing the computer
work that is required in this information age.
The board is seeking to change this but really if not for the union we would
all be working for 8.00 per hour wouldn't we?
The positon required the upmost in computer skills to make a dent in the
information recording. Many people answered my question and it seems that
collections managers as a rule are highly computer literate.
I know you have helped people learn CHIN so I know you regard database
management by computer as an essential part of collections management.
The new position will be one of two directly under the Director with all the
responsibilities that I outlined previously. I sincerely hope that she
realizes that one person can only coordinate these functions not physically
do them all. However, I do believe that this person must be able to perform
all the duties at least in a cursory fashion in order to have the tasks
executed efficiently.
Many museums are simplifying their org charts by eliminating entire
>levels.
Are you aware that all middle management at the museum was eliminated 8
months ago. Some professional categories have been reduced to technician level.
Your statement which follows is exactly what has happened.
What seems to be happening is that all>duties previously performed by a
department are being compressed into one or>two job descriptions. But
rather than refer to the new super-job by the job>title at the top (eg
curator), job titles are being selected from the bottom. This is probably
being done to keep a cap on salaries.
>It seems to me the Board has fundamentally misunderstood the mandate of the
>museum.
I feel that the Board has not fought enough for the museum to be included as
an essential educational service but I blame our various levels of
government for cutting culture first in this fight against inflation. It is
almost impossible to make culture a paying proposition and governments on
all levels are requiring us to be at least cost recovering. We could not do
it with the previous staff levels and programming. However we can't do it
with no staff either which is the situation we are in now that the strike
has not gained back a single position.
The elimination of the education department seems like a tradegy and it is
for the staff who were employed there, however, I'm told that they were
losing 90,000.00 per year on the Museumobile program. We must find alternate
sources of funding in order to re-instate it. The Musuemobile served the
Lower Mainland region but not one single cent ever came in from the
municipal governments around the region, so in essence the people of
Vancouver were subsidizing the education needs of the students inother
municipalities.
Anyway, Barbara, does our Board deserve to be flogged in public? Not sure,
the perception that they are from the social elite which does not know about
a museum's mandate seems to be undeserved. The emergency general meeting
which voted non-confidence in them was a non-event because there were not
enough votes to remove them from office. They work hard for the museum and
it is not their primary job so I sympathize but I think that perhaps there
needs to be an arm of the Board which has education as a primary goal and
with that the ability to raise money, whether by lobbying the government or
raising corporate interest. We did a feasibility study to find out about
raising money from the corporate sector and found out that we were not in a
good position to raise money this way because our visitorship was so low
that it was not good bang for the buck for corporations.
So change is required and I'm afraid that means a whole new way of looking
at things at the Museum.
This message is too long but I wanted to at least give you an idea of what
is happening. The news in papers is highly inaccurate. It is a major turning
point for this Musuem, we either change or close. The City, the Province and
the Federal government are cutting our budgets, we are in a deficit position
and will be trying to effect major changes and increased visitorship with a
skeleton staff and management/staff relationship that is less than amicable.
Thanks for taking the time to respond
Linda Tanaka
Vancouver Museum
|
