TE PAPA, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, is developing a
new national museum for New Zealand, to be opened in six months time.
We are all very busy working on the thousands of tasks that are needed
for Day One, from exhibition installation, to setting up the shop, to
making signs for the car park.  

Yet in all of this, we are still very mindful of a basic value of the
Museum, that all we do and communicate to our publics must be based on
the highest quality of scholarship and, in our bicultural society,
mätauranga Mäori, the knowledge and learning systems of the Mäori of New
Zealand.

A strategy document "Speaking with Authority" (1996) set out our
approach to these responsibilities, developing four major themes around
which all our research endeavours are now focussed.  The outcomes for
research will be many and varied, but in all cases an audience for that
research must be identified - the Museum can no longer afford the luxury
of a researcher's pursuing knowledge for its own sake, in a
non-strategic way.  The audience for our research may be our scholarly
peers, or readers of our publications, or visitors to the Museum's
exhibitions, or visitors to its web site, to mention only some of them,
but an identifiable audience there must if our scholarship is to be
meaningful, as well as viable.

Having developed (and published) the strategy, we are now developing
ways of implementing it (even while we work so hard to be ready for Day
One).  An internal team is working on procedures and guidelines,
wrestling with the complex problem of arriving at a balanced programme
of research that will meet our exhibition and public programme needs,
while also meeting our longer term research goals, and allow us to
progress our scholarship in all our specialist areas of interest.  An
international panel of museum scholars, managers and thinkers will be
visiting in November, to help in this process, by giving us an external
viewpoint on our endeavours.

We're no different from other museums whose staff have contributed to
this thread, in that we have cannot devote as much time to research as
we would like.  What we are committed to is ensuring the time and
resources we do have are focussed strategically, to maximise the
benefits from those efforts, and to ensure that we do indeed "Speak with
Authority".
___________

Stuart Park
TE PAPA
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
Wellington, New Zealand
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