Subject: Objects or people >One response to this thread insisted on the primacy of objects, "Are you an >objects person?" he or she was asked and continued to ask of museum staff. This was my anecdote, and in fairness to Edward P. Alexander, who was the questioner (to me), what he meant was, did I have an interest in objects, as opposed to the traditional historian's exclusive interest in manuscript or primary sources. He never implied objects versus people. The reason I dragged that anecdote into the discussion was not to say that museums should make a choice between objects and people--this is, logically, not necessarily an either/or choice. I was trying to say that museums--at least among art and history ones--used to seek "objects people"--staff and trustees both--because the role of collecting and collections stewardship was considered the unique, distinguishing characteristic among museums. It was understood that part and parcel of maintaining a collection was visitors coming to museums to experience real things with their significance explained. (I wonder at the studies that surface saying the authenticity of artefacts is not a priority among visitors, at least to history museums.) Nevertheless, the view that the collection is a public trust, to be maintained as a inviolable corpus for its own sake, is still maintained. The fights still waged in the US over what de-accessioning funds can be used for imply that maintaining a collection as a corpus-not-to-be-liquidated is still a primary concept. One cannot liquidate collections to cover operating costs, even if those are the expenditures that allow various kinds of access to the collections by the public. The underlying thought is that while "museum visitors" are certainly people we care about, they are a subset of overall society as well, including those yet unborn, who are supposed to get a broad benefit from having such collections preserved. The implication is, that if it means access is limited for some types of visitors today in order to preserve the collection for the people of tomorrow, that's what happens. I think in recent years this view of "museums as a collections stewards for the benefit of society as a whole, present and future," is getting lost. If we decide, as a profession, that this is an obsolete notion, that's one thing. Generally, we have not done that. But what we do, more and more, is justify our existence, at least in the US, based on visitor numbers alone. Museum expansion and other projects are sold on the basis of their visitation's economic impact. In some cases, where there is no intent to collect, visitation is certainly all there is. And I've done my share of pointing out the benefits that museums bestow on communities that are not inherent in mission, such as functioning as downtown anchors and catalysts for re-development. It's a dangerous game. The two-edged sword is that such marketing of museums puts us in competition with a lot of other attendance-driven and quasi-educational operations, for profit or non-profit. Many of these can outspend us and have lower overhead. And if we fail to deliver the numbers we promise, we lose credability. If we, as museum professionals, accept that at least some museums maintain collections with a societal value that extends past this and next year's visitation figures, we have to be concerned about whether we adequately explain this part of our mission. I think it should be explained better, because given the competition for audience and/or support from schools, libraries*, public television, films, the Internet, or theme parks, we need to be able to emphasize what unique, irreplaceable contribution museums make. Collecting, research, and collections stewardship as well as interpretation is what makes many museums unique. Given what collecting and maintaining objects costs, we need to be concerned about justifying it on the basis of something in addition to attracting visitors. If collecting and collections matter, than it is disturbing that numbers of museum trustees think the collection is the merely the source of the props that we must put out to attract the necessary number of visitors to make the museum a successful "attraction." This despite the fact that when trustees periodically recast mission statements the credo is routinely repeated that we collect, preserve, research, AND interpret. We are either failing to attract the right trustees, or we are failing to orient them properly about what we do, and why. We can do better. >How can you possibly be an 'objects' person without being a 'visitor', or at least a 'people' person? >The whole point, surely, of a museum is that we preserve, conserve, display, >explain, enhance, contextualise objects FOR PEOPLE. We recognize the work >of people of the past, we communicate with people of the present, we >preserve for people of the future. Moreover we museum professionals are >also people (well, some of us are, I know a few I've got my doubts about) - >and also the most constant of visitors. We are not supposed to sit on our >hoards like dragons! (and if we don't get through to our visitors NOW, we >won't even be there to hand on the results of our 'stewardship' to the >future). I think, Heleanor, that you're setting up something of a straw man here. I don't think anything in the discussion implies that being an "objects" person precludes an interest in people. In the present and future tenses, it is a matter of who we perceive our audience to be, and how our audience perceives us that we need to think about, not to mention what we say we are in return for the support we seek. "You better decide what you want, 'cause that's exactly what you're going to get." *Public libraries, like San Francisco's, seem to be having their own conflicts about the value of their collections--are they bound to maintain little-used collections of scholarly present and future import, or should they ruthlessly pare back collections to save money and concentrate on promoting a wider amount of service delivering basic information in a cost effective way?