In what might seem to be a large museum, I am in fact the only professional historian. I write almost all most of our exhibits, every question about history comes to me and I investigate all our donations of artifacts. I have only one co-worker in this work - our museum registrar.
MUSEUM ORIGINS
We are the oldest and largest marine museum in Canada, created in 1948 by
a group of naval officers all fired up with patriotism and worried that
American antique dealers and American curators were draining away the
artifacts of the region's marine heritage. Our Museum became part of the
Nova Scotia Museum system in 1967.
MUSEUM IMPORTANCE
I think most Nova Scotian's would agree that our province deserves a
Maritime Museum, so tied has our history and development been to the sea.
Ships and seafaring loom large in the collective experience of our
heritage. It is a subject that needs preservation, study and critical
thought as well as commemoration. You need actual evidence of the past to
do that unless you want to wallow in empty cliches about Canada's Ocean
Playground. Over the years we have built a large collection, 30,000
artifacts, another 30,000 photographs, over 70 boats and a 180 foot
steamship. We operate the largest marine library in Canada which attracts
researchers from all over the world. We also act as a support to community
museum across Nova Scotia supplying them with advice, photographs and
artifacts.
ECONOMIC ROLE
We also play an economic role. Our move to the waterfront in 1981 was a
major force in reviving the decaying Halifax waterfront. Our photo
collection plays a big role in publishing and film making in the region as
a supply of visual raw material.
And it is sometimes overlooked but according to the latest study I've
seen, we draw more paying customers than any other paid attraction in Nova
Scotia, drawing on average over 150,000 visitors a year, in one year a
quarter million. Unfortunately that very success which I have devoted
myself to, has become our downfall. Successive governments and museum
senior managers have decided that since the Maritime Museum attracts so
many people that it should look after itself. We moved from being
completely supported by government in our peak years in the late 1980s to
our status today where we raise most of operating costs, over 60%. This
seeming success has come at a terrible internal cost. It has made us
dependant on the fickle whims of the tourism industry. This year it is
down and we cut deeply into programs. When it is up we pour more money
into attractions to make those visitors happy and spend more. Almost the
Museum entire resources are now committed to pulling in visitors and
squeezing money out of them. We charge fees for everything, rent out our
small craft gallery charged everyone to use our photos. We have poured
great enterprize and energy into making money. However, the things that
don't make big money but should be the lifeblood of the Museum, the
library, conservation, research and collecting artifacts, these things are
dying, the very things that I think are most important for the people of
Nova Scotia and for the future of the Museum.
DECLINE
When I started at the Museum in 1996 we had five people working on
the collection at the Museum. Today we have two. We have all sorts of
people working on creating visitor experiences and on marketing but almost
no one who knows about ships. Come to our Museum and you will look in vain
to find anyone who has read the classic literature, read any recent work
or who knows where to find out about seafaring. Many days I feel that I
work at a school without teachers.
* We have the best marine library in Canada but we can only staff it for 8
hours a week.
* We had to give up on answering historical enquiries because we don't
have the staff to answer them.
* We do not really do any primary research at the Maritime Museum, other
than the work of a handful of volunteer research associates.
* We once sponsored conferences, published research and made regular field
trips around the province. We've had to abandon all these things.
* We used to teach a marine history course with local universities but
that's been abandoned.
* We destroyed our conservation lab to build a giant Gift Store in search
of more revenue. That means no place to do serious treatment of corroded
metals or any advanced conservation work beyond the cleaning and basic
repairs done by a dedicated team of volunteer model builders.
My days are filled with people asking me why don't you do an exhibit on this subject or this community of people, why don't you research this subject, why don't you interview this old fellow, why don't you start collecting this type of artifact, why isn't my artifact on display. The truth is we can't do any of these things. We really can't event support our core life-support activity which is keeping our collection alive by accepting new artifacts.
DONORS
Our collection is built almost entirely by the generosity of Nova
Scotians. We have virtually no acquisition budget can't afford to bid on
ebay or go to antique auctions or even systematically approach business or
institutions, but in many ways, making the best of a meager situation we
don't have to. Donors come to us, 98% of our collection and most of our
best and most valuable objects are donations. The commitment and respect
of donors continue to astonish me and in a very depressing Museum
environment, it is one of the few things which I still find inspiring.
These people don't want money for their artifacts. Most don't even want
tax receipts! They just want to find a home for something they regard as
precious and which they believe should stay in Nova Scotia. It is a
crushing duty to answer them when you are systematically deprived of any
resources to respond to their donations. We have to investigate our
donations carefully to make sure we don't have one already or that it is
relevant to our collection or that we can look after it properly. Because
our Museum has such a high profile, we are the first Museum which many
people call when they have any kind of model, furniture or document. This
means in fact that we spend a lot of time redirecting donations acting as
a channel to other museums, mostly community museums around the province.
I get calls almost every day from people who want to donate artifacts to our Museum. Today it was someone with a Bluenose pop bottle, yesterday it was a little girl's dress from the Halifax Explosion, the day before that a policeman's fingerprint kit. Some with marine connections, some not but there are not enough hours in the day for me to respond to all these offers. I have no staff or assign or delegate to. We end up with hopelessly long backlogs of artifacts to investigate and process. Our most recent reorganization cut us further from three people to two has made this much worse and donors now have to wait months and months to hear back from us and because of that artifacts are being destroyed. In the last three months I had one donor who threw out rare cable ship instruments while he was in our backlog, another woman who threw out navigational instruments and charts when she had to move while waiting for us. A large anchor was sent to the scrap yard while waiting for us and a large collection of nautical books was went to a Rotary Club flea market instead of to our library while the donor waited.
TITANIC
I would like to end with a final example: the Titanic. Over many years the
curators who proceeded me at the Maritime Museum and staff over at the
Nova Scotia archives collected material on a tragic Edwardian shipwreck
which seemed only to interest a cult following but which was worth
collecting because it had a great impact on Nova Scotia. After James
Cameron made his film in 1997 the world rediscovered the Titanic story and
people flocked to Nova Scotia to see the objects and places associated
with it. Thanks to the foresight of years of collection work by people
before I arrived at the Museum, I was able to write and curate an exhibit
based on the world's largest collection of wooden Titanic objects. A 1999
market study showed that Titanic initiatives, mainly at the Maritime
Museum of the Atlantic, generated 11 million extra dollars in tourism
revenue - 11 million! A lot of restaurant owners, hotel operators and gift
merchants made a pile of money on visitors attracted by our collection, a
seeming success story for heritage tourism but I note a number of
disturbing observations from the Titanic Museum experience:
Aside from being able to hire a cataloguer and ship maintenance worker for
a few extra months, our collection received no benefit from all this
traffic. Our staff and resources continued to be cut away and all we got
out of it was more work as everyone wanted Titanic information from us. I
also ask what does it say about the business corporate culture in Nova
Scotia, that private industry, which made piles of money from this
heritage event give so little support to its museums. And I would suggest
that today we are in danger of missing out on the next Titanic. By that, I
mean given that our pathetic collection resources, we are missing
opportunities to collect objects today that will be of great interest
tomorrow when another story from our collective past catches the mass
imagination of Nova Scotians and people who visit here.
CONCLUSIONS
So I would summarize my observations in the following ways:
1) Museums deserve more money. I know you've heard this before but Nova
Scotians seem to value their Museums enough to donate objects to them. I
think they would like to see them get more support from their
government.
2) The foundation of Museum are their collections, the people who know
history and artifacts. They deserve more resources within the Museum.
Marketing and creating visitor experience mean nothing if there is no
content at the heart of it.
3) It is misleading and in the end destructive to see the tourism value of
Museums as their salvation. So heavily stressing and promoting museums as
tourism attractions distorts Museums, their resources and their worth.
They should be valued and supported first and fundamentally as cultural
assets for Nova Scotia's identity.