Dan Conlin's Submission to the Heritage Strategy Task Force Nov. 23, 2005

INTRODUCTION
My name is Dan Conlin. I work at Nova Scotia's Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage with the Nova Scotia Museum where I am Curator of Marine History at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. However I speak tonight for myself as an individual, not for the Museum or the department. I should also say that the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic is considering a possible expansion but as it is unclear whether this will actually happen and in what form, so I will address my comments to the present shape of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, which I feel is in deep decline, a hollow shell, in some ways a tourism attraction passing itself off as a museum.

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.


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