DOING MORE BETTER, WHEN WE WERE ALREADY DOING (ALMOST) EVERYTHING PRETTY WELL: NATURAL HISTORY AND GEOSCIENCE MUSEUMS IN THE 21ST CENTURY (Invited Presentation)

We expect today’s high school and college students to learn things that their parents never did, like DNA sequencing and non-western literature, but they are also still expected to learn most of the material their parents learned, like Shakespeare and algebra. It shouldn’t be a surprise that they don’t get it all done to everyone’s satisfaction.

Natural history museums (in which I include museums that focus in whole or in part on geosciences) were founded in the nineteenth century around a multi-part core mission of caring for specimen collections and their associated data, doing research on them and (usually) publishing some of the results, and interpreting them for the public. Today these same museums are also expected to put images and data from their collections online, interpret those collections to larger and more diverse audiences in a never-ending array of new media, and apply data and research results from their collections to increasingly pressing societal concerns, from climate change to biodiversity conservation, against the backdrop of massively expanded competition for audiences and financial support. And they also need to continue to triage and organize the backlog of collections that were never adequately curated.

In this context, it is remarkable that natural history museums did and do so much. Yet there is no denying that even those museums that performed their “core mission” successfully have struggled to add emphases on the spectrum of priorities that society has come to value as much or more than this mission, from entertainment and spectacle to social equity and return on investment.

So our core work is not done, the value of our collections is greater than ever, and we face daunting competition for resources. In other words, as Mao Zedong once observed, “there is great disorder under heaven and the situation is excellent”. Carpe diem. Museums should aggressively partner with academics and their institutions and work toward a massive infusion of public and private support to fulfill their massive promise under these currently urgent circumstances. This “Marshall Plan” for natural history museums should involve all corners of society, but focus on what museums do best – old and new. We should unify around a common message to argue for – and earn -- resources commensurate with the enormity of our mission and value.