The Museum-Ed Blog

I spent last Friday afternoon sifting through over 100 digital images of Chinese ceramic vases looking for the one a client wanted to link to their educational newsletter online. The newsletter has always been published online on another site, but the educators who authored the newsletter didn’t include accession numbers of the objects in the digital pictures in the newsletter. They believed, like so many art museum educators, that the teachers who read the newsletter don’t care about accession numbers.

This is not the first time I’ve had this problem. Many museum educators believe that the public doesn’t know what accession numbers are and so don’t include them in the content they author about their museums’ collections. And I agree, the public doesn’t know or care about accession numbers. But when educators want to reuse, repurpose or refine the educational content, how do they know which object is which? Putting a slide set online becomes an even more challenging task when you don’t know which Chinese vase is in the slide, because no one put an accession number in the slide set when they wrote about the Chinese vase. Is the Chinese vase you need already digitized? Already online? On display somewhere in the galleries? If not, how will you communicate to the digitizers which vase you want photographed? You see the problem.

An accession number is the only unique identifier an object has. If the museum has 100 Chinese vases in its collection, and you don’t have a unique identifier to go with the one you are looking for, a ten-minute job turns into an entire afternoon of hunting.

So consider this a plea for the return of accession numbers to educational content. Don’t include accession numbers for your public, include them for yourselves, the future educators who will inherit your work, and the consultants you hire to help you retool your educational content. I, for one, will thank you for it.

When my partner, Scott Sayre, worked at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (I’m sure they wouldn’t mind me telling this story) they were just gearing up to digitize the collection. Presenting digital images of the museum’s works of art meant that they had to request rights for many of them. A lawyer was consulted and he produced a letter for the museum to send out. The letter was filled with legalese and lawyerly language, and the staff knew that whoever received it would be both suspicious and overwhelmed. So they rewrote it, keeping the important legal requirements, but putting everything in language that was friendly and down-to-earth. And whenever they sent it out, they included a stick of gum. I’m not kidding.

The permissions that were returned to them were astounding. They had a huge success rate, and attributed it to rewriting the letter. The staff knew that a letter filled with legal terms was enough to put anyone off, and believed in the power of writing in plain language and a friendly tone. Goes to show you that the topic of writing in museums reaches into all corners of museum functions, and good writing can open doors to all kinds of opportunities. A stick of gum doesn’t hurt either.

We ended our Museum-Ed Interpretive Writing Workshop a week ago last Friday, whereupon I lit out for a week of camping in a remote wilderness with no access to any technology beyond some waterproof matches. Now that I’m back, renewed and refreshed, I’m happy to post these guidelines created by the workshop participants. To develop the guidelines we analyzed popular journalism consumed by museum visitors (think Time and Newsweek) and brainstormed a list of techniques that could relate to museum interpretive writing. Then we wrote about several works of art, and used that experience to refine the guidelines.

I’m hoping that folks who participated in the workshop will comment here, adding to what I’ve written. And of course the list is open to comments from everyone, so have at it! What works for you? What doesn’t make sense? What is here that you never thought of?

And yes, we will run the workshop again, so stay tuned for dates and times.

Content
- Engage VTS Stage II viewer, who is most likely to be the one reading
- Narrow focus, as in a single subject for a single label
- Relate to exhibition theme or other organizing principle
- Not too many ideas
- Few nuggets of info
- Provide “human interest”
- Direct viewer to look at object
- Ask viewer to think about things, with discretion
- Use quotes when helpful
- Arrange content around experience
- Reference popular culture
- Relate story to readers’ lives

Style/Voice
- Clear concise sentences
- Use headlines when appropriate
- Grab the viewers’ attention
- Be brief, 100 to 150 word limit
- Use accessible language
- Define jargon that can’t be avoided
- Active voice, conversational tone
- Playful language where appropriate
- First person narrative
- Questions asked for reader, e.g. “What does this mean?”
- Consistent voice across the museum

Design
- Good readable font, type
- Easy to find, to see
- Use color
- Use images
- Use finding aids: sub heads, pull quotes
- Offer multimedia
- Use Web for reader’s contributions

Process
- Keep image at hand for continuous reference
- Occasionally check with original
- Discuss, draft, read, edit, edit, edit