1. Mission, ethics and open media AMIA Conference Sat, Nov 7, 2009 St Louis Suzanne Fischer Curator of Technology The Henry Ford Dearborn, MI [email_address] @publichistorian
Hello, my name is Suzanne and Iâm a a historian. Iâm a curator at a large history museum; I work with material culture, not moving images. Iâm here to give you a view from the rest of the LAMiverse (libraries, archives and museums) and my goal is to show you that, whatever the new tools, they are only a means to our mission, which is facilitating access to collections and, more broadly, to knowledge. I say we because you all and I are part of the same collective enterprise as stewards of cultural memory, and I encourage you to think of yourself as part of this community of service.
Just to start I wanted to tell you a little about my institution. Our mission is to provide unique educational experiences based on authentic stories lives and objects of American traditions of ingenuity, resourcefulness and innovation. [about THF] Have any of you been there? So what we are is a public history institution. How many of you are familiar with the term public history? PH is the practice of history, itâs helping people to make meaning from the past; more mundanely, itâs doing history in museums, historic sites, national parks, historic house museums and yes archives; itâs history outside of the classroom. I encourage you to think about this equation: public history is to history museums as [what?] is to moving image archives. What is your guiding philosophy?
As a community and a profession, organized (loosely) around a mission, we have a code of ethics, foundational principles that guide our practice [read 1 st line]. So open access is part of our ethics. How many of you are members of SAA? SAA has a similar code of ethics: âarchivists recognize their responsibility to promote the use of records as a fundamental purpose of the keeping of archives.â
And hereâs AAMâs ethics code. AAMâs original code, written when the organization was founded in 1925, included this phrase: âThe life of a museum worker is essentially one of service.â So from the beginnings of our professionalization, the idea of a public mission, of being a public trust, has been important. One of the folks who founded the AAM was a great advocate for the usefulness and accessibility of museum and library collections: John Cotton Dana.
JCD was a pioneering librarian and founder of the Newark Museum. He was an advocate for access to collections: if objects cannot be seen, he said, they are not of use. He also famously suggested dept stores as models for museums [etc]. He also collected contemporary objects and argued for their value as emotional connections to help folks understand other objects. His selected works were recently republished, highly recommended, also available online.
Another of my Heroes of the LAMiverse is Gratia Countryman, also a Progressive Era library/museum person, is Gratia. She was the director of the (Mpls) Hennepin County library system during the Depression. She opened branches in hospitals, prisons, factoriesâanywhere people needed access to information. She also organized the libraryâs art and natural history artifacts to be available for circulation. For JCD and Gratia, cultural heritage objects and information were a key part of building citizenship, and democracy and access were deeply linked.
So now I want to show a few examples of public history stewardship and facilitation principles in action using new tools. A return to open media principles has been facilitated by new tools. [Flickr Commons, Powerhouse, why itâs awesome.]
Another example of open access in actionânot just access to collections but to metadataâand this is institutional metadata. Being open means opening up our policies and procedures too. Radical transparency Also, 2 years old. Happy birthday to the dashboard!
I thought I would show you something film-related from my institutionâso hereâs our YouTube page. Thatâs Geo Washington Carver in Greenfield Village.
And to end with a reminder: open media, access, and public history and archival practice is about people. Advocating for collections, being on the side of collections, means being on the side of users. Theyâre the same side. And this is the only metric that matters. If weâre not reaching users, weâre doing it wrong.
![Mission, ethics and open media AMIA Conference Sat, Nov 7, 2009 St Louis Suzanne Fischer Curator of Technology The Henry Ford Dearborn, MI [email_address] @publichistorian](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/cfakepathamiasf-091111120032-phpapp02/85/Mission-ethics-and-open-media-1-320.jpg)
![thf ,[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],Photo by gruntzooki on flickr](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)