Now hiring: City of Edmonton Historian Laureate

“This places Edmonton at the forefront of heritage awareness in Canada,” said City of Edmonton archivist Michael Payne. “Edmonton is the first municipality in Canada to create a Historian Laureate position. This is a testament to Edmonton’s commitment to heritage preservation.”

An excellent idea.  I hope  more municipalities, states, counties, etc., demonstrate their commitment to history by hiring public historians.

Museum workers on strike:

• Staff at two of Canada’s biggest museums, the War Museum and Museum of Civilization, both in Ottawa, have been on strike for over two months.  Union museum jobs, how about that?  Keep up the fight, colleagues!  (Thanks to Dan Cull and Kirsten of Museos Unite for the heads up).

• Additionally, museum staff at the Centre Pompidou have been striking; staff at other Paris museums have struck in solidarity.

Repercussions of the financial crisis:

State Historical Society of Missouri cuts hours, employee pay:

“The reduced hours will have a significant impact on genealogists, students, and scholars who make use of the State Historical Society’s collections,” said Gary R. Kremer, the executive director. “And local organizations that have used scholars well-versed on a variety of historical topics will lose access to a much-needed source for speakers.”

The 25 percent withholding reduces the Society’s state funding to 65 percent of the FY2009 appropriation.

(thanks to Gordon Belt)

Gordon has also done a roundup of financial problems at state historical societies.

An update on the Ironworld closure:  an article linked by David Grabitske asserts that the Minnesota Discovery Center’s problems stemmed from an identity crisis:  were they a museum or an amusement park?

Twitterverse: the twitter museum community is very happy to welcome LAM hero John Cotton Dana to our ranks (as well as the museum he founded.)

Here’s what looks like a great job opportunity for an NYC-based public historian/museum type, at the Brooklyn Historical Society:

Historian – In Pursuit of Freedom Project

Two year, grant funded position

Job Description:

The Historian will serve as curator and lead history scholar for a project called In Pursuit of Freedom, which focuses on the history of abolitionism and the Underground Railroad in Brooklyn, providing new resources for preserving, interpreting, and advancing public understanding of this dramatic and significant chapter in American history.

The In Pursuit of Freedom collaboration links three complementary cultural entities: the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS), Weeksville Heritage Center (WHC), and Irondale Ensemble Project (IEP). Implemented over a two to three year period, In Pursuit of Freedom will create five mutually-reinforcing components designed to help the public explore Brooklyn’s historic role in the fight against slavery and the effort to fulfill America’s promise of liberty and freedom: 1) A commemorative installation by a commissioned artist in Willoughby Square Park 2) Interpretive exhibitions at the Brooklyn Historical Society, Weeksville Heritage Center, and the Irondale Center at Lafayette Avenue Church, providing opportunities to go deeper by exploring historical images and rich archives of primary documents. 3) The development and presentation of an original theater piece that will draw upon the story of abolition in Brooklyn. 4) An Educational Curriculum, and 5) a web site that will connect all of the components: introduce the walking tour; preview the interpretive installations; and reinforce educational curriculum. The site will provide a downloadable tour map of relevant sites throughout the Borough as well as accompanying podcasts, so that visitors can explore the Borough through the historic lens of abolitionism and the Underground Railroad. To this end, the historian will synthesize information for all aspects of the project, and coordinate the content, taking responsibility as follows:
Conduct original research in archives around the city including but not limited to: Brooklyn Historical Society and various Brooklyn churches, the Schomberg Center and other research collections.
Work in close coordination with project archivists, and the entire project team, which included other historians, archivists, educators, exhibit designers, community and stake-holders.
Communicate about research regularly through oral presentations and written reports.
Organize meetings periodically with Scholarly advisory board.
Give guidance and input on the development of the school curriculum.
Provide a curatorial voice in the development of interpretive plan for exhibitions, working with project team and designers.
Write exhibition text and texts for website and historical markers
Review scripts for exhibition, website and theater program

Qualifications:
Ph.D. in history (or public history) with a focus on NYC history, abolitionism and the Underground Railroad
Demonstrable knowledge of and experience in creating public history projects in a timely fashion
Excellent interpersonal, written and oral skills
Ability to carry out multiple and diverse tasks concurrently
Strong organizational skills

Position reports to the Vice President for Exhibits and Education at the Brooklyn Historical Society and works in close collaboration with a team of historians and partner staff members.

Please send curriculum vitae, a cover letter and writing sample to kfermoile@brooklynhistory.org No phone calls, please.

Compensation:
$45,000 to $50,000 depending on experience, with benefits. There is some flexibility in schedule. Grant funded, for two years.
Start date: Immediate

I discovered yesterday (via the Minnesota Association of Museums on twitter) that the Minnesota Discovery Center (formerly Ironworld), the mining history center in Chisholm on the Iron Range, is closing as of today, and putting its 47 employees (26 fulltime) on “temporary layoff.”  It’s unclear if and when it will reopen.

Two years ago the state agency (Iron Range Resources) which used to run Ironworld helped spin off the museum/center as an independent nonprofit with a new name and helped establish an endowment for continuing operations, with transitional funding tapering over 5 years.  It’s a huge attraction (I’ve heard it described as a “mining theme park”) on 660 acres, with not only the museum but an important archives center.  The recession has hit the endowment hard (it dropped from 10M to 6M this year), and the museum can no longer make payroll.  Apparently revenue from the gate has been going up:

Revitalized programming within budget yielded a 15% increase in attendance figures despite cold weather, five months of highway construction, and an economy where tourism spending in northeastern Minnesota saw double digit declines.

–but that has not been enough to offset the endowment decline and lack of state funding.

The scariest part of  the Duluth News Tribune report on the venue’s closing is this:

Efforts are underway to make sure the facilities don’t freeze while closed.

I really worry for the collections at Ironworld as winter rolls in.  The museum’s artifact collections are good, but the archives in particular are an extensive and unparalleled repository of life and work on the Range.  I hope that the board is able to regroup and reopen the facility as soon as possible;  and if not, that collections held in the public trust are transferred to another public history institution (ie, the MHS).  In this transition period, please take care of your collections, Minnesota Discovery Center.  They touch your visitors’ lives.

• I’ve posted my slides from the talk on museum ethics and open access at the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference I attended last week.  This is the talk a museum archivist called “inspiring.”  I have to tweak my SHOT paper a bit but I’ll put it up there eventually too.

• It’s November again, time to nominate history blogs and bloggers for the Cliopatria awards!  Our compatriot Northwest History won for best individual blog last year; hopefully public history will make a good showing this year as well.  I particularly want Preservation Nation to win for best group blog.  Nominations are open till the end of the month.

At SHOT several weeks ago, we had a meeting of the TEMSIG group, the technology museums special interest group.*  A small braintrust of public historians of technology (Allison March, Erik Nystrom, David Unger and I) had an exciting conversation.

We realized that most of us, and the many people interested in, broadly, the material culture of technology don’t often go to SHOT or are not particularly involved in that Society, but we do generally make the rounds of other conferences and associations, such as NCPH, AAM and Museums and the Web, where we talk about our work among people in intersecting, but not exactly the same fields.  We are museum people, scholars, public historians and digital historians and have no particular disciplinary homes–so how can we connect, coordinate and collaborate?

We quickly realized that working only within SHOT was probably not useful for us, and we don’t have any interest in forming a new professional association**–so what’s next?  We’re thinking about an informal coordinating committee with one basic aim being to improve communication with some further goals relating to collections (cooperative loans and exhibits), and an interest in nurturing and developing better tools for digitizing material culture (and the mat cult of technology in particular).

What’s next?  Well, who’s in?  Also, we need to develop a catchy name and a basic timeline of plans and goals.  What do you think?

*I have no idea what the E stands for.  Engineering?  Or is it just for euphony?

**The way that professional organizations are broken is one of my personal hobby horses.

I had a lovely time in Pittsburgh last weekend with a crowd of historians of technology.  Here, the highlights of the conference from a Suzanne perspective.  140 character highlights can be found by searching the #shot09 hashtag (which was mostly me).  

Plenary at the Heinz History Center, where I had a chance to see their new Innovation exhibit, which is a history of Pittsburgh through the lens of particular innovations.  I was particularly taken with the mining safety equipment section, which was interpreted in such a way as to make me sudden realize how interesting mining safety equipment is.  There was also the interactive where you could speak with George Westinghouse on video and hear about his inventions (“No, I didn’t invent the telephone,”), though he stares creepily at you if you try to walk away.  The plenary was by Brian Hayes, who showed lovely photos of power stations.

Friday morning was our session on Web 2.0 and the History of Technology. There was no internet in the conference rooms, for some nonsensical reason, so we all had to talk from screenshots.  Mike Geselowitz from the IEEE History Center talked about their interesting IEEE Global History Network, a wiki project to capture engineers’ stories.  It allows for single-authoring of some articles (“Why would I write my stories if anybody could come change them?”), with a mix of personal stories of technologists and NPOV articles on projects and concepts.  Highly recommended.  Stephanie Crowe spoke about the Charles Babbage Institute’s recent projects, including a project to capture information about photos from their Control Data Corporation archives, and their google sites project.  I took up the rear and got very excited about failed projects, John Cotton Dana, and the value of amateur historians (paper up soon. really).  There were lots of excellent questions, and the panel was really helped by being composed of an archivist, a museum person and someone who works at a research center without physical collections, so it was a great LAM convergence incident.  This panel was quite unlike most sessions at SHOT, which generally consist of three papers about historical research.

One of the great joys of museum work is that it has freed me to become a generalist, so I went to the sessions that seemed particularly awesome.  Great papers included Alice Goff’s, on the “recording lag” between recording and listening, in the context of a cylinder record archive in Berlin of ethnomusicological recordings.  She explored what it meant for Western anthropologists to transcribe nonwestern musics, and what got changed in the lag.  Alexandra Hui’s comment on this session was really insightful, noting that when we listen to the past, we hear mostly silence, and that thinking about sound and sound recording is an exercise in thinking about embodiment and being human.

A fascinating session called “Reforming Technology to Serve Community” discussed technology use in Plain Anabaptist communities:  Amish, Old Order Mennonite and Hutterite.  The papers, by the Anabaptist Studies scholar Donald Kraybill, Judson Reid from Cornell’s extension service, and Rod Janzen, were sociological and descriptive of technology use and decision making.  Considering these 3 communities was valuable comparatively:  the Amish consider technological choices on a congregational level, the Old Order Mennonites on a national level, and the Hutterites hold everything in common and thus are less worried about the community effects of (for instance) precision ag equipment.  Arwen Mohun, in her comment, gave the session a valuable historical perspective.  She agreed that the Amish are good to “think with” in terms of technological determinism and invited us to   consider how these communities are similar to others which with we are more familiar historically which also do boundary control around technology, using as an example the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on contraceptives.  She noted that these plain communities did not advance an alternative economy or an alternative to capitalism but stood as consumers and in some ways parasites on the larger culture (in the same way, I thought to myself, as dumpster diving types do).  But this insight is why the Amish distinction between use and ownership of technology matters.  The session was a great exploration of how a clear vision of community can shape technological cultures.

A session on users and consumers was also excellent (though not super well attended!  What were you all thinking?  Did everyone go to the robot session?).  I really enjoyed Susan Spellman’s paper on how small businessmen were early adopters of, and drove innovations in, cash register development, particularly at National Cash Register, which she found some rich archival materials on.  Zbigniew Stachniak and Dov Lungu’s paper on TRACE, Toronto Region Association of Computer Enthusiasts, a 1970s hobbyist group, gave a great snapshot into the rise and fall of a hobbyist group and the shape of regional amateur computing associations.

There was a lunch for museum people, during which we hatched great plans.  More on this later.

I also enjoyed a session on Technology and Culture in Post-Industrial Landscapes.  Jordan Kleiman spoke on the Bronx Frontier Development Corporation, which did community development and environmental work in the South Bronx in the late 1970s (and honestly reminded me of many current Detroit organizations).  Pat Munday gave maybe the conference’s best talk on the convergence of enviromental cleanup and historic preservation in Butte, Montana.  Butte is the country’s largest superfund site as well as a site of industrial heritage, both due to the culture and technology of copper mining.  Labor history and continued resistance to The Company helped galvanize preservation efforts.  On the historic “gallows frames” on the pit mines, which the company threatened to take down, one miner/preservationist said “You take the first one down and you’ll hang from the second.” The last paper was from Frank Uekotter, who spoke on “The Ruhr as Germany’s Pittsburgh” and considered the effects of this industrial heritage area.  A comment came from Matt Mehalik, director of Sustainable Pittsburgh, who flatteringly saw SHOT as a corrective to the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago, that history is key to healing and preventing post-industrial landscapes.

All in all, a fine conference.  I felt less beleagured than usual as a museum person at an academic conference,  I walked around a city I like, and I spent time with long-lost friends.  Thanks, SHOT.

I’ve been having a busy fall; you can see some of the results on the museum’s blog and some will be announced later.  I’ll be making the rounds of some fall conferences, so here’s the details:

10/15 (this Thursday):  I’ll be poking my head in at the Michigan Museums Association conference in Ann Arbor before heading on the road to Pittsburgh

10/15 to 10/17 In Pittsburgh for the Society for the History of Technology conference .  My session is bright and early on Friday morning.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16

8.30-10 AM

3.   Web 2.0 and the History of Technology

Chair: Sheldon Hochheiser (IEEE History Center)

Commentator: Thomas J. Misa (Charles Babbage Institute)

Organizers: Michael N. Geselowitz (IEEE History Center) and Thomas J. Misa (Charles Babbage Institute)

Stephanie H. Crowe (Charles Babbage Institute): Experimenting with Web 2.0 at the Charles Babbage Institute

Suzanne Fischer (The Henry Ford): The History Museum as Communication Platform

Michael N. Geselowitz (IEEE History Center): The IEEE Global History Network

10/21 I’ll be attending TEDx Detroit, along with my THF colleague Eric Reasons.

11/5 to 11/7 In St Louis for the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference.  Yes, I’m clearly not a moving image archivist, but I’m excited to have been asked to speak on an awesome panel about open media and to bring lessons from public history to moving image archives colleagues.

Saturday, November 7

10:45 AM – 11:45 AM
The Problem of Open Media

Chair
Jack Brighton – Illinois Public Media

Speakers
Peter Kaufman – Intelligent Television, Inc.
Rick Prelinger – Prelinger Library & Archives
Suzanne M. Fischer- The Henry Ford
Karl Fogel – QuestionCopyright.org

The term ‘Open Media’ has gained currency with the explosion of online archives. Some media collections are open for people to download, share, mashup, and reuse. Others seek to prevent their works from being copied. To the extent that there is an “open media community,” it envisions a large and active public media commons, providing global access to historical, cultural, and other materials relevant, and in many cases vital, to the public interest. Meanwhile, copyright and intellectual property laws add layers of confusion and conflicting interests, while new technologies make controlling and monetizing media problematic for all concerned. How might we solve the problem of open media? This session will address some of the obstacles and opportunities, and suggest new business models that allow content to breathe freely while still paying the rent. We’ll also discuss the role of the archivist as key to an open media future.

We’ve had some sad preservation stories recently here in southeast Michigan, with a few bright spots nationally.

• Old Tiger Stadium (near my house in Detroit) is now almost totally down, and folks are gathering pieces as mementoes.
• The Lafayette Building in downtown Detroit is being readied for demolition.
• The Michigan State Fair, the country’s oldest, really is shutting down (I was hoping for a deus ex machina).  The Archives of Michigan has been gathering Fair records–and don’t ask me what’s going to happen to the big stove.
• HAL itself is in limbo.
• Michigan History magazine has moved from HAL to the Historical Society of Michigan, but there were calls to privatize the magazine. (h/t Lisa Craig Brisson).

The good news is all cliffhanger saved-in-the-nick stories:

• Every library in Philadelphia was set to close, but, perhaps due to the public outcry, the state legislature passed a budget and saved the libraries.
• Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (who has tried to defund museums in the past), as well as Sen McCain of Arizona, proposed amendments to the FY2010 transportation bill to prohibit transportation funds from being used for museums or historic preservation.  These were happily defeated in the Senate last week.

For good historic preservation news, the National Trust has some interesting content on Latino heritage in preservation.

If you’d like to read my dissertation, here it is.

Please cite as:

Suzanne Fischer, “Diseases of Men:  Sexual Health and Medical Expertise in Advertising Medical Institutes, 1900-1930,” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2009.

Diseases of Men: Sexual Health and Medical Expertise in Advertising Medical Institutes, 1900-1930 by Suzanne M Fischer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This week, a blow for preservationists in Orange County, VA. The county board has approved Walmart’s plans to build a store on the outskirts of Wilderness battlefield, which will radically change the character of the historic site.  Local historians have been fighting the store, but aren’t surprised by the decision.  There is some possibility, however, of a continued fight or appeal.

This news, combined with continued preservationist losses here in Detroit, is disheartening.  I can’t shake the feeling that we’re turning into CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.  Readers, do you have any positive history news to share?