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An excellent “Long Read” by The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins reviews the many ways in which the British Museum has got itself into what she describes as an “omni-crisis” – beset by financial pressures, legacies of imperialism and, most recently, some internal skulduggery involving the spiriting of some 2,000 artefacts out of the putative safety of the Museum and into the commercial maelstrom of eBay and PayPal. In a world in which many regard the Museum as pre-eminent, the theft was acutely embarrassing. Trust was eroded, and the resulting attention has the world of GLAM in general – Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums — looking over its collective shoulder: the “ghosts are everywhere”.
Higgins makes it clear that old problems will need re-framing and that the Museum itself is keenly aware that these problems cannot be solved by carrying on doing what museums have always done, working on “museum time rather than human time”, without stiff re-examination of what it is that museums exist to do. Given the pre-eminence of the British Museum in a country that was for so long the world’s premier imperial power, it is natural that anything it can do to overcome this crisis and minimise the chances of recurrence will have wider implications for GLAM in the world.
The British Museum has long recognised the many ways guises in which today’s world sees them: as Higgins reports, the British Museum is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, and a detective agency. Given the reverence with which its millions of artefacts are regarded, and the efforts being made to share the fruits of its labours with wider audiences, she might add cathedral and community centre to that ontological list.
By no means a turnkey solution but a substantial step forward in addressing the curatorial challenges of the GLAM sector generally, will be found in the digitisation of artefacts in increasingly imaginative communities of 3D images with accompanying notes and stories that set out the cultural significance of the artefact and in ways that the real-world tangible thing cannot match. While the 3D render doesn’t bring with it the tactile thrill, there are so many artefacts that are not even on display or, where they are, are beyond being touched.
And critically, all artefacts can, once they are appropriately catalogued, be returned to their places of origin. What will evolve is a common language of artefactual analysis that will make yesterday’s and today’s world accessible to many more people in the future. Moving beyond wondering to each other “what these old walls would say if they could talk”, our descendants will have a more informed grasp of how to answer one of the oldest challenges that continues to bedevil our species:
If those walls could talk, what might they say? What values and meanings would they encourage future humans to assimilate in their working through their histories and their cultural differences? Will the digitally rich and data-enhanced artefacts of the future encourage us to look beyond our museums and ask ourselves not so much what sort of past we choose to live with, and instead ask the question on which our survival will depend: what future do we wish for our children?