You Know You Work in a Small Museum When...

I recently saw this great blog post linked on the AASLH website: You Know You Work in a Small Museum When...

Nearly every single one of them rang true. My institution is large for its area, but small for just about anywhere else. It's the second-largest institution I've ever worked for.

Small museums have some great perks - the flexibility, creativity, and efficiency is second to none - but they definitely have many drawbacks.

Fairbanks Museum

The Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont ("Gateway to the Northeast Kingdom"), is a wonderful little gem of an institution. In many ways, it's anachronistic beyond belief, as you'll see in the photos below: row after row after row of stuffed animals in clinical lineups or faked-up natural settings, hand-lettered labels, odd collections of odd items (an entire collection of art made out of dead insects; I swear I am not making that up), and many other old-fashioned museum pieces.

In other ways, the institution has a vibrancy and a life that's palpable as soon as you step in the door. In large part, I suspect that has to do with the museum's planetarium and its meteorologists' Eye on the Sky program, which gives detailed weather forecasts on Vermont Public Radio and means that the museum has attention throughout the state. When I visited, I took in a planetarium show and when the narrator for the day introduce himself as one of the people who voices Eye on the Sky, fully two-thirds of the planetarium audience broke into spontaneous applause. They're museum rockstars, those meteorologists.

The museum has also embraced some interesting, innovative programs such as the Balch Nature School and serves as a community center in a part of Vermont that badly needs it. The Northeast Kingdom is Vermont's most remote and least affluent corner, and even the name Fairbanks is a symbol of the industry that has since gone - the Fairbanks Scale Company employed thousands and the Fairbanks family loomed large over the entire state. (Several of them served as governor.)

And you know, at a certain point, all that 19th-century overcrowded natural history display swings right back around to cool again, especially when you come face to face with a grizzly bear.

Small Museums & Task Saturation

I'm an avid follower of the blog at the Small Museums Online Community, a professional affinity group of AASLH. It's updated infrequently, but it always gives me something to think about when there's a new post.

Recently, one post talked about the dangers of task saturation for employees in small museums. I've been thinking about it on and off since.

More and more studies are saying that multitasking can be detrimental to overall productivity, and blogs like Unclutterer emphasize a more focused, one-task-at-a-time approach to work and life. I've thought for some time now that the instant gratification attention grabbing distraction that is the internet is a danger for me personally - I rarely even turn my home computer on unless I'm home for a full day, in order to concentrate on reading, offline writing, or tasks that are right in front of me in the real world.

There's also no doubt that many small museums struggle to get everything done with limited resources, as the blog post eloquently describes. I don't see any horizon past which things will get easier, either.

Here's the thing though: the kind of task saturation they're describing? It's exactly why I love small museums.

Cleaning the bathroom one minute and writing a grant proposal next, then leading a school tour and writing a collections article later in the afternoon? That sounds like pretty much the best day ever for me. Before I learned about the field of public history, I knew that I loved history, but I struggled with the prospective narrow focus of an academic career. I love research and writing and teaching, but spending all day, every day, doing just that wasn't for me. I'm an active, energetic person by nature who needs lots of new things to try and lots of different things to do.

I suspect that a lot of public history professionals who are drawn toward small museums feel the same way. Yes, burnout is a real danger, but for some of us the demand and variety of tasks in a small organization are a reward, not a penalty.