Single case descriptions

Case 1: A small municipal science museum

C1 is a municipal science museum dedicated to conserving and exhibiting the history of the natural world. It has over 90000 pieces in its collection, ranging from dinosaur fossils to animal and plant specimens. However, the museum only has two staff, one of whom is a contact worker from a private company; therefore, the director actually has multiple roles as registrar, conservator, and curator. In order to overcome the lack of manpower, the museum makes full use of internships and collaborations in almost all functional activities. Students from local universities with academic backgrounds in biology and museology are the main source of trainees for the museum, and are important in assisting museum staff in restoration, digitizing, guided visits, and other technical assignments. But the collaboration with universities and public heritage facilities plays a decisive role in some technique-intensive activities such as restoration. The museum’s restoration work is exclusively reliant on support from relevant faculties of local universities. Upon the director’s requests, a temporary restoration team is assembled, with university professors and students, and will undertake specific restoration work. The team will provide several repair plans and corresponding experiment results to the museum; the director, together with the head of the university’s team, has to make decisions about the selection of the final solution,

techniques, and materials of restoration.

The museum is very active in updating its permanent exhibitions and organizing new temporary ones. There are, on average, ten temporary exhibitions every year. These exhibitions have a broad range of themes, such as climate change, nature and art, and sustainable society, and so on, most of which are planed and curated by the director herself on the basis of her own interests, learning and research. But the making of the exhibitions involves frequent interaction with other cultural institutions, especially in collection rental and exhibits on loan. Additionally, the museum also hosts some exhibitions produced exclusively by external organizations.

Although the director emphasizes the importance of virtual museum as an innovative means to bridge the collection and the public, there isn’t much application of ICTs in the museum except some outdated multimedia machines installed in the exhibition hall. For example, the museum doesn't have an independent website – the actual webpage (not website) is hosted within the website of municipal government and only provides brief visitor information; the digitized collection is not accessible to the public either. Conversely, the museum delivers an element of interactive experience onsite by encouraging visitors to “touch” particular high-stimulation exhibits to get a real sense of the experience, developed by the company Olorama. Regular satisfaction surveys, and face-to- face communication with visitors, are two major channels for the museum to evaluate visitor needs in order to improve service quality. The director often talks to visitors in person so as to canvas opinions among the visiting public. But she has to sift through suggestions and recommendations because the quality of the information varies and decision-making should be only based on useful information.

Case 2: A medium-size municipal ethnology museum

C2 is a municipal ethnology museum concentrating on collecting, restoring, studying, and exhibiting audiovisual resources, documentation, and other objects reflecting popular and traditional society and culture in the Valencian region. There is a total of 24 members of staff, nearly half of which are conservators working in the restoration and investigation departments. Although the two

departments have a different focus, they usually play complementary roles and collaborate for conservation and exhibition. Considering the fact that conservation work requires a high level of specialization and each conservator specializes in his/her field of collection and knowledge, the museum still suffers from an understaffing of restorers, especially when faced with a large amount of restoration work and approaching deadlines, for example, only days before the inauguration of an exhibition. Therefore, the museum tends to outsource a part of its work to other professional restoration companies so that all the necessary work can be completed in time.

The museum director considers innovation an important strategy for the development of the museum, and the development of new formats for value transmission for its neighborhood and society. At the museums, exhibitions, among others, are an important format where to innovate. According to the director, innovating in exhibitions is embodied in content innovation through the exchange of exhibitions and collections of between museums. Meanwhile, technology is regarded as an efficient means for value transmission. But the adoption of ICTs in the museum is modest, only limited emphasis is given to the interactive experience in their website. For instance, the museum released an interactive game about traditional herbal remedies with the help of a local technology partners.

In the museum, the objective of higher quality in cultural products and visitor services is pursued through innovation. In order to conduct quality evaluations, the museum adopts two main approaches. The first one is to collaborate with an independent consultancy for the introduction ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management Systems to the museum. Another is to interact directly with visitors to track their preferences and needs by means of the formal claims and suggestion system.

Case 3: A small contemporary art museum affiliated to a private foundation C3 is a small-sized contemporary art museum affiliated to the first private art foundation in the city. The staff is composed of five members who are in charge of direction, administration, exhibition, communication, and institutional relations, respectively. Because the museum is focused on contemporary arts, the

restoration of contemporary arts is not so complicated as that of antiques. The museum doesn't have any full-time restorer; it hires an external one as independent restorer temporarily when objects need to be restored. But their longstanding cooperation started in 2005 when this museum was inaugurated and hence, such employment relationship has achieved a high degree of mutual trust.

The museum aims to disseminate and promote its collection by organizing collection-based exhibitions under different themes. In the museum, curating an exhibition is mostly done as a curator’s solo effort rather than a team effort. The sole curator, who is responsible for the planning and development of exhibitions in the museum, compared his work to mental mapping:

“When you read books and the Internet, or visit exhibitions and artists, you draw what you find interesting at just like a conceptual map; then you can arrange these ideas in your own manner through such mental diagrams; after making more of an effort, you might change all that you planned theoretically and get new ideas which are totally different from the original” (cited from the interview).

In addition, the museum also hosts one or two roving exhibitions every year. In this case, the role of the curator is more akin to that of a coordinator of the installation of the exhibitions with the external producer.

The museum views the adoption of ICTs as an innovative strategy to reach to a wider audience, with particular emphasis on the role of the digital platform (e.g. website and blog) and virtual exhibition in strengthening online visitor engagement. An ongoing digital project is the development of 3D-oriented virtual exhibitions aiming to conserve and disseminate physical exhibitions physically sited in the museum, with the help of an external IT provider. In fact, the museum team has outsourced all IT-driven work to external technology providers.

Lastly, the museum also emphasizes the importance of interaction in the service to its visitors. On the one hand, the museum has developed a so-called “dynamic visits” (Visitas dinamizadas) approach to strengthening visitor engagement by encouraging debate during the guided visits. On the other hand, the museum also evaluates and improves the quality of visitor services in an

interactive manner by means of surveys and a suggestions box. Case 4: A medium-sized private specialized museum

C4 is a private specialized museum displaying a private collection of toy tin soldiers. Although the museum has a total of ten staff on different types of contracts, the collector – who is also the director, curator, and restorer of the museum – plays a decisive role in the management of the museum. Because the museum’s funding is mostly reliant on revenue from ticket sales and private sponsorship from the collector’s family, the museum emphasizes particularly operational performance through innovative collection preservation and marketing. In respect to the preservation, the carbonatization of toy tin soldiers owing to the ambient humility, temperature and wooden structure of the building is the main risk that the museum faces. As a marginal subject, techniques involving the restoration of tin soldiers are totally different from those in the restoration of paintings, sculpture and other ordinary heritage objects; and there are no prior experiences to learn from. In consequence, the museum had to invent specific solvents and custom-made bathtubs for the restoration by learning relevant chemical knowledge, and by their own trial and error with experiments. In respect to marketing, it was the first museum in Valencia to utilize social media (e.g. Facebook and Tweet) and YouTube for self- promotion and to attract a younger generation of visitors. Due to his working experience at an IT company during the 1990s, the director has an in-depth knowledge of the application of digital technologies to his museum. He not only constructs and maintains the museum’s digital networks (e.g. website and social media platforms) by himself, but also liased actively with the Vodafone Foundation to install wireless infrastructure to offer visitors free access to a Wi- Fi service within the museum.

In addition to exhibiting an antique collection, the museum is also engaged in developing new exhibitions responding to social demands. An example is the ongoing Silk Road project. Differently from collection-oriented exhibitions in traditional museums, the new exhibition in development here is characterized by the design and production of a new “package” that is composed of new tin figures and new scenes with the purpose of reproducing scenes under

different civilizations, historical times, and regions. Therefore, the core of curating the new exhibition typically consists of historical research about fashion, customs, social outlook, and so on. In most cases, the director works as a typical “lone scholar” immersed in books. On occasions, he also asks for advice from professors and novelists with whom he has a longstanding relationship.

Concerning visitor service, the collector thinks that he is familiar with visitor-oriented trends in the museum community and is confident to know what different groups of museum visitors need on the basis of his personal knowledge. Besides, the museum also attempts to collect feedback through online and onsite interaction between the museum and its visitors.

Case 5: A medium-sized art museum under the joint management of the national and regional governments

C5 is a state-owned art museum under the administration of regional government. Such “two in one box” system complicates decision-making and management of the museum greatly. The museum director regards innovation as a transformation of knowledge through artistic collection, which can improve the mediation between museum collections and the public. But demotivation and negative attitudes torwards the bureaucratic system have become serious impediments to innovation in the museum. According to the director, the obstacles are best exemplified by three aspects. First, all staff are civil servants; and “civil servants are an inconvenient (factor) to museums” (cited from the interview); second, in theory, there are a total of 17 staff working at the museum, but some are hard at work and some are slack in work, “the museum is kept alive because of eight or ten civil servants who still work here” (cited from the interview); third, the museum doesn't have a clear mission and workers are demotivated, “(their) work is always substandard, they go there in a trance and the time seems to be eternal” (cited from the interview). As a result, the museum is less active in producing new exhibitions, in developing the digital agenda, or in interacting with visitors to improve service quality.

On a more positive note, the museum has a rich and high-quality collection of artworks, as befits a fine art museum of national caliber. The advantage that the museum has is its strength in restoration, with an especial

focus on painting restoration. Even so, the demands placed by some essential analytical techniques utilized in restoration work still requires the museum to collaborate with other research institutions like universities and Cultural Heritage Institute of Spain (IPCE). In sum, the museum director faces the big challenge of overcoming the deficiencies in the system and to fostering an environment favourable to innovation.