Seeing the Collection: the Virtual Museum

Community issues

Communities are now expressing themselves through collections-centred virtual exhibitions, or are sought out to provide value added information to existing collections which have been alienated from their originating communities.  The Virtual Museum of Canada hosts a number of good examples including two developed in British Columbia, Drawing on Identity: The Inkameep Day School and Art Collections (Osoyoos Museum 2004), and an early online example, the Haida Spirit of the Sea.

According to Ruth Phillips (2005: 83), community engagement with museums signals a “Second Museum Age”.  In many countries with colonial histories, originating communities are critiquing traditional academic and museum research methodologies and ascribing new de-colonizing agendas to museum practice.  Museum collections are important symbols of the colonial process and originating communities are reclaiming them as central to presenting both colonial histories, but also to assert their stories and for forging new relationships with museums that are willing to work with them in new ways. Intercultural understanding in a multi-cultural county such as Canada is exemplified by the Spirit of Islam program which created an ongoing, multifaceted collaboration between the community, the museum and other community groups (Canadian Unity Council & Museum of Anthropology, 2004). The Spirit of Islam virtual exhibit was produced and hosted by the Museum of Anthropology in 2002. 

A project that is based on the principle of collaborative development between a group of international museums and British Columbia First Nations is the Reciprocal Research Network.   The network, funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, is led by the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Museum of Anthropology. In partnership with the UBC Laboratory of Archaeology, fourteen international museums and three First Nations co-developers the RRN will be based on a new model for web-based collections research. The Musqueam Indian Band, Stó:lo First Nation and the U’místa Cultural Centre have been working with UBC to outline the network’s research agenda in accordance with community-based objectives including language preservation, support for virtual repatriation, reconnecting objects to community-based classification schemes, as well as to rights, oral traditions, places and to other reconnections to serve community revitalization needs.  Museums with British Columbia First Nations materials will begin working with the co-developers to find sustainable ways to meet the networks objectives.  Bringing together heritage that has been separated for decades in ways that provide means to share information, supports dialog, and strengthen relationships between institutions and the communities from whom the collections are derived is the ongoing challenge for this project (Stevenson, 2005).

Another trend in museum-community engagement is museum’s pro-actively seeking communities to identify and contextualize museum collections.  For example, the Kainai-Oxford Photographic Histories Project undertaken by Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (Peers & Brown, 2005).