By Desi Gonzalez
This year, we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of MCN. In other words, it’s been fifty years since a group of individuals galvanized around changes in technology and cultural institutions to form this loose field we call #musetech. A community of practitioners came together with the aims of sharing knowledge, developing best practices, and building toward common goals. Or, as an issue of Spectra journal put it a few decades later: MCN aimed to connect “colleagues in museum automation.”
Over the past few months, a scrappy team of researchers have been mining #musetech job history past and present to uncover the emergence and evolution of our field. Our team—consisting of Sean Blinn, Zejun Cai, Sheila Carey, Eric Johnson, Matt Morgan, Sarah Outhwaite, and Nicole Riesenberger—has been digging into archives, scraping annual report data, and dredging up old job postings.
Through these efforts, we’ve made some fascinating discoveries: patterns in how we discuss technology-related jobs in the cultural sector, technologies that have risen—and fallen—in popularity, and the introduction of digital into senior-level roles. But perhaps equally meaningful are the questions that have arisen along the way. What is a “museum technology” job, anyway? Which departments and roles do we consider to fall within the realm of what we today call “digital”? To put it another way: what are the boundaries of our field? Today, we take for granted that virtually every staff members has a computer; but as Rachel Allen recently reminded us in an #MCN50 Voices post, when the Smithsonian installed its first three Wang computer terminals in 1982, staff members had to sign up for time slots to share these cutting edge tools. As technology shifts from new to ubiquitous, so does the focus of our field.
Over the next few weeks, team members will be sharing their findings and reflections on the MCN blog. Our writings will cover a variety of themes and methodologies: We’ll share the most amusing job listings out there, discuss how trends in the larger technological zeitgeist are reflected in museum roles, and provide visualizations that illuminate the change and continuity in our field. We’re excited to mine the past with you, and we hope that these insights might inform the next fifty years of MCN and the role of digital in cultural institutions.