• 17 minutes 48 seconds
    114. Bulgaria Doesn’t Have A Museum of Communism. That Might Be Changing Soon.

    Thirty-seven years after the collapse of Bulgaria's communist regime, the country still doesn’t have an interpretive museum about the period. But even if one existed, I know Bulgarians who would never visit, confident that a museum of communism would be an endorsement of the regime.

    Political scientist Louisa Slavkova, founder of the Sofia Platform Foundation, is hoping to solve both problems with Facade, a new museum set to open in Sofia in 2028. The name points to the gap between the regime's promises and its human cost.

    In this episode, Slavkova describes how her team's work at the former Belene concentration camp gave them the confidence to build a museum, the first version of the museum inside a converted bus in time for Eurovision 2027, and how Facade will make room for a full range of Bulgarian’s memories without treating those memories as a verdict on the regime.

    Image: The building of the future Facade museum in Sofia, Bulgaria.

    Topics and Notes

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    9 November 2026, 3:15 pm
  • 17 minutes 35 seconds
    113. World Trade Center Steel in Your Area

    Steel from the World Trade Center has spread to every corner of the U.S. When the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey gave away more than 1,800 pieces of steel saved from Ground Zero, and communities in all 50 states built them into memorials. A few were designed by famous architects, but most were welded by volunteers.

    Artist and researcher Sam Holleran first encountered the steel in a posting for a small-town public art commission. The listing described the steel in almost sacred terms and requested that the material be unaltered. Holleran and his brother Max, a sociologist, spent the next several years figuring out how the distribution of these relics turned the steel from the World Trade Center into a nationally dispersed collection of memorials. Their new book is called Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center.

    In this episode, Sam Holleran describes how archivists hand-picked the most "charismatic" pieces of bent steel from the pile at Ground Zero, why firefighters became the keepers of 9/11 memory, and what these 1,800 memorials might mean once the towers have been gone longer than they stood.

    Image: The 9/11 Memorial in Tallahassee, FL

    Topics and Notes

    • 00:00 Welcome to Museum Archipelago
    • 00:15 Berlin Wall Everywhere
    • 00:54 Sam Holleran
    • 02:22 WTC Steel After 9/11
    • 03:44 Saving the Shrouds
    • 05:29 Hangar 17
    • 08:00 How Steel Was Distributed
    • 09:47 Civic Spaces and Odd Sites
    • 10:59 Tallahassee Memorial Story
    • 12:37 Firefighters as Memory Keepers
    • 14:03 What We Remember
    • 15:12 25 Years Later
    • 16:07 Visit Your Local Memorial
    • 16:29 Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center
    • 16:45 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

    Transcript

    Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 113. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

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    20 July 2026, 3:45 pm
  • 15 minutes 40 seconds
    112. In Relooted, You Steal Back What Museums Won't Return

    It's 2099, and you and your heist team are about to case an unnamed high-security museum in Europe. One of the targets: the Kabwe skull, a roughly 300,000-year-old early human skull found in present-day Zambia in 1921. This is Relooted, a new video game from South African game studio Nyamakop, where your job is to steal back looted artifacts by mapping entrances and exits, positioning your crew, and making it past robot security using your parkour skills. Several things about this are unrealistic. For one, the actual Kabwe skull, currently on display in the Natural History Museum in London, might not need such an elaborate plan.

    But there is a damningly realistic fact at the heart of the game: every single one of the roughly 70 objects you steal was taken from the African continent and currently sits in a Western museum or private collection. And the way museums in the game wiggle out of a fictional treaty to return stolen artifacts doesn't sound fictional at all. It mirrors the real-world tactics that have kept the Kabwe skull in London for over a century, despite Zambia's repeated requests for its return.

    In this episode, Ben Myers, CEO and creative director at Nyamakop, and Mohale Mashigo, the studio's narrative director, talk about why heists are the perfect genre for a game about repatriation, what they found when they visited the real artifacts in person, and why their video game often does a much better job telling the story of these objects than the museums that hold them.

    Image: The Kabwe skull as it appears in a Relooted heist briefing.

    Topics and Notes

    Transcript

    Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 112. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

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    2 March 2026, 4:30 pm
  • 13 minutes 24 seconds
    111. Why Software Hasn't Eaten Museums (Yet)

    Museums today are filled with software, yet they've largely avoided being "eaten" by the tech industry. Unlike music or movies, exhibitions can't be downloaded or scaled infinitely. There's only one Mona Lisa. But if the wrong platform finds the right leverage, that immunity may not last.

    Which is why the kind of software museums choose matters. TilBuci is a free, open-source tool used by museums to build touchscreens, kiosks, and projections. It was created by Brazilian software developer Lucas Junqueira after watching too many digital exhibitions quietly break down once the opening buzz faded. Designed to be usable by museum staff long after developers leave, TilBuci treats software not as a product, but as infrastructure.

    In this episode, Lucas Junqueira talks about what it takes to build museum software that lasts. Through the story of a projection still running on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum in Belo Horizonte over a decade after it opened, we explore how open, locally controlled tools extend the life of museum systems, and what's at stake if a tech platform ever inserts itself between museums and their audiences.

    Image: A projection animates the façade of the Espaço do Conhecimento (Space of Knowledge) museum at Praça da Liberdade (Liberty Square) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Lucas Junqueira's software Managana, a previous version of TilBuci is running the projection.

    Topics and Notes

    Transcript

    Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 111. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

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    15 December 2025, 2:00 pm
  • 21 minutes 26 seconds
    110. Revisiting The ‘Enola Gay Fiasco’ Today

    For the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum planned to display the Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The plane was restored to be part of a full exhibit, presented alongside context about the atomic bombing's mass civilian casualties.

    But that exhibit never opened. Instead, after years of script revisions and intense pressure from veterans' groups and Congress, the museum displayed the restored bomber's fuselage with minimal interpretation. The exhibit was primarily dedicated to the technical process of restoring the aircraft; as one visitor noted, "I learned a lot about how to polish aluminum, but I did not learn very much about the decision to drop the atomic bomb."

    In this episode, historian Gregg Herken, who served as Chairman of the museum's Space History Division during the controversy, recounts how the exhibit went from reckoning with the bomb's full impact to re-enforcing a patriotic narrative. He recalls the specific moments that led up to one of the museum industry's cautionary tales, like when the director agreed to remove evocative artifacts like a schoolgirl's carbonized lunchbox from Hiroshima from the exhibition plans, and how the Air Force Association demanded the exhibit say the bombing saved 1 million American lives and other assertions that have been challenged by generations of historians.

    Today, a new presidential executive order dictates how the Smithsonian interprets American history.

    Topics and Notes

    • 00:00 Intro
    • 00:15 The Enola Gay in the 1980s
    • 01:07 Gregg Herken
    • 02:21 Initial Planning
    • 02:40 Martin Harwit
    • 03:48 Herken's Visit to Hiroshima
    • 04:39 'The Lunchbox'
    • 05:32 Initial Exhibit Script
    • 06:26 Opposition and Controversy
    • 07:15 Revisions and Criticisms
    • 10:49 Air Force Association's Demands
    • 11:59 Exhibit Cancellation
    • 13:37 "Pale Shadow"
    • 14:10 Reflecting on History and Censorship
    • 20:55 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

    Transcript

    Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 110. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

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    14 April 2025, 12:30 pm
  • 15 minutes 52 seconds
    109. The Rise and Fall of Enterprise Square, USA

    For the last few decades of the 20th century, if you visited Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, you could have been serenaded by a barbershop quartet of audio-animatronic portraits of America's founders as framed on U.S. currency. This was one of the many exhibits at Enterprise Square, USA, a high-tech museum dedicated to teaching children about Free Market Economics. The museum, which found itself out of money almost before it opened, shut down in 1999.

    Barrett Huddleston first encountered these exhibits as a wide-eyed elementary school student in the 1980s, mesmerized by the talking puppets, giant electronic heads, and interactive displays that taught how regulation stifled freedom. Years later, he returned as a tour guide during the museum's final days, maintaining those same animatronics with duct tape and wire cutters, and occasionally being squeezed inside the two-dollar bill to repair Thomas Jefferson.

    He joins us to explore this collision of education, ideology, and visitor experience, and how the former museum shapes his own approach to teaching children today.

    Cover Image: Children watch audio-animatronic portraits of America's founders, as framed on U.S. currency, sing a song about freedom. [Photograph 2012.201.B0957.0912] hosted by The Gateway to Oklahoma History

    Topics and Notes

    • 00:00 Intro
    • 00:15 Buzludzha Again
    • 00:46 Enterprise Square, USA
    • 01:32  Barrett Huddleston
    • 02:05 The Origins and Purpose of Enterprise Square
    • 03:09 The Boom and Bust of Oklahoma's Economy
    • 05:47 The Disney Connection and Animatronics
    • 07:54 The Decline of Enterprise Square
    • 11:42 Huddleston's Reflections on Education
    • 13:41 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

    Transcript

    Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 109. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

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    • 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show.
    • 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us.
    • ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

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    24 February 2025, 4:15 pm
  • 19 minutes 9 seconds
    108. The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life

    The tension is right there in the name of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. It sits inside a 1953 kindergarten building in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, a city that was born from utopian socialist ideals. After World War II left Germany in ruins, the newly formed German Democratic Republic (GDR) saw an opportunity to build an ideal socialist society from scratch. This city – originally called Stalinstadt or Stalin’s city – was part of this project, rising out of the forest near a giant steel plant.

    The museum's home in a former kindergarten feels fitting – the building's original Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka still depict children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity. But museum director Andrea Wieloch isn't as interested in the utopian promises as she is in the "blood and flesh kind of reality" of life in the GDR. The museum's collection of 170,000 objects, many donated by local residents who wanted to preserve their history, tells the story of the GDR through the lens of how people actually lived during the country's 40-year existence.

    The approach of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life is to treat the history of the GDR as contested, full of stories and memories that resist simple narratives. In this episode, Wieloch describes how her approach sets the museum apart from other GDR museums in Germany including ones that cater to more western audiences.

    Image: Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka welcome visitors in this former kindergarten.

    Topics and Notes

    Transcript

    Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 108. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

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    • 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us.
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    9 December 2024, 3:45 pm
  • 18 minutes 35 seconds
    107. Crypto and Museums Part 1

    In November 2021, an extremely rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution was put up for auction at Sotheby's in New York, attracting a unique bidder: ConstitutionDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. This group had formed just weeks earlier with the sole purpose of acquiring the Constitution – and would not have been possible without crypto technology.

    While museums and crypto don't commonly coexist at the moment, they may increasingly intersect in the future. They actually address similar fundamental issues: trust and historical accuracy. Both can help answer the question: what really happened? To explore this overlap, we speak with Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, who helps trace the story of ConstitutionDAO's bid for the Constitution. We explore key crypto concepts like blockchains and smart contracts, and how they might apply to the wider museum world – particularly around questions of provenance and institutional trust.

    Image: Nicolas Cage in 2004's National Treasure. Supporters of ConstitutionDAO drew parallels between his character's fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and the DAO's real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution.

    Topics and Notes

    Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

    Transcript

    Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 107. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

    DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️

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    • 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show.
    • 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us.
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    23 September 2024, 6:15 pm
  • 18 minutes 43 seconds
    106. Last Call on 'The Streets of Old Milwaukee'

    I remember visiting – and loving – The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) as a child. Opened in 1965, it’s an immersive space with cobblestone streets and perfect lighting that evokes a fall evening in turn-of-the-20th-century Milwaukee. The visitor experience isn’t peering into a diorama, it’s moving through a diorama, complete with lifelike human figures.

    And I’m not the only one with fond memories. When the museum announced that the exhibit would not move over to the planned new museum down the street, the public reacted negatively. Dr. Ellen Censky, president and CEO of the MPM, describes the reasons why the museum can’t – and most interestingly shouldn’t – move The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit. It’s a story involving cherished memories, the distinction between collections and exhibits which isn’t always at the top of visitors’ minds, and public trust.

    In this episode, we explore why the Milwaukee Public Museum decided to move (it’s the fourth relocation in its history) and Milwaukee Revealed, the planned new immersive gallery that will be the spiritual successor to The Streets of Old Milwaukee, which will cover a much larger swath of the city’s history. Plus, we get into the meta question of whether museums are outside of the history they are tasked with preserving.

    Image: Bartender in Streets of Old Milwaukee at Milwaukee Public Museum. Photo by Flickr user JeffChristiansen

    Topics and Notes

    • 00:00 Intro
    • 00:15 The Streets of Old Milwaukee’s 2015 Renovation
    • 01:17 The Streets of Old Milwaukee’s Visitor Experience
    • 03:40 Dr. Ellen Censky, President and CEO of the Milwaukee Public Museum
    • 04:10 The Decision to Move the Museum
    • 04:45 AAM Accreditation
    • 06:21 The Current Museum
    • 07:42 Funding the New Museum
    • 08:55 Milwaukee Revealed
    • 11:14 Milwaukee WTMJ4 from January 11th, 2023
    • 11:40 The distinction between collections and exhibits
    • 12:45 “We owe future museum goers the opportunity to see something different”
    • 13:44 Local Talk Radio Coverage
    • 14:07 Museum Designers
    • 15:29 Closing Thoughts and the “Next Best Thing”
    • 17:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

    Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

    Transcript

    Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 106. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

    DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️

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    Support Museum Archipelago

    29 July 2024, 12:00 pm
  • 14 minutes 58 seconds
    105. Building a Better Visitor Experience with Open Source Software

    While working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the pandemic, Dr. Morgan Rehnberg recognized the institution's limited capacity to develop new digitals exhibits with the proprietary solutions that are common in big museums. This challenge led Rehnberg to start work on Exhibitera, a free, open-source suite of software tools tailored for museum exhibit control that took advantage of the touch screens and computers that the museum already had.

    Today, as Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Rehnberg continues to refine and expand Exhibitera, which he previously called Constellation. The software is crafted to enable institutions to independently create, manage, and update their interactive exhibits, even between infrequent retrofits. The overarching goal is to make sure that smaller museum’s aren’t “left in the 20th century” or reliant on costly bespoke interactive software solutions.

    Exhibitera is used in Fort Worth and Nashville and available to download. In this episode, Rehnberg shares his journey of creating Exhibitera to tackle his own issues, only to discover its broader applicability to numerous museums.

    Image: Screenshot from a gallery control panel in Exhibitera

    Topics and Notes

    Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

    Transcript

    Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 105. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

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    15 April 2024, 3:45 pm
  • 14 minutes 52 seconds
    104. What Large Institutions Can Learn From Small Museums

    The Murney Tower Museum in Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a small museum. Open for only four months of the year and featuring only one full-time staff member, the museum is representative of the many small institutions that make up the majority of museums. With only a fraction of the resources of large institutions, this long tail distribution of small museums offers the full range of museum services: collection management, public programs, and curated exhibits.

    Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor has dedicated her studies to understanding the unique dynamics and challenges faced by small museums, and is also the Murney Tower Museum’s sole full-time employee.

    In this episode, Dr. Erdogan-O'Connor describes the operation of The Murney Tower Museum, discusses the economic models of small museums, and muses on what small museums can teach larger ones.

    Image: Murney Tower Museum

    Topics and Notes

    Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

    Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

    Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

    Join the Club for just $2/month.

    Your Club Archipelago membership includes:
    • Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
    • Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
    • Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
    • A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

    Transcript

    Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 104. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

    View Transcript

    Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner.

    Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

    Let’s say you sorted every museum on earth in order by the number of yearly visitors.

    At one end, with yearly visitor numbers in the millions, would be large, recognizable institutions – places like the British Museum in London. There’s a cluster of these big institutions, but as you go further along the ordered list of museums, the visitor numbers start to drop.

    At some point during these declining visitor numbers, you reach small museums. Exactly where in the order you first reach a small museum doesn’t really matter – one definition of small museums from the American Association of State and Local History is simply: “If you think you’re small, you’re small.” You could do the same sort by number of staff members or by operating budget – the effect would be more or less the same. The point is that once you reach the threshold where small museums begin, you still have the vast, vast majority of museums to go.

    Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: You just realize how many small museums are there in the world. Unbelievable numbers, right? They're everywhere and they hold such an important space in local cultural landscapes. Even if I dare to say more than large institutions.

    The sorting exercise illustrates a long tail effect – each small museum, while attracting fewer visitors individually, collectively hosts an enormous number of visitors. There’s just so many of them. The long tail effect was coined in 2004 to describe economics on the internet: the new ability to serve a large number of niches in relatively small quantities, as opposed to only being able to serve a small number of very popular niches.

    But unlike the economics of the internet, where distribution costs are minimal, small museums face the challenge of fulfilling nearly all the responsibilities of larger museums without any of the benefits of scale.

    Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: What fascinates me most about small museums is despite being so small, they offer almost everything you can find in a large museum, Ian. So do they have collections and do collection management and care? Yes. Do they curate exhibitions? Yes. Do they offer public programs? Yes. Do they organize special events and do marketing and digital engagements? Yes. They make these things happen.

    This is Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor, who studies small museums in her academic practice, and works at one.

    Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: Hello, my name is Simge Erdogan-O'Connor. I am a museum scholar and professional, currently working as museum manager at a local history museum called the Murney Tower Museum located in Kingston, Canada.

    Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a city of about 150,000 people and the Murney Tower Museum is Kingston’s oldest museum.

    Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: It will turn 100 years old next year. The museum itself is based in a 19th century military fortification, which was built by the British government as a response to a territorial dispute between England at the time and the United States. And the building itself is called Murney Tower. So the museum, taking its name from that building, but also being based in this building, is very much about that history. Why this building was constructed, what's its relationship to broader Canadian, British, American relationships in the 19th century, but at the same time, the museum is very much about the local history of Kingston as well so we are very local in our focus.

    No matter how you define a small museum, Murney Tower is a small museum.

    Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: We hold about 1300 objects in our collection and we are seasonal. We are only open to the public from the end of May through September. And I'm the only full time staff member that the museum has, which can also show, I think, many people what small museums are in terms of operational capacity. And then we almost entirely rely on volunteers, interns, and seasonal staff members that we hire in the summer.

    Ian Elsner: Right, I was going to make a joke about your, your staff meetings being super quick, but I guess you do have to have meetings nevertheless.

    Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: But sometimes I make a joke about that too Ian, meaning, yes, of course, we have board meetings, I constantly have interns, every semester through universities, and in the summer I have three full time staff members. Regardless, sometimes I'm like, I'm the gatekeeper, I am the security guard, I clean the museum, I run the museum, right? I do all of these cool things, like I write the strategic plan, but then there are times that I'm on call waiting for a maintenance person to come to the museum and I just need to be there to open doors to him.

    Ian Elsner: I can already see the challenge of having one person do all of those things that you described, but what are some of the other challenges of a small institution or your small institution specifically?

    Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: Simply because a big part of Ian, my professional, academic, personal life is concerned with this question of challenges, right? Whether understanding those challenges or finding solutions to those challenges. All my colleagues mention in any conversation that are very common to museums worldwide, big or small, and these challenges certainly affect my own institution as well, like the challenges of colonial and elitist legacies of museums, issues of reconciliation, repatriation, or funding limitations, or reliance on government funding, or contemporary challenges like COVID 19.

    So all of these challenges that are very much common in the museum world. But then when I look at his lens of small museums a little bit further, I identify in two major challenges that are much more specific to small museums.

    The first one is limited staff resources. I know I already mentioned that, but I still want to explain that a little bit further.

    While you have 40, 50, or hundreds of people doing these things in a large museum, you have only, like in my case, one or two people carrying out very similar activities in a small museum. This is a huge challenge because, yes, you can maybe carry these out in some form and capacity, with several people.

    But how can you make these activities really effective and impactful, with only a few people? This is a very important challenge that does not exist in large institutions.

    And there is a second challenge related to this, is what I refer in my own practice as this incapability mindset. And I found myself in this mindset when I started my work in a small museum four and a half years ago, it took a while for me to get out of this way of thinking. This limitation creates a mindset both in the institution as an institutional mindset but a mindset also in staff members and team members that's very much based on incapability.

    So you find yourself being almost conditioned, Ian, inherently to think small. Right? And this way of small thinking poses such a huge challenge to actual capacity of these small museums to grow and to make something meaningful. And, for example, you want to create a new website. You have the idea. You're excited.

    And what's the first thing you think? Oh. But I cannot hire a webmaster. I don't know coding and I cannot hire a website designer. I will never be able to make that happen. Or you want to create new exhibits, new exhibitions, nicer panels. And then you're like, but I cannot hire a graphic designer or exhibit designer. I don't know graphic design.

    And this kind of, this creates a chicken and egg situation where an idea comes and instantly a door closes. , this is another huge problem, Ian, simply because it took a while for me to get out of this way of thinking. And then the moment I did, I realized a huge potential.

    Small museums could do the things they want to do. They can do it, right? Maybe not in a big scale, but you can still make these things happen. You can find a way to make these things happen, but it starts with that mindset. And that's, I think, a huge challenge that exists.

    The manifesto writes itself – small museums, not small ideas.

    Having only one staff member or not being able to hire somebody to make a website are downstream of not having enough resources. And it’s not obvious how a small museum could take advantage of internet economics because there’s no way to get enough scale such that the marginal cost of each visitor approaches zero. But there is a way to take advantage of internet economics on the production side.

    Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: What you said about the internet or digital world is actually, it's a solution to these two problems in a way that I mentioned meaning there's so so many digital resources out there that you can really run a museum on a budget. Of course you cannot hire a webmaster, but there's so many custom made website platforms that allow you to build your own website at a very low cost and quite easily.

    There are digital design platforms like Canva graphic design, which has free subscriptions to non profits and they allow you to create really beautiful designs and two platforms, quite frankly, that I'm using in my work. You can leverage that digital world, take advantage of it and then make these things happen at such a low cost.

    And then on the flip side, it also opens all of this range of audience engagement, allowing these museums to go out of their localities and becomes something bigger, like you said, at no cost. This is what we have been doing, like using social media, internet, and YouTube. Last summer, we were visited by 12,000 visitors, which was very impressive for us. And 7,000 of those visitors were local or international tourists. And they got to know us through the internet.

    So I'm now curious, what, what can big institutions learn from small institutions?

    Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: I'm so glad you brought that up. The first thing, Ian, that I really believe, and I'm really, really, really passionate about this, when it comes to small museums, is local connections. I think the biggest impact of small museums is their local connections. How they leverage these local connections to create local impact, but potentially global impact. And I think this is something that larger museums can really learn from them. These museums, they already hold a very important place in the local landscape, local memories, and local stories.

    So they have a greater potential to connect with local audiences in a much more efficient and quicker way. And the way they connect with their local audiences is something I think large institutions could really learn from small museums. Because I know large museums that I work with on different capacities, they of course have local initiatives, community initiatives, of course they do, but I think that really understanding local connections and local concerns and histories, it's much different in a small museum, the way the small museums work that out.

    And I will give you an example again because I know what I mean could be a little bit vague sometimes. Back in 2020, COVID time for all of us. At the Murney Tower Museum, we really wanted to do something to address the needs of people living in Kingston during the global pandemic, especially find a way to address their issues of social exclusion and isolation and foster connections in our community.

    So we launched a local photo contest. We placed ads on local newspaper, TV, and basically we asked people living in Kingston to go back to their cameras, check their photo albums, and then check their childhood albums, and then check their family albums to see if they could find Murney Tower Museum, anywhere, right? And if they did we ask them to find the story behind it and send those pictures to us. So over the course of three months, I think we collected about 120 Incredible, Ian. Photos from 1920s, photos from, yeah, like 1940s,

    It also speaks to the advantage of the scale that small museums are operating on, because it's so much less interesting to have that same idea with a big institution. If the British Museum says, everybody send us your images, I'm sure you'll find some great images, but the scale actually isn't meaningful because of course people were going to the British Museum 50 years ago. But having it be that local connection of actually we have 120 pictures and like, I really see that point. The bigger the institution is, the less interesting that exercise is.

    It's, yes, absolutely, and the connection part of it becomes much stronger, and it in a way becomes much more intimate. It allowed us to leverage this local connection and I think large museums can really take that local focus from small museums. I think sometimes they can be lost in their big ideas and big collections and big audiences, which are equally important, I get that. But I think sometimes it starts with their neighborhood. Look at your region first, to create something global and bigger, go from there, much more focused perspective, rather than coming from something global or large and big into small.

    This has been Museum Archipelago. I have two quick announcements about Club Archipelago, our bonus podcast. I've been having a lot of fun making Club Archipelago, which is kind of a mirror image of Museum Archipelago. While the main show examines the landscape of real museums, Club Archipelago is the podcast that examines museums through the lens of popular culture, like movies and video games.

    We've built up quite the collection of episodes from the Night at the Museum series to Toy Story 2. And honestly, I think more people should listen. So I've just added a seven day free trial to the Patreon. You can sign up, listen to as many episodes as you can and cancel before the trial is up completely absolved of any guilt.

    Of course, you're very welcome to hang around too. To get access to the free trial, just go to join the museum.club.

    And finally I'm discontinuing the sticker rewards of the Club Archipelago membership. It's just too much of a logistical challenge to ship things from Bulgaria. And I want to focus all my time on the much more scalable podcast production. But if you're interested, regardless of whether you're a club member or not, just send me an email and I'll let you know where the closest museum is, where I've left a pile of stickers for you to collect.

    For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com.

    Thanks for listening, and next time, bring a friend.

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    26 February 2024, 8:30 pm
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