It's Not All "Old Stuff"

There’s a fairly common perception about museums that we’re only interested in “old stuff.” This is often reinforced by visits to museum galleries, where mostly “old stuff” is on display. This perception, while understandable, is false.

Let me ‘splain.

Museums are about preserving history. “History” to a lot of people conjures up thoughts of famous dead people and long-ago dates. The origin of the word in ancient Greek means “inquiry;” up through the Middle Ages it meant much the same as “story.” It wasn’t until the late 15th Century that “history” specifically referred to the past. So we’re probably better off to think of museums as preserving “stories” rather than “history.” After all, the only difference between a story from yesterday and one from 1910 is about a hundred years; it’s only a matter of time before yesterday’s story is that old, too.

There’s a couple of reasons why “museum” and “old stuff” seem to go hand-in-hand. One is that we often need a time buffer to be able to recognize significant events or social trends. It can often take the passage of several decades to provide enough context for someone to say, “Yes, that is important—we should preserve that.”

Museums also want to educate their audiences. As recent events are often already well known, exhibits tend to focus on older, less well known stories.

Another factor seems to be the reluctance of people to recognize that their own lives are witness to “history.” I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard people say, “I remember those; that can’t possibly be old enough to be in a museum.” My personal experience is that most people don’t consider something to be “historic” until its 40 or 50 years old. And, since most of our collections come from donations (museums being chronically under-funded and unable to buy many artefacts), we’re largely dependent on our donors pre-selecting what they think is historic.

This is not to suggest that museum people are above this kind of “history prejudice.” I’ve worked in museums that had self-imposed cut-off dates for what they collected. That might work for, say, a First World War museum that won’t collect anything more recent than 1918. But, for a community museum to decide not to collect anything post-1960 is just kinda silly, and necessarily restricts them to collection “old stuff.”

If we’re doing our jobs right, social history museums like the Esplanade ought to be collecting material that relates to significant developments and experiences of our communities, regardless of how old that material is. “Contemporary collecting,” as it’s called in the museum field, offers the opportunity to collect objects in prime condition, often with other materials that help tell the story.

Some of the pieces we’ve collected in recent years include a car window flag reading “Go Kalan Go” from Kalan Porter’s 2004 “Canadian Idol” campaign; a blazer from our local Centennial Ambassador from Alberta’s 100th anniversary in 2005, and a 2010 Canadian Monopoly set, featuring Medicine Hat on the property usually occupied by Illinois Avenue. It’s all about the story behind the artefact, not how old it is.

If you wanted to preserve something to represent Medicine Hat as it is in 2011, what would you choose?