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| Roderick MacLean poses at the Halifax Citadel with historical interpreter Juan Rivadeneira. Photo taken by J. Whattam. Photo courtesy of Roderick MacLean. |
Roderick MacLean is the Executive Director of the Halifax Citadel Society. He graduated from the Museum Studies program in 1997. He is also the Board Chair, manager and a playing member of the 78th Highlanders (Halifax Citadel) Pipe Band, and has won numerous awards in recognition of piping excellence.
What is your favourite memory from your time in the Museum program?
I suppose the funniest memory I have is from Sue Maltby’s conservation course. For the section on artifact condition reports she took us to the Canadian Museum of Health and Medicine in Toronto (now it's The Museum of Healthcare in Kingston.) We filed into this standard meeting room and we sat down in front of these little white boxes. We all took the lids off our boxes and there was complete silence around the room. Each of us had a wax, resin model of a syphilis infected penis or tongue and I think everybody was looking at their model and wondering if they had the only one. Then one of my classmates said in a loud voice “It’s a PENIS!” And then we all burst out laughing at the situation. That’s one of the stand-out, quirky moments from the program that I remember.
What has changed in museums from the time you graduated to now?
I know I’m certainly more aware of two things now than I was when I started working in the sector. The first is the need to balance entertainment and education in programming. I think I was solidly in the “must be educational” camp when I first starting working and the entertainment aspect was a “nice-to-have”. Without the balance between the two, though we can't expect to bring people back and attract new audiences. The second is the availability of visitor survey data, especially large data-set work happening in the US, that I am starting to rely on fairly heavily in order for background in decision making. In the first case, I think this is more a change in my awareness than a change in the sector itself, good programming probably always balanced the educational and entertainment value for visitors. The second example may be more sector-wide and I find it extremely valuable to have solid, data-driven evidence in planning and, where appropriate, making the case for change.
What does a typical day entail at your job?
It spans the gamut from working on new projects, mapping plans, working through budgets, meeting with people, or I'm out, walking around the grounds to see how our staff is doing. On occasion in the fall period when we're still quite busy and a lot of our staff have returned to school I'm also assisting in program delivery with historic clothing. This morning I was help take delivery of about 20 barrels of gin, rum and whisky which are being aged at the site as part a partnership we’ve just recently struck with a local distillery - so there’s rarely a dull moment.
What are your budgeting tips?
Always build in a contingency.
What are the best ways to build a good relationship with your/a board of directors?
My suggestion for positive Board relationship-building is to get a system of governance in place that spells out specifically what each of your roles entail. About eight or ten years ago we instituted such a system called Policy Governance® which is also sometimes known as the “Carver Model” after its creator and it has worked quite well for us. The system spells out specifically what the role of management is, and what the role of the board is. It allows you to help the board in a very sort of defined way, and also tells the board what it can and cannot do with regard to management's work. So I would say the best way to build a good relationship is to have a clear idea of what each of your roles is, and stick to that.
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| A view of the Halifax Citadel Photo courtesy of Evelyn Feldman |
Working with a young staff. There’s that enthusiasm and eagerness that's associated with new people that come in who are pretty passionate about our program. That's a real energizer. My position allows me to see people progress through our program year after year. It's a really cool thing to see people progress through a program that way where they started as people who didn't really know the job, and then become people who are really confident and are passing on their knowledge to the next generation of staff.
What is one of your failures that was a great learning experience?
When I think about my experience of leadership specifically, I believe I had a series of mini-failures especially at the beginning of assuming successive leadership roles. These have informed my belief that you can take all the courses you want and read all the books out there on the subject but nothing really teaches you about leadership adequately until you are actually doing it. One’s leadership style is unique and changes over time. I think of it sort how folklorists define the concept of tradition, that is, as a constant process of selection and re-selection. If you apply the same kind of idea to my experience of leadership, then it's sort of a constant process of many mini-failures. I just fail in different and (hopefully!) better ways as time goes on.
What are some of the long-term trends that you think young museum professionals need to be aware of?
I think it’s interesting to think about how larger environmental, economic, cultural and technological trends will affect cultural institutions down the road. Take one of the biggest ones - climate change - and what impact that might have on transportation, the physical well-being of museum buildings and collections and on visitation patterns. As a micro-example, in Nova Scotia the visitor season is extending further into the fall, and we're getting better weather going into September, October and November. What is that going to mean for us? If that continues for five or ten, or fifteen years, are people going to adjust their visitation patterns to seek that better weather in the fall period? One of the impacts to our site is that, if the University year remains as it is, then we're going to have problems with offering the same amount of service in the fall period as we do in the summer period. So that's a consideration.
With regard to the economic and cultural, we deal with a lot of cruise ship traffic here in Halifax and that visitation has been growing for quite a long time. We're not at the same point as a place like Barcelona, and some other really well known visitor sites, but just the impact of tourism, especially fast tourism, as the baby boomers retire even further, and a lot of them decide to travel as well, what impact that's going to have on historic sites and museums? In some ways that is a good problem to have, because you’ll have an increasing number of people wanting to see these places, but it also presents dilemmas for many places with regards to transportation and accommodation.
I also wonder about the effect of technology, artificial intelligence and robots specifically, and what effect that will have in our sector. Whether there are opportunities to add robots in museum settings, and what that means for programming and museum labour. On the one hand, it might be a way to offer a lot more information to a lot more people. On the other, I feel it's really the person to person interaction in historic sites and museums that's the most important thing that we can offer. So the increasing use of AI and robots ten to twenty years from now might mean that it's even more important to have that personal aspect in information delivery and programming in cultural institutions because people will be looking for opportunities for real, human interaction even more in the future.
Finally, and I’m not sure if this an answer to the “trend” question or just a general “heads-up,” I would like to put a plug in for the work of Colleen Dillenschneider. She's working for a company called IMPACTS Research and Development in the U.S. and they're looking at fairly large-scale data sets of surveys, from people visiting all sorts of cultural attractions in the U.S. They’re extracting all kinds of, pretty useful data, some of which I would think confirms what people in the museum sector are already aware of anecdotally. She's the only person I know of who's publishing this stuff in that way. I've looked for Canadian and European equivalents, but I can't find any. I think everybody should really check out her blog. It’s really great stuff, I think.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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