I'll speak on behalf of my site. I don't want to generalize museums across the country, but I'm quite certain there are a number that are going to echo this.
I'm the sole researcher on my site. I am also the director-curator, and I do whatever else I need to do. However, on a lot of the smaller sites, we rely on those wonderful student programs and human resource programs where we hire students every year. On a lot of sites, a lot of the core research is being done by these kids. Some of them are very good and some of them are not so good.
It's an issue that brings about the fact that curators on smaller sites don't have the luxury of time to devote to actually doing the job. It becomes something that we don't do firsthand because we're looking for funding, we're worried about watching the contractor who's fixing the roof because we're now liable for that, or we're doing things like that. It's a big issue.
You brought up the tourism issue, and we talked about this last summer in Timmins. Whenever you talk about using heritage to stimulate economic development, it has a role; however, I find that the big discussion is on tourism. How are we going to get all of these other people to come to our sites, without actually looking at the fact that museums service their communities first, not the tourists? Yes, tourists come and visit, and it's wonderful. We all welcome them to our doors, and we'll never turn them away. But we have a responsibility to our people as well, and that doesn't always happen.
A lot of the discussion then becomes not about the importance of the museum and the heritage of the community but about how we're going to get some bucks out of this to support something else. The issue is always skirted. It happens on smaller sites. I'm not going to say it happens everywhere, but it certainly happens on a number of smaller sites.