Thank you.
The Canadian Museum of Civilization—soon to become the Canadian Museum of History—is, with our sister institution, the Canadian War Museum, the country's national repository of historical knowledge. Last October the government announced a new name and mandate for the museum, which will enable us to better fulfill our role in researching and communicating Canadian history to the Canadian people and the world. It is a challenge we accept with excitement.
Chief among our plans is a major new exhibition hall dedicated to a comprehensive, narrative history of Canada. Historical knowledge is embodied in many things. We are a museum, so for us it includes, at the most basic level, our national collection of historic artifacts, including everything from Champlain's astrolabe to ancient stone arrowheads to Sir John A. Macdonald's desk. We have the country's only large and nationally representative historical collection. It is usually numbered at about 3.5 million objects, a figure that could easily mislead as many could be best considered as scientific samples rather than objets d'art.
Let's begin with a brief overview of best practices in acquiring, preserving, and protecting our historical collections. As museums change, so do the collections upon which they are based. New acquisitions bring different perspectives to existing collections, new areas of research and interpretation are initiated, and the capacity to represent a changing society is enhanced. At the same time, old collections can sometimes lose their meaning, as expertise shifts and the museum's role in a larger society evolves.
A major challenge for any museum is to determine what items it will collect and what items it will keep, how the collections will be organized, and how they will be preserved for future generations. The museums follow rigorous practices for selecting and accessioning material into the national collection. Relevance to the museums' mandates and documentary evidence to this are of primary importance. However, costs and capacity to preserve and protect are reality checks when weighing the merits of any acquisition. A responsible collection plan includes the careful comparative examination of existing holdings and the possible refinement of the collection, to ensure that only the most viable material is retained.
The Canadian Museum of Civilization is a cutting-edge preservation centre with a great capacity to control environments, and provide security access measures and accessibility to the collections for research and exhibitions. We have come a long way from the days of the substandard, warehouse-like, satellite repositories of the not-so-distant past. So, too, have our knowledge and techniques for ensuring the mitigation of risks associated with long-term storage, handling, exhibiting, and lending of the national collections.
As central to our mandate as they are, objects by themselves tell us nothing. We need to determine what they mean, and that is the museum's real job: we not only preserve and protect, we also research and communicate meaning. In other words, we use objects—and other assets like images, archival documents and sound recordings—to tell the story of our country. The museum employs about 25 research curators, normally with doctoral degrees in history, archeology and allied disciplines, to research the objects themselves and their historical contexts. These research curators then work with other specialists in interpreting and presenting this information to the public. We do this using a number of media and types of presentations.
As a museum, the most typical of these is the physical exhibition. They can be permanent exhibitions, which means they can last anywhere from 15 to 25 years, or temporary, for a few months.
As a key part of our recent name and mandate change from the government, the CMC is currently planning our biggest and most ambitious such exhibition since we opened at our present location 24 years ago. This is the new Canadian history hall. It will replace the current Canada Hall and Canadian Personalities Hall and encompass about 45,000 square feet of exhibition space. For the first time in Canadian museological history, we will tell the comprehensive story of Canada from beginning to now. Louis Riel will be there. The conscription crisis of 1917 will be there, Expo 67, Champlain, the first Viking visitors to our shores, and the arrival of the first human beings at the end of the last ice age.
We have put together research teams who are working on the storyline and finding and researching objects, images, and other exhibitable things. We have also engaged museologists and interpretive specialists to work with the curatorial team on messaging and thematic development to help make the content come alive. We want a result that will engage and enthrall our visitors, to communicate to Canadians and the world that Canadian history is vital and important.
At the heart of the development of these products are the various needs of the audience. Knowledge and understanding of these audiences helps determine the best means by which objects and research can be presented in an engaging and stimulating manner. Across a variety of projects, the museum regularly conducts audience research through surveys, interviews, product testing, and other visitor studies. The application of these studies combined with up-to-date learning theories help ensure that the museum delivers a powerful learning experience as part of the museum visit.
The new Canadian history hall project is an example of this principle in practice. In this case an extensive public engagement exercise has taken place across Canada and online, consulting thousands of Canadians about what they would like to see, experience, and access in the new Canadian Museum of History. Currently, the team responsible for the new permanent exhibition are collating and reviewing these findings, which will be applied directly to the development of the new museum. We are also consulting with history experts through various consultative committees and brainstorming sessions to ensure that we get the right content, that it is factual and balanced, and that it presents different perspectives on complicated issues.
In the 21st century, a great deal more is expected of museums than the traditional physical exhibition. But even that has changed. Where 50 years ago a history exhibition might consist of a group of important objects with some accompanying text, we now seek a much more ambitious storyline, something approaching three-dimensional journalism. For the new Canadian History Hall, we remain dedicated to the physical exhibition as still central to our mandate. Only here can a visitor see, directly and personally, the “real thing”. Not an image of the real thing, but the actual first Maple Leaf flag to fly over Parliament Hill in 1965, or the handgun that shot D'Arcy McGee.
Our dedication to the “real thing”, however, is not absolute, and in a digital age so much more is possible. With smart phones and apps like Augmented Reality, we can program in a great deal of additional information that the visitor can access at will. We are already experimenting with digital applications at the museum, and you can expect to see a great deal of them in the new Canadian History Hall.
For example, the museum owns a small wooden carving found in an Inuit archeological site on Baffin Island. Carved in a typical Inuit style, this artifact, which is approximately 650 years old, depicts what is evidently a European, presumably a Norseman or Viking, wearing a surcoat or robe, with a cross faintly incised on the chest. Therefore, it suggests that there was direct contact between the Inuit and Europeans.
Visually this object is extremely unimpressive, not much more than 2 inches tall. Some of its meaning, its significance, can be communicated through text, of course, but with digital applications we can now do so much more. We can program in a brief interview with a subject expert, insert a film clip, add a map to show where it was found, or photos of the archeological site. We can allow the visitor to digitally manipulate the object or the image of the object, flip it around and see what it looks like from every angle. We can also allow the visitor to log comments or email a photo of the object to herself at home. And that's just what we can do now. By the time we open the new History Hall in 2017, who knows what may be possible.
A slightly older medium of presentation that has become standard is the website. CMC has a large and ambitious website featuring all kinds of information, including archived exhibitions. We also host digital exhibitions that go straight to the web, of which the largest recent example is the “Virtual Museum of New France”. It is just being finished and encompasses about 45 sections or chapters and 300 images, generally in colour. Many of these offerings are produced with the support of the Virtual Museum of Canada project at Canadian Heritage.
Another Heritage ministry program we took maximum advantage of was Canadian culture online, which allowed us to make available online many thousands of historic objects from our collection. Much of our collection is now available online to scholars, first nations, and the general public.
For the new history hall project we anticipate a comprehensive and interactive supporting web program, although we must admit we haven't begun to plan it yet.
Cyberspace isn't our only frontier. We also send exhibitions to other public museums, particularly in Canada, but also around the world. At any given moment we usually have about a dozen exhibitions touring the country, the largest and most important travelling exhibition program in the country. We also share expertise and provide loans to Canadian museums and international partners, and are actively involved in developing the Heritage ministry network of Canadian history museums.
For the new history hall we will also be working with educators to develop and provide content for school curricula. The Canadian Museum of Civilization offers a wide range of school programs that meet provincial guidelines and curricula. They are available for students from preschool through secondary school and offer interactive educational experiences in fields of study ranging from geography and citizenship to history and cultural studies. The programs enable students to learn about the people, places, and events that helped shape our country and the world. Programs, tours, and special event days attract over 40,000 students to the museum each year.
This represents a very fast and basic overview of what the Canadian Museum of History is already doing and will continue to do to preserve, protect, and enhance Canadian history at the level of a national museum. Thank you for your attention