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The Missing Link: Volunteers, Stakeholders and Museums - A Case Study
- 1. The Missing Link Joe Coleman & Alan Nankirvis Volunteers, Stakeholders and Museums: A Case Study
- 2. We all know our stakeholders – Right?
- 3. They Don’t Look like this... ...Or This
- 4. Stakeholders Are the Museum “…persons or interests that have a stake, something to gain or something to lose as a result of the [organisation’s] activities”
- 5. Stakeholders Are the Museum Managing stakeholder relationships is important Relative Saliency = Power, Influence and Urgency Supportive High Cooperative potential / Low competitive threat Unsupportive Low Cooperative potential / High competitive threat Marginal Low Cooperative potential & Low competitive threat Mixed Blessing High Cooperative potential & High competitive threat
- 6. Volunteers are my favourite Stakeholders Museum Victoria has lots of them: 562 active volunteers 61% are female Average age 57 years 37% have volunteered for 10 years or more Half volunteer at least one day per week
- 7. The most important reason given for volunteering... “The museum shares my values”
- 8. Biodiversity Heritage Library Online library for biologists Histrorical and current publications Contributions from major natural history museums and research institutes 112,000 + volumes All free and CC licensed
- 9. Digitisation Down Under Making the best of what’s available
- 10. Digitisation Down Under Workflow conducted by Volunteers 6 volunteers, 3 days / week 360 books or 101,000 pages Become a gateway for other museum’s publications Mostly things work... ...But sometimes they don’t!
- 11. “Not just doing ‘busy’ work Treated like professionals with respect.” “The project is about safeguarding the legacy of scientific publications” Being autonomous and trusted to handle valuable manuscripts and seeing interesting books “Material is interesting because it is different from what I do “ “The morning teas are very nice. “ “Handling the old books is a very special experience”
- 12. We have not become extinct yet...
- 13. Digitisation expanded to include field notes and journals Won an Arts Leadership award Developing a package to assist other BHL partners Volunteers have expanded...to include me!
- 14. What has been learned? By managing you stakeholders you can... do a lot with very little planning is important, but so is being able to change your plans. Stakeholders may not always be who you expect Ongoing communication is vital Volunteers are eager to rise to a challenge
- 15. We are just one strand in a web of stakeholders
- 16. Thankyou Tak
Editor's Notes
- Hi, thanks for having me at the Inclusive Museum conference. It ’ s wonderful being in Copenhagen. This presentation is about the application of stakeholder theory to museum business and in particular a digitisation project that I set up with a group of volunteers just over a year ago. The paper was co-written by myself and Professor Alan Nankirvis, who is himself a volunteer on the project. The intention was that we would present it together, but unfortunately, he has been unable to come, so this presentation will be more about the project from my perspective and less about the theory. I hope that you will forgive this.
- We hear a lot about our stakeholders every day, but do we really know who they are or what they want from us?
- They ’ re certainly not BBQ implements, or vampire slayers
- Stakeholders are defined in the literature as “ …persons or interests that have a stake, something to gain or something to lose as a result of the [organisation ’ s] activities ” . That means just about everybody, but we can broadly categorize stakeholders into three groups: Inputs - those who offer something to the organisation, Outputs - those who benefit from its services and Two way stakeholders - those who enjoy the benefits and also offer something back. The graphic in the slide shows a few stakeholders and their relationship to the museum.
- We can further categorise our stakeholders into four more segments: - Those who are supportive of the the objectives of the Museum - Those who are not supportive and may pose a threat - Marginal stakholders, who are not really worth too much effort - and Mixed Blessing stakeholders who can be both supportive or a threat, depending on circumstances Of course stakeholders can change their stance at any time depending on the relative attractiveness of the organisation and it ’ s compatibility to their values. How we manage these groups will depend on their ‘ relative saliency ’ - their power, influence and the urgency with which they demand our attention.
- Volunteers are a stakeholder group that are highly supportive of the museum, but are sometimes overlooked by management because they have a low relative saliency. Ignoring the contribution of volunteers means that the organisation is missing out on a large segment of supportive stakeholders and runs the risk of them moving into Marginal or Unsupportive modes.
- Volunteers give a variety of reasons for their involvement: - often they want to keep active in retirement, - some are amateur collectors with an interest in a collection held by the museum, - some just like the social interaction - but almost always, they identify with the values of the organisation and the compatibility with their own values. When management understands this - the relationship can be great. Without paid remuneration, the relationship with volunteers is largely about trust. - the organisation trusts that the volunteer will be reliable and provide valuable assistance - and the volunteer trusts that they will be treated with respect, not exploited, and offered meaningful activities Treating volunteers as professionals and giving them a project they have a sense of ownership of is a great way of ensuring they come back.
- The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a free online library of over 112,000 volumes which have been digitised by many of the major natural history museums and biodiversity research institutes from around the world It was conceived in response to a need by systemic taxonomists and field biologists to access the legacy of scientific publications relating to their field. For scientists, accessing the historical literature is often necessary to confirm the finding of a new species, or the re-classification of an existing one, and sometimes the publications are just not accessible. Waiting for them to be sent by libraries, or have photocopies made can significantly hold up the researcher ’ s work, so instant access to such a large collection is a boon. There is no charge to access the BHL all of the content is open licensed. This is because much of the historical literature that has been digitised is in the public domain and for any in copyright material, a license is sought from the copyright holder to digitise the work and distribute it under a Creative Commons license The Australian branch was setup late in 2011 and is run by Museum Victoria.
- The Australian branch was setup late in 2011 with a small one off grant from the federal government and is run by Museum Victoria. Our aim was to upload all the publications we could access that were published in Australia or contained first descriptions of Australian Species. We initially had a target of over 7 and a half thousand titles that we wanted to scan hoped to establish digitisation projects at several of the major natural history museums around the country. The seed funding fund we were ultimately given was just enough to buy one scanning platform, a couple of image processing workstations and employ two fulltime staff. We had very little experience in literature digitisation and not enough money to fund a mass scanning operation, so it soon became apparent that there would be little chance of reaching our initial target. Given the challenges that we faced, the objective of the Australian project changed from mass scanning to the establishment of a self-sustaining digitisation project that would try and target journals published by Australian museums and early descriptions of Australian flora and fauna. As the project manager, it was my job to establish the local digitization operation. This was a challenging task to accomplish within the resources I had at my disposal and I soon learned how labour intensive literature digitisation can be. We had bought a manual, two camera imaging system that would accommodate a wide range of publication sizes without needing to unbind them but was also quite a physical process to operate. It involves lifting a glass platen to turn the pages and triggering the cameras with a button. As a result, each image was slightly different and I found out by trial and error that automated post processing software was not going to deliver satisfactory results. The workflow that I developed involved five stages for each item: 1. selecting an item or series of publications from our scanning list and checking them out of the library. 2. Photographing the entire book, including covers and end pages 3. Post processing every page image in Photoshop 4. The addition of descriptive page metadata and packaging up of all the images for upload 5. Quality assurance – checking image and metadata quality. The intention of the digitisation project was always to make use of our volunteers to conduct the actual imaging however, as I developed the workflow it became apparent that they would take on the process from end to end. I recruited six people through our volunteer coordinator with the proviso that they would need to be fairly au fait with working with imaging technology. The volunteers who responded were from a wide range of backgrounds and experience levels but were all enthusiastic about working on the project although none had any experience in literature digitisation at all. This posed some challenges when I developed the training programme and manuals as I needed to be as concise as possible without resorting to technical detail. I compiled comprehensive guides for each stage of the process and they spent a day in the library with the equipment learning the entire process. By the end of that time, the volunteers had mostly got over their initial trepidation and were keen to get started.
- Once production got under way, ( CLICK ) I divided the group into three pairs and each pair was rostered to the project for one day a week. ( CLICK ) For the first few weeks I supervised the teams closely, but after about a month they felt like they were comfortable enough with the process to work mostly unsupervised. I feel that to date, we have accomplished a lot: - uploaded 101,000 pages, or 360 books ( CLICK ) - We have set up an online gateway to allow other museums to upload their digitized books with quality control provided by our volunteers. ( CLICK ) Putting together the workflow in this way has given the project a lot of flexibility to accommodate books coming from different sources and has allowed us to respond very quickly requests for particular publications (CLICK) … but, building a workflow from scratch meant that there have been numerous times when we discovered things didn ’ t work properly and the volunteers had be patient as we made improvements on the go. (CLICK)
- From the outset I wanted them to feel like they had ownership of the project. To put the project into context for the volunteers, I arranged meetings with scientists working at the museum and organized tours of the natural science collections. The feedback given to the volunteers by the research staff was particularly encouraging with comments such as “ The BHL saves me so much time…literally weeks waiting for interlibrary loans ” and “ this is a great resource that documents our changing understanding of biodiversity ” .