Research Roundup
March 9, 2010

Tools for the future
The near future
Social trends, etc.
Other articles, essays, and recent items of interest
Refresh and reflect

Tools for the future:
  1. A Glossary for Futurists and Trend Watchers from New York-based Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., a "pioneer foresight consulting firm in providing strategic scanning services."
  2. One way to think about the future of museums is by analogy: What industries (or institutions) are similar to museums, and how are they responding to similar social forces that also affect museums? For example, "Which industry does [the museum field] most resemble: music, news or medicine? What do you think? We are endlessly fascinated by the story of how technology has disrupted these industries, displaced incumbents, and up-ended long established business models." (This comes from Blog U, an excellent blog on higher education issues. I replaced the words "higher ed" with "the museum field"—but the examples still make sense.) 
  3. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Salzburg Global Seminar just released a major report on Connecting to the World’s Collections: Making the Case for Conservation and Preservation of Our Cultural Heritage, based on a seminar held in Salzburg, Austria, last fall. Download the full report at http://www.imls.gov/pdf/SGS_Report.pdf.

The near future:
  1. What would a rise in sea level of one meter mean to your museum? How do you even wrap your head around the concept of an extra meter of water? As David McCandless says, "it's meaningless without context or some link to our everyday lives." So he created a visually striking diagram that "sum[s] up all the current research on sea level rises. What will happen, when it will happen, and where the sea water is coming from." See it here. (By the way, an increase in sea level of one meter—which some climate scientists say is possible in the next century—means no more Venice. Three meters—maybe two centuries from now—means no more St. Petersburg or San Francisco.)
  2. The future of parking (!) from BNET: "Parking can be a real hassle—whether you’re fumbling for change for the meter or just trying to find an empty spot." But smart parking meters and cell phones could change that.
  3. How will nonprofits sustain their creativity in the years to come? Recently, "North Carolina’s Institute for Emerging Issues challenged leaders to evaluate how creativity can transform businesses and local communities." The answers involved education, building a creative workforce, and "[addressing] problems in places where there are not adequate market incentives." A thoughtful peek at how business leaders think about the "creative economy" from the financial blog Bank Talk.
  4. "An astounding 80 per cent of the world's film and video holdings could be gone by 2015, predicts Matthew White, a founder of the United Nations-led group Archives at Risk, which has advocated for the digitization and preservation of film archives worldwide." That's the key passage in a recent article from the Toronto Star, "In a digital world, why is our visual history being lost?" Fortunately, at least two international conferences have turned their attention to the preservation of heritage in a digital world (see the links in sections above and below). Also, the Canadian Conservation Institute has placed all of its CCI Notes online for free. "Intended for a broad audience, the Notes offer practical advice about issues and questions related to the care, handling, and storage of cultural objects."

Social trends, etc.:
  1. From the Population Reference Bureau, a detailed look at U.S. Economic and Social Trends Since 2000. In this case, "social" largely means "economic":
    This has been a tumultuous decade for the United States. During the first 10 years of the 21st Century, there was a major terrorist attack, a housing meltdown, a severe economic recession, and a significant downturn in the U.S. stock market. Unemployment recently passed the 10 percent mark for the first time since 1983. Household wealth increased somewhat with the stock market gains during the past year, but remains well below prerecession levels. Household net worth dropped by more than $10 trillion during the recession—the largest loss of wealth since the federal government started keeping records of wealth accumulation 50 years ago.
    The data come from a variety of government sources, but each chart includes an explanatory audio clip from one of PRB's expert demographers.
  2. Projecting ahead to the future, here's The U.S. in 2050: Bigger, younger, less white, less urban. (It's an interview with demographer Joel Kotkin, author of The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.)
  3. Millennial generation more educated, less employed, says the Pew Research Center (via USA Today): "The most detailed study to date of the 18- to 29-year-old Millennial generation finds this group probably will be the most educated in American history. But the 50 million Millennials also have the highest share who are unemployed or out of the workforce in almost four decades." For a comparative look at all the generations born since 1900, there is a series of publications from the MetLife Mature Market Institute. “The profiles provide a snapshot of four generations. They look at demographics and, perhaps more importantly, the events occurring during their teen and young adult years that influenced their values and their viewpoints,” says Sandra Timmermann, MetLife's lead researcher.
  4. From Portfolio.com, an interactive map of the U.S. Wealth Centers. (Actually, it includes data on all of the nation's 420 largest cities, not all of which are faring so well in the current economy.) 

Other articles, essays, and recent items of interest:
  1. From the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale Firenze comes the proceedings of an international conference held in Florence in December 2009, Cultural Heritage on line. Empowering users: an active role for user. For a list of the sessions and presenters, see http://www.rinascimento-digitale.it/conference2009-proceedings.phtml. Although tilted towards libraries, the central themes of digital preservation and improving the online user experiences pertain to museums just as well (another example of museum-library convergence). 
  2. Blogger-librarian Will Manley discusses the apparent contradiction between a love of blogging and a wariness towards cellphones in My Favorite Medium: cell phones make me nervous—their random ringing, constant buzzing, and multiplicity of functions. It’s all so frenetic and complicated. If a cell phone did one thing it wouldn’t be so bad, but I’m mechanically incompetent and behaviorally incapable of multitasking, and needing reading glasses doesn’t help. Why can’t a phone just be a phone? Why does it also have to be a camera, a projector, a computer, a radio, a television, a calculator, a tape player, and a video game? Things that are too complicated lower my self esteem … [but] my blog gives me something solid and real—a whole crowd of blogging buddies." In a similar vein, Laurie Fredrich asks whether we have become a Gadget-Dependent Nation?

Refresh and reflect:
  1. News from the Near Future by Fiona Tan at Museum Kunst der Westkuste. Enough said.
  2. Future Archaeologies. Photographer Armin Linke "explore[s] how some contemporary places and building structures can be regarded as 'archaeologies of the future,' modern artefacts subject to slow-fading decay."

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