As I mentioned in the blog post I linked to in the above post, I went to an SI round table on interdepartmental cooperation and new media. When a straw poll was taken of the room– and keep in mind that these are the people interested enough in interdepartmental cooperation and new media projects to attend a session on it– almost none said that they allowed their curators– their primary content creators– access to the CMS’s for online exhibits.

Is it any wonder that curators, more than most other groups, seem to fear crowdsourcing and folksonomy and other techniques that harness the wisdom of their user/visitors?

People know they need to have a social media and online presence. They know they want to have mobile apps. But many of the people whose hands are really at the rudders in cultural institutions– the senior administrators and the like, often only understand that they need to do so because it’s “the new thing.” Or because it represents new potential revenue streams.

I’m not trying to issue a manifesto against departments. But I do wonder, seeing as departmental siloing is a problem that many people have discussed with me at many institutions, if we might not want to gauge whether or not this commitment to new media is lip service or real… and see if we might use that as an opportunity to hack the org chart a bit.

What if junior staff were required to be interdepartmental, sharing time between, say, education and web content development? Or curation and collections management?

That’s a more radical thought, but yes– we need to find ways to keep departmental siloing from getting in the way of our institutions’ missions, and their ability to communicate with the outside world.

It’s not enough for the marketing team to do all the Facebook and Twitter updates. In my opinion and experience, museumgoers want to engage with content and content producers, but it can be hard to get those content producers to participate in online communities and related efforts. I think we’ll see a shift as younger curators, museum educators, etc., come up–but until then, what can the institution itself (or a group of committed people within it) do to make robust social media a reality?

I’m all for talking more about strategery in that regard.

And I don’t think departments will ever go away. It might be, as Trevor says, more about acting as if there are no departments.

imho the is how to leverage the networks we are creating to make cool things happen in our own local contexts. That means saying look the Chronicle of higher edu says this is good, when you are really talking about someone from @profhacker or similarly leveraging someone you know at an institution with a fancy name to get the thing you want to do done, or into the process of being done.

I think part of this is being able to talk about things we love, things that are public services, things that we want to do to change the world as *cringe* business cases.

We can talk about what a cultural institution would look like without departments. Or, we could well talk about what it would mean if we all just started acting like our cultural institutions had no departments.