Issues with Digital Providence: A Case Study from Bralorne Pioneer Museum and Virtual Museum of Canada
Images when used for history can be problematic. In the first place, they might be framed or staged in a certain way to support the political or strategic aims of the contemporaries who took the picture. Additionally, they might be used later on to represent either events they are not associated with or where the image was mean to represent the opposite perspective. The internet has brought new problems, as museums and archives digitalise their collections. While it means that items that could be only accessed by a selected number of people are need widely available, it also precludes the possibility for it to be spread across the web with little regard for citation or proper providence. Such is the case of Bralorne Pioneer Museum, the Virtual Museum of Canada and the 1940s Time Traveller. The Virtual Museum of Canada is a Federal Government initiative to post exhibits and achieved images from museums all over Canada in a central space. One of their specific programs is the Community Memories program which provides funding to museums with less than five full time paid staff members to create exhibits. In 2005, the Bralorne Museum launched an online exhibit through the service. Five years later the image above was uploaded to a social book marking site with the caption "Time traveler caught on camera from 1941?" in reference to a young man who seemed to be wearing a modern pair of sunglasses and t-shirt (the sunglasses were later revealed to be very popular at the time, and the "t-shirt" was probably a hockey jersey). Soon afterwards the VMC received requests for enlarged versions of the photo (which was difficult given that the Bralorne Pioneer Museum had the original copy and was only opened in the summer). Additionally, as time went on the original connection that the VMC and Bralorne Pioneer Museum had to image was disappearing as people started to refer to it as coming from "some Canadian museum".
Therefore there needed to be a rebranding campaign by VMC and the Bralorne Pioneer Museum to gain back control that they had over the image. Together they studied social media rebranding techniques and came up with strategies. The VMC created a news article on their own site and youtube video (linked in the title above) to capitalize on the interest, while the Bralorne Pioneer Museum rebuild their own image independent of the VMC through Facebook.
The struggles of the VMC and the Bralorne Pioneer Museum are a warning to small museums and historians who want to maintain providence over their collections. However, their choices in how they dealt with the circumstances also offers an example of how museums and historians in similar positions might handle the circumstances.
Sources: http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/programs/the_mystery_of_the_1940s_time_traveller_the_.html
http://www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/sgc-cms/nouvelles-news/anglais-english/?p=1585