It doesn't work in California either. Trust me on that.

What you think I forgot, I actually take for granted. Once a museum has a "back 40", they WILL put up carbarns. It is inevitable. It is the natural next step, and it happens fast. Always has.

And it takes you back to "triage", except kindler and gentler. At Ohio Railway Museum the triage is "what is so far gone that we can't save it given our limited means"? At Illinois Railway Museum, triage means "what needs to go indoors next?"

Most museums don't put up carbarns becaue they have nowhere to put them. They shoehorn what little facilities they have into space along the right-of-way, incidental land here and there, etc. They wind up, at best, with their facilities strung all along the line, on multiple campuses, etc. You know what I mean. The approach yard and big laydown area of a building really deters it being shoehorned in anywhere.

Amen to that brother!

Humbug. I think for many museums, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Another way to put it is a "death spiral" that the members just don't wake up from, they just keep doing the same old cozy comfortable routines and don't wonder why it isn't working anymore.

As for declining membership -- humbug again. I'm involved with the Southern Michigan Railroad Society, which did indeed shrink from 300 members to around 160 over the last 20 years as they suffered a decline. But then gained it all back in the space of a couple of years when they "woke up" and started doing interesting things. And Michigan is not exactly pregnant with railfans. That's just what "a little" publicity will do.

If you wonder about "a lot" -- ask IRM.

You want railfans? Go where the railfans ARE. Present tense.


Those metrics are wildly misguided because they fail to account for Internet effects, which have effectively replaced the media of which you lament.

Railroad enthusiasts now "meet" in new ways far more, and in old ways far less. Remember "dual projector" slide shows? Most organizations I know had one a month. Not anymore! Sure, there are the occasional powerpoints... but the bulk of this kind of thing happens on Flickr and Youtube. Some of it's sloppy and some of it's damned good. And you see crazy view counts for that stuff. Crazy. Where are all these people coming from?

Publishing generally is having a dramatic reformation due to the internet. Reformation. Like what Gutenburg did, but only this time, he's getting done to. Traditional plate-press publishing may be entirely gone in 5 years - if not 3. In an age of Kindle, Nook, iPad, PDF and book-on-demand... plate publishing makes no sense... especially on small runs. And then there's informal Internet publishing like web pages, blogs etc. which are being done by absolutely everybody. I remember when it was unusual for a person to know how to type. Like Gutenburg with the scribe monks, they are wringing hands, but really, this is the opposite of bad. It also has nothing to do with railfanning generally.

As for communicating with the public, it's easier than ever, go do it.


Web-rot is pretty normal, unfortunately. Blogging and tweetering have just made it worse, because everybody's off blogging and tweeting and (still) not maintaining their website.

In a number of instances where groups have websites that are several years out of date, members tell me they are "too busy" to take the time to learn how to use the software to edit and maintain their website. However I notice that they do manage to find lots and lots of time to argue with everyone else on internet discussions. In the case of some local groups if you offer to help them out their officers are apparently too busy arguing with everyone else on the internet discussions to find the time to reply to their e-mails. So at least they are consistent in handling their various means of communication, or lack thereof.

No problem, I see plenty of other things that need to get done.

Publishing and the internet may deserve a separate discussion here. Everybody I have talked with is telling me that they can't find anybody who wants to produce content for their websites any more. Consider the more than two year gap since any articles were posted on RYPN and the long discussion of an "Internet Journal of Preservation" on this site about three years ago.

PC

At the risk of hijacking this thread to its original subject, I would like to raise the question of how to triage a collection. I come up with four possible approaches:

Relevance: dispose of items that do not fit your definition of a core collection. This may be geographic or by type of equipment, such as railroad equipment at a primarily traction museum. This appears to be what the Ohio Railway Museum is attempting.

Condition: dispose of items that are in such poor condition that they are unlikely ever to be restored. This usually means scrapping, as such items are unlikely to be wanted by any other organization.

Duplication: dispose of items that are either pure duplicates or are so similar that 99% of people could not tell them apart.

Marketability: dispose of items that there are likely to be wanted by other organizations.

Personally, I would first look at any collection for duplicates, as I have been preaching at PTM for many years. However, the problem is usually the membership, as one member's usless duplicate is another's sacred object. The most frequently heard objection is "We need two of XXX to display them in different paint schemes."

"Duplicates" can be a sensitive subject in electric-railway collections, because many of the larger cars (and some of the medium-sized cars) were designed to run in Multiple-Unit trains. On a number of occasions, Orange Empire has run a three-car train of Pacific Electric "Blimps", and back in the 1960's, a three-car train of "Hollywood" cars was operated. Illinois Railway Museum can run Chicago, Aurora and Elgin, Chicago Transit, and North Shore cars in trains. For traction fans, seeing a three-car interurban train thundering along a volunteer-built trolley line is an awe-inspiring experience. (for the record, each of the PE "Blimps" at OERM represents a different sub-class: IER coach, IER combine and NWP coach.)

*lol* So true. Guilty as charged!

There is also an understandable reluctance on the part of officers in many groups to accept offers of outsite help to remedy an out of date website. They simply cannot bring themselves to grant access to anyone outside their "inner circle" to edit the site, so you see these situations where the outdated notice of a long ago banquet featuring a now-deceased speaker stays posted forever, confusing site visitors and making the group look bad.

As I have mentioned before, I got "drafted" to do website management in a similar situation, with no prior experience. It took less than an hour to do the excellent tutorial provided with the software (you know, those features on the disk that nobody ever looks at again...) and I have been maintaining that site for several years now. But as a consequence of the experience I now have little tolerance for groups with dead and dying websites, the fact is that it takes about as long to put up a meeting notice as it took me to type this posting.

But what is really irritating are the situations where people want volunteers to drive across several states to help out at an event and then will not take the five minutes needed to post something announcing the event on their own website. They fail to grasp the fact that the rest of your family can use the computer too, and one increasingly common question you get from family members is "Why are we doing this long drive when there is nothing on this group's website about this event"?

PC

PC, I feel your pain

I find the issue of communicating with the general public rather fascinating and it is interesting to look around the websites and see how the various groups have handled it. Despite my observations about the groups that fall short in their efforts to use the internet, there are many groups that do make very excellent use of their websites, with well written descriptions of the museum and collections, excellent directions for finding their location, and contact information prominently displayed and up to date.

I have noticed some correlation between the appearance and detail of a group's website and the way they do business both within and outside their organizations. An excellent website more frequently is the product of an organization that has got their act together, or occasionally the product of excellent work by the webmaster who is functioning independently. But generally the sloppy websites can be viewed as a great big "caution" sign. If they aren't doing things very well on the internet they often are not doing things very well within the organization either.

Another challenge for groups, one quite similar to the website development problem, is the effective use of video technology for educational and information displays at their facilities. I have seen some examples of this that are very good, some that are not very good, and a few that are overdone and even interfere with other activities. Seems like it is an area that has great potential but needs some work.

PC

I think, P, that this falls into the broader category of most organizations spending the bulk of their time m,aintaining the status quo of traditional operating, wehatever that may be, punctuated by the panic of extinguishing fires the majority of which they either laid or lit themselves. Public reachout of any kind is seen as a sort of second rate priority (if that high on the list), much less quality of public reachout product.

Just once I'd like to see the actual collecting, interpreting and/or operating of stuff be the product of the business and marketing plans, rather than the other way around..........

dave

That technology is currently "between incarnations".

The old incarnation is, as you observe, spotty at best, when it's working. What I tend to see in the wild, though, is "broken" or "ripped out".

What's really unnerving about those video kiosks, though, is the cost. They are all custom jobs. The playback machine is custom, the buttons/interface are custom, the design is custom, the context (display it's built into) is custom, and of course all the media. All this is by consultants that bill at an hourly rate. Easily gets into 6 digits. And again, back to there's a 90% chance it'll suck from day 1, and a 75% chance it'll be broken in 3 years.

The new incarnation isn't here yet - stream video to people's handheld devices on campus WiFi. But it's close enough that you should be preparing content NOW. And you should be preparing that content YOURSELF -- for three reasons. First because you can do it yourself for the price of a Mac Mini and a $200 viddycam; second because you know your subject better; and third because you can fix it for free if it sucks, and do so iteratively until it is awesome.

While this piece talks about trimming collections it only touches on the subject of the artifacts historical significance. One thing to watch out for is unique pieces whose history is not readily apparent and due to the items long standing idle status its unique history is lost by the organizations lack of knowledge of their own history.

Respectfully
Robby Peartree