The word “museum” has a rooted, fusty feel. It smacks of rainy Saturdays spent inching across thickly carpeted floors in hushed corridors, hands clutched behind one’s back, perusing gilt-framed portraits on pastel walls or glass-fronted exhibits on platforms.
The word sounds important and earnest and . . . slow. Oh, so slow.
In a hyperactive world that seems to respond to but a single invective — “Faster!” — the museum often is saddled with a reputation as a static, sleepy place, a place that grimly boxes up the past instead of speeding ahead to scoop up the future.
The folks at the Field Museum want to change all that — without changing the venerable establishment’s central mission to explore painstakingly the world’s wonders.
Toward that end, the Field has taken the lead in using contemporary technology to soup up its programs. From Web casts of expeditions to on-line lists of materials available for classrooms, the Field is wired and willing.
And to anyone made a bit nervous by the idea of the Field — big, old, solid, tradition-laden — as a trendsetter in the information age, the staff is quick to say, “Chill out.”
“We’re not replacing anything. We’re augmenting it, to make the on-site experience better,” said Jennifer Eagleton, manager of the Field’s educational media department.
Earlier this month, the museum sponsored an electronic field trip to Colorado. Four Chicago public school students joined four students from Muncie, Ind., on a dinosaur dig outside Denver. The students — from Chicago, they were Loren Harris, 9; Oscar Jones, 10; Marlon Brown, 10; and Tawana Daniels, 10, all students at Mary E. McDowell School — helped paleontologists in their work.
The dig was broadcast live over the Internet and over Chicago’s WYCC-Ch. 20. Students who followed the trip on the Internet were able to pose questions and observations to the scientists while the team worked.
Electronic field trips can multiply the museum’s force, said Mary Ellen Munley, director of education and outreach at the Field.
“This technology allows us to make our programs accessible to people beyond Chicago. We’re reaching homes and audiences who may not be able to come on site. We can deepen our education program,” she said. “In an hour’s time, we can reach hundreds of thousands of people.
“We think a lot about how to keep a museum current, about offering something to people in their lives today.”
In 1996, the Field was one of the first museums in the country to offer electronic field trips. In 1998, the project was christened Field Expedition Co.
“It’s new. But in Internet years, of course, it’s old,” Eagleton said with a knowing chuckle. “It’s very exciting. Technology changes so fast, there will be different applications coming all the time. You can really be on the cutting edge.”
Raissa Jose, a project coordinator for the Field’s educational technology department, believes that electronic field trips are a way “to start a conversation” with students.
“The electronic field trip is about a process. You can teach the facts in a book. But with this, students can ask questions of the scientists,” she said.
“It’s that moment of discovery — we want to give kids a taste of it. We also want to get kids interested in careers in science.”
All of this, of course, is a far cry from what museums used to do, used to be, used to mean. As Dillon Ripley notes in his book “The Sacred Grove: Essays on Museums,” the word derives from the Greek word mouseion, which means a place for the Muses. Greek museums were primarily research centers, not collections; the collection aspect came later, in Rome.
Especially after Christianity began to take hold in Europe, museums became, in effect, handmaidens to the church, Ripley wrote: “The early museums were inextricably linked to the evolution of the church as a stablizer in uncertain times of violence, as a communicator of tradition and culture, of art and aesthetics, of philosophy and a sense of beauty and taste.”
In the 19th Century, museums became known as repositories of things; this was the century when the Smithsonian Institution and its trove of artifacts rose to prominence. Ever since, museums have become synonymous with inert exhibits that, while interesting, tend to promulgate a sense of grandfatherly stuffiness.
Hence what Ripley calls “the paradox of museums . . . in the present day”: They are fixed entities in a fluid world, stable objects in an age that prizes zippy, nimble, turn-on-a-dime instability.
The tools of the information age, then, have helped establishments such as the Field bridge the gap between museums as dynamic research institutions and museums as sleepy repositories of a lot of old stuff — the gap between the classical Greek idea of museums and the 20th Century version.
Technology enables them to be both — and, best of all, to take curious kids and grownups along with them.
The Field continues on its collision course with the future: While various expeditions are in the planning stages, three are confirmed. In February and May — exact dates to come — Field scientists will show Internet and TV viewers how they do their work on dinosaurs. And on March 21, viewers can witness work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, a traveling exhibit that will arrive at the museum.
Hmmm. The word doesn’t sound quite so old-fashioned anymore, does it?
