Our first guest from the Canadian Heritage Information Network, otherwise known as CHIN, is Lyn Elliott Sherwood. She was the Director General of CHIN from 1993 to 2003. She then went on to become the Executive Director of the Heritage Group at the Department of Canadian Heritage. During her time at CHIN, she was responsible for the creation of the organization’s most well-known program, the Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC). The VMC is a collection of online exhibits contributed by Canadian museums and heritage institutions. The program is still ongoing but is now managed by the Canadian Museum of History. Lyn Elliott Sherwood spoke to hosts Nathalie Nadeau Mijal and Kelly Johnson about her favourite heart-stirring moments while working at CHIN.
Lyn Elliot Sherwood: Director General, CHIN, 1993-2003
Duration: 00:44:13
[Music: “We Don’t Know How it Ends” by Lee Rosevere from the album “Music for Podcasts 6.” Style: Electronic Minimalism]
Lyn Elliot Sherwood (LES): He headed the potato museum in Prince Edward Island. He said, “We at the Museum, we have a picture of Marilyn Monroe in a potato sack. Do you think that would be something that people would like to see on the Internet?” “Yes, I think they would like to see that very much!”
Nathalie Nadeau Mijal (NNM): I'm Nathalie Nadeau Mijal and this is "CCI and CHIN: In Our Words".
Today’s episode marks our first interview about the Canadian Heritage Information Network, otherwise known as CHIN. And how fitting that our first interviewee from CHIN is Lyn Elliott Sherwood. She was the Director General of CHIN from 1993 to 2003. She then went on to become the Executive Director of Heritage. During her time at CHIN, she was responsible for the creation of the organization’s most well-known program, the Virtual Museum of Canada. The VMC is a collection of online exhibits created by Canadian museums. The program is still ongoing, but it is now managed by the Canadian Museum of History. Lyn Elliott Sherwood is retired, but she remains very passionate about her work.
She started by explaining how her career led her to CHIN.
[Music fades.]
LES: I then went, after a number of years, to take on a job that was the most relevant to what I then needed to be able to do at CHIN and that was to set up an electronic communications network for senior executives across the government. This was 1989; no executives had computers on their desks. That was very déclassé, you would—you know, only support staff had computers on their desks. They had tried for two years to do this with a very technical orientation. It had failed and they said to me, as someone who really didn't know much about technology, “Would you take this on and make it happen for us?” So, we started with deputy ministers because we knew if we didn't get the deputy ministers, nobody below deputy ministers would buy in and so there were issues of assessing how you make something work, how you get buy-in to things. We had to get the technical groups on board we had to find software and platform that would work on this. [Laughter] You didn't want something that would require deputy ministers to go to computer school and we wanted not just communication, but we wanted content that would be of interest to a target audience as well and that was very high stakes, high risk, high pressure. We did it. By the time the Department of Communications was abolished in 1993, we had over 3,000 federal executives hooked in. We had content services. I then, also in that period, took on the job of DG of Informatics for the department, again without the technical background, but I learned a lot!
As I said-- 1993 the department was folded and its component parts went off to different departments one of which was the Department of Canadian Heritage, the new Department of Canadian Heritage. So, I spent about six months doing strategic planning and transition there and at the end of that period they said, “Right, we have to find a job for you because we have five other directors general of Informatics.” So, that's the point at which I had the choice of either being the DG of Broadcast Policy or the DG and Chief Operating Officer for CHIN and CHIN was the one that spoke to my heart.
NNM: What was it about CHIN that, you say, captured your heart?
LES: Well, I think it was a number of things. One is the heritage dimension to it, which is something that had always been important to me personally. It just looked like a far more interesting job at the time. It was also a job that suited my personal life. I was a single parent and I knew that I could bring the problems home in my head and think about them, whereas broadcast policy always had crises at quarter to 5:00 in the afternoon that you had to solve by midnight.
Kelly Johnson (KJ): I'd like to just take a step back. When you say that you didn't have the technical background in the years that you were working on a fairly technical file, how did you deal with that?
LES: I had two questions: “Why not?” and “Is it actually working somewhere?” and those two questions I found to be really useful in talking with technical people. What it drove me towards and what was the reason the senior executive network succeeded where it had failed previously is we used off-the-shelf products. As opposed to going into the background to spend years trying to develop things with small teams that weren't necessarily equipped to be pioneering technology and user groups that were definitely not equipped to be suffering the pains of insufficiently trialed technology.
KJ: Interesting. I always find it so fascinating when people don't necessarily have the background in something specific but have that mentality of “Why not?” and “Let's see where this takes us.”
LES: The question “Why not?” was when people told me things couldn't be done. That's where I used the question “Why not?” Let me understand, because maybe we can find a way through it and I found when you ask someone, an expert why not it very often stimulates thinking and brings people to a solution.
NNM: Because you're asking for an explanation.
LES: And as they think their way through “Why not?” the lightbulbs go off. “Oh! If we did this we could fix that!” So that's the “Why not?” question was designed for me to understand why things couldn't be done, but also I discovered, had the added benefit of stimulating other people's creative thinking.
KJ: Coming back to CHIN, when you accepted the position as director of CHIN, could you tell us what
CHIN was like at that time?
LES: CHIN was a healthy mature organization that had been building a very strong capacity in collections management over more than 20 years at that point, in fact, probably closer to 25 years. It was also an organization that had started to experiment with things like CD ROMs, which were new and video discs and new technologies. At the same time, it was an organization that knew it needed to confront the fact that computing power was becoming affordable by at least the larger museums, which was something that was certainly new and that lack of affordability of computing power was one of the reasons why CHIN had developed its early model of having a centralized mainframe computer into which client museums connected. Collections management software designed to be used on smaller computers and used by individual museums was becoming available and in the early
1990s, the deficit had hit the government and one of the challenges was that every organization was being faced with financial pressures. So, we had both a tremendous strength in collections management but also a context in which some of the assumptions about what CHIN was, why it existed and how it existed were about to be challenged.
KJ: How large was the team at the time, or the organization I should say?
LES: I think we were about 25 people. We had a very small budget. Most of the budget went to two things: one was salaries and the other was the cost of the mainframe computer and when I got there it had practically a whole floor to itself in the building we were in. One of the things we were able to do quite early, first of all we moved to leasing a smaller computer, which meant we could combine forces with the IT department. I think that was an 8,000 square foot computer, which we leased and then we were able to persuade the ADM [assistant deputy minister] responsible for corporate finance at year-end, one year that we could buy that out. So we were able to free up a little bit of cash but we basically had no cash. We had no cash and on top of all of those things, in ’94-’95, the World Wide Web burst onto the scene. So, that's the other contextual element. So, there CHIN is, with its traditional business model of a mainframe computer and remote access on one hand and no money and there's the World Wide Web and a whole new opportunity and there's a major financial cut from government all programs were asked to cut by 33%. So, that was the initial challenge in the first 18 months at CHIN. So, part of the, “How are we going to handle the major cut?” Is it that we do everything but not as well? Or, do we actually rethink what we're going to do? CHIN’s role was under threat, continuing with that role was not feasible.
KJ: What was it like to be director general of CHIN?
LES: It was exciting. It was scary. It was incredibly rewarding and all of those three things go together because as a team we took on the challenge of saying, “The world is changing, the money's changing, the organization needs to change.” And what we did in 95 when we had the demand that we find 33% of our non-existent budget-- to give it away [Laughter] we did a series of cross country consultations with client museums and we asked, “What's important to you about CHIN? And what do you think CHIN should be doing?” And we didn't prompt. We made no assumptions about what was going forward and what came out-- collections management was not first on the list and in many cases was not mentioned at all.
We brought a consultant in to do that with us and at that point, I had in my head a sense of moving forward to a different use of the information and a different way in which to use information and it was a question of starting to flesh that out and at the same time this new medium, the Internet, the World Wide Web, provided a way to think differently and to think, not just about museums, but about the general public and a link between the general public and museum information. So, the transition of coming to a decision that the thing we would eliminate, as part of that financial cut, was a centralized collections management service, while still trying to maintain the National Inventories, while having no real money to invest in a new way forward… That was the “tightrope” moment. I would say 1995 and from 1995 through to 1999 was a “tightrope” period, as we were finding new ways to do things, experimenting with new things, understanding the challenges that we would face in making that transition. One of them was maintaining relationships with museums, some of whom made very clear to me after our consultations that they had just assumed the collections management function and that's why they hadn't raised it. Some of them were technical challenges. If we still want information fed to the National Inventories, how is that going to happen? Museums did their entire collections management function remotely on the CHIN mainframe and CHIN essentially skimmed a layer of information off the top. Those were the National Inventories. If we were no longer going to have that underlying information, how did we get the new information?
Rob Dallas, on his holidays one-year, decided he was going to develop the application, the protocol for getting the information shared in a different way from museums who were using their own collections management software. Rob was “Mr. Mainframe” but Rob made this incredible mental transition on his own, and got excited and made that happen because it was a problem he wanted to solve and the team at CHIN-- that's one example, the team at CHIN-- phenomenal, full of people who would take that idea. We wanted to try virtual exhibits. We had no money. Danielle Boily, who was working on that side, was superb at going and finding little pots of money. Ooh! La Francophonie has a little bit of project money. We can use that. We can get people to volunteer here. So, the kind of initiative and innovative spirit that the team members at CHIN had through that period as we were testing these ideas starting to get museums into a new mode of contributing to the National Inventories, starting to develop a new set of training modules around some of the issues with the Web, starting to think of new services: a guide to Canadian museums, which we were able to start having people feed, partly with a partnership with the CMA [Canadian Museums Association], which—that was interested in also finding ways to promote Canadian museums and the idea was that all these people using the World Wide Web would want to be visiting museums and if they could find out opening hours and the kind of theme of museums and where they were, that would help drive traffic to museums. So, museums-- we developed this idea of more “member museums” and a museum of any size could participate by feeding information to the guide to Canadian museums. So, it was building a new set of relationships not just with the sort of 103 or whatever, big museums raising collections management service but this idea that we would work with museums of all sizes across the country to use this new medium to help them connect to audiences.
Then the next wave-- and I mentioned 1999-- we had a new Deputy Minister at CHIN, Alex Himelfarb, and it was in the fall of 1999 and we were-- every branch, every organization was doing its initial presentation and so at this point we have pieces that might be part of it what later became the Virtual Museum. We had the guide. We had a few virtual exhibitions. Our first one was about Christmas and was December 1995. So, very early; but, I'm racking my brain: how do you get a Deputy Minister who works in policy and big picture excited? And I'm sort of at midnight the night before our briefing I said, “Okay, Canada's heritage is a jigsaw. It's a jigsaw that exists all across the country and what we are trying to do is put the pieces of that jigsaw together and create in effect of virtual museum of Canada,” and I used that line in the briefing and he literally jumped out of his chair and said, “I love it! I love it! Give me words for a speech from the throne.” It was one of the most exciting moments I've ever had as a public servant. To have someone that excited about an idea that you've just articulated and the department at the time was trying to put together a broader culture online strategy and we were in the speech from the throne. We were actually in the budget plan. The words “virtual museum, there will be a Virtual Museum of Canada funded…” actually came about. So, by the time we got that money which was budget 2000, we had a very clear idea of where we wanted to go and what the possibilities were, with enough money to be able to do a proper platform, to invest in the creation of content and to take those ideas and just expand them and we spent a really intense year.
We did 14 consultations across the country with museums of all sizes; trying to, sort of work out what this beast would look like, the Virtual Museum of Canada; designing an investment program and getting a sample group of virtual exhibitions ready for a launch. We hired a-- radical concept—a marketing person, a marketing and sponsorships person: Stéphane Cherpit. And Stéphane was brilliant. Stéphane lined up a sponsorship from Pattison that gave us six million dollars with billboards and bus shelter advertisements when we were launching, which was phenomenal. Across—and that was across the country and our first big theme, our first big poster advertising, our billboards were “Take your mouse to the museum,” and we had billboards across the country, bus shelters across the country. So, we had all of these elements and on March 22nd 2001, which was just thirteen months after the budget announcement, we did a live launch of the Virtual Museum at the Art Gallery of Ontario and with our fingers crossed and I, with instructions to stay away from all of the computers because I have a very bad impact on live computer demos. Computers cease functioning when I stand too close to them. So, [laughter] I was not allowed to stand close to any of the computers and we did a very successful live launch and one of the things I'm proudest of was an email that we got about four weeks later, three or four weeks later. After we launched from a man who lived, I think, somewhere in a small town in southern Ontario saying, you know, “I live in a place where I don't have access to museums and you have made this possible for me to see and for my children to see and I'm really happy to see my tax dollars being spent like this. Thank you,” and as a public servant that was a wonderful, wonderful reaction to have.
KJ: So you were-- you mentioned how you had 14 consultations throughout Canada. How did the museums that you met with react to this?
LES: I would say the major reaction was excitement. There was skepticism. There was, “Well I don't know if we'll be interested,” but there was also a level of enthusiasm. There was also the inevitable chorus of, “Well this wouldn't have been our priority to spend money on, so why are you spending money on this?” and “it should have gone to MAP,” to the Museums Assistance Program – to which you say, “It's not that there was a pot of money marked ‘museums’ and we all sat around and said, ‘Oh yeah, we'll ignore all the priorities and spend it on this.’” What there was, was an opportunity to become part of the government's interest in the online world and moving in that direction and an opportunity to make museums part of that so there was enough enthusiasm and I'm not going to remember the man's name but he headed the potato museum in Prince Edward Island and he came to the consultation and it wasn't entire sure about this but he said, “Well, you know, we at the museum, we have a picture of Marilyn Monroe in a potato sack. Do you think that would be something that people would like to see on the Internet?” And I said, “Yes, I think they would like to see that very much!” And I don't know that I have seen it but he, you know, he said he was 83 years old. He was a volunteer working with a very, you know, a small community museum and he was really excited by the ideas and we certainly had younger directors and younger people within museums who were excited.
A lot of people-- because this was so new the technology was still very new at that at that point, museums had so many other priorities. I think one of the keys for us is that part of the money we got was the investment program so it was a series-- it was a not grants, these were contracts to create virtual exhibits and part of the financial equation that we use that I think was really important in saying, “This is not just government funded. Institutions are also investing in this.” When museums made their images available and we encouraged people to start adding images to the national inventories. If you had to license images, there's a cost to that. So, we were able to portray this accurately as a partnership between the government and museums with an intellectual property value that they were contributing to the effort in addition to the contracts that we were issuing to create content. One of the challenges that we had with the virtual exhibitions is that the scope, scale, and sophistication that we were looking for was generally beyond the reach of the smaller museums and we very much wanted to include them in this mix. I think for 50 at the time about 1,500 community museums across the country. That's really important part of the jigsaw puzzle of Canada's heritage and in September 2001 I was speaking at a conference in the UK and the group that was speaking immediately after me was a group called Commonet, which had developed archival software designed to be used by community groups one of their big drivers-- mines were closing down in Britain and the miners associations wanted a way to kind of capture the memories. It was a software designed for use by people who didn't know computers: large print, large font format, usable by seniors, some controlled vocabulary elements and I got really excited because I thought this could be easily adapted to provide a tool for small museums in Canada. So, I kind of—I let them finish their talk, but I practically dragged them off the stage after their talk and said okay come to Canada! I want to first to meet with the team and show them what we have and I decided we would start with Newfoundland, which had a very high number of community museums. So, within I think about six weeks we had them come over, bring the software over. They met with the team. The team went back and forth, back and forth and I should note that by now, CHIN is 65 people. So we've grown by you know a good 40 people, yes there are lots of different expertise. So, we took the people from Commonet and some of our staff to Newfoundland we did two meetings one in St. John's and the other in Gander with the community museum people. We showed them the Commonet software and we said, “Would you be willing to pilot this?” and they got excited and they said yes we will be willing to pilot this and we had I don't remember the number of museums that signed on. One of the loveliest exhibits: it was a mother's suitcase. It was a museum that bought some suitcases at an auction just to dress up an exhibit. In one of the suitcases, the suitcase was full of letters between a mother and her son during the First World War and they used their Community Memories software to bring that to life. So that was, you know, another-- I'm trying to share “goose-bump” moments with you.
NNM: I got them.
LES: That was “goose-bump” moment for me. [Laughter] Over time, the Community Memories software-- one of the projects that CHIN and staff undertook was to find a way to be able to search across the Community Memories exhibits and that was after my time at that CHIN but that was something again when we talked about pulling the jigsaw together. That is the way to look at information in different ways. Given the museum in Newfoundland and a museum in Vancouver could have had similar themes and similar issues to explore and finding ways to make greater use of the Community Memories exhibits and simply the individual exhibits in the same way that you can search more broadly across other content.
So, the Community Memories project and getting that piece of the puzzle in place is probably my last, sort of, major shift, major piece of the puzzle that I undertook before I went on to a different job. It was really exciting and those were done-- that was very simply-- those were flat fee contracts of $5,000 and that amount was chosen because it enabled the museums to buy a computer, to get set up and, you know, maybe buy coffee and biscuits for the volunteers. And, there was some pushback from the archival community of something because it was archival and this wasn't proper. This wasn't archival and you could incorporate voice clips and sound clips. “Well that's not proper oral history!” And so, there are always, within the heritage community, these rivalries as to who gets to own which piece of heritage. I think for, especially for community museums, the heritage is the local literature, it is the local stories, it's the objects that are meaningful, the special objects that are meaningful, and in every community museum, it's also all the things that came from Sears or Eaton's on the train that arrived in the community as the basic things of life. So, I think the community museums serve a very integrated role in heritage in their communities.
KJ: One thing that really stands out to me when you when you talk about the Virtual Museum is how from the moment you more or less got the approval to go ahead with this project and it was included in the speech from the throne to the moment that it was launched-- you mentioned it was about 13 months. How did you make that happen in 13 months? What did that look like?
LES: That looked like hell on wheels! [Laughter] It happened because there was a team of really good people who really worked their tails off that year. It happened, as well, because of the work we had done between 1995 and 1999 (at the beginning of 2000) of testing ideas. So, we knew how a virtual exhibit could be done. We have been doing training for museums. The idea of designing a website, you know, a portal that was attractive, that people could come into that was new, but the elements like the guide to museums, we had started with building the image gallery, which was the tip of the iceberg for the collections management system. We had some of those pieces in place but it was mostly a team of really creative people, who could solve problems, who could come up with solutions that they knew would work. They had they had the technical expertise. They had the content expertise and for me it was because we have both the technical people and the content people working together. I had a really bad habit of going and mulling things over at night and I'd come in in the morning and say, “I've been thinking,” and everybody used to run. I guess… [laughter] but we challenged all the way through that development and one of the things that I've found personally really meaningful is as we all kind of collapsed in a heap at the end of that process it was a couple of months before the public service week and one of the departmental awards that you could get where you had to be nominated by staff was the people management award. And, I felt like I'd killed the team. I felt like I had been horrible. I felt like I'd been a slave driver and just an awful manager to get this done and the team nominated me and I just I completely and utterly lost it in the ceremony because I didn't expect that. I wouldn't have expected that, but I think everybody in the team took ownership of the project and its success and that was a fabulous group to work with—fabulous! Excuse me, I'm going to weep now.
KJ: [Laughter] No it's touching actually you're getting me… You're making me emotional too, but I think it's a testament though to your leadership and it kind of goes back to what you said at the very beginning on, you know, the reason why you accepted to go work in a technical environment was: “Why not?” And, you know, you challenged the people to kind of think otherwise and I think that's probably what led you through this project and your team probably just really enjoyed having that-- I don't want to say freedom but that liberty of being able to be to be challenged but also listened to and see that whatever they were proposing was actually leading to something as opposed to you just saying, “No, no, no, this isn't going to work.”
LES: I'm not going to pretend that in 1995, when we made the major change about getting out of the collections management business, that that was welcomed by everyone in the organization. There was a lot of tension. I found the tension really interesting because when I looked at the group and
who was really nervous and anxious and negative about it and who was positive and looking forward, the people who had been with CHIN since the beginning, who'd already lived through the major change in 19… I think it was 1981 it might have been 1982-- were actually very accepting of the idea that the organization had to evolve. The people who had come into CHIN since then and had only seen one model for CHIN were very worried that in this process that we would lose the possibility of continuing the National Inventories and that museums would not be able to make the transition to doing their own collections management electronically. And, some people did choose to leave the organization at that time.
NNM: They didn't have that experience of the resilience that the organization had.
LES: That's right and some people, we were able to retain by offering a different role. If you feel you can't lead this new change, you still have a lot of skills and gifts and we'd like to keep you on board. So, some people it was possible to do that. In other cases, it was… people needed to and chose to move on and that's tough. That's tough for an organization and it's the stuff that keeps you awake at night thinking did we get it right? Have I got it right? You know, I take that personally. Am I taking a fabulous organization that's had an extraordinary track record, am I leading it in the right direction? That's really nerve-racking. So, when I said earlier “scary”-- that's the scary.
NNM: Did you have a thought or a belief that convinced you that you were going in the right direction?
LES: I certainly had the belief that what we had been doing… it could either dwindle slowly or quickly because the world was moving in a particular direction and museums were going to move with it. I had the excitement that this was a way for museums to continue to connect to a new generation and if museums chose to ignore the virtual world, they would be missing out on an opportunity and part of that was driven personally. When I took on the senior executive network, my son was six and we happened to have an Apple computer with a mouse, which I continually picked up and tried to use like a remote because I… [laughter] He came into the office at six and we didn't have a computer at home. He came into the office and said, “Oh! Can I use the mouse?” and knew exactly what he was doing with it and just totally and it was an Apple Computer. It had something on it that he could play with or draw with or something and I looked at my son and then he was born in 1983. So, he was in, you know, late teens by the time the virtual museum was happening I could see what he was interested in and how he reacted to technology and how his friends reacted to technology and when you start to think about the future and museums’ challenge that it's older people who at school children who get taken and older people who have developed the habit of museums over a lifetime… How do you start to bridge that gap and make a connection to museums relevant to people whose expectations and experiences are different because they're growing up in a different era? So, that for me--ensuring that connection and keeping it vital was probably the big driver for me.
KJ: That's very interesting. I was-- my other question that I was going to ask next was, what kind of impact have you noticed that CHIN had on museums but I think, in a sense, you touch on that with what you just shared with us. Is there anything else you would like to add to that?
LES: I think what I would say, the impact for CHIN-- collections management and a clear understanding of what you have in your in your collections is critical to the function of a museum. Nothing else in a museum happens without that and without then the physical preservation of the objects and but the knowledge about those objects is a key part of that preservation. So if I look at CHIN’s history, building that and reinforcing that competency within museums from the beginning has been critical. In the era where finding reliable information on the Internet was tricky, encouraging first quality content and b) helping people find reliable content and helping museums understand the skill sets involved in—first, in sort of creating virtual exhibitions but then secondly becoming visible in the Internet world. Those are all really critical elements but it all starts at the early end. It's the stuff! You know? It's the stuff! It's the objects, the artifacts and it is the knowledge around those artifacts .Whatever element of the activities you're looking at whether it's collections management or the virtual museum. Those are two ends of the same spectrum.
KJ: When you talk about CHIN, we can sense the emotions and the pride that you had about being
Director General at CHIN. What made you want to move on?
LES: I thought I deserved a promotion. I thought, you know, the job in 2002 was quite different from the job I'd taken on in 1993. It was bigger and I said, “I really think we should look at reclassifying this position,” and Alex Himmelfarb, the very wonderful deputy who jumped out of his chair and said “Yes!” to the virtual museum responded by saying, “You can have a promotion but only if you agree to take on heritage policy as well,” and so it was really kind of a falling into a new job by default and I would have found I emotionally very difficult to leave CHIN completely. I could not have detached myself completely from CHIN, I think, at that point. You're quite right to see the emotion when I talk about—it’s the most extraordinary opportunity to have been able to do that job in that era with that group of people. Phenomenal. And so that idea that I could continue to do it but also situated within a broader context and, at that point, in my in my spare time, I had been asked to chair a sort of policy table that included the departmental policy, heritage policy group but also the heritage agencies within the Canadian Heritage portfolio. So, I had actually been doing that for about a year, you know, with a series of meetings and working towards a heritage policy framework at the time. So, it was kind of a natural-- I mean if you’re going to ask me to do these things, it would be really nice if you paid me to do them. That was part of the impact, but the opportunity was to continue to see how CHIN fit within the universe and to promote its part of that broader universe along with CCI and the heritage policy and the cultural property exports provisions and tax provisions and the Museums Assistance Program and the Indemnification Program and you start to see that they're all part of a broader story, which is you have the objects and the knowledge about the objects and how to preserve them. There's no point, in a sense, in that if you don't also have access and that can be through travelling exhibitions, that can be through virtual exhibitions, that can be through supporting the opportunity for museums to acquire significant objects that are threatened with export or that people are willing to donate and made more willing to donate as a result of tax incentives. There's also a huge capacity-building and knowledge-building element and there was expertise within CHIN, within CCI, that fell into that capacity-building model. There's also funding through the Museums Assistance Program. So, it was seeing all of those different pieces and how each of them contributed to the health of the museum community and the ability of the museum community to connect with its audiences in any form. So, that was a really-- that was a logical transition but I wondered… There were days when I thought, “I really wish I'd stayed at CHIN because this is a really neat problem to be solving,” and occasionally I think it was probably really hard particularly for the DG who replaced me. I found it really hard to be “hands-off.”
I've been retired for seven years you know… you look back on things and you think… I continue to think I was extraordinarily lucky to have had the chance to work at CHIN when I did, with people I worked with. Thank you. I'll get weepy again.
[Music: “Here’s Where Things Get Interesting” by Lee Rosevere from the album “Music for Podcasts 6.” Style: Electronic Minimalism]
NNM: Thank you to Lyn Elliot Sherwood and to my co-host Kelly Johnson.
CCI and CHIN: In Our Words is a production of the Canadian Conservation Institute, Department of Canadian Heritage.
Our music is by Lee Rosevere.
Production assistance provided by Pop-Up Podcasting.
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Next time on the podcast…
Peter Homulus: