Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry
Visiting Chicago, the city where I did my undergraduate and graduate studies (the latter being before my library science degree), I visited the Museum of Science and Industry for the first time in some 25 years. My family and I didn't have a lot of time to stay so we devoted our attention to the new U-505 submarine exhibit, completed in 2005 (http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/u-505/).
U-505
Visiting the new exhibit was, succinctly, phenomenal. I started off rushing as I proceeded through the wending, twilit walkway, then began to slow down to take in the whole experience. Eager to get to the submarine, I must have been doing what every visitor did; flying through to the next exhibit. I saw the first station in a blur, but not without noting its import. It spoke of the strategic significance of the German u-boat in the context of WWII. Well, that's important; people need to understand U-505 in time, place, and circumstance.
With each station leading the visitor to a deeper understanding of what they were about to see, I started slowing down to pay attention. Each emphasized a diorama or a video screen surrounded by printed panels providing more information about the value to the Allied effort of capturing a submarine, the challenges, and the genesis of a plan to surmount the challenges.
Proceeding more leisurely, I started taking in more details. I paused at a diorama behind backlit glass and satin curtain which dramatically opened and closed on electronic cue to see a scene which now portrayed the effort to sight the targeted German submarine. I anticipated what was sure to be, in my assessment of traditional museum exhibits, quasi-professional acting and noted with surprise that it was quite passable. I studied the faces of the actors and guessed from the physiognomies that they were contemporary. The production must have been filmed recently, not 20 or 30 years ago like museum productions I've seen always seemed to be.
I noticed an increasing sense of eager anticipation as I progressed. It was fueled by orchestration piped in from speakers positioned through the walkway. The music reminded me of a 21st century drama movie soundtrack. The fact that it was continuous was typical of so many movies today that use music integrally to establish mood and utilize silence only occasionally but with deliberation as its own distinct sound element.
The next station was a period style black and white video imagining the scene inside the vessels of the anti-sub task force dropping depth charges. The cameras captured closeup after closeup of the seamen. But these weren't the stiff, immaculate faces of reenactors of the past. These were the emotive visages of contemporary actors adorned with perspiration and grit, rumpled and sweat-stained. The background music continued to reinforce the drama.
With the stage set, I entered the hall housing the vessel itself and reeled at the unfolding view of the stern back to the keel that neither permitted it to overwhelm the space nor the space to overwhelm it. Descending the circumferential ramp, I continued to read more and more details about the submarine and the supplemental artifacts and educational stations.
A Biology major at the University of Chicago in the 80s, I remember the submarine as a museum piece that stood outside the museum where you could observe it while driving along Lake Shore Drive. I'm not sure I ever even went into it during the couple of times I visited the MSI in those days. Whatever the exhibit was then, the museum had moved leagues beyond the sensibilities of the day and thoroughly embraced a revolutionary approach to exhibition design.
The best of museum exhibitions I've seen have been floor-to-ceiling displays filled to visual and informational overflowing with printed and illustrated details. True they were typographical and layout extravaganzas designed to emphasize main themes and minimize information overload while telling a story, but the rare intrepid visitor was the primary beneficiary. (Yes, I generally read everything. It pains my family.) This exhibit was true storytelling carefully conceived to unfold the account sequentially and experientially. Participants had time to absorb the unfolding details as they proceeded to each station at a measured pace. It was difficult to imagine many people missing the main themes the way they surely would confronted by Info-wall.
How could the Museum of Science and Industry afford such an exhibit? Someone had clearly consolidated years of observation and made striking conclusions about the inadequacy of older designs. And the recommendation clearly to me couldn't have come cheaply. Museums in recent decades stopped depending solely upon admission dollars and had already been soliciting major corporate and private donors to underwrite its operations and development. This exhibit would have demanded a substantial budget simply to generate the concept accoutrements necessary to secure the donors for its development.
As I exited the hall, I paused to read about the making of the exhibit; a final nod to contemporary movie-making.
Lessons
This blog could end here. But I'm a librarian—who's blogging i-candy.
As a big picture person, I see solutions across boundaries. And there are some here, I believe. One is to pay attention to the trends in the entertainment industry. So the industry uses music and visuals to create suspense and anticipation. Why not use a soundtrack and striking images on the library's website? The museum created a successful storytelling technique by unfolding the details through the exhibit. Can a website about learning database searching techniques capitalize on this technique? It's worth an experiment. Will it cost an arm and a leg to execute? It could, but doesn't need to even if it does take time. How do the entertainment industry and even museums keep people coming back? By keeping content fresh. Libraries can emulate that.
What else will come out of this mind-expanding experience? I don't know yet, but I'm not going to stop considering what I saw.
Showing posts with label background. Show all posts
Showing posts with label background. Show all posts
Friday, January 1, 2010
Monday, August 31, 2009
PHR or Something Like It
When I started library school at Drexel University in 2003, it rapidly became clear how well suited I could be to being a librarian.
This statement is a setup to what makes me who I am as an academic librarian, so it requires me to step back a bit and recount my background. (Incidentally, I hinted about planning to write this post back several months ago near the inception of this blog. Now is definitely the time to do it. Bear with me.)
Educational and Professional Background
When I was a student at the University of Chicago, my first campus job was in the catalog digitization unit of Regenstein Library. Throughout my 4 years at UC, I worked across the library system. I briefly considered getting a library degree, but really had my heart set on medical sculpting. I wanted to use my hands to make medical models. I attended graduate school at University of Illinois at Chicago which had a program called Biomedical Visualization (medical illustration). The mind I developed for imagining the physical, relationships, and ideas, I continue to use. I received a Master of Associated Medical Science degree and came to the Philadelphia area to pursue a profession in applied materials science developing molding and casting processes for contract research. Yeah, there's more to that, but that's enough for now.
After 10 years of contract research, I got downsized and decided to change tacks. I went into non-profit administration and learned a great deal about customer service. Four years into that line of work, I decided to reconsider my whole professional game plan. Reevaluating my science background, my customer service experience, and my past jobs in the academic library, I concluded that academic librarianship would be an ideal new course of study.
Faith Background
There is also an ecclesial component in all this. A believing Christian from childhood, I became heavily involved in the leadership of Chinese Christian Church and Center, a Chinese church in Philadelphia's Chinatown. In fact, several of my years in the non-profit sector I spent at this church working as the office administrator. As administrator, I refined my organizational, communication, and public relations skills. As a lay leader, I developed new settings for applying all those skills.
Synthesis
In library school at Drexel University, these disparate pieces began coming together. I began to realize that I like seeing the big picture behind anything I undertake. I began to observe connections that drew together my fantastic liberal arts education at University of Chicago, my medical sculpting training, my research work, my administrative work, my lay leadership work, and now my information science training. And I happily took all that into my first and current library job at Arcadia University.
End tangent. (Don't forget this background information, though; I will undoubtedly refer to it again and again.)
Patient Health Record
For many months my pastor has been discussing the idea of how to develop church members and regular attenders. I called him to toss around his ideas and began shaping the idea myself of how to evaluate members and attenders. I understood what he said about church leaders needing to assess people as soon as they showed some signs of commitment to the church. I thought that any kind of assessment would have to get logged on a standard form of some sort that the evaluating leader would be able to share with any other leader. My library school medical informatics class abruptly came to mind and I realized that I was describing a patient health record.
When patients first visit their primary care providers, their family physician must perform a medical evaluation to determine their present state of health and any medical needs they might have, known or unknown. When patients return, their physician must use their medical records to assess their continuing health and treat their developing conditions. They amend their records and add appropriate ongoing documentation. When physicians identify conditions that require the intervention of medical specialists, they obtain permission of their patients and forward the necessary documentation to the specialists.
Spiritual Health Record
In the faith setting, members and regular attenders become patient analogs. With their permission, pastors, lay leaders, fellowship leaders, and Sunday school teachers (all primary care providers in their own ways) must perform spiritual health evaluations. They must use standardized evaluation criteria and document their observations in conventional formats. With permission, they can share the information with other spiritual care providers. When members and regular attenders have needs that require the intervention of spiritual health specialists, e.g., marital counselors, those specialists can consult the spiritual health records generated from the PCPs.
In a variation that rather incongruously blends health records with medical training documentation, those same records can determine members' or regular attenders' fitness for special training so that they can themselves be equipped to become spiritual primary and specialty care providers.
Professional Health Record
This all has a connection to the professional world because of a conversation I had with my brother-in-law while on family vacation together. I was sharing with him the challenges of equipping my instructional technology lab student workers, i.e., the padawans, to function more professionally. I equated that to the challenge of myself developing and improving my professional managerial skills. And everything came together. Those patient records and spiritual health records became professional health records. Those patients and faith-community members became professional trainees. And it was good.
The challenge is how to craft a professional health record that standardizes professional health with the systemization of a patient health record. This will not happen overnight anymore than the development of the patient health record did. But once one does come into existence for my padawans or for me, whether because I find it or create it, I expect the merit to become as equally self-evident as for the now ubiquitous patient health record.
This statement is a setup to what makes me who I am as an academic librarian, so it requires me to step back a bit and recount my background. (Incidentally, I hinted about planning to write this post back several months ago near the inception of this blog. Now is definitely the time to do it. Bear with me.)
Educational and Professional Background
When I was a student at the University of Chicago, my first campus job was in the catalog digitization unit of Regenstein Library. Throughout my 4 years at UC, I worked across the library system. I briefly considered getting a library degree, but really had my heart set on medical sculpting. I wanted to use my hands to make medical models. I attended graduate school at University of Illinois at Chicago which had a program called Biomedical Visualization (medical illustration). The mind I developed for imagining the physical, relationships, and ideas, I continue to use. I received a Master of Associated Medical Science degree and came to the Philadelphia area to pursue a profession in applied materials science developing molding and casting processes for contract research. Yeah, there's more to that, but that's enough for now.
After 10 years of contract research, I got downsized and decided to change tacks. I went into non-profit administration and learned a great deal about customer service. Four years into that line of work, I decided to reconsider my whole professional game plan. Reevaluating my science background, my customer service experience, and my past jobs in the academic library, I concluded that academic librarianship would be an ideal new course of study.
Faith Background
There is also an ecclesial component in all this. A believing Christian from childhood, I became heavily involved in the leadership of Chinese Christian Church and Center, a Chinese church in Philadelphia's Chinatown. In fact, several of my years in the non-profit sector I spent at this church working as the office administrator. As administrator, I refined my organizational, communication, and public relations skills. As a lay leader, I developed new settings for applying all those skills.
Synthesis
In library school at Drexel University, these disparate pieces began coming together. I began to realize that I like seeing the big picture behind anything I undertake. I began to observe connections that drew together my fantastic liberal arts education at University of Chicago, my medical sculpting training, my research work, my administrative work, my lay leadership work, and now my information science training. And I happily took all that into my first and current library job at Arcadia University.
End tangent. (Don't forget this background information, though; I will undoubtedly refer to it again and again.)
Patient Health Record
For many months my pastor has been discussing the idea of how to develop church members and regular attenders. I called him to toss around his ideas and began shaping the idea myself of how to evaluate members and attenders. I understood what he said about church leaders needing to assess people as soon as they showed some signs of commitment to the church. I thought that any kind of assessment would have to get logged on a standard form of some sort that the evaluating leader would be able to share with any other leader. My library school medical informatics class abruptly came to mind and I realized that I was describing a patient health record.
When patients first visit their primary care providers, their family physician must perform a medical evaluation to determine their present state of health and any medical needs they might have, known or unknown. When patients return, their physician must use their medical records to assess their continuing health and treat their developing conditions. They amend their records and add appropriate ongoing documentation. When physicians identify conditions that require the intervention of medical specialists, they obtain permission of their patients and forward the necessary documentation to the specialists.
Spiritual Health Record
In the faith setting, members and regular attenders become patient analogs. With their permission, pastors, lay leaders, fellowship leaders, and Sunday school teachers (all primary care providers in their own ways) must perform spiritual health evaluations. They must use standardized evaluation criteria and document their observations in conventional formats. With permission, they can share the information with other spiritual care providers. When members and regular attenders have needs that require the intervention of spiritual health specialists, e.g., marital counselors, those specialists can consult the spiritual health records generated from the PCPs.
In a variation that rather incongruously blends health records with medical training documentation, those same records can determine members' or regular attenders' fitness for special training so that they can themselves be equipped to become spiritual primary and specialty care providers.
Professional Health Record
This all has a connection to the professional world because of a conversation I had with my brother-in-law while on family vacation together. I was sharing with him the challenges of equipping my instructional technology lab student workers, i.e., the padawans, to function more professionally. I equated that to the challenge of myself developing and improving my professional managerial skills. And everything came together. Those patient records and spiritual health records became professional health records. Those patients and faith-community members became professional trainees. And it was good.
The challenge is how to craft a professional health record that standardizes professional health with the systemization of a patient health record. This will not happen overnight anymore than the development of the patient health record did. But once one does come into existence for my padawans or for me, whether because I find it or create it, I expect the merit to become as equally self-evident as for the now ubiquitous patient health record.
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