II. American and European models are in need of being translated

During my 20 career years in the museum field, I have realized that my work has been a problem-solving process. Unavoidably, any museum of our time has to face the new situation of globalization in economics and cultures, and get a..good..outcome for the society. I have attended the AAM's annual meeting that started in Atlanta since 1997. It was when I started teaching museum studies in the Graduate Institution of Museology in the Tainan University of the Arts. I was as excited as Margriet Lestraden, when she heard in 1988 about AAM's American system of measurement and quality, performance indicators and evaluation. 2 I have used the same channel to approach this issue. I met Kim Igoe, the newly elected president of AAM in August 2006, who was the Chairperson of the Accreditation Process. She introduced me to Prof. Jane Legget from New Zealand, and to all the resources and materials of AAM and other museum systems following this American system in the world. Since then, I have taken one more step forward than what Margriet has done for South Holland, and that is translation.

In Taiwan, museum staff and future staff, and my students, are working and training without enough adequate materials or any available experienced professionals. The undeniable fact was that they lacked professional training, worked under the immobile mechanism of civil service, and did not use (or understand) English. Museum evaluation, or improvement, is beyond their comprehension; it became too difficult even to explain to those in the museum field in Taiwan. Therefore, I took another way around the problem, and let them understand firstly that there are some helpful models. I started by translating some basic and important publications in the museum field into Chinese, hoping some of these new ideas could be accepted by members of the field, both for my students and my colleagues. At least this teaching position in a national college has helped me expose and spread my ideas. But my effort has yet to be accepted by the executive governmental institutions. Even until now, my books still have a hard time to circulate, read, and be understood by them.

Twelve books have been translated according to my teaching sequential orders. The first group of them is: Museum Basics 3, A Higher Standard - The Museum Accreditation Handbook 4, The Museum Accreditation Self-study 5 and Shaping the Museum: The MAP Institutional Planning Guild 6. For the first two years of my first teaching career, Museum Basics was used in the courses of Introduction of Museology, while I carried out deeper research for another Museum History class. These two classes gave my students an overview of the museum, as my students varied as museum professionals. In the first semester, they could understand what they would be asked to do in a museum and to build a clear concept about why and how a museum was established in Western societies as a cultural institute - a cultural vehicle. These translated introductory books were used as textbooks and my students could easily and quickly read them. Taiwan is not an English-speaking country, and I am not an English teacher, but, I did this out of my responsibility to give them fundamental knowledge about the museum. That was my starting point of translation. We have a wonderful library in the campus that has collected old and new monographs and periodicals from professors of Leicester University, Book Store of AAM, museum book publishers in the UK, and three out-of-print art book dealers in the US. This 80,000 volumes collection was extremely helpful for my research. I spent all the weekends translating all the pages in the books relevant to these two basic courses.

For the first semester in 1996, I tried to prepare lectures for Museum Accreditation in our department, but unfortunately, this was rejected by our president of the college, who was also the head of our department and known as the Father of the Museum in Taiwan. His reason was that my syllabus was too redundant compared to other colleagues, and as he understood, that there was no such kind of accreditation work in the museum field, because it was a job of the government. Actually, at that moment, I myself was not sure if I was right until I participated in Ms. Kim Igoe's AAM session in Atlanta, in 1997. Then, I included it in my new courses, hoping that my students could understand the process of evaluation, as AAM has done in the last 30 years, and that it probably could help their practical work in the future when they have museum jobs. The last three translated books mentioned above were used in my class, Museum Evaluation of the American System for Advanced Studies in Museology. Eventually, in 2000, I also led 9 of our graduate students of this class to participate in the AAM's annual meeting in Baltimore. Ms. Igoe gave them a short talk about this program. That experience actually strengthened their idea of museum improvement theoretically, but it could not encourage them to take this program into their future career, because, at that time, not only had the students never worked in this field, even the mid-job students who were working as civil servants did not consider it useful for their work. In fact, these continuously translated books about museum accreditation did not give any confidence to any public employees working in the Education Ministry Department. They did not even understand the usage of this method, although the Department has already established the seven largest museums in Taiwan. Instead of using these books in their museums, they could only help me publish them, but in a doubtful manner which was their usual attitude towards all public services. Then, I realized that the museum field in Taiwan was not ready to accept accreditation. I had to change my teaching programs and focus on other aspects of museum performances, which became the new class called Exhibition Evaluation that came into the curriculum of our graduate school in 2000.