IV. Set up a system of museum professional training and career structure

Actually, my journey shows a way for museum movement in Taiwan. This movement will take two directions: visitor and museum staff. I can imagine that the next steps will be slower than translating books, because it will happen with a realization of culture in Taiwan. Fundamentally, changes of a system in cultural institutions will be related to the governmental cultural policy and a renaissance of our ..middle class.. society. It is a job that cannot be done by my students and me alone. It is a cultural rethinking movement of the whole society. We need to educate our professionals as well as our audience. We have to work with the authorities and the individuals in this field, and especially, we need support from the outside world. An experienced, professional, and constant standing organization should be set up for building and rebuilding a higher standard, training programs, and evaluating museums, and it can be non-governmental or non-profit.

In our public museums, most of the staff has to pass an examination held every year before filling the vacancies of civil service in governmental institutions. If you pass the examination, you definitely will get a post in the organization which has reported a vacancy. There is another way of recruiting museum staff. One can work in a public museum with a major academic degree in formal education studies. Teachers are candidates of museum staff. The recruitment policy of museum staff is still unclear in informal education. Therefore, neither of these two ways of recruiting museum staff is good for this cultural mission. As a result, different kinds of cultural ..powers.. can dominate museum exhibitions. These powers can be formed by the government, political parties, press, or money, and there is no voice from the audience of museums. This phenomenon is not an isolated case in Taiwan. It is especially obvious in some postcolonial societies, because their middle class developed differently from those in the Western world, where the museums were their achievement in their society. At first, they became the class of bourgeoisie through their connections with the powers or the cultures of their colonists, and then by becoming industrialized or commercialized and finally democratizing the public. In this process of the so-called..progress..or ..modernization,.. they have lost their culture in the first two stages. Unfortunately, they do not realize the importance of their own culture until the last stage when..democracy.. appeared. Therefore, no..good..museum or a..standard/criterion..of museum could be seen in these countries, but only some ..good.. imitated buildings of museums. Although it is always too late to ..recover..or to..re-discover..a culture, it makes the project of training professionals and building career structure more important than the American project of accreditation.

With the help of the Minister of Education, our department has started a program of Graduate Degree for mid-job museum members since 1998. I received more understanding and help from these students who are working in a museum or a cultural institution. They support me from their office and make my courses much more feasible, but this program stopped after I retired.

To professionalize museum staff, I am starting with a practical proposal of an exhibition workshop to the authorities, the Ministry of Education and the Council for Cultural Affairs, Executive Department. It is based on the International Council of Forum of Museology's article by Maroevic in Study Series no. 8. The author said, ..Museology develops from practice, is confirmed by practice and even anticipates practice, studying theoretically those phenomena which will manifest themselves in practice and applying the results within its framework. This makes it inseparable from practice...15 I divided my first project into two stages for grounding the field of Museology in Taiwan: theoretical courses and exhibition practice. This project is an attempt to extend into some successful community colleges, where every small museum's staff will have a chance to participate, and the book from ICR will be one of the textbooks used in those classes. It is better that I don't continue this topic here, because this plan has been lying on the desk of the changing chairpersons since 2003. The Council for Cultural Affairs has cooperated with the Chinese Association of Museums in Taiwan to fulfill all the preparation work for this annual meeting of INTERCOM. Of course, this will bring it to the attention of international professionals, and at the same time, through this global participation, the museum field in Taiwan will learn more and faster, too.

V. Another model is from Associateship of Museum Association in UK

Here I have to explain the reasons why I turn my focus to the UK. Before the revelation of our middle class in Taiwan, we need museum professionals to work together to set up a flowerbed for future blossoms. Since our government has copied the institutional forms of the colonist museum, the museum staff has been all civil servants. It would be easier for them to accept a professional system by following a model than their own performance of their own will. If this training project can be a leading program for their performance, then after that, the government or the museum association can follow by issuing a certification, which can be formally used to form a system or a policy for recruiting museum staff. Once the identification of the museum professional is established, their performance will develop according to the fundamental concept - the museum as a cultural vehicle.

Our members of the museum know that no museum is perfect, even under a good evaluation system. At any given time it may fall short of meeting some standard of the field. However, the American accreditation project, the UK Associateship, or training programs of any country or region do expect a museum to identify accurately areas where it needs improvement and to incorporate these priorities into its planning. It should draw on the collective wisdom of the field gathered from many sources. This information comes from the hundreds of museums members of different countries and regions under various communities of museums. By gathering information from all these sources, we can observe what is happening across the field in the world. These are the lessons that I have learned from my career of 20 years in the museum field.