Carnegie Museum reorganizes in 'radical step forward'

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History today will announce a potentially groundbreaking reorganization it hopes will mean more interdisciplinary collaboration among its researchers, staff and regional institutions, increased funding, and, ultimately, more interest from, and education for, the public.

But if all of that sounds like so much administrative jargon that visitors to one of Pittsburgh's most cherished institutions will never see its impact, the museum's director, Sam Taylor, promises they will.

"We need to have science and education work more closely together, so important programs and research that we sponsor don't just end up in journals read only by scientists," said Dr. Taylor, who was hired 2 1/2 years ago specifically to take big steps like this.

The reorganization results from a strategic plan completed in 2009. It will take the museum's 285 employees now split up among 15 groups -- 11 of them curatorial departments like vertebrate paleontology -- and group them under one of five new "centers" that are designed to spur interdisciplinary collaboration.

Experts in museum administration and informal learning say the effort will be closely watched at natural history museums around the world.

"It's a radical step forward," said Judy Diamond, professor and curator of informal science education at the University of Nebraska State Museum. "Natural history museums have been left out in the cold a bit in recent decades. Science centers have been experimenting with techniques to teach people science, but this is still in its infancy with natural history museums.

"This will shake up the museum field around the globe because the Carnegie is an influential museum."

While museums have created individual centers within a typical museum structure, neither Dr. Diamond nor Robert "Mac" West, a longtime museum consultant, and several other experts contacted for this story, were aware of any other museum totally reorganizing itself this way.

"There's a center for this and there's a center for that, but no one has done it with the completeness that the Carnegie is proposing," said Dr. West, who was director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History from 1983 to 1987. "Other museums are going to be paying very close attention to this."

Dr. Taylor said it is a big change, but: "I think of it as a natural evolution to the way the world is organized."

He said the inspiration for the move comes from both near and far.

Part of the motivation was watching the creation of centers at other museums -- such as the highly successful Center for Biodiversity and Conservation created at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 1993.

But he was also inspired by the various interdisciplinary centers at Carnegie Mellon University, such as the Entertainment Technology Center, which merges students and professors of computers with their counterparts in the art world.

"There are 24 different centers like that at CMU," said Dr. Taylor. "And they all clearly are looking at contemporary issues that one or more academic departments wouldn't take on on their own."

Today the museum will announce it has taken the first step in creating its own centers by accepting a $1 million seed grant from the PNC Foundation for the newly created Center for Lifelong Science Learning.

The goal of the learning center will be to use current research on how people learn in museum settings to build better exhibits and educational outreach to schools and communities.

"Behind it is this notion that you always hear, 'Well, we aren't producing scientists anymore,' " said Joe Guyaux, president of PNC Financial Services Group and the chairman of the natural history museum board.

The learning center could help with that, he said, something the PNC Foundation liked because it fit the foundation's ongoing work in education.

The learning center will put all of the museum's educators and exhibitors in one department and have them work more closely with outside organizations, for example, learning experts from the University of Pittsburgh and design experts at CMU.

Part of the grant will be used to hire Mary Ann Steiner, currently the curator of public engagement at the museum, as the first director of the learning center.

"The public program can really do more to bring people into the behind-the-scenes world here at the museum, including the world-class research we do," Ms. Steiner said.

The museum has started to put such ideas into practice. In September it opened an exhibit -- "Winging It: An Experimental Gallery About Birds," which put CMU design students to work with museum staff to explain the research done at the museum's Powdermill Nature Reserve in Westmoreland County.

Similar interdisciplinary work will be expected in the four other centers: Biodiversity and Eco-Systems Management; Evolutionary Biology; World Cultures and Diversity; and Scientific Visualization and Computation.

Creating the biodiversity center would be a way to better integrate the 54-year-old Powdermill Nature Reserve, Dr. Taylor said, and would be the place, for example, to oversee creation of an exhibit on Marcellus Shale drilling.

The evolutionary center would incorporate "the bulk of the research we do in paleontology, zoology and other areas," he said.

Creating the world cultures center would be a way to "rebuild our anthropology division," Dr. Taylor said.

Dr. Taylor envisions the visualization center bringing computer experts from CMU and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center together with museum experts to make better use of the reams of data, both in comprehending it and creating images for use by the public.

Dr. Taylor said he has yet to line up funding for the other four centers, though he has prospects for at least two of them.

Ultimately, "I'd like to seek endowments for each of them, and that takes at a minimum $5 million for each," he said. "But gifts like that are very difficult to raise, particularly now."

First published on November 17, 2010 at 12:00 am