Hello, I'm Katia Kukawka.
I'm the Deputy Director of the Museum of Aquitaine in Bordeaux
in southwestern France.
Today, I'll be talking about a steering document
the "Scientific and Cultural Project", or SCP.
I find the following definition quite complete.
It's by Marie-Hélène Joly, one of our colleagues.
It's a general-orientation document that's a maximum of 30-50 pages long.
It defines the museum's strategy and major directions
for the next 3-5 years.
It's a vital strategic document
which makes it possible to see short-, medium-, and long-term prospects.
It's also a framework document to maintain our heading
when day-to-day work skews things.
Finally, it's a steering tool for evaluating your action.
When do you make an SCP?
In France, it's recently become a legal obligation for all museums
with the "Musée de France" label.
It's an obligation that's on the law books.
Before, it applied when you created a new museum,
or when you did renovation or expansion work.
It now applies whenever management changes
or whenever there's a new mandate, particularly in cities.
It really enables you to define and approve new directions,
the new policies set out by a newly arrived director
or an elected official who wants his museum
to take a new path.
Now this legal obligation applies to all "Musée de France" museums.
On average, we write an SCP every 5-6 years
in each of our museums.
Or rather, we should write an SCP every 5-6 years
in each of our museums.
That's far from being the case,
because writing an SCP involves a lot of people
and takes a lot of time.
It involves a lot of people because a scientific and cultural project
requires a head administrator to lead it,
but he doesn't write it alone.
He must call upon his whole team
to really engage in a thought process
which is truly collective, concerted, shared.
It also involves a steering committee.
When you plan to write an SCP, you need a steering committee,
a group which includes administrative supervisors
and scientific supervisors.
In France, that's the Musées de France Department,
which is part of the Ministry of Culture.
It can also be qualified public figures.
Generally speaking, we also usually mobilize the partners
closest to the museum.
That means the other museums in a city or an area,
tour operators,
some members of professional networks, representatives from associations,
representatives from major universities or research labs in the area.
Very quickly,
you can end up with quite a large steering committee
and a network of partners which is mobilized more sporadically
but which is also quite large.
When you're writing a scientific and cultural project,
you also have to gauge the value of creating a scientific committee,
to really specifically think about the major scientific directions
for the museum.
I mentioned the time frames.
An SCP can't be scribbled down in a few hours or days.
It takes time for consultation and maturation,
to really involve a whole team,
namely the whole hierarchy,
including museum guards, who are usually the closest to visitors,
along with reception staff.
It's also a summary document with many appendices.
That involves analysis, editing, and formatting,
and all of that takes time.
Finally, it's a contract.
It takes time to get administrative approval.
For the Museum of Aquitaine, which is my example today,
that approval comes from the city of Bordeaux,
to which our museum belongs.
Scientific approval comes from the Cultural Affairs Department
in Bordeaux in the Aquitaine region,
which is part of the Ministry of Culture,
of the central offices in Paris, the Musées de France,
which is part of the Ministry of Culture.
You never - and I think this is a vital detail -
you never make an SCP in a rush.
You have to set deadlines, a schedule, right away,
one that allocates time for these thought processes and this writing
and then for various approvals.
An SCP is based on three fundamentals.
As you've understood, it's a steering document,
and that document must really be based
on three main fundamentals,
namely the collections, visitor bases, and the place.
Regarding the collections, it covers management,
conservation and restoration.
It covers policies on research and showcasing,
exhibition strategy in the short, medium, and long term.
It also covers acquisition policy.
The types of visitors must be defined in this SCP.
You have to know and categorize them.
You have to carefully analyze ticket-sales data,
see if studies have been or can be done on museum attendance
and visitor satisfaction.
You have to think about the past visitors' policy
and what it should be in coming years.
Finally,
you have to think about all the cultural and educational planning.
The third fundamental is the place -
the building, the site.
What are the positives?
What kind of shape is the building in?
Has work been done in recent years?
Is any work planned, and, if so, why?
What about entrances and traffic patterns?
Again, you take stock and suggest improvements
for the building's spaces, uses, and traffic patterns.
In short, I would say that an SCP is a concept, first.
With a few lines, a few sentences, you must define the museum's identity.
Simply put, a museum's identity is what makes it unique,
what makes it itself and no other.
Its image, its history, the appeal of its collections,
and the history of those collections create a museum's identity.
All the collective thought processes
that go on when you're writing an SCP
enable you to arrive at a concept, a coherent, structured idea
of what the establishment is.
Again, I stress that this is necessarily a collective approach,
one that is shared and concerted.
Finally, it's a vision, a way of looking ahead,
of setting out great prospects for the coming years,
so that you're extremely focused on that path.
You're also taking the time to think outside of time-consuming daily tasks.
There are three very classic stages.
You have to take stock.
The Musées de France department doesn't want us to linger too long
on this stock-taking.
We're only to dig into the last 3-5 years, max.
Using very recent data,
we draw up an objective assessment of the situation.
There are questions I like to ask.
Out of all the steering documents we've gathered
in previous years,
ones written by us or our predecessors,
what had we planned to do?
Where are we today?
Where did we succeed or run into obstacles?
Those are the four main questions to ask when taking stock.
After taking stock, you begin a critical diagnosis.
The idea is not to congratulate yourself on a job well done
but rather to be as objective as possible.
The museum had a vocation at the outset,
one that may have evolved over time.
We've been responsible for this establishment
for a year, 5 years, 10 years.
What very objective gaze can we cast over all the work
done over the last few years?
Objectivity enables you to set goals
which are necessarily the third stage of a scientific and cultural project,
strategic and operational goals.
Again, this is done in a very realistic, reasonable way.
It's not about thinking you'll become the Louvre
but about setting goals
based on your known human, technical, and financial means.
You ask yourself where you want to go and in what time frame.
The Musées de France department,
as you'll see at the end of my talk,
created a "Muséofiche" article a few years ago,
which is online.
It's very well done.
I relied on it to write this talk.
It also features a model plan,
a blueprint for a scientific and cultural project.
It lines up with what I've said.
The introduction asks clear questions.
Why write an SCP now?
What has changed in the context, the environment?
What justifies creating an SCP?
Then there are two main sections -
a critical assessment of the situation,
with sub-sections which I'll give you time to read later,
and a second section
which really dives deep into the project part,
with a concept that takes up one or two paragraphs, max.
This concept is then broken down depending on the subjects to cover -
the site and the building, the collections,
past history and museography, research policy,
visitor types, attendance, and the museum's influence,
partnerships and networks,
communications, means, and functioning.
In a second volume, there are reams of appendices.
Again, these are regulation for us.
I'm well aware that these regulations only apply in France, for now,
but they're still useful to study,
because they really make it possible - it's really the first stage of an SCP -
to gather all the data needed to make an assessment.
After having used this model, you have to be able to let it go
and manage to create an SCP
which is really your own.
Each SCP is unique.
It's one museum, one area, one place, one collection.
The good thing about our job is that we're asked to be innovative
while remaining pragmatic.
We're asked to be effective.
Once written, this SCP must not just be stuck in a drawer.
It's a working tool which must be consulted regularly.
We're asked to be concise,
and that's really important for us and for our readers.
Being concise requires us to be very selective.
It means that 30, 40, or 50 pages is already too many.
Let's really try to establish priorities
and not try to say everything in a scientific and cultural project.
Finally, I'll reiterate that an SCP has a very limited lifespan
in a museum's history.
Three, four, five years.
At the Museum of Aquitaine, we wrote an SCP
which ran from 2011 to 2016.
It was voted for by the municipal council in 2012.
It was announced that it would run until 2016.
A new director came on board in 2017.
Now, in 2018, we're writing the next SCP,
which will be adopted next year.
There can be two or three transitional years between SCPs,
rarely more.
The SCP we're writing will run from 2019 to 2024.
It's up to us to hew to election mandates.
It's up to us, in 2024,
to start to consider what assessment we can make
of the major directions we're setting right now.
I'll end with a question asked by one of our colleagues.
Why not an SSCP rather than an SCP?
That would enable us to raise the social issue,
to underline the importance of a museum in a given area
and for a given population.
I hope that we at the Museum of Aquitaine in beautiful Bordeaux
will manage to write not an SCP but an SSCP.
The last slide is about resources.
I mentioned the "Muséofiche" article
posted by the Musées de France department in 2007.
I'd also like to invite you to go online
to read the "Lettre de l'OCIM", a great magazine for heritage professionals.
In 2009, it devoted an article to museum projects,
covering methodology, and thus scientific and cultural projects,
with a few case studies and a few interesting opinion pieces
by curators currently running museums in France.
Finally, the National Heritage Institute,
which trains curators in France,
also posted a series of articles on scientific and cultural projects.
It's very well done.
Thank you.