0.10 Chapter eight: facing tough choices today

Another complicating aspect of managing the Society's different entities manifests itself when one considers the effects of the change in the career paths of present-day professionals compared to their counterparts in previous genera­tions. Today, professionals are far less likely to spend significant portions of their careers serving a single institution. Mobility tends to increase interdepartmen­tal rivalries as leaders fight to show demonstrable successes that will qualify them for other opportunities.

Finally, and perhaps most important, is a way the Society is a victim of the strength of its collections. One can cite many cases where a library and museum have been folded into a single organization without debilitating difficulty, but in most of them it was quite clear which part of the collection predominates. If an institution's art museum is more renowned, its library collections play a supportive role. The culture has been built around such assumptions, so tension concerning the allocation of resources is minimized. The same is true in cases where it is the library that holds the preeminent collections. In the Society's case, because of the unusual strength of both collections, the Society has never established which en­tity gets priority. Staffs continue to fight battles over resources, autonomy, and power.

In some ways, it is not surprising that interweaving a library and a museum is so difficult when one considers how different the two institutions have become. Oversimplifying somewhat, a library's central charge is to hold collections and make them accessible for private study by individual scholars. By contrast, a museum is primarily expected to prepare its collections for public display to large groups of people. The two objectives spawn entities with very different person­alities: one is introverted; the other is extroverted. Not surprisingly, the cultures that have grown up around these two institutions are very different, and the lead­ers that come up through the ranks tend to exhibit those differences. Even the cataloging standards used by the two types of entities are different and not trans­ferable. Placing these two cultures together in a single, small organization that is woefully short of resources represents, at best, an extraordinary management and leadership challenge.

Governance

The Society began as a membership organization. For most of its history, it did not have a board of trustees; it had a librarian and a president elected by its members. It was not until 1938 that the Society was reorganized and a self-perpetuating board of trustees was established. Because this reorganization took place after the Society had received the $4.5 million Thompson bequest, the trustees were not called on to play an active role in overseeing the Society's financial affairs. Membership on the board was regarded more as a privilege than as a responsibility. Trustees got together once a month to hear about the Society's new acquisitions, to discuss mutual interests, and to enjoy one another's company. Once elected to the board, a trustee typically served for life.