Hey all, I recognize that this isn't so much a historical question as much as it is a question about how contemporary historians would approach the problem of documenting and piecing together an outline of everything that was lost.
Primarily, I'm interested in knowing how often, if ever, historians take into consideration what future historians would find useful when assessing the scope and significance of the loss of a museum such as this one.
Do historians ever attempt to preserve certain historical or contemporary artifacts and documents for future generations with the knowledge that it is precisely these sorts of documents and artifacts that they themselves would like to possess when engaging in historical scholarship?
Or a bit more precisely, we have a fairly good idea of what was lost in this fire because individuals who worked there are able to tell us just what was contained in these collections. Does this first-hand knowledge ever become formally documented after an event like this so that future historians with no access to individuals who worked at the museum can nevertheless still have an idea of what this museum contained?
My second question is, given the prevalence of technology such as smartphones with built in cameras, it would be reasonable to think there exist massive amounts of personally taken photos of the contents in the museum so that, even if the original artifacts no longer exist, at the very least photos of them still do. Is this helpful to future historians?
And lastly (I hope the mods forgive the lack of specificity of my questions!), have there been efforts to recreate digital walkthroughs of museums for posterity such as the one Google did a few years ago? Would something like this be feasible for all the existing museums in the world?
Thank you!
This is less an Historian question, more a Museology question, and fortunately I'm a museologist.
So, first thing's first, museums (and archives) are the way in which artefacts and documents are preserved for future generations. The decision to accession particular artefacts or documents is a difficult one, as a number of factors need to be considered - first and foremost, the relevance of the object to the collection of the museum or archive. For example, I work at the Museum of Industry in Nova Scotia, and while we have people bringing us all sorts of neat personal effects from former industrial workers in the province, they don't often fit into our collection's mandate - which is the preservation of industrial history and culture. We do, however, encourage them to send those to the relevant museums (usually local museums, but occasionally to other large, Provincial museums)
In general museums (like, for example, the Royal Ontario Museum or the British Museum) the mandate's a little more easy-going. Anything that the curator of a specific area believes would be of value for preservation can be taken in. The Museu Nacional held a massive collection of huge variety, from ethnographic documents and artefacts to archaeological finds to biological specimens, and had curators for each department making the decisions on which objects to accede into their particular collection at the museum. Cataloguing the collection, including the provenance of objects (origins, history, significance, donated by, etc.) is one of - if not the - key duties of collections management in a museum, and provides future researchers with as much information as is available at the time of accession.
Museums have - or should have, according to ICOM, the International Council of Museums - a Disaster Recovery Plan, which includes fire safety, object recovery, restoration, safe storage, and - increasingly - digital records of objects and documents. The problem with digitization of collections is that it is both time consuming and extremely expensive. You can't just take snaps with your smartphone and upload them to a database; they need to be of extremely high quality and very detailed, so that in the event of the loss of the artefact any future researchers will have as good a representation as possible. Digitizing documents is also difficult, as the material the original was created on can be extremely fragile or photosensitive or hydrosensitive or all three and scanning it or keeping it in too warm or dry or damp or cold an environment could damage it irreparably.
Insofar as your second question goes, yes! Museology students from Unirio are sharing photos of the Museu Nacional and hope to create a virtual space to provide some context for what was lost.
Your last question is one which I've been struggling with at my museum, and I know that others have been too. Many (most) museums outside of the UK are paid entry and there is a reluctance from directors, boards of trustees, etc. to allow, essentially, free tours of the museum online. This is often a site-specific issue, and it is understandable when the majority of the site's revenue comes from admission fees or, as is increasingly common, gift-shop and café revenue. That said, the future of museums is, in part, digital, and having tours done online - or at least some sort of interactive online element to the site - is going to be, in my opinion, an essential part of keeping sites open and relevant.