Museums flourishing amid a flood of ‘fake news’ online
Spread of false information has sent people flocking to trustworthy institutions
OTTAWA— During peak tourist season, thousands of people stream into Canada’s national museums each day — and this summer is already shaping up to be even stronger than usual in Ottawa, thanks to Canada 150 celebrations.
But the spike in visits isn’t just about the summer.
Museums say it’s also about a quirk of the present age: a proliferation of false information online that has made separating fact from fiction all the more a challenge.
That’s leading people to increasingly seek out museums as a primary source of information and in turn leading institutions to think a bit differently about how they do things.
“There is so much — for lack of a better term, I will call it noise — there are so many different stories: ‘What is news? Is it fake news? What’s going on?’ ” said Fern Proulx, chief executive officer of three of Ottawa’s national museums.
“Museums are a trusted source of information. We need to be prominent in that space.”
The three museums Proulx oversees — Agriculture and Food, Science and Technology and Aviation and Space — collectively rebranded themselves last month as part of their effort toward renewed relevancy.
Their new moniker is Ingenium: Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation, a nod to the human ingenuity behind their extensive collection of more than 100,000 objects and hundreds of thousands of books, historical photographs and archival documents.
The intention is to leverage the brand to promote that ingenuity and build a reputation akin to Washington, D.C.’s famed Smithsonian group of 19 museums and a zoo.
For example, Ingenium collaborated with German, Italian and Israeli institutions this month for an exhibition in Jerusalem on the 200th anniversary of the bicycle, drawing on Ottawa’s collection of more than 200 well-preserved bikes. “Museums are much more than curio kits that are displays of the past,” Proulx said. “We are part of the fab- ric, part of the culture. We need to get Canadians on the world stage.”
Museums are a source of intel on the present, said Meg Beckel, president and chief executive officer of the Museum of Nature.
That museum’s roster of scientists is adding constantly to the specimen collections. Their research is tracking nature in real time, and the results are able to show the public — and other scientists — what is going on.
“In addition to being a place of inspiration, which is the public engagement part of what we do . . . we’re also the keeper of the evidence and the creator of knowledge based on the study of the evidence,” she said.
“And all of that makes what we do real and relevant.”
Canada’s chief librarian, Guy Berthiaume, sees an even broader role for the nation’s cultural institutions.
He’s at work now on a plan to engage traditional and social media companies to figure out if there’s a way to draw on Library and Archives Canada’s holdings and other museum collections for people to be able to check the facts they find online.
“We need to be the place truth can be found.”