This article applies the lens of participation and collaboration not to specific projects, but rather to the routine practices of museum work and museum use. The idea that knowledge is in constant circulation (tudáskörforgás) creates an open museum model that, instead of the unidirectional transfer of knowledge, highlights knowledge-sharing processes that involve museum users, while emphasising the role of everyday interactions in shaping the institution. Knowledge exchange and collaborative research are important in this praxis, yet they are not seen as the main drivers behind specific projects, rather as collaboration that permeates the institution’s operation as a whole.

 
 
The concept
 
The term knowledge circulation attempts to expand the typically horizontal concept of knowledge exchange towards the vertical and the cyclical.  

The knowledge circulation model understands the chain of events in a museum (object and data collection, exhibition, publication, research, archiving), which can last several years or even decades, as a cyclical process that centres on the reciprocal sharing of knowledge. In this framework, both the input and output side of the museum’s knowledge are open, regardless of current trends, projects, or exhibition topics. Input and output are not sharply divided, which ensures the flow of knowledge. The museum collection relays information to those who express interest in it, and complements objects and archival documents with another layer of knowledge through the cooperation of external partners. Knowledge circulation views former, current, and future museologists, as well as former, current, and future museum users as equals, and it relegates the consideration of short-term benefits (i.e. political, ideological, or financial advantages) to the background.
 
The knowledge circulation model understands the museum as a densely layered hub of knowledge, where collected or exhibited objects, photographs, documents, and information serve as points of orientation and focus.
 
Knowledge circulation considers the museum in the broadest possible time frame. This makes it possible to define a new role that is distinguished from the institution’s traditional core functions (collection, preservation, processing, exhibition) and understands the function of interpretation on a broader spectrum than before. The museum is conceptualised as a central coordinating body that simultaneously creates, adopts, and publicises knowledge related to objects ‒ in diverse forms and through a variety of mediums. This model takes into  consideration that a museum’s knowledge ‒ much like everyday or scientific knowledge ‒ forms part of larger networks that are conjoined through collections. This idea makes it easier to connect the knowledge of external partners with that of museum experts.  

Museums have always operated according to the knowledge circulation principle, but in the long run, its conscious adoption and application can expand the circle of knowledge based on objects and collections. In this sense, the model is both descriptive and normative: it models the process of learning in the museum context and develops a reflexive version of it as a framework to be followed. From this perspective, the museum is seen as an assemblage (Harrison 2013), a process in which every participant (person, object, knowledge) behaves as an agentive entity. People, objects, and information are all in a flow, coming and going, connecting to each other, changing, ceasing to exist. In the assemblage framework, museum identities are understood as resulting from capacities and relationships (Kennedy 2013: 60).  
 
As a normative model, knowledge circulation is also connected to the field of symmetric anthropology, and argues that in the long run it is worth opening up the museum to a wide spectrum of knowledge. This approach does not believe in ultimate truths and finds inspiration in the diversity of perspectives. It uses the method of collaborative ethnography consciously and applies it to the world of museums.
 
 
Museum use
 
External partners most typically get involved in museum practice through the donation of objects or through a specific research process. From the perspective of participation, these two types of involvement have several similar traits. Both assume active participants who step into the museum space ask questions and formulate ideas: they are alternative museum users who cannot be fully grasped by the term visitor, which implies a more passive consumer of culture, akin to the figure of the viewer in a theatre or cinema. Within the language of museum theory, the term museum user reflects the theoretical and methodological changes brought about by the concept of participation over the last two decades. The term’s meaning is shaped by the idea of a useful museum that is formed with the people instead of for the people: an institution that functions as a social platform (Bradburne 2001: 78; Simon 2010: 137–139; Gesser et al. Hrsg. 2012; McSweeney–Kavanagh 2016).  

The shift from visitors to museum users and the related discourse affects all aspects of a museum’s operation and is an important step towards recognising the circulation of knowledge. For the time being, this change of perspective is typically only articulated in participatory projects. Inviting guests to one’s house is often understood as a basic metaphor for participation. This resonates with the approach that considers the donation of (guest) objects, encouraged through targeted projects and thematic collection campaigns, as the minimum requirement for participation (Wenk 2012; Flagmeier 2012). The idea of participation has also brought about changes in research, primarily with the appearance of open museum storages (visible storage, study storage) and the facilitation of democratic access to the institution. However, even though personal relations can catalyse long-term collaboration, these community projects do not necessarily affect the institutional view in relation to donation and research requirements.  

In museum practice, donation- and research-type activities usually bring about a unidirectional flow of knowledge: the donor gives objects and information to the museum, while the researcher requests and receives information from the museum. But is it really that simple? It is especially important to ask this question in the case of museums working with local cultures or everyday realities. Do we recognise the future researcher in today’s object donor, and vice versa: the future object donor in today’s researcher, who entrusts the museum with his/her objects and memories, or becomes a participant in a collective research project? Do we see in museum users the representatives of source communities, families, upholders of tradition, or any other stakeholder group, who come in contact with the museum at a certain point in their lives? Are we ready to see the donor and the researcher as equally important museum users? Is it possible to make these formally unidirectional processes reciprocal and turn them into long-term collaboration? Or – in other words – is it worth perceiving these daily collaborative situations as synchronic knowledge exchange or diachronic collaboration between institution and museum user, at the centre of which we find the circulation of knowledge?
 
 
Museum research as participation and collaboration
 
The right and possibility to seek knowledge in museum collections and archives is still not quite on the same level as in more traditional forms of museum use, such as visiting exhibitions, attending lectures, partaking in museum pedagogical work, or participating in various projects. The ‘visitor’ is a welcome, honoured museum user, who is also key to the institution’s financial support and an important subject of statistics. Conversely, however, the freedom to do research in a museum is not currently guaranteed to ordinary citizens with no academic status. The centralised, bureaucratic, anti-democratic process of access to information is often quite cumbersome (Keene 2005; Keene ed. 2008; Fink 2010). Some museums view their collections as their intellectual territory, while others are forced to keep their doors shut (or only partially open) due to limited resources. Like all participatory situations, the fragile interactions of ‘research services’ are driven by trust and sensitivity. Yet the quality of these also depends on individual circumstances, the type of museum, the number of staff, etc. In research situations, the museologist is a kind of gatekeeper who may take on different functions, such as protecting the institution’s monopoly on knowledge from outsiders, or defining the concept of ‘outsiders’ in a bureaucratic and often arbitrary manner.
 
The museologist coordinates access: s/he controls its conditions, circumstances, timing, and scope. This control is partly manifested on the conceptual level: the way museologists categorise objects and collections, or the way they describe and define collection units. These practices greatly affect how and to what degree a collection becomes open towards the public. Museologists act as coordinators in this world: not only (or not necessarily) do they educate and receive or pass on knowledge, they also facilitate (or limit) access. Although overall and in general, the museologist’s understanding of a collection can be deeper and more detailed from a professional point of view, the level of familiarity with specific areas or sub-disciplines can vary considerably.
 
The knowledge circulation model regards research activity as a participatory situation and considers the competence to connect museum and everyday knowledge to be the most important aspect of the gatekeeper’s role. This increases the efficiency of access to information in museums, facilitates cultural translation, helps establish a shared language between museologist and external partner, and recognises the productive impact of mutual misunderstandings and ‘frictions’. It is an important issue whether the development of trust is hindered by the museum’s pursuit of objectivity or its use of objectivity as a main reference point. The museologist who commits to a subjective perspective is naturally more apt at relating to museum users’ subjective experiences and matching these with objects. Thus, in a way, subjectivity is an investment into collections management: the subjective museum and multivocality are domains that go beyond exhibition projects.
 
The lack of clarity around the concept and methodology of ‘museum research’ and the wide spectrum of meaning associated with the term ‘researcher’ in several languages makes it somewhat difficult to elucidate the perspective of knowledge circulation. There is a lack of consensus even in the definition of professional, academic research on museum collections. Some use the terms ‘authorial’ or ‘thematic knowledge’ to distinguish research and interpretation based on gathering data and information about museum objects from academic research. Other authors make more nuanced distinctions between research projects directed at the collection, classifying them as museum-based, museological, and museographical research. While museum-based research has no distinct methodology and only differs from other types of academic analysis in terms of its specific topics, museological and museographical investigation can be described as applied research (Mensch 1992). Society’s interest in the knowledge contained in artworks, documents, and photographs adds to the complexity of the issue. The fact that this interest is also called ‘research’ results in the conflation of several categories: village chronicler and craftsman, genealogist and archaeologist, high school student and historian, and even explorers of the North Pole or geologists in the field are placed on the same level. This conflation of concepts may be pertinent on the level of content, since folk dancers, source community members, and local history chroniclers all perform applied, thematic, or expert research. Yet it is still inaccurate because the museum usually distinguishes between museum users who are familiar with academic research methodology and those who are not; a distinction that is also present in the categorisation of researchers. Terms like ‘outsider’, ‘amateur’, or ‘private researcher’ may help clarify the concept, but they do not bring us closer to understanding and fully exploiting the opportunity of reciprocal collaboration.
 
Based on the anthropological concept of fieldwork, researchers increasingly often describe the museum space as a field (Fienup-Riordan 2003; Silva–Gordon 2013). Here, the museum takes on the role of the examined community or group, while external partners or researchers assume the position of the anthropologist who strives to understand and describe the place in its specific context, as it unfolds in front of his/her eyes. The (museum’s) gatekeeper and key informant (museologist) also play their parts in this process. However, collaborative ethnography ‒ which, like knowledge circulation, is both a descriptive and normative model (Lassiter 2005) ‒ emphasises the importance of what researchers and partners bring to this field situation and what they are open to. In classical fieldwork, researchers seek information to develop their own interpretation. In collaborative ethnography, partners do not simply aid this process, they also bring their own perspectives: researchers are not only interested in the information they can provide, but also in their specific worlds. Accepting and exploring the resulting multivocality provides an opportunity for shaping methodology. The acceptance of multivocality on an institutional level is a key issue.
 
The concept of the field thus links knowledge circulation to anthropological fieldwork: museum researchers and external partners can enter each other’s spaces and mutually explore and connect their worlds.
 
 
The museum as field
 
From the late 1950s, the emergence of open-access museum storages and collections began to question the validity of distinguishing between the museum’s “two personalities” (Keene 2005: 87.), i.e. the forms of knowledge contained in exhibition and collection objects. Utilising the tools of communication and architecture, open storages conveyed the gesture of users’ democratic access to the museum’s knowledge (Bose 2012). In parallel with (but also independently from) the opening of storages, museums experimenting with online access communicated a similar message. A reflexive analysis of these two processes ‒ making storage publicly accessible and publicising databases online ‒ showed that transparency and openness are important steps, but they do not necessarily lead to a change of perspective in museum use and museum management. Open storage is employed in exhibition practice rather than collections use. Yet some of these experiments are aimed at creating a totally open collection, which could even relegate traditional permanent exhibitions to the background and simultaneously fulfil the functions of exhibition and researchable collection space. This can reflect (or bring about) a complete review of institutional policy and the introduction of a research and interpretation strategy founded on participation and collaboration.     
 
Open collection spaces create an unprecedentedly inspiring context for research collaboration. Yet the key to transforming research into knowledge exchange is not the location (library, archive, office, internet, closed or open storage), but rather the open attitude of museologist and curator. Nonetheless, the unusual reality of the museum’s repository, its “attic-like quality” (Reichel 2010: 158), or the (dis)order of collections and archives that, unlike an exhibition interior, evokes a feeling of mundane homeliness all act as catalysts that automatically broaden the original research question and activate personal memories or professional experiences.  

As boundary zones between unusual and familiar realities, collections and archives contain several boundary objects that become drivers of the dialogue, even if none of the original research questions were concerned with them: as shared objects of attention and coordination, they are able to connect persons or groups with different interests and knowledge. This is especially true for 21st-century open storages that are deprived of the structural identity of earlier research collections (Fehr 2010: 16‒17). Freed from the confines of representation, thick description, and former meanings and interpretations, these spaces are favourable for the recognition of boundary objects and, through this, for the mobilisation of collection users. Nevertheless, all museum regulations simultaneously include and exclude objects by defining what is inside the museum’s world and what falls beyond it, i.e. what is of interest for the collection and what is not.
 
Personal knowledge that appears in the museum space ‒ and especially in the sphere of boundary objects ‒ can be transformed into archived museum knowledge using a variety of different methodologies. This applies to knowledge about genealogies, local histories, or private collections, as well as a community’s folkloristic knowledge, the technical skills involved in a specific craft, or experiences related to personal object use. It is not only collection users who receive new information during museum research; they also share their specific knowledge with museologists. In an ideal case, the dialogue takes place between two equal partners and is of mutual benefit to both. Knowledge archived in the research situation automatically becomes part of knowledge circulation and is incorporated into future exhibitions, publications, research, and museum use. Objects’ capacity to store data is not limited to information about their use and other findings from their context of acquisition, as these are continuously complemented with newer and newer research results and subjective reflections ‒ either on the record card or in the appropriate fields of the digital database. It is an important question how this information becomes part of the museum’s knowledge repository. In order for this to happen, museums have to give equal treatment to the various types of knowledge related to objects, and in the long run, they will find their place amongst other information stored in the institution.
 
In this sense, the circulation of knowledge is an extension of participative and collaborative practices in space, time, and towards communities. Stakeholders (individuals or groups) who ‘sign up for’ collaboration are replaced by the museum as an institution on the one hand, and the source, knowledge, or creative community or the family on the other. The museum expands the collaborative process, i.e. the right to access and interpret collection items as a source of information. These forms of museum use map out the circulation of knowledge between generations of museum users and museum makers. This circulation can eventually transform into synchronic collaborative knowledge.
 
 
Relative museum knowledge
 
Contemporary heritage discourse and its discrepancies highlight the fact that heritage items are in a constant circulation between global and local, dormant and active, individual and communal, formal and informal, interpreted and non-interpreted, etc. states. The museum is only one possible stop and location within this cycle. This perspective may relativise the principles of museum making and museum use, i.e. the collections and their inner hierarchies. A work of art might be considered highly valuable in one moment but completely worthless in the next, while items that were considered insignificant may suddenly attract considerable research interest. According to the philosophy of object-oriented ontology (OOO), all items in the cycles of knowledge circulation (be they material or immaterial, man-made or natural, in the museum or outside it) are of the same status, and it is only current ideological, local, and community movements and scientific paradigms that allocate more prominent positions to some of them. In a constant relativisation of meanings, the open museum attributes the same significance to museologists currently in charge of the collection as it does to former museum guards or future researchers, curators, and external partners.
 
Practicing openness means providing access to collections, objects, and related museum knowledge, as well as accepting, processing, and preserving outsider knowledge and perspectives. Even though participants do not necessarily see them the same way, objects act as points of connection between numerous disparate perspectives in this process. At the same time, museologists and museum professionals also gain new (types of) knowledge. This presupposes that we express interest in and openness towards other skills and beliefs and stop creating a hierarchy of knowledge.
 
Vera Schleicher & Gábor Wilhelm