2015 – Page 7 – American Alliance of Museums

Designing for Resilience

By Elizabeth Merritt

One of the themes CFM focuses on in TrendsWatch 2015 is the changing climate of risk facing museums. Fully a quarter of museums & related organizations in the IMLS MUDF database are located in coastal areas with high vulnerability …
Futurist Friday: Economic “Ifs”

By Elizabeth Merritt

The Economist just released the 2015 edition of “The World If“– a companion to their annual compilation of predictions. I’m working through it today, and you can, too.The editors pose one of my favorite questions: …
New Economic Models for Field Wide Research

By Elizabeth Merritt

On my desk is a report from Reach Advisors’ Museums R+D membership program. It’s on museums and trust. Before I opened the report, the latest data I had on this critical subject was a survey about public attitudes toward museums that AAM …
Laboring over Art

By Elizabeth Merritt

I have a super-quick musing for you today, sparked by something I read last Friday: Looking at How Performers Are Paid for Performance Art There has been a lot of talk lately about labor conditions and pay equity in museums (looking at …
Futurist Friday: 10 Bite-sized Stories of the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

Popular Science has released their annual collection of “Dispatches from the Future,” a collection of microscenarios solicited from sci-fi writers. At a few hundred words each, these provide a nice short pop of futurist …
A Bodacious Commitment to Diversity

By Elizabeth Merritt

Yesterday the Mellon Foundation released a report based on the first comprehensive survey of the demographics of art museum staff. For the most part, it documents what we already knew: “professional” staff in museums (e.g., directors, …
So this museum geek walks into an academic research meeting…

By Elizabeth Merritt

Earlier this month I was in London, participating in the Diversity, (In)equality and Differences workshop organized by the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities. As I shared in an earlier post, I was one of about …
Monday Musing: Thinking the Unthinkable

By Elizabeth Merritt

The other week I included a sobering story from the New Yorker in Dispatches from the Future of Museums*. The Really Big One, by Kathryn Shulz, looks at the Cascadia fault line that runs for 700 miles down the coast of the Pacific …
Futurist Friday: Rise of the (Cute, Self-aware) Robots

By Elizabeth Merritt

Have you seen Ex Machina yet? I watched it on a flight back from London. Its depiction of artificial intelligence is way, way ahead of the actual state of the field, but this week we saw a hint, just a tiny bit of evidence, that we may be …
Notes from the Team: An Introduction, or Why Predict the Future, Anyway?

By Elizabeth Merritt

I am so pleased to introduce a new member of the CFM team—Nicole Ivy will be working with me for the next two years, supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. I invited Nicole to introduce herself today—you …