On September 2, 2009, the Center for the Future of Museums sent the first edition of Dispatches from the Future of Museums out into the world. It was, as we described it at the time, “a vehicle to bring you timely, useful information about trends and innovations that will shape museums’ worlds in coming decades.” That first edition included ten stories ranging from K-12 education and urban design to space travel and robots. In the ensuing years, my colleagues and I produced over 800 issues of the newsletter, with brief abstracts and links to articles that fueled our thinking about the future.

Looking back over the Dispatches archives, I’m pleased with our track record in finding and sharing news presaging trends that would prove to be significant to museums and their communities, including stories on:

• The significance of the “majority-minority” future (2009)
• Museums and political engagement (2010)
• Museum programs for Alzheimer patients and their caregivers (2011)
• Trust in museums versus trust in web content (2012)
• Crowdfunding (2013)
• The indefensibility of unpaid internships (2014)
• Smart phones and selfies in the museum (2015)
• Check-ins rather than performance reviews (2016)
• Neurodiversity in the museum (2017)
• The fraught future of historical monuments (2018)
• Are fundraisers ready for artificial intelligence? (2019)
• How museums are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic (2020)
• NFTs and the creator economy (2021)
• Censorship in America (2022)
• Nonprofit unions (2023)
• What to expect from the Trump agenda (2024)
• Funders retreat from DEI (2025)

I decided to take this walk through the archives because we’re about to change the way we deliver these stories to you. The information environment is a lot different than it was sixteen years ago. AAM’s readers tell us that they are overloaded with communications, that too many emails create a kind of content paralysis. We’ve listened and are pruning our e-newsletters to one per week–AVISO for members, and Field Notes for nonmembers. The stories that I used to share via Dispatches will now be published on a dedicated page on the AAM website, and a list of topics for newly added stories will appear in the weekly newsletters.

I’ll also be sharing links and commentary about significant news in the Future of Museums Community on the AAM discussion forum Museum Junction. (You don’t need to be an AAM member to participate in Museum Junction, but you will need to set up an free account on the platform.) If you join the CFM community, you can opt to receive a daily digest of posts using the community notification settings in the forum. I’d also love to connect with you via BlueSky, where I am @elizabethmerritt.bsky.social.

Next year I’ll be premiering a new monthly newsletter for the directors of member museums and look forward to sharing more about those plans in January.

As I pivot to the new format, I’d love to hear from you what kinds of news you want to hear: what is useful, uplifting, even a welcome distraction from daily work.

Warmest regards from the future,

Elizabeth Merritt

Vice President, Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums, American Alliance of Museums.