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Guiding Light: How Values Exercises Can Help You Present Challenging Content

By Ashley Witherspoon

When a visitor enters a museum, they arrive with more than just their belongings. They bring their entire cognitive framework to interpret and store knowledge, including their complex understanding of how significant events throughout …
How Book Bans Might Impact Museums: A Q&A with PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman

By Adam Rozan

This series of Q&As by the author are conducted as independent work and not part of his professional activities. If you follow the news, you’ve likely seen a surge in headlines about censorship and book-banning, with libraries and …
Faces of Baltimore Museums: Gage Branda

By American Alliance of Museums

Have you heard about AAM 2024 in Baltimore this month? (We hope so—we’re doing our best!) If so, you might have seen one of our ads for this year’s edition, featuring a lovely cast of smiling faces. But just whose faces are …
The Best Museum Gardens, According to Museum People

By Joseph O'Neill

Gardens can be artful, historic, and scientific—beautiful, educational, and ecological all at once. So they tend to go hand in hand with museums, uniting much of the diverse subject matter our field encompasses. Some museums are gardens, …
Toward Equity in Metadata: How Sandy Spring Museum Is Going beyond Reparative Cataloging

By Allison Weiss

Equity: freedom from bias or favoritism Metadata: data that describes and provides context for digital items, which in turn helps users find and discover these resources. Though Black and white residents numbered almost equally throughout …
Faces of Baltimore Museums: Rachel Leeds

By American Alliance of Museums

Have you heard about AAM 2024 in Baltimore this month? (We hope so—we’re doing our best!) If so, you might have seen one of our ads for this year’s edition, featuring a lovely cast of smiling faces. But just whose faces are …
Extending the Invitation: Strategies for Welcoming Visitors and Reducing Barriers to Access

By Raphaela Platow

In the aftermath of the pandemic and amidst ongoing calls for museums to become more inclusive and attuned to community needs, many institutions are still seeking ways to recover from faltering attendance and expand the reach of their …
Language/Arts: How the Verbal and Visual Intersect in Museums

By Glenna Barlow

A picture is worth a thousand words. Or so the aphorism tells us. What, then, is the value of a single word? That is the question I have explored time and again as an educator in an art museum. It might seem counterintuitive that someone …
Define Museum: A Q&A with the Museum Glossary Project Team

By Adam Rozan

One of my all-time favorite sayings is, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together,” which was the case with the Museum Marketing, Communications, & Audience Engagement Glossary project. In part one of this …
Speaking the Audience’s Language: A Q&A with James Heaton

By Adam Rozan

At some point in the pandemic, I was working on a project, and I needed a museum-based definition of a term relating to audience development and museum work. I started by flipping through a few books in my library, none of which had what I …