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Report from the Horizon Project 10th Anniversary Retreat

By Elizabeth Merritt

Today’s guest blogger is Marsha Semmel, director of strategic pPartnerships at the Institute for Museum and Library Services. In late January, I joined several museum professionals (including CFM’s Elizabeth Merritt!) and approximately …
Using Pinterest to See the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

What is the fastest growing social media startup-of-the-moment? Pinterest, a site devoted to “visual scrapbooking.” Pinterest’s first investor, Brian Cohen, attributes the site’s burgeoning popularity to “people’s natural desire to curate …
Introducing TrendsWatch: Your Digest of the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

At a recent conference I was challenged to come up with an image representing my role in the universe. I had a sudden image of myself as a Whale Shark trawling the vast digital sea of information and filtering out bits that museums will …
Future Babble by Dan Gardner

By Elizabeth Merritt

Today’s recommended reading is contributed by Rob Waller, president of the Protect Heritage Corporation. Prior to PHC, Rob spent thirty-three years at the Canadian Museum of Nature, including periods as chief of the Conservation Section …
Prodding Sacred Cows: The Mission Statement

By Elizabeth Merritt

When I was pulling together the book National Standards & Best Practices for U.S. Museums, I found myself increasingly uneasy with the way that the standards use mission statement as the ultimate touchstone for determining what a given …
Making the Most of What We Have: Museums & Collaboration

By Elizabeth Merritt

Yesterday, at the orientation for Museums AdvocacyDay, deputy director Cora Marrett of the National Science Foundation predicted that, in a future of increased resource constraints, museums will need to collaborate on competitive funding …
Ethics and the Distributed Museum

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’m wrestling with the draft report of “Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethics.” One of the most delightful things about this project is that, despite the constraints of format (multiple choice and free text in an online survey) the …
Open Authority & the Future of Museum Ethics

By Elizabeth Merritt

Lori Byrd Phillips is the U.S. Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedian in Residence at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. As a museum studies graduate student at Indiana University-Purdue …
Choosing Roles: Facilitator or Advocate?

By Elizabeth Merritt

Would you rather be loved, or would you rather save the world? You can’t necessarily have both. I pondered this choice, as it applies to museums, yesterday morning at the last half day of the 21st Century Learning in Natural History …
The Future of Funding

By Elizabeth Merritt

Everyone wants to know what the next business model for museums may be. Will they morph into hybrid nonprofit/for-profit social benefit corporations? Lose tax exempt status entirely? In today’s post Carl Hamm, immediate past chair of the …