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Forecasting the Future of Accessibility: Please Touch or Don’t Touch?
I wish I could preview my Inbox from 2036. How come Outlook doesn’t have an option for that? As a member of AAM’s staff Ethics Taskforce, I help answer plaintive, irate, indignant and panicked questions that come over our email. So I have … -
Ethics Forecast Round 3 & the Future of Museum Standards
This week we launch Round 3 of Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethics. As with previous rounds, the public is invited to weigh in at the same time (on a parallel track) as our recruited “Oracles.” This round delves into six issues … -
Museums Innovating in Businesslike Ways
Many people tell us that, in the future, museums need to be more entrepreneurial. It’s hard to find written case studies, however, of museums innovating in businesslike ways. Today’s guest post helps fill that gap, as Karen Coltrane, … -
Civic Duty Calls
In this blog post, AAM Director of Government Relations and Advocacy Gail Ravnitzky Silberglied explores why advocacy—like voting, jury service, and paying taxes—is a civic duty that furthers our nation’s democracy and prepares us and our … -
Questioning Assumptions: The Ideal Employee:Volunteer Ratio
Today’s thought experiment: what if, in the future, museums asked not “how many volunteers do we need” but rather “how can we structure our operations to engage as many volunteers as possible in meaningful work?” Volunteers are already … -
The Workforce of the Future Starts Now
We get a lot of questions about who will be working, or should be working, in the museum of the future, and how museums should be finding, recruiting and training these future staff members. Any exploration of the future of the museum … -
Futures Studies 101: Implications Wheel
What would happen if a space craft full of weak, disoriented insectoid aliens parked itself in orbit over South Africa? The implications of that (highly) improbable event are explored the 2009 film District 9. The director posits humans … -
Can Disasters Help Us Build a Better Future?
The best that can be said of a disaster is that sometimes we can learn something, if we are wise and attentive, that will make for a better outcome in the future. I just finished reading a great essay, Lost and Found in Japan, on the World … -
Building a Better Fishing Pole: how technology-focused organizations can help their museum community
Many museums are struggling to navigate the expanding universes of social media and digital content with the slim resources available to them in constrained budgets. Fortunately, some entrepreneurial museums are breaking trail—pooling … -
Futurist Friday: Agenda 2026
To paraphrase Churchy, from Pogo, “Futurist Friday comes on a Thursday this week.” I am delighted to find that our museum association colleagues in the Netherlands—the Nederlandse Museumvereniging—produced a report last year that parallels …
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Latest Stories from AAM
From Fragmentation to Alignment: Project Management in Museums
Category:
On-Demand Programs
Project management in museums is often misunderstood as task tracking or administrative …
The Four Illusions of AI: Implications for Museum Practice
Category:
Center for the Future of Museums Blog
I introduced our exploration of artificial intelligence with three stories of potential …
How Museums Can Resist Censorship
Category:
Center for the Future of Museums Blog
As the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) points out, “every generation of …