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Museums and Spontaneous Eruptions of Art: Yarnbombing

By Elizabeth Merritt

Over the past two weeks, we’ve had Maria Mortati share with us the foundation of the San Francisco Mobile Museum and Barbara Stauffer discussing the challenges of orchestrating a participatory design experience in an institution. To …
Thoughts on the Digitization of Museum Collections

By Elizabeth Merritt

When The Pinky Show asked attendees of the 2010 AAM Annual Meeting what they thought about the digitization of museum collections, it was on no one’s radar that Google was planning to do exactly that with the Google Art Project. …
Using Your Audience as Exhibit Designers

By Elizabeth Merritt

Last week, Barbara Stauffer shared with us the challenges of orchestrating a participatory design experience in an institution with well-established organizational procedures and hierarchies. For her, inviting the input of over 800 …
Help Choose the Next CFM Lecturer!

By Elizabeth Merritt

When I gave you an early peek of CFM’s plans for the year, I dropped a hint about the topic of the 2011 CFM lecture. Now I will spill the beans. We are going to address museums and…food! “Wait,” you may say. “Gaming (Dr. Jane McGonigal) I …
Museums & the Spectrum of Control: Part I

By Elizabeth Merritt

This week’s guest post is by Barbara Stauffer, chief of temporary exhibitions at the National Museum of Natural History. This is the first in a series of posts exploring how museums are adapting to people’s desire to contribute, share, …
The Art of Learning Science

By Elizabeth Merritt

Some people learn math by drawing pictures, or crocheting reef creatures or building model bridges. Some people are drawn into art by their appreciation of geometry, or taxonomy or historic costuming. Point is—sometimes the distinctions we …
Gearing up to Explore the Museum of Tomorrow

By Elizabeth Merritt

We are in full annual meeting prep mode here at AAM, getting ready to offer you a great experience in Houston. Since this year the whole meeting pretty much revolves around the future, CFM won’t be producing our usual “guide to the future …
Trends in Tax Exempt Status

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’ve written about the trend for cities to establish PILOTs (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) for nonprofit organizations. These payments (nominally voluntary) can be seen as a civilized way for museums to be good neighbors, supporting …
Free Webinar on Forecasting the Future of Vulnerable Populations

By Elizabeth Merritt

I blogged a couple of months ago about a wonderful set of scenarios commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the future of vulnerable populations. Now the RWJ is offering a free webinar to enable readers to explore these …
A Twebevent Wrap Up

By Elizabeth Merritt

Late last month, we ran the first of what will (hopefully) be many twebevents. With Cecilia Garibay and Lisa Sasaki joining Elizabeth Merritt and Phil Katz, we spent an hour on Twitter sharing information about demographics and museums, …