Museum Magazine

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Excellence On A Small Scale

By Ann Fortescue

What does excellence at a small museum look like? My experience moving from a large history museum, with a full-time staff of 77 and an annual budget of $9.3 million, to a small art museum with a full-time staff of three and an annual …
Exploding the Four Walls: Museums Face the Prospects and Perils of Digital Learning

By Jeff Levine

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2015 edition of Museum magazine. On May 30, 1899, a struggling young inventor wrote the Smithsonian Institution asking for help: “I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I …
Nine Effective Strategies of Audience Building

By Lucas Held, Anne Bergeron and Beth Tuttle

Lucas Held, Anne Bergeron and Beth Tuttle summarize The Wallace Foundation report, The Road to Results: Effective Practices for Building Arts Audiences, by Bob Harlow (2014, The Wallace Foundation), and Magnetic: The Art and Science of …
Beyond the Label: Strategies for effective interactive media

By American Alliance of Museums

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2015 edition of Museum magazine. Creating digital interactive experiences in museums can be costly and time-consuming. Given the financial and human resources required to create …
Food Forward: Eat and drink trends in museums

By Marika Barranco

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2015 edition of the Museum magazine. Museums today are leveraging eating, drinking and tasting in new ways for visitors. Institutions striving to deliver multisensory experiences can find no …
Beyond Four Walls: A conversation with Peter Kim about creating a museum of food and community

By Elizabeth Merritt

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2015 edition of the Museum magazine. Good projects never really end—they flow into the future with all sorts of serendipitous consequences. A lovely ripple effect of the Center for the …
Why Cities, Museums, and Soft Power

By Gail Dexter Lord

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2015 edition of Museum magazine. An adapted excerpt from Cities, Museums and Soft Power by Gail Dexter Lord and Ngaire Blankenberg, available from The AAM Press in late April. Please go …
The “Open” Economy: Filling The Data Pipeline

By Elizabeth Merritt

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2015 edition of Museum magazine. A sample of TrendsWatch 2015. “‘Open’ is already on track to supplant ‘participatory’ as buzzword of the year, with good reason. The proliferation of …
First Steps for Engaging New Audiences

By Bob Harlow

In the Wallace Foundation report The Road to Results: Effective Practices for Building Arts Audiences, (2014, The Wallace Foundation), Bob Harlow identifies and examines nine practices of arts organizations that successfully expanded …
How Far Have We Come? Civil rights museums evolve and transform

By Jeff Levine

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2015 edition of the Museum magazine. Of necessity, museums that document the nation’s civil rights struggle must also confront the litany of moral wrongs committed against African …