Scrappy Ways to Get Your Museum in the News
For many museums—especially small- or medium-sized institutions where everyone wears multiple hats—a marketing department is a luxury, let alone dedicated media relations staff. For those without experience dealing with the press, the …
Toward Equity in Metadata: How Sandy Spring Museum Is Going beyond Reparative Cataloging
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 …
Finding New Audiences in Small Markets
While most major museums are based in urban centers or tourist hubs, those located in more rural areas face a unique challenge to expand their reach. Without a large local population or a steady flow of out-of-towners, how can isolated …
A House Museum Built for the Digital Age
The museum sector went into the pandemic ill-prepared to use digital strategies to keep themselves afloat, but many museums that had begun to experiment with how digital could enhance or replace existing practices found themselves at an …
With the Help of MAP, the Manassas Museum Met Its Changing Community’s Needs
Through the Museum Assessment Program, museums gain perspective on how to improve core areas of their operations, with a combination of guided self-reflection and close consultation with an expert Peer Reviewer. One of the many museums …
From Preservation to Participation: The Journey of Sandy Spring Museum
Many museums think that serving the needs of more ethnically diverse constituents will lose them “traditional” audience and supporters, but at Sandy Spring Museum (SSM), we’ve found just the opposite. Nearly ten years ago, when a financial …
Black History in Our Own Backyard: Building Community in a COVID World
Lately, at the Neill-Cochran House Museum we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what community means, and the best way we can define it for our institution. This question has become even more critical since the COVID-19 pandemic …
Advocacy is (Always) Essential
Do you have five minutes to take a small action that could make a big impact? I know, it sounds like a cheap sales pitch, and if you work in a small museum, your answer may be no. Whether closed, working to reopen, or able to welcome …
A Small Museum’s Rapid Response Collecting Project for COVID-19
For historians, there is history in the making at any given moment. The life events, triumphs, and tragedies we experience and record help us define our ever-changing world for generations to come. So, when the coronavirus began affecting …
A Community Museum’s Plan to Document Gentrification
This past November, I attended Reimagining the Museum: Conference of the Americas, held in Oaxaca, Mexico. Part of my excitement about attending the conference was that Latin America, and especially Oaxaca, is known for its community …
