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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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Silent No More: The new Lucy Burns Museum speaks to the centennial of suffrage

Suffragists are recorded as the first in US history to use silence as protest, calling themselves “Silent Sentinels.” US suffragists (rather than British suffragettes) were also the first …

It Takes a Village: How community partnerships made for a winning summer camp formula

For museums with the resources and opportunities to do so, offering a summer camp is a great way to open up the doors to students whose guardians might need the structured daytime hours a …

Leveraging MAP for Capacity Building: The Sierra Mono Museum experience

The Sierra Mono Museum and Cultural Center—a small, rural, nonprofit museum set in the California foothills just south of Yosemite National Park—is today undergoing a one-million-dollar …

The Advantages of Being a Small Museum

Despite visiting only rarely, I have a strong affinity for New Orleans, the “big sister” of my own hometown: Savannah, Georgia. Both were historically port cities, sites for the global …

Confronting a Painful History: How a museum partnered with its Native community to educate the public about an offensive place name

The Black Rock Historical Society (BRHS) is a volunteer organization on the west side of Buffalo, NY, formed in 2013 around the two-hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812 and chartered …
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Latest Stories from AAM

#AAM2023 Keynote: Gregg Deal

Category: Annual Meeting
Gregg Deal (Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe) took the stage as the 2023 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo keynote speaker. Deal is a multi-disciplinary artist, activist, and “disruptor.” His …

Empathy Interviews: A Tool for Museums to Understand the Feelings and Experiences of Others

Category: Alliance Blog
Imagine sitting down with local community members and hearing stories about the places they feel they can show up as their most authentic selves, or where and how they have learned …

Techno-skepticism: Rethinking the Costs and Benefits of Digital Technology

Category: Center for the Future Of Museums Blog
The night before my flight to Denver for #AAM2023, I went over my slides for the annual presentation on TrendsWatch. The talk was formatted around the chapters of the latest report (access …

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