Posts
Small Museums
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 …
Upcoming Events
2023 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo
Event Date:
Presented by:
American Alliance of Museums
Denver, CO
Latest Stories from AAM
Museum Colleague Shoutouts for 2023
Category:
Alliance Blog
Last month we asked readers of our Field Notes newsletter to share their shoutouts for outstanding museum colleagues in honor of the new year. Here were some of the responses they shared: …
Chatting About Museums with ChatGPT
Category:
Center for the Future Of Museums Blog
Two months ago, the research and development lab OpenAI released ChatGPT, an interactive “chatbot” powered by artificial intelligence. Chatbots aren’t new (I’ve been writing about …
Different by Design: A New, Inclusive Framework for Accessible Museum Exhibitions
Category:
Alliance Blog
In January 2020, I authored a post for the Alliance Blog about speechless: different by design, an exhibition that I curated for the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) and the High Museum of Art in …