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 to picket the White House. They stood in front of …
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 camp provides, and to offer students an interactive …
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 renovation thanks, in large part, to its recent …
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 movement of goods, ideas, and people (willingly and …
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 with the New York State Education Department in …
2019 Award Winner for Innovation in Museum Education: Wa kuk wa jimor (“Canoe of One Community”)
The EdCom Award for Innovation in Museum Education recognizes, encourages, and celebrates new, creative ways of engaging with audiences. The Shiloh Museum of Ozark History’s approach to collaborating with the local Marshallese …
Seeing Paris—and the World—through Small Museums
A few months ago, a museum exhibition sparked a thought in my mind that I haven’t stopped thinking about ever since. I was walking aimlessly around Paris and had just wandered into Le Musée des Arts et Métiers. There I found rows and rows …
How One Small Museum Approached Accreditation
Accreditation helps museums focus their purpose, refine their practices, and build their futures. But some museums, particularly those with small staffs and budgets, might consider it challenging amid their other responsibilities and …
Thinking about the Unthinkable: Disaster preparedness and emergency response plans for small museums
Since 1981, the Museum Assessment Program (MAP) has been assisting small and mid-sized museums in their quest to achieve best practices and national standards. The process begins with an application to AAM for one of the assessments, …
Making Professional Development Work for Small Museums
“We had been talking about going to different conferences for years, usually in a joking, musing way, so it is awesome to be able to do it.” When I asked my colleague Mark Riccetti, our organization’s director of operations and programs, …
