Standards

When Trends Collide: The New Gilded Age Meets the Rise of the Amateur Expert

By Elizabeth Merritt

Museums have long struggled to resist pressure from wealthy donors or sponsors who want to call the shots. How might this play out in a future in which museums loosen their grip on curatorial authority and actively encourage participation …
Museums & Wikipedia: The Future of Collaboration and Accessibility

By Elizabeth Merritt

Lori Byrd Phillips is a museum studies graduate student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and the current Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. She recently received a full scholarship …
How many museum educators does it take….

By Elizabeth Merritt

….to respond to Elizabeth Merritt’s “Call to Action” issued in Museum related to the CFM’s Demographic Transformation report? Apparently, 40 is a good start. Word cloud of participants’ responses to the question “What lingering thoughts, …
Forecasting the Next Educational Era

By Elizabeth Merritt

As I wrote last week one of CFM’s foci in 2011 and 2012 (and probably beyond) will be the future of education. You’ve told us in workshops, correspondence and in feedback to this blog that the trends shaping American education will have a …
Engaging and Empowering New Immigrants through Art

By Elizabeth Merritt

AAM’s recently released forecasting report Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums highlights the gap between current museum audiences and the majority minority future of American society. The sobering statistics are leavened …
What is Innovation Anyway?

By Elizabeth Merritt

One of the goals AAM set for CFM is to “foster innovation.” Why? Because innovation is to museums’ survival what genetic variation is to evolution—a source of novelty, producing structures or strategies that succeed better than the old …
The Museum Identity Crisis—Who the heck are “we,” anyway?

By Elizabeth Merritt

Recently, the Christian Science Monitor ran this article examining the ways museums are engaging with their communities on a number of fronts. The reporter chose one quote from James Chung (co-author of the CFM report Museums & Society …
Killing Buddha

By Elizabeth Merritt

The Accreditation Commission is meeting this week here at the AAM offices in Washington, D.C. Each time I walk past the big glass walls of the board room I see the huge binders scattered across the conference table, and the long, long list …