Food for Thought: Should Museums Accession lolcats?
Go and read Suse Cairns‘s fascinating exploration of native digital objects and art, and how museums can think about them and deal with them. Bonus interview with Tom Woolley, New Media Curator at the UK National Media Museum. (He’s responsible for a Life Online gallery that has a constant video of memes on it. If [...]
Google World Wonders Project
Initial reaction: OMG COOOOOOOL. More measured response from Max Van Balgooy of Engaging Places: Google Launches World Wonders Project.
Food for Thought: Making a Museum from Scratch
In case you haven’t seen this, Ed Rodley at Thinking about Museums has had a really, really fascinating, thoughtful, and thought-provoking series of discussions lately. He’s playing out a thought experiment that starts with a basic premise: how would you create a museum from scratch? That is, how would you incorporate all of our current [...]
Food for Thought: Recognizing Holidays
The third Monday of April is recognized in Boston as Patriots Day. On paper, it’s a commemoration of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, one of the major events – perhaps THE major event – during the beginning of the American Revolution. Every year, there’s a large reenactment in Lexington and Concord. Local Minutemen reenactors [...]
Food for Thought: Radical Trust & The Decentralization of Curation at TED
If you’re looking for fascinating and thoughtful reading about social innovation and the future of nonprofits, look no further than the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s blog. A recent post on that blog, “A Platform Worth Spreading,” discusses the decentralization of the TED conferences and how sharing has actually strengthened, rather than diluted, their model. How [...]
Survey on Contemporary Objects in History Museums
Please take a few minutes to help a fellow museum studies student out. Leslie Howard, who’s completing an MA in Museum Studies from Harvard and is NEMA’s Membership Manager, is writing her thesis on collecting contemporary objects. Do you have an opinion on whether museums should collect contemporary objects? Do you work at or know [...]
Museums Advocacy Day 2012
Dear Museums Advocacy Day supporters, With just a few days to go until Museums Advocacy Day 2012 gets underway, we ask you to please share the following message with your members and networks: Museums Advocacy Day 2012 Webcast The American Association of Museums will be webcasting portions of the two-day event. We invite you to [...]
Food for Thought: FailFaire
I’m going to make what I think is a fairly safe assumption and call most of you overachievers. Grad school is tough. Museums are tough. People who do both have a lot of passion and a lot of talent. Probably you’re not thrilled about the idea of screwing up. What if someone gave you a [...]
Food for Thought: Visitor Inflation
Merriam-Webster’s defines inflation as “a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services.” We’re most familiar with the concept in an economic context. Each year, a dollar buys less. In times of high inflation, it buys a lot [...]
Food for Thought: Museums & Historic Sites
We’ll call this an occasional series, which means when we have content, we’ll run it. The basic idea is to present a quick idea and get you thinking. If any of our suggestions catch your eye, and you’d like to write a response post, we’d love to publish it. Leave a comment and we’ll be [...]