by Cira Louise Brown Over the past few months, I have been working to develop an exhibition catalog from an exhibit currently on display. The exhibition explores the topic of time from various cultural, scientific and mechanical standpoints, and uses artifacts from a variety of …
Join Kevin Gover, the Director of the National Museum of the American Indian, tomorrow at 6 p.m. for a free talk and reception. Here’s the invitation for more details! You are invited to attend a 6:00 PM public talk and reception on Wednesday, October 9 at the Peabody Museum, “”Changing …
by Tegan Kehoe
This fall, the museum where I work is having an exterior restoration project done, and this means the building will be enveloped by scaffolding with dark mesh covers. The gallery, which is largely lit by natural light, will be considerably dimmer. After a staff meeting that included a lot of joking around about lending out headlamps in admissions, a few of us realized that now would be a great time to create large print exhibit guides, which had been in the back of our minds for a while. I volunteered to spearhead the effort.
I set about looking for resources and examples to make the guides as useful as possible. In doing so, I learned that there are few universally-accepted standards in this area. In addition to making the font large, it is important to print on opaque, non-glossy paper, to minimize special formatting, and to use a clear and readable font, but often, I found I just had to read what many different groups had to say and choose what seemed to make the most sense for this particular project. I wish we had a focus group of testers, but it doesn’t look like that will happen. Continue reading Learning Large Print
Of course, undeniably the story for this week is the fallout from the government shutdown: shuttering museums, historic sites and parks around the country. Although many articles, like this one from the Washington Post, focus on the National Mall, let’s not forget the bigger impact …
Join Historic New England and the Boston Society of Architects for the opening of Boston City Hall: Drawings by Kallman McKinnell and Knowles. The reception will be held next Monday, October 7, at 5:30 p.m. at the BSA Space, 290 Congress Street, Suite 200 in Boston. To …
by columnist Kacie Rice
One of my favorite things to do is when I travel is to see new museums, and I and a friend recently had a chance to visit Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), one of North America’s major natural history and anthropology museums. Founded in 1912, the museum serves over one million visitors a year and acts as Canada’s largest field research institution. ROM has a much more encyclopedic collection than we might expect of a typical natural history museum in the United States, more closely following the European model of the “cabinet of curiosity” than the American system of division between subject areas. In addition to dinosaurs, minerals, stuffed animals, and anthropology collections, the museum also houses arts from around the world and artifacts from Canadian history. The ROM’s collections are almost impossible to visit in a single day: in four hours, we weren’t even able to see half of the permanent exhibits – but what we did see was terrific! Continue reading Museum Review: The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto