The Uncataloged Museum

My Day as a Docent: What Do You Think?

2012-02-09T08:52:00.000-05:00

Last month, guest blogger Tegan Kehoe (above) wrote about her training to become a docent at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the conceptual shift from a history to an art perspective. She's back, to share her experience of her very first docent shift, just a week after the Gardner's grand re-opening. We'd love to hear your perspectives on working directly with visitors--comment away!

My first shift as a volunteer at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was on a Saturday afternoon, just over a week after the historic museum re-opened to debut its new wing. The excited returning visitors and curious new visitors gave the museum an incredible energy. When I arrived, the line to the admissions desk was out the front door.

While all volunteers, new and old, get into the swing of things with the reopening, the museum is asking us to come a half-hour early for a pre-shift meeting. We went over where we would be stationed and other tidbits of useful information. It was a relaxed meeting that helped me learn the names of my fellow volunteers and reassured me that I knew what I was doing.

I spent my first hour of my shift on the second floor of the historic building, surrounded by paintings by the Old Masters, furniture from Renaissance Italy, sculpture from ancient Rome, and more. The Gardner is not an ordinary museum. The art is arranged the way the museum’s founder and patron, Isabella Stewart Gardner, felt the pieces were most inspiring, and very little is labeled. Visitors often need help finding the rack of laminated room guides or determining which guide corresponds with which wall. I was asked a question every few minutes. Excited and nervous, I focused on correctly and helpfully answering visitors’ questions rather than on using the techniques I was trained on. I did ask a few families, “How are you enjoying your visit today?” and that got conversation going, but for the most part, it was busy enough that it seemed both overwhelming and impractical to engaging visitors in deep, thoughtful conversation.

My second hour was in the new wing’s Living Room, a glass-walled space for informal learning, reflection, and discussion. The space is inspired by Mrs. Gardner's tradition of hospitality, and has couches, bookshelves full of books on all topics (although art certainly predominates!), a timeline of the museum's history, a touch-screen panel with more information, and even two birdcages with finches like the one Mrs. Gardner kept. There were two volunteers stationed in the living room, which I liked. I got to know my fellow volunteer, there were enough visitors to keep us both busy, and having two of us meant we had time for have longer, deeper conversations with the visitors.

I spoke with visitors who made the Living Room their first stop and wanted to know what else they should see and how to get there, and also with visitors who had already explored the historic building. My favorite conversation was with a woman who was impressed by the sheer size of the early Renaissance tapestries in the Tapestry Room.

The last hour of my shift, I was in the new special exhibitions area, a spacious, three-story room on the second floor of the new wing. It's a beautiful space, but contemporary art is more hit-or-miss with me than earlier art, and I felt unsure of what to do with myself while greeting visitors there.

At one point, a woman asked me, “Why is the ceiling so high?” I explained that the ceiling was actually adjustable, and for this particular installation, it was at the highest of three possible levels.
“But the art doesn't go nearly that high... there's so much white space,” she said.
“This is an exhibit of an individual artist's work, so it was the decision of the artist,” I said.
After she left, I realized I had missed an opportunity to ask her, “Why do you think she did that?” or, “What do you think about having all that space there?”

Later, another woman asked me, “What was on the artist's mind when she made these sculptures? I read the pamphlet and I still don’t get it.”
“Well, what do they make you think of?” I asked.
“I don't know.” She paused. “What about you?”
We were standing by a drum that had a small painted tile and a handful of bobby pins on its head. I was glad, because it was the only sculpture in the room that evoked something specific for me.
“This one reminds me of doing college theater, with all of the props and supplies mingled together in the green room,” I offered.

Then her husband, who had been looking out of the enormous windows, spoke up. “There was this bar I used to go to, you know, the kind with the dueling pianos. This guy named Eddy was ninety-one, and he had been working there for seventy years. His job was to stand between the pianos with thimbles on his fingers, holding a metal tray with coins on it, and he tapped out the beat like that. I think that's what it would sound like if you hit the drum and the bobby pins bounced.”

“Huh,” said the woman, sounding baffled, but more amused than frustrated “You have the green room, and you have Eddy, but what do I have?”
She looked at me. Her husband moved over to one of the eight foot by ten foot paintings.
“Something to think about between now and your next visit?” I said.
“Yeah, I guess so!”

Did I help that woman feel empowered to form her own opinions about art? I'm not sure. I do think I planted a seed to get her thinking, though, and I know that the three of us had an enjoyable, meaningful conversation.

The Gardner embraces the model of having many volunteers who make a small monthly time commitment. I wouldn't be able to fit it in if they required more each month, but I'm happy to commit to the two years they ask volunteers to stay in the program. I will be working about two shifts a month. After I have gained more experience there, I'll write again to reflect on what I have learned talking about art with the Gardner visitors.

And, related to my last post, check out the Gardner Museum's thoughtful mission statement here.

Images, top to bottom:
Tegan Kehoe in front of the Gardner Museum, by Matt Kamm
Living Room and Gallery by Kidsturk on Flickr
Hallway connector, by Tegan Kehoe

Mission Accomplished?

2012-02-06T09:33:00.001-05:00

How often does your museum staff think about your mission? You know, that thing that says, "the mission of x is to do y?" In the past month, I've visited one museum that totally missed the opportunity to clearly share its mission, talked about mission with a group of small history museum staff and volunteers, and co-written a new mission statement for the Pickle Project. Each of those situations made me really think about why missions matter--and how we can delve deeper into them.

The missed opportunity was at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. When we arrived, we paid admission and then were asked to gather at a desk in the lobby to wait for a staff member to provide an orientation. Okay, fair enough. We stand around, other groups of visitors stand around, we wait for a visitor to come out of the bathroom and have a staff member say, "oh, you're back!" which is sort of a strange way to start a visit. Thus gathered, we're led down the ramp to the lower level. Ah, I think, here's where we'll hear about what tolerance means, or what the museum hopes to do, or what its mission is. Nope! We hear that one exhibit is to the left, one to the right, bathrooms upstairs. After the visit, I went back to the museum's website. It says that the museum is dedicated to challenging visitors to understand the Holocaust in both historic and contemporary contexts and confront all forms of prejudice and discrimination in our world today. Why would you not introduce/reinforce/engage visitors with that powerful idea when they enter your museum? A totally missed opportunity at a place where I expected much more.

At a StEPs-CT training in Connecticut, I asked participants to introduce themselves to the group with their organization's mission statement. Out of the group of 25, I'd say easily half were virtually identical. "Collect, preserve, educate..." "history of x town, Connecticut, the nation" "collect real and personal property" and the long list of activities including historic markers, publications, exhibits, presenting, educating, taking care of historic buildings. Only one or two mentioned the audience in ways other than the phrase, "the general public." The next day, we had a great discussion about those mission statements--about why they're important and not just boiler plate--a discussion greatly helped along by AASLH's StEPs program and its benchmarking checklist. When your mission is the frame for your work, or the sieve through which all your activities must pass, it just makes sense to have a mission that really matters--and to make sure that everyone knows what it is.

Some time ago, Dorothy Chen-Courtin provided workshop participants with a useful way to think about mission--one I've continued to share with others. She encouraged us to keep asking why or so what? Why do you collect things? Because no one else does. So what? Because they're disappearing. So what? The goal is to push, push, push until you really figure out the why--the meaning; who it's for; and what your lasting impact will be. In writing this post I looked at many, many museum mission statements thanks to Google. And I've come to think that "appreciate the history of..." is just not enough. I can appreciate all kinds of things without wanting to make any effort to go any deeper. Is appreciate in your mission statement? Can you make a case for why? And if your organization has a hard time attracting donors or community interest--could it be that your mission just doesn't inspire passion or commitment?

Where are some good models for mission statements? Here's some I particularly like (and thanks to Anne Ackerson of Leading by Design for sharing many of these).

The National Civil Rights Museum, located at the Lorraine Motel, the site of Dr.Martin Luther King's assassination, chronicles key episodes of the Americancivil rights movement and the legacy of this movement to inspire participationin civil and human rights efforts globally, through our collections, exhibitions,and educational programs.
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center¹s mission is to preserve and interpret Harriet Beecher Stowe¹sHartford home and the Center¹s historic collections, create a forum for vibrantdiscussion of her life and work, and inspire individuals to embrace and emulateher commitment to social justice by effecting positive change.
Through its preservation, research andinterpretive initiatives, Historic Cherry Hill focuses on one Albany family’ssearch for order and stability in response to personal and social change,encouraging the public to establish an emotional connection and critical distancein order to gain perspective on their own history and lives.
Themission of the Minnesota Historical Society is to foster among people anawareness of Minnesota history so that they may draw strength and perspectivefrom the past and find purpose for the future.
The Brooklyn Historical Society connects the past to the present and makes the vibrant history of Brooklyn tangible, relevant and meaningful for today's diverse communities, and for generations to come.
In writing mission and vision statements, The Historical Society of Woodstock drew inspiration from that community's rich and varied artistic traditions:
The Historical Society of Woodstock will be the common threadthat brings together the rich and colorful tapestry that is Woodstock. The society then provides a more detailed mission:
The Historical Society of Woodstock shapes our future through ashared understanding of our past. Weaccomplish this by:
.   Creatingengaging programs for all ages
.   Collecting andcaring for our history
.   Encouragingand undertaking research and documentation of our history
.   Making itpossible for all of us to share in our history
The Pacific Science Center has what seems like a sparely worded mission: ...inspires a lifelong interest in science, math and technology by engaging diverse communities through interactive and innovative exhibits and programs. But that mission is accompanied by a passionate vision statement:
We envision communities where children and adults are inspired by science, understand its basic principles and bring their scientific curiosity and knowledge to bear in the world.

From an outside view, all of these mission statements share several common elements. They are passionate. They don't view education as a one-way street. And, I'm guessing, each was the subject of intense discussion and debate during their development. Go back to that science center statement:

Bringing curiousity and knowledge to bear in the world.

A passionate statement of the work of any museum. Heard any good mission statements lately?

Why by markheybo , Questions by Gurdonark both on Flickr.
Museum of Tolerance parking garage and stickers.

Behind the Curtain: What's Driving the Latest Change in Ukrainian Museums?

2012-01-30T22:37:00.000-05:00

Transparency and change: two things I care deeply about in my work with museums. Last week, thse two concepts connected in unexpected ways. Early last week I facilitated StEPs training for a group of Connecticut history museums for the Connecticut Humanities Council and the Connecticut League of Historical Organizations. Then, late last week, and continuing this week, there is the news from Ukraine that the directors of several national museums have been summarily relieved of their duties by the Ministry of Culture and replaced by new directors, none of whom have museum experience. Removed have been the directors of Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, St. Sophia's (both UNESCO World Heritage Sites) the Taras Shevchenko Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and Pyrohiv, the National Museum of Folk Architecture and Life--even more removals are rumored. These are all government museums, but in American terms, picture the removal of the directors of the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art, and Colonial Williamsburg, all at once, with no real explanation.

In the United States, transparency in the age of the Internet has become easier in every way--and the government assists, to some degree, in the process of creating transparent organizations. If I want to know about any non-profit in the United States, I can look up their 990 tax filing on Guidestar. I can see how their money came in, how it came out, how much they have in cash reserves, how much their director is paid, and who their board members are. Our national museums, the Smithsonian, releases its budget information and journalists regularly cover museum issues ranging from deaccessions to fundraising. Our small group in Connecticut talked about the reasons why such transparency is important--and I emphasized the fact that, whether a museum takes grant support or not, the public still supports you--that we operate in the public trust, by virtue of a museum's tax-exempt status. That's a lesson worth remembering no matter how big or small your organization is.

There is no such pattern of transparency in Ukraine.   Unfortunately, Ukraine continues to rank high on the list of Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index and these removals do nothing to dispel concerns that these changes are meant to benefit individuals. The reasons given for the firings are sketchy. Some directors have been accused of financial irregularities, and at other institutions the need for "change" has been promoted--that museums need to find new ways of doing business. And of course, that all these dismissals have happened at once speaks to a larger goal, one that is not visible to the public.

So what about that change?

I'm in full agreement that many museums in Ukraine need changing. And in fact, I headed a team that did an evaluation of one of the above museums in 2010, recommending significant changes. I've seen positive changes in a number of museums each time I return and do everything I can to encourage new ways of thinking. But, and it's a big but, it's entirely unclear, because the process has been sudden, outwardly capricious, and without clear rationales or outcomes, that any change will be for the better. There has been some talk of monetizing collections--selling off the nation's cultural heritage in order to pay debts.   These museums occupy some very valuable real estate in Kyiv--it's entirely possible that inappropriate development will be allowed to take place.   There have been reports of conversations between the Ministry of Culture and a Canadian firm who promises a systematic way to catalog and monetize collections (but who appears to have no museum clients). On January 31, the Minister of Culture will hold a press briefing where, one suspects, more answers will not be forthcoming.

Part of the discussion among museum colleagues in Ukraine has been that these new directors have no museum experience. Ukraine is still a place where experts are highly valued. The track record of directors without museum experience here in the United States is mixed, but there have been successes. It's possible that a new director with a willingness to listen and to learn could create positive changes. But without a clear explanation of why the changes were made and without a commitment to a transparent process in every area of museum operations, I find fear t that the changes will be for the financial benefit of a few, rather than for the benefit of the nation's citizens. New Ukrainian museum directors, please prove me wrong!

A particular thank you to the Ukrainian Center for Museum Development for their work in covering these developments at an extremely challenging time. Keep up the great work!

Updates: The story of Ukrainian museums continues to develop in complicated and not entirely unsurprising ways. The Minister of Culture held a press conference earlier this week in which he didn't do much to clarify things, except in several areas. He said that the collections would not be monetized, would not be used to pay debts or as collateral. Museum colleagues will, I'm sure, continue to be vigilant about this. Evidently the director of the National Art Museum has not been released and at least two of the directors have done interviews or made efforts to be slightly more transparent. The new director at Pyrohiv, Dmitry Zaruba, has invited journalists to visit the museum and has said that all museum employees will be wearing name tags (small progress, but progress!).   The new director of the Shevchenko Museum, Dmitry Stus, the son of poet Vasyl Stus, who died in the gulag at Perm-36 (now a museum) gave an interview where he sets out several thoughtful goals for the museum and appears to be listening to staff, even saying, after three days, he is not ready to decide who is right.

But all that said, it's still unclear about the why for these changes and about how the new directors will be accountable moving forward. Because of course, problems have existed in these museums for decades, with little or no attention from the Ministry of Culture.

Learning to Talk About Art

2012-01-18T20:54:00.003-05:00

Welcome to another guest blogger! Tegan Kehoe is an emerging museum professional who's also a volunteer docent at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as it reopens, with a wonderful new wing, on January 19. This is the first of three posts from Tegan going inside the docent process from learning to doing. As professionals, we spend lots of time talking about docents and what they should/could/might be doing. Here's her inside view.

As a museum professional, Ibelieve that working directly with visitors should be a lifelong practice forme. I had thought for a long time that I might want to volunteer at theIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a small, beautiful Boston institution full ofart from all time periods. Until recently, I had too many other things going onin my life, including being a tour guide at two history museums, but this fall,after starting a desk job, I realized now might be the time. It’s also a veryexciting time to be at the Gardner, because they just completed a new wing,opening to the public on January 19. They recruited a large group of newvolunteers, and I applied just in time. In November and December, I attended aseries of trainings to get oriented to the museum’s story, the collection, andhow to help visitors have a great experience.

While I’m excited to get involved at the Gardner, I’m ahistorian, and there’s a voice in my head asking, “What do I know aboutart?” We aren’t expected to be encyclopedias -- in fact, the mostimportant part of our role is being a friendly, welcoming presence in thegalleries -- but I want to help visitors make meaning of what they see.Thankfully, the Gardner volunteer trainings include a few very useful kernelsof museum education theory.

At the trainings, I was re-introduced to John Falk’s theorythat museum visitors are influenced by their own conception of themselves andtheir reasons for attending a museum. There are Experience Seekers, who want tosee and experience something new, especially a landmark or a well-loveddestination, Facilitators, who bring their children or out-of-town relatives toa museum to give them a good experience, and three other archetypes thatdescribe a visitor’s reason for being there.

I think it’s a very useful way to think about visitors.There is no value judgment in acknowledging that visitors want differentthings. A part of me feels that in an ideal world, every visitor would behungry to learn, learn, learn, and maybe stop and gaze at a painting orartifact in wonder. In reality, it’s not my place to say this is what visitorsshould want, and it’s not always what I want when I’m the visitor. Museums arefor the public, and we do visitors a better service by trying to help them getwhat they want out of the experience. Still, I believe that it’s key to takeadvantage of teachable moments -- just to do it in a way that’s appropriate forthe individual.

Another of the trainings introduced us to Visual ThinkingStrategies, an art education tool that uses questions. To demonstrate theprocess, a Gardner staff member showed us an image of a painting not in themuseum’s collection, and asked us, “What’s going on in this picture?” A man satat an office desk reading some papers, while a woman stood at the filingcabinet. Several people noted that something in the room seemed not quiteright. Our leader asked, “What do you see that makes you say that?” and a youngwoman said the walls were oddly blank, as if the office’s occupants were notreally settled there. An older woman replied that she didn’t find the blankwalls odd at all, given the time period of the piece. As the leader asked,“What more can we find?” we went deeper into the mood of the room. We allagreed it was nighttime. I saw that we seemed to be looking down from above, aswe could see the top of the door frame and the cabinet and the top of thefigures’ heads. It gave a feeling of distance from the subjects.

As we talked, I was surprised to realize I kept waiting forthe “reveal” moment, when we would be told the work’s title, year, and painter.It wasn’t coming.* VTS is about affirming the viewer’s ability to have ahigh-quality experience with the art, and meaningful ideas about it, whether ornot they know anything about it. The system is designed for classes, ratherthan informal interactions, and volunteers aren’t asked to practice VTSstrictly, just to use it as a guide. I like this model, because I think it willhelp me engage with visitors. Before I know much about the collection, it willgive me something to say, and later on, it will save me from the temptation tojust rattle off my favorite facts about a work. Still, I wonder how I will doat keeping Visual Thinking Strategies in mind when I volunteer. Will it feelawkward? Formulaic? Or will it blend seamlessly with asking visitors how theyare enjoying the Gardner?

While I think I’ll start out a little out of my comfortzone, it helps to think about the whole visitor experience, not just whatknowledge I can impart. I’m really excited to do this. I feel privileged tobecome a part of a team that sets high standards for itself with regard tovisitor experience. It is said that Gardner arranged the pieces with theintention of inspiring the viewer, and I expect to be repeatedly inspired. Ihope that over time, I will continually build my skills at helping to sharethis inspiration with museum guests.

My first shift will be on Sunday afternoon after the debutof the new wing. I will be posting again to let you all know how it goes!

*For your gratification, if you’re feeling the same way Iwas, it was Edward Hopper’s 1940 painting Office at Night. I laterlooked it up online.

Tegan Kehoe is a Boston-based emerging museum professional andhistorian, whose many professional interests include free-choice learning,nonprofit management, and local history. Her own blog, Cambridge Considered, [cambridgeconsidered.blogspot.com]covers the history of Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is also thesometimes-leader of a nascent Stitch and Bitch (knitting and other crafts club)for history and museum professionals in the Boston area.

Top: Banner outside the Gardner Museum by Dave Gilbert eye2eye on Flickr
Bottom: Office at Night, Edward Hopper

Learning While Leaving: Unexpected Lessons on the Way Out the Door

2012-01-16T14:46:00.000-05:00

Late last year I invited readers to become writers--to consider writing as a guest blogger here at the Uncataloged Museum. I was thrilled to have several people take me up on that offer--and very excited to share this post from Leslie Kesler (read more about her at the end of the post). In this and upcoming posts Leslie provides food for thought from an important vantage point that's facing many colleagues these days. Thanks Leslie!

On December 1, I learned that my job, historian and curatorat a local history museum and historic house, was being eliminated. Like manyother non-profit organizations, our museum had experienced a pattern ofrevenues lagging behind expenses. Faced with an unsustainable trend and a dutyto ensure long-term survival, trustees determined the time had come to makedeep cuts, cuts that would include eliminating more than half of staff positions.

It is hardly a unique story. I have several museumcolleagues who've been through a variation on this scenario and you probablydo, too. Stories others had shared, including at sites like Blue Avocado,were both helpful and comforting as I navigated through shock, grief, andconfusion.

At my museum, the decision had been made to implementlayoffs with a month's notice, a choice for which I am sincerely thankful.Everyone responds differently, but for me it was therapeutic to be part ofwrapping up my projects. I felt that I was a still a trusted (albeitshort-term) member of the team, and that what I did would make a difference,two things gave me a much-needed short term focus.

Surprisingly, wrapping things up turned out to be a learningexperience. Closing down my job gave me more insight into my strengths andweaknesses than any formal performance review I've ever had. It illuminatedsome of the unconscious choices I'd made in doing my job and showed me theirramifications. More than once, I found myself making mental notes for thefuture. “Okay,” I'd mutter to myself, standing in the chaos of a half-packedoffice, “Next time, please remember . . . “

To set and stick to priorities, ruthlessly

I'd been trying to do too much and part of me knew it. Butit was easy to get caught up in the moment and convince myself that everythingwas critical, or that taking on just this one more little thing really wouldmake a difference. It was easy, that is, until I had only a few finite weeks oftime left to spend. Then it was very clear to me which tasks were the best useof my time and which ones I should drop, without second-guessing or guilt. Ibegan to wonder how I could train myself to maintain that kind of decisivefocus over the long haul.

To cultivate better digital housekeeping habits

My system works great . . . for me. But my desire to handprojects off quickly, in apple pie order, was quickly foiled by the need tocull hundreds of old e-mails about daily project minutia, purge outdated draftsof documents, and rename folders whose contents had strayed far from theiroriginal label. I talk a good game about keeping orderly records that any teammember can step in and use in an emergency. But I wasn't living up to thatideal, at least in the digital realm.

To always prioritize work on critical documents

Here's one place we got to pat ourselves on the back. I losttrack of the number of briefing notes I wrote that included “consult therecently-updated collections policy for details.” I marveled at how quickly ourteam regrouped and set priorities, something I attribute partly to timeinvested in disaster planning. No, we didn't have a plan for major staff layoffs.But we did have practice at thinking through scenarios of sudden change,identifying likely impacts, and making decisions about how to mitigate them.I'm convinced it made a difference.

The true potential of the work blitz

Once we had a plan, our collections team set to work on thetop priorities. Some of the things we tackled had long been on our “someday weought to . . .” list. Without the prospect of a future someday in which to dothings perfectly, we forged ahead with the best imperfect solutions we coulddevise. In the end, we accomplished an amazing amount, including fixing someinherited situations that we'd worked around for years. Just about every placeI've ever worked has declared occasional “work days” when everyone puts asidedaily tasks for an all-out effort of some sort, usually focused aroundcleaning. What if we declared a different kind of blitz? What if the questionwas what can we do together in one day, or one week, to address our toppriority issues now?

The hidden costs of feeling overwhelmed

A funny thing happened on the path to my last day. I keptthinking of things that I wanted to do, or try, or read, in January. So manythings, in fact, that I had to start an actual list. Quite a few were relatedto skills I used in my job. Many were things I'd already considered, despairedof shoe-horning into my schedule, and started feeling vaguely guilty anddefensive about not managing to accomplish. Now, all of a sudden, they soundedlike fun again. Suddenly and viscerally, I understood that my pattern of tryingto do too much hadn't just dulled my efficiency. It had also taken the edge offmy zest for experimenting and learning new things, potentially depriving me ofboth joy and some useful new skills.

Two weeks post-job, I'm still not sure precisely where I'mheaded next. Someday, I hope to again have a job very much like the one I justleft. It's what I love to do, and I'm good at it. I'll be even better nexttime, if I can hang onto the lessons I learned on the way out the door.

What about you? What have you learned from unexpected twistsin your career?

In her twenty years as a public historian, Leslie Kesler has worked variously as a frontline interpreter, education manager, curator, and staff historian for museums in the southeastern U.S. Most recently, she was historian and curator at a local history museum and historic house in the North Carolina town where she grew up. In addition to history and museums, she enjoys running, baking, and books, with a particular fondness for mystery novels.

Top: Creative Commons licensed photo by flickr user Maker Mama

Bottom: Creative Commons licensed photo by flickr user greg.turner

Dropping in at the Getty

2012-01-12T10:35:00.000-05:00

My last post about what any museum can learn from the Getty has drawn lots of attention (and thanks to all who retweeted and shared it). So I wanted to share another experience from my visit there because I think, in one small space, it exemplified the museum's thoughtful approach--and again, it's something that almost any museum could do, scaled to fit your own circumstances.

As I walked down a hallway, I saw a sign that said Sketching Gallery--and as I approached, there was a buzz of activity. It's a small gallery, filled with art (real art, not reproductions), tables, drawing horses, and people. That's what struck me at first--it was a group of people that was so diverse in terms of age, gender, ethnicity--everything! And everyone had their pad of paper and pencils--eagerly ready.

At the front of the room stood a white-haired man and a younger man (who exuded a lovely kind of calm) sitting on a stool. This was a life drawing drop-in class. No experience needed. Some people had started drawing, others were awaiting instruction. More people continued to squeeze into the room and the education staff greeted everyone, provided supplies, and encouraged them to find a space--on the floor, on a chair, wherever.

An educator provided a brief introduction--drop in life drawing, every Thursday in January, come to one or all, and here's the instructor. The instructor was great--because rather than beginning with a lecture about life drawing, he had everyone jump right in--start drawing, he said! And everyone, of all different abilities, began. And he began circulating the room, asking to sit where participants were seeing so he could see the model from their perspective. All of a sudden, surrounded by art, the room grew quiet as participants really looked and drew.

I didn't stay for the full hour, but also took some time to look at the interpretive labels around the room and chat a minute with the educators. The sketching gallery is always open and so these labels provide context--explaining the great classical tradition of sketching from great works of art--and provide tips on looking and thinking.

You can read more about the Sketching Gallery here. But the description--and I'm afraid this blog post--doesn't quite convey the spirit of the place which was fun without being silly, serious without being formal, planned without being overly directive, and reflective without being way too quiet.

Although not every museum has a Rubens to exhibit, we all do have beautiful, interesting or fascinating objects. And we could all create ways--and spaces-- for our visitors, no matter what age or interest, to look deeply, try something new, and enjoy themselves.

Five Things Any Museum Can Learn from One of the Big Guys

2012-01-09T14:17:00.000-05:00

Last week I was in Los Angeles and took the opportunity to visit the Getty Museum. I'd never been before and from the long view, it's a place that you imagine being pronounced THE GETTY, in a deep, sonorous voice, that has more money, more everything, than anywhere else. I imagined it as sort of snooty. And to my delight, I was totally wrong. It is a fantastic setting and few of us have a building designed by Richard Meier and gardens designed by Robert Irwin. Plus, now that I'm back in gray upstate New York, I equally appreciate the sunny setting that few of us have as well!

But the Getty Museum had five aspects that any museum, no matter what your size or discipline, can and should emulate.

1. Be Friendly Above, as a family was going through the galleries and a young boy stopped to look at a sculpture, a guard stepped forward, smiling, and told the classical myth about the piece. Being friendly also extends to spaces. In the center courtyard, there's plenty of tables, welcoming both to those who chose to buy food and to those who bring a picnic lunch. The Getty's free, but parking is $15, so it means that only $15 could provide a whole day's outing for a family. A great, friendly deal.

The gardens are manicured to a T so I imagined it might be the kind of place where you couldn't even walk on the lawn. Instead, Frisbee players, readers, loungers, plant lovers, photographers, kids, adults, all felt welcomed to enjoy the spaces.

Visitors could photograph everywhere except in the temporary exhibitions. In several other LA museum visits, photography was forbidden even in permanent galleries with few objects. At one museum, when I asked why, I got a shrug and a "well, they say so," from the front desk staff. Not friendly (and hence, why you won't be seeing those museums here.)

This friendliness, the feeling of being welcomed, didn't feel phoney, but it obviously was something that was reinforced by museum leaders.

2. Offer Choices The audio tour offered plenty of choices: a highlights tour, a tour featuring food in art, tours by time periods, tours for families. And even within an audio clip itself choices were offered. As I listened to a curator talk about one piece, it ended with, "and if you want to hear more about the reaction to the piece from the artist, press 5." It made me more curious about hearing more--a sense of what's next, rather than just a longer audio to listen to. There were lots of other choices as well--indoors/outdoors; self guided/guided tours; drop-in programs; and more.

3. Write Great Labels In particular, the labels in the Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in LA Painting and Sculpture and the Lyonel Feininger temporary exhibits were terrific. No pictures allowed in these temporary exhibits and I didn't take notes, but my memory of these is that they were each different in feel, but eminently readable. The Pacific Standard Time ones were sort of muscular, with lots of active words and a real sense of the power and experimentation of the time period. The Feininger ones were quieter, and took the visitor through a life filled with art--but also with family and colleagues. They were more like having a quiet conversation. And both seemed blessedly free of the sort of art history jargon all too often found in art museum labels. There were also additional materials that provided great starting places to think about art, as in this looking at photographs piece.

4. Be Fun Because the setting is so spectacular it did seem a place where people really relaxed. It's not the crazy fun of a children's museum, but a place that's really enjoyable--for all kinds of people (and another note--one of the most diverse audiences I've seen in a long time). The family room was creative and fun. In a very small space, they took five works of art and created activities around them, It worked for many different kinds of learners, from kinesthetic to verbal and everyone seemed to be having a great time. In another post I'll talk about their Sketching Gallery, an entirely different kind of fun. The large-scale sculptures really encouraged fun exploration outdoors as well. The images below show the family fun space that relates to the sculpture below it.

5. It's in the Details It's pretty sunny at the Getty and this bin of umbrellas below highlights their attention to details (although I have to admit, I thought they were for rainy weather until I saw a tour group sheltered underneath them).

This attention to details extends to signage, to the organization of school group clipboards, to the nametags saying "educator" that are given to teachers with school groups. It feels like every day, someone thinks about how the museum looks to the visitor. But what was interesting, that attention to details doesn't feel stiff and formal, but rather welcoming. A favorite small detail: the informality of this removed from exhibit card just tucked into the label.

Obviously, the Getty has significant resources to bring to bear on these five items. But at any museum, we can pay more attention to them. We can welcome visitors, we can make sure our signage makes sense, we can have more fun, we can write great labels, and we can pay attention to the small things that make a big impression on our visitors.

And one more: Appeal to our better natures
As we waited to take the tram back down, a sign invited us to take an online survey. All of us have seen them, and survey takers usually have a chance to win a membership or something of value to them. This turned that aspect on its head. For every visitor taking the survey, the museum would donate $10 to Inner City Arts. I felt great helping! What if you said for each survey taken, you would offer free admission to a family? How else can we get people to think about the largest aspects of community, not just themselves?

As we were leaving, I glanced at a small plaque near a bust of J. Paul Getty himself, where it notes that the museum has been dedicated to "delighting and educating its visitors." You sure did!

Ask More? Ask More!

2011-12-31T11:00:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about writing an end-of-year post for more than a week as I read other reflections, advice, what-ifs and to-dos. But I realized that thanks to my great group of planning colleagues, I've been doing that kind of reflection for several months. So no top ten list from me. But just this morning, thanks to Anne Ackerson who blogs over at Leading by Design, I read The Bamboo Project's list of six 21st century skills you really need.

It's a great list--but I really focused in on one skill for me to work on 2012. It's #2--Asking more questions. For me, it really relates to all the other skills. Asking hard questions of myself can make me more self-aware; questioning can help lead to empathetic listening; question asking can lead to authentic conversations; it can lead to reflection; and question asking can help take me outside of conversations with people just like myself.

So what kinds of work-related questions do I want to ask in the coming year? Here's just a few...

For myself:

What new skills can I learn?
How can I stretch my own skills further?
How can I continue to encourage or mentor others?
What contribution can I make to diversifying our field?
How can I better organize my time? (as, sadly, I have realized that the prettiest new file folders aren't the answer)
Where in the world could I go next?

For potential new clients:

Do you want real change?
How can we be most effective working together?
What do you want me to bring to the table?
How have you asked questions of your audiences? What have you done with the answers?
Do you have fun when you work?

For audiences and potential audiences:

How can museums make themselves into real places for deep listening, reflection, conversations, and interactivity?
What would make you pay a visit? What keeps you away?
What community stories are we not telling? Can you help us with that?

For museums I visit:

Do you really need that no photography rule?

For readers of this blog: (that's you!)

What do you want to read more about?
What blogs do you want to make sure I read? Who should I make sure to follow on Twitter?
Have you liked the Uncataloged Museum on Facebook yet?

When I began this blog four years ago (four years ago!) I thought about it as a place to raise questions, to share ideas, and to learn from all of you. Those same motivations still continue for me--and I'm very interested in working with those of you who share a commitment to active questioning and listening. So please be in touch if you have a project in mind.

So let's raise our glasses to a question-filled 2012!

Images, top to bottom
dullhunk on flickr
fffound.com
slainte74 on flickr

Got Something to Say? This Space Available

2011-12-18T19:26:00.000-05:00

As the end of the year closes in, I'm thinking about both the past and the year to come. As I think about the past year, I realize how many voices I value. Some of them are the ones close to me--Drew, Anna (above) and the rest of my lively family; my strategic planning colleagues; Sarah Crow, my Pickle Project partner; my walking partner Anne; and the clients who dig deep and commit to thinking about new ways of doing things.

My Ukrainian colleagues and friends (for example, Ihor and Tania Poshyvailo, above) continue to be sources of inspiration as they work to remake their institutions or create new organizations against pretty some pretty incredible odds. Some of the voices I value are just people I meet along the way. I love the process of talking to museum visitors and potential visitors, something I just did last week in Canandaigua, NY. Every museum should do more of it. Some of the voices are the ones implicit in exhibits--from Ukraine to Iceland to here in the US--when an exhibit works, it's a delightful place to be.

Our Pickle Project Conversations this fall showed me that building a space for free and open conversations can be a critical part of creating a civil society. I'm always thrilled by the willingness of everyday people to share their thoughts on what we're trying to do from 18th century western New York to making manti in Crimea. At several conferences this year I've found myself having memorable conversations with someone entirely new (a great lesson about approaching strangers at these things). And conference session participants have been lively and thoughtful.

Then of course, there are those bloggers: Nina Simon as she takes on a new challenge; Anne Ackerson; Jasper Visser; newbie blogger Gretchen Jennings; Beth Merritt ever considering the future; Susie Wilkening and many others. This year there's also the voices of the people I follow on Twitter, from near and far, as they make me think, lead me to new ideas, and make me laugh, all in 140 characters or less.

For a long time when I wrote this blog, I felt like no one was reading--so the voices of those who comment are especially valued and I'm always happy to see a comment pop-up. Keep up the great work, you commenters.

But I want to hear more of your voices. In the coming year, I hope to feature guest bloggers here at the Uncataloged Museum. Have you read a great book that connects to your work, seen a compelling exhibit, or just need space to try out a new idea? I'm particularly interested in featuring colleagues from outside the United States--so as your new year approaches, consider joining me here. I look forward to many more lively conversations in the coming months.

I Wish I'd Known....

2011-12-08T17:33:00.001-05:00

What do you wish you knew when you started your first museum job? This week, I began a new project with the Connecticut Humanities Council and the Connecticut League of History Organizations, facilitating a series of workshops as part of the new StEPs CT program which uses AASLH's StEPs program, combined with active mentoring and training, to help 20 plus organizations in the state move forward.

My meeting this week was with a talented group of project mentors, who bring, in total, decades worth of experience to the table. To get to know each other better, we began by talking about what we wish we knew when we began our first museum jobs. Here's what we shared:

That what I learned as a camp counselor would be far more useful than what I learned in graduate school.
That I could temper my expectations and be more realistic.
No matter how good the programming or exhibits, all the board cares about is the bottom line.
Customer service never ends. Every time the phone rings you have to be on your A+ behavior.
That all institutions are so different from each other.
That when you come to work in an institution, there's a whole host of existing relationships that you can only guess at.
I have to be me--not what others expect.

What do you wish you knew when you began your museum career? Let's hear it!

Photo by elycefeliz on Flickr

Do You Need Every Single Thing?

2011-11-26T16:00:00.000-05:00

Often when conversations about new museum initiatives comeup, the reason for inaction isthat there’s too much to do and not enough funding. I won’t argue with the fact that right now is a reallystressful financial time for every organization, but I do want to propose thatperhaps, local history museums own too many meaningless objects--and that paying attention to meaningful objects will give us more time, more money, and more connections to our community. After all, consider the BBC/British Museum collaborative project, A History of the World in 100 Objects, a connection my colleague Christopher Clarke made at the WNYAHA meeting last month at the same time I was working my way through the BBC audio.

A couple months ago, I was working on a planning report fora museum looking to be more targeted about their contemporary collectingefforts. A tweet looking for othermodels sent me to the McLean County (Illinois) County Historical Society andSusan Hartzhold, their curator, was good enough to chat with me about theirefforts.

This historical society is an old one, founded in 1892, anda relatively large one, with 9full-time staffers. Whencollecting started, in 1892, allthe objects were collected with provenance—a way of enhancing and reinforcing asort of ancestor worship, I suspect. Susan’s been on staff for 20 years and she describes theissue as “stuff vs. meaningful stuff.” As an organization, they were facing decades of collecting from curatorswho, for whatever reason, didn’t ask the questions that would provide thecontext for the object.

Some historical societies and museums might just shrug theircollective shoulders at that issue—but McLean County chose anotherdirection. For the last ten years,the staff has gone back and looked at every single object, trying to find, through research, what meanings there are for each object—whoowned, who used it, how itcompares to others. Theyhave looked at 18000 objects and deaccessioned 6000 of them.

There was not a collecting policy until the 1970s and now,Susan says, they have become, as a staff, hard-nosed about the collections theyhold. They have gotten rid ofthings that qualify as a “cabinet of curiousities,” had no provenance or were in poor condition. They have established benchmarks (i.e.limitations on the number of something—like wedding dresses from the sameperiod) and objects with provenance always trump objects with no provenance.

It’s taken ten years and is part of a larger strategic plan—butwhat’s equally important, the size of the collection still stands at 18,000because the society has continued to collect, but have been much more focusedand strategic in their collecting.

What is that new collecting like?

Much of it has happened through partnerships with communityorganizations. A local BlackHistory Project grew from a teachers’ project and the museum became arepository for materials that were collected documenting the African Americancommunity in the county.

There is an active South Asian community and the museumworked for five years to more fully engage with them—a task that was helpedsubstantially by bringing in a traveling exhibit on Asian Games and invitinggroups to support the exhibit. Butthe engagement didn’t end with the traveling exhibit, the museum continues towork with the South Asian community.

There is a growing Hispanic community in the county and themuseum has begun efforts to engage with it. Susan admits that it’s a challenging effort as the museum islocated in a courthouse, which makes many new immigrants fearful. They arecurrently working towards a partnership with a community’s Hispanic group todevelop programming for an upcoming exhibit about traditional Mexicanarts.

Susan makes the point that these community efforts take along time, take patience. She says, “We have to go to them, we have to say, what can we do foryou?’

And that’s a great take-away from this story. Collecting and caring for collectionsis a time-consuming process—but a wasted one unless we really approach theprocess in a thoughtful way—both in terms of what we have and in terms of howwe engage with our communities today.

Images and captions courtesy of the McLean County Historical Society, and many thanks to Susan for taking time to share her work.

Top:

The nightgown wasdonated by a local woman, Jean, who was born in 1916. When asked aboutthe nightgown, Jean had a wonderful story -- She said that she was surprised bythe gift, that it really wasn't her style. She felt that her husband hadpurchased it for one of two reasons:

1) He didn't knowwhat to get her, so he let a sales clerk in the lingerie department at thelocal department store "convince him that it was exactly what shewanted." During that time period lingerie departments always hadfemale sales clerks who helped both male and female customers. It wasn'tunusual for clerks to help male customers pick out gifts for their wives orgirlfriends.

2) "He'd seenway too many Jean Harlow movies"

Jean said she onlywore the nightgown once, but the story and the nightgown tells us so muchabout the culture of the time period.

Bottom:

The pottery wasbrought to America by the Alvarez's family; purchased in Zacatecas,Mexico. The donor’s father came to Bloomington in 1972, her mother and 2 brothersfollowed in 1974. She joined them in 1975. Her parents returned toMexico in 1995, but the rest of the family stayed.

You Can Help Preserve an Endangered Culture

2011-11-21T16:42:00.001-05:00

In 2010, Peace Corps volunteer Barb Wieser found me through this blog, and we've since had the opportunity to get to know each other in person. I've visited her in Crimea and had the chance to learn about the Crimean Tatar people's complex, rich history and her work at the Gasprinsky Library (and to learn how to make manti with her wonderful neighbors!) Barb's now working to raise funds to assist the library in its preservation work and I wanted to share her story with Uncataloged Museum readers. It's easy to make a contribution--and I hope you can join me in supporting the work of the library. Here's her story:

I am a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer and have been serving at theGasprinsky Crimean Tatar Library in Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine for over twoyears.

A little background onmy site: The Gasprinsky Crimean Tatar Library was founded twenty years ago whenthe Crimean Tatar people began to return to their homeland of Crimea from whichthey were forcibly deported by Stalin fifty years earlier (an action in which46% of the population died and has since been labeled a genocide). Living inexile in distant Soviet republics, the Crimean Tatars were forbidden, like many other ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, to teachtheir language or practice the traditions of their culture. As a result, by thetime people were allowed to return to Crimea and reestablish their communities, after the breakup of the USSR,much of the culture was lost and the language had become endangered. TheGasprinsky Library was founded to preserve, protect, and revitalize the CrimeanTatar culture and language; to be, as my counterpart at the Library soeloquently puts it, “the keeper of the memory of the Crimean Tatar people.”

However, like many cultural institutions that are a part of the Ukrainian government, the Library suffers from a severe lackof funds to do anything beyond building maintenance and salaries (the averagesalary for a librarian in Ukraine is only about $200 a month). Many of the documents of the library are in urgent need ofpreservation, particularly in a digital form that would give them a much wideraudience.

The Peace Corps givesVolunteers the opportunity to do fundraising in the U.S. with their PartnershipProgram in which people can make a tax exempt donation to support a Volunteer’sproject. With this Partnership project, we hope to raise $3000 which wouldallow the Library to purchase a small flatbed paper scanner for the numerousarchival paper documents—letters, unpublished manuscripts and other donatedpapers—and also to purchase digital scans of some of the library’s old microfilms.The Library is particularly interested in purchasing scansof the microfilms of the newspaper Terdzhman,published from 1883 to 1918 by the Muslim educator and reformer IsmailGasprinsky, whom the library is named after. Perhaps no other document is sovital to understanding the culture and history of the Crimean Tatar people thanIsmail Gasprinsky’s newspaper, but currently access to it is limited to a veryfew people.

The Crimean Tatars are a unique Muslim peoplewith a vibrant, tragic history. The Gasprinsky Library, the de facto cultural center ofthe Crimean Tatar people, has struggled hard to preserve the language andculture of their people. By makinga donation to this project, you can aid in that struggle. Thank you so much foryour support.

Photos top to bottom:

Many of the library’simportant original documents are in a state of disrepair.

Billboard inSimferopol marking the anniversary of the day the Crimean Tatars were deported(May 18, 1944)

Many Crimean Tatarwriters, political leaders, intellectuals, and artists have donated theirpapers to the Gasprinsky Library.

The Gasprinsky CrimeanTatar Library, located in the city center of Simferopol, the capitol of theAutonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine. The Library is a historic building thatwas the site of a madrasah (Islamic school) in the 18^th and 19^thcenturies.

Take the Ten Word Story Challenge!

2011-11-18T09:01:00.001-05:00

At yesterday's AASLH webinar on storytelling, I invited participants a ten word story challenge as a way of using our imaginations about the historic spaces that we share with our visitors. What's a ten word story challenge? At some point, it's said that Ernest Hemingway was challenged by a friend to write a story in ten words--he responded with a story in only six. His story?

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Many of the participants in the webinar had wonderful responses when I asked them for a ten word story about the image shown at the top of this post. The responses had a sense of drama, of excitement, that is often not found in historic house interpretation. Here are just a few of the responses:

Thedog passed, the lamp went dark. No one ever ate in this room again.
Answered an ad to go to the prairie as a bride.

The house is still; mourners are in the parlour.
Mother left. The children found her dog.
Yikes! Empty space on wall! Out looking for another picture.
Awoke. Snuck off. Had fun. With who?

A quiet man had lunch.

After the earthquake thelamp eventually stopped swinging.

Thelight was lit, they led them into the hall.

Take the challenge--what's your story of this place?

What Makes a Museum Exhibit Sociable?

2011-11-13T12:28:00.001-05:00

The vast majority of us visit museums with other people--but many museums are just beginning to consider that sociability within the exhibit development and design process. Maria Mingalone of the Berkshire Museum and I are presenting a session this week at the New England Museum Association conference where we hope to talk with participants about designing exhibits for social experiences. Is it the concept? the design? do we think too much about just interactions for families and not enough for adult visitors? Are there exhibit elements that automatically make an exhibit sociable or unsociable? (For an important take on this, take a look at Kathy McLean's new book, The Convivial Museum.)

But for our session, we'd love to hear from you in advance of our presentation about what you think. Please share your stories (or pictures) of exhibits that encouraged or discouraged social interactions. What works for your organization? What pitfalls have you overcome? and are there unwritten rules about social interactions at your museum. Do tell!

Sociable museum activities happen anywhere.
Top to bottom: MassMoca, photo by Drew Harty; American Museum of Natural History, and the Rijksmuseum.

Want to Be a Museum Director? Evidently, Be a Man

2011-11-03T12:56:00.002-04:00

This is just a quick post that I hope stimulates an organization or individual to do considerably more research--and, I hope encourages feedback and comments. On Facebook, I like the Art Museum Partnership as they post interesting news, including appointments of new directors at larger museums. I realized that it seemed like almost every face that popped up in the announcement of a new director was a male; a white male.

And I thought really? So I went back through their FB announcements to the beginning (mid-August of this year). And here's what I found. Of the 15 directors named, only 4 were women, just 26%. Two of those four positions were at university art museums, which may suggest a different process than a board hiring process undertaken by stand-alone museums. Admittedly, this is a highly unscientific survey, but revealing nonetheless.

Certainly, as anyone who's ever attended a museum conference can attest, this is a field filled with women. Why so few women museum directors? What do we know about the make-up of boards--are they mostly male? What is it that boards think male directors can do better? And as a field, why don't we make more noise about this? Funny how future of museums seems an awfully lot like the museums of the past.

Miners and More Miners

2011-10-24T07:44:00.000-04:00

As part of the Pickle Project's grand tour of Ukraine this month, Caleb Zigas of La Cocina and I spent a couple days in Donetsk, in far eastern Ukraine. Donetsk is the center of the Donbass region, where coal mining and metallurgy are the most important industries. On my last visit to Donetsk, I wrote about the idea of superfans, based on an outdoor exhibit created by the Shakhtar football team. This time, I was impressed by the idea that Donetsk has chosen to highlight the things that make it different than any other tourist place, not the same. The city is not a place much visited for tourism by either Ukrainians or westerners (in fact, we got more than one raised eyebrow when we said we were going there). But, it's one site of the upcoming Euro 2012 football (soccer for US readers) championship. Donetsk is about mining. Two exhibits, both about miners, both different, both compelling.

At Izolyatsia, a new cultural center located in a complex of industrial buildings outside of the city center, the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang worked with the organization's staff, miners, and volunteers to create an installation featuring large-scale portraits of miners installed in a huge space, filled with both salt and coal. The artist actually went down into the coal miners, to experience what the men do in this dirty, hard, business. Local realist artists were then asked to create portraits of workers as they came up out of the mines, dirty and tired at the end of the shift. With the help of volunteers, and with audiences watching, Cai Guo-Qiang then converted those sketches into large-scale stencils, blown into black and white portraits by the controlled explosion of gunpowder. These large portraits were then mounted in a manner similar to that used to carry portraits of leaders in Soviet times, and installed upon huge heaps of salt and coal.

It was a really cold rainy day when we went--on a day when it was not officially open (thanks izolyatsia and Eko Art for the arrangements.) It's hard to describe what it's like to scurry inside from the wind and rain, underneath the slag heaps, to see these gigantic portraits of everyday people. They are not the abstracted portraits seen in Soviet propaganda, but really people, tired, perhaps worried about their families and their jobs. They made Donetsk seem really to me--the part that most people never see. Standing there looking at the portraits brought both tears and respect to my eyes. And I think it's tremendously important that this organization has chosen to focus on the ways in which contemporary art can illuminate and inform the history of a place. I can't wait to see what they do next.

Very different is the Shakhtar Museum at the new, enormous stadium built by Donetsk billionare Rinat Akhemetov, where the soccer team Shakhtar (the miners) plays. This isn't a place where you go to learn the history of Soviet sport, or to fully understand the global, commercial nature of today's worldwide soccer. It's a fan's place--but within that context, they also do an interesting job of engaging visitors. On the one hand, it's a straightforward narrative of team history, but several elements make it fun, and certainly different than your average Ukrainian museum.

There's a movie of past team highlights projected on fog; and then you're invited to walk through the fog and see the future of Shakhtar--sort of a neat visual trick. Players' feet (and goalies' hands) are presented as cast metal molds--a nod to the team's industrial heritage. A projected football field and ball that you could kick meant that immediately, people who didn't know each other could participate--all of a sudden I looked up, and Caleb was kicking the ball back and forth with a total stranger. And, by the way, an enormous giftshop with everything from soccer gear to Shakhtar air-fresheners.

At various points in my career I've gone to heritage tourism meetings where it seems like the conversation about how to make a place special are just like the ways that every other community. We have old buildings! There were settlers! Some of those things that make communities different are challenging to acknowledge because they represent a difficult past. There's no question that Donetsk's mining life is a hard story to tell, and these projects certainly don't tell a comprehensive story, but both of them help visitors understand a bit about what Donetsk is, and how it came to be.

Why Am I Thinking About Food?

2011-10-12T03:07:00.002-04:00

All of a sudden, it seems, the museum world is thinking more about food. I don't just mean thinking about what to serve in your cafe, but about what food means, if a museum can should have a farmers' market or a community garden, how food connects to the "Let's Move"initiative, and much more. It's been interesting to me as, at the same time, my own interest in food has grown as a result of the Pickle Project, an effort I co-founded with Sarah Crow to explore, understand and share the food traditions of the complicated place that is today's Ukraine.

So although I wish I could be at the Feeding the Spirit Symposium sponsored by AAM and other organizations, this week I'm headed back to Ukraine with Sarah, Caleb Zigas of La Cocina in San Francisco and Rueben Nilsson of Faribault Dairy in Minnesota for a series of four community conversations, in four different Ukrainian cities, about food.

The juxtapositions between American food and Ukrainian food are sometimes startling. Most Ukrainian villagers grow their own food; but their city grandchildren rarely cook. Ukraine has some of the most fertile soil in the world, yet much farming is scarcely above a subsistence level. The country's difficult history, with times of great hunger, mean that Ukrainian cooks, growers and eaters are resourceful in ways most Americans have forgotten.

This summer I've spoken about the Pickle Project to a couple American audiences, who are full of questions about food safety, about sustainability, and about a country that most people only identify with in terms of Chernobyl or painted eggs. We have much to learn and share with each other.

This isn't a museum project, but we hope that a traveling exhibition emerges from our work. We've been interested in how many colleagues have said, "You just started a project?!" Perhaps that's what the museum field needs more of--projects that don't necessarily have a final product, but spring from a passionate interest in connecting. But that's a subject for another post.

For now, however, thanks to support from the Trust for Mutual Understanding and our community partners in Ukraine, these conversations will be the next steps. If you're in Kyiv, Donetsk, Odessa, or L'viv over the next couple weeks, we'd love to see you at a conversation--check out the Pickle Project blog for the dates and locations, or find us on Facebook--to keep up with the conversations from afar.

Seen Led Zeppelin at Your Museum Lately?

2011-10-03T09:58:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, in the tiny Westman Islands off the coast of Iceland I turned a corner in the local history museum in the fishing village of Heimaey and saw this poster of Led Zeppelin. I walked a little further and saw Muhammad Ali, Farah Fawcett and a beer bottle or two. Definitely things I had never seen in a local history museum before, so I made a special effort to discover what I was looking at. Literally, it stopped me in my tracks because I had never seen a period room installation like this:

This local history museum, the Byggdasafn Folk Museum, has much amazing history to tell. The story of why it's called the Westman Islands (Irish slaves escaping from their Norse captors); the invasion of Algerian pirates from the Barbery Coast; the conversion and immigration of hundreds of Mormons; and last but not least, the 1973 volcano eruption that covered the island in volcanic ash. So why Led Zeppelin?

This museum chose to tell a story about all the kinds of people who live and work here--up to the present day. This re-created space is a dorm room lived in by men who came to work in the fish factories in the 1970s and 1980s. At first when I thought about this exhibit--which also has a great label explaining how they re-created it--I thought it was important because it was about contemporary life, not just some far-distant past.

But over the last several weeks I've continued to remember this installation and to think about its meaning to my own work. Yes, this museum did a great job looking at all kinds of contemporary issues. Is fishing the most dangerous job in the world? If the video doesn't convince you, the memorial listing of fishermen running up to the present day might. But what really made me remember it?

I might keep thinking of it because it's a reminder of how reluctant many museums are to address issues of class and economics. The guys in the fishworkers dorm were working class, and not all local. The museum treated them equally. Their story was integrated into the entire story of the community, not segregated into a separate exhibit about working people. The museum just didn't tell the story of founding fathers and mothers, without any mention of hired hands, factory workers, maids or servants. Many museums have made great strides in this direction, but few do such a good job at telling an integrated story; telling the story of workers as one part of a whole community story.

And for an entirely different take on working, if you're in Western Massachusetts, check out MassMOCA's exhibit The Workers, where work by more than 40 contemporary artists encourages thought, debate, and sometimes confusion about work in today's global economy.

So who knew that spotting Led Zeppelin on a tiny Icelandic island would lead to a meditation on class and museums?

Brisk, Bold, And Not Boring

2011-09-25T20:39:00.000-04:00

Recently I found myself waking up one morning wondering, "Why did I say I'd do that!" What was it? I had committed to giving a session at the American Association for State and Local History conference about how not to do a boring session. Luckily, with many thanks to my colleague Lindsey Baker, director of the Laurel Historical Society who joined me as co-presenter, willing to try anything, and to a great group of session participants, we all had a good time. I thought I would share a bit of what we did with Uncataloged readers as you head off to conferences, Rotary meetings, or anywhere else where you stand up in front of a group.

First off, we planned. Lindsey and I did an agenda, revised the agenda, talked on the phone, emailed, shared our powerpoints, and met the morning of. I've been in sessions where the participants appeared to engage with each other for the first time on the podium. For us, the planning really helped.

Changing the Space

The chairs were set up in straight rows--we just rearranged them into slight curves, which felt more conversational and friendly. We put up big pieces of brown paper and asked participants to share their thoughts on what they love and what they hate about presentations as they entered. Even this little bit of change communicates that a session might not be the same old thing.

PowerPoint

Yes, we used PowerPoint, but we wanted to show that presentations can be fast-paced and compelling. We started by thinking about Pecha Kucha (20 slides/20 seconds per slide) as a starting point and discovered we could go even faster. Lindsey's presentation was about how to do a bad Powerpoint, and she did it by actually doing a great version of a bad Powerpoint. It's below, followed by my Powerpoint on what makes a good presentation.

What Makes a Bad Presentation

View more presentations from lindanorris

What Makes a Good Presentation

View more presentations from lindanorris

In addition to Pecha Kucha, we modeled two other presentation techniques. Drawing on ideas about multiple intelligences, we asked participants to draw (not write about) their idea of what a conference participant in 2111 would look like (you can find the framework at the end of my Powerpoint above). Of course, there was some grumbling about not being able to draw, but it produced some interesting results, spurring lively conversation. We tried a stand-up interview as our next technique, leading one participant to comment, "It works so well we're now asking you questions about the project, rather than about interviewing!"

Our final assignment (accompanied by candy) was small group work. We took real session titles from the conference and asked small groups to design participatory, engaging conference sessions. From dropping a vase in a session on collections care to role-playing the closing of a historic site, the results were great. And the results were gained by really lively conversations--and that, to me, is the sign of a great session--when everybody's ideas are in play.

We made sure we had some time at the end to debrief. Participants were also encouraged to ask questions along the way and we both got out from behind the podium. There was nothing miraculous about our recommendations. They are ones we know from our work with museum audiences, but somehow those techniques are often forgotten when we step in front of that conference podium. It's just like working with school groups--if you don't approach the task with joy and enthusiasm (and a sense of humor) why would they?

We'd love to hear about other great suggestions for making any presentation more memorable. What techniques have you found effective?

Oh, Planning Does Work!

2011-09-23T20:55:00.001-04:00

As any consultant knows, there's a point when you can just hope for the best--you've worked with the client, you've facilitated community conversations, and you've written the report. And then...it's like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Has the organization really embraced the process? Are there the skills and the drive to move a plan forward? And the bottom line...did your work make a difference?

This past week or two I've had two experiences that reinforced my belief in the importance of planning, but they also helped cement my understanding that sometimes it takes a while for the results of the process, much less the plan itself, to be fully known.

Almost two years ago, my colleague Anne Ackerson and I led the strategic planning process for a volunteer committee of a small town in Massachusetts as they worked to save a historic building for use as a heritage center. Focus groups, space planning, conversations with other stakeholders, benchmarking, committee meetings, budget development--the whole process. No word for a while, as sometimes happens with clients as we and they head off to the next steps. But this week an email that read, "there have been many twists and turns to get us here but it finally is a happening thing! Your study proved very valuable to us as we went before numerous committees, radio, TV and finally a special town meeting to appeal for the last chunk of funding." That's what a good plan does--it helps convince others to join in, to help accomplish the goals.

Yesterday I went to a meeting with a client that had had a number of staff changes throughout a long interpretive planning process (mostly completed some time ago) and met with senior staff, three of four of whom were new (although not necessarily new to the organization). To my surprise and delight, these four women embraced the knowledge gained in evaluations along the way; over a long lunch we had a lively conversation about the meaning of community engagement and community anchor; discussed the real needs of the organization to accomplish the interpretive goals; and overall, made a substantive commitment to work together as a team to lead the way. Tremendously gratifying.

What made the difference? It's hard to say. In the first case, it was a long-standing committee that remained united and committed to the project. In the second, it took some staff changes to make that commitment happen. But, like almost all of my work, it's about the people involved--and the need to be ready, to have a plan in place when the time is right. Planning is best done when you're not under the gun but when your organization takes the time to slow down and think collaboratively with your community. "Too busy!" you say? Find the people; find the time.

Planning by J'Roo on Flickr

Icelandic Museums

2011-09-18T13:41:00.001-04:00

My family and I recently spent two weeks in Iceland on vacation. It's a fascinating place, unlike any other and its museums were the same. I saw traditional folk museums, met a few impassioned small museum professionals, and saw high-tech media installations. I thought Uncataloged readers might be interested in seeing some inspiring images and have posted them on the Uncataloged Museum Facebook page (oh yes, and don't forget to like it). Enjoy!

Talk, Talk, Talk!

2011-09-13T08:24:00.001-04:00

This past month, my book club read, A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation, by Daniel Menaker, and although we had some mixed feelings about the book, it did generate lots of conversation over a terrific lunch of home-grown fruits and vegetables.   We talked about social media and the web, and rather it has lessened conversations; about how talking with family is different than talking with friends--we ranged all over the block.

But then one friend asked if we felt we were able to have deep, meaningful conversations in our regular lives, in our work lives perhaps. And it made me realize how lucky I am to have a job where those deep conversations are really a part of my work. Not every day, but often. Over the last several months I've had the chance to talk with colleagues about whether greed was the primary factor in the shaping of early Western New York; about the creative process of artists and whether representing in an activity is a way to share it with others; over a dinner in Ukraine, about how Soviet citizens and American citizens perceived each other during the Cold War; with my long distance food writing course, about everything from wheat trials to the meaning of kimchee; with my consulting colleagues at our retreat about the changing landscape of the museum field; about how collecting beautiful objects tells the story of a life; and most importantly, over and over again, how we, as museums, can encourage deep conversations in everyday life.   Increasingly for me, museums are about those conversations--and the objects are the ways to frame or to spark thinking and talking.

As I head off to the AASLH meeting in Richmond for several days of more conversations,   I'm grateful to be a part of a field that values and appreciates talk. And at the same time, it made me realize how much more, we as a field, can do to encourage those deeper conversations among all the members of our diverse communities.

Where Do New Ideas Come From? How Do They Happen?

2011-08-23T14:52:00.001-04:00

I hear from many emerging museum professionals that they have a hard time getting their ideas heard at their museums (if they can find jobs at them) and wanted to highlight a great example of both working from within and working collaboratively, in a setting many of us would find pretty challenging.

In spring, 2010, in L'viv, Ukraine, Eugene Chervony (above), a young scientist, attended one of my workshops about creating a visitor-friendly museum. He then followed up with an invitation to visit his museum, the Natural History Museum in L'viv and talk about projects, so of course I did. At that point, his museum has been closed for renovation for twenty (that's right, twenty) years. Amidst bits of construction debris, seemingly almost finished spaces and taxidermied animals stuffed into storage areas we walked, talking about some of his ideas for the future. But how could it happen? No space, an organization with no real plan for the future, no money...there was a long list of seemingly unsurmountable nos.

But last month, I was back in L'viv and saw Eugene's new exhibit, The Story of One River at the History Museum (not at the still-closed Natural History Museum). The exhibit looks at the history of a river in L'viv in terms of not just science, but in terms of the river's impact on humans and our impact on the river (now wholly underground and essentially, a part of the city's waste disposal system). And, quite unusually still, his exhibit incorporated English language text for international visitors. How did this exhibit happen?

Eugene was good enough to share some of his thoughts on this project with me. In Ukraine, scientists (and museum curators) are really specialists so a broad-based exhibit like this is unusual. I asked,
How did you come up with the idea? He replied,

From MATRA partners [Note: a Dutch program supporting various efforts in Ukraine] we got a task [note: and supporting funding] to make an exhibition about co-existence of humans and nature and their influence an each other. So we thought about what we should to do. In my opinion we should present exhibition one story. The best example is a story about our river. As I am biologist all nature belong to sphere of my work. And design and project management is what I like to do because it is a process of creation and every time it is something new, some new tasks, some new ideas and problems. You can't be bored.

And how/why did you decide to connect it to the present day?

It is not a finished story and we are still part of this story. Children who are the target group should understand that every action have consequences and you need to think to do or not.

Collaboration is not usual in Ukraine, so I asked, "How did you convince the history museum to partner with you?--and your own museum to participate? He also mentioned that the agreement to participate took longer than he had hoped--like almost any partnership.

They were interested to participate because it was supposed to be new kind of exhibition in the collaboration of Natural History museum and History museum. And also we promised new approach in exhibition design. Our museum has partners from Netherlands and also we are specializing on ecology and environmental problems.

What's interesting here is that Eugene promised a new approach to design, despite the fact that his experience was really pretty limited. But his imagination, his willingness to engage current museum colleagues and to expand his network were not. I asked how he found the skills he needed:

Everything was made by museum workers. The artist I found from my friends. I did research on who doing art projects in L'viv and outside what dedicated to river and get whole network of connections. Some of them disappointed me and but some I enjoyed to work with them. With translations my American and Canadian friends helped me and I need to say big THANK YOU.

But the hardest thing to accomplish was to convince his colleagues of the art object (see above) and of its relevance to the exhibition. Although people were interested in new ways of exhibit design, the reality is sometimes a bit harder--and really required, Eugene said, "a big fight" to install the art.

He would try and do a couple things differently (and what exhibit developer has ever done an exhibit that isn't the same?). Those included these three:

Probably I would change little bit of way of presentation of information about river.
I would start full evaluation from the beginning but I didn't have the time and or experience for it.
I would not present so many animals without any background but ....

The exhibit ends with a space for visitor feedback on Post-It notes and I was curious about the comments. Eugene wrote this about visitor response:

Children like to write feedback very much.
A 5th grade pupil wrote: I did not think that in Ukraine can be like in the USA. (about exhibition)
Government should open this problem (talk about it more)
But most of them are thanks and best wishes.

What are the takeaways from Eugene's exhibit project? To me, they are:

Look inside and outside your own organization for skills, partners, and inspiration.
Work collaboratively and persistently, believing that both new and long-term colleagues can be valuable members of a team.
Don't be afraid to think that you can learn something new--and just try those new things (as the Little Engine that Could would say, "I think I can, I think I can.")
Think about audiences--that should go without saying, but it's a bit of a new concept in Ukraine and too often, a new concept other places. Eugene had a message he wanted to convey to children, and evaluation shows they're getting it.

Over the course of several days and a long car trip into the Carpathians this year, Eugene and I had a great talk about new exhibit ideas and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next! And I'm sure that new, enthusiastic audiences are also looking forward to it.

Charting A Course

2011-08-13T16:03:00.001-04:00

This past week, five colleagues, all independent museum professionals, sat down to talk about our futures. We had discovered that despite doing a significant amount of planning with organizations, none of us had a strategic plan, or even any sort of plan. And, we discovered, all of us wanted to think about, for various reasons, some shift in what we do or how we do it.   So we all came together at my house, to eat fresh peaches and tomatoes, taste freshly-infused vodka, laugh, ask hard questions and consider the future.

The process was exceptionally informal and designed collaboratively before we all came together. Like every process, we tweaked it a bit as we went along.   We began by devoting a half hour each to a career review.   How each of us designed that review was up to us--and the results were fascinating. We had a mind map, a statistical analysis of income vs. satisfaction, graphs analyzing sources of project funding, a pie chart of activities, and for all of us, narratives about how we got to where we are (not a single straight line in the bunch!).   We asked each other questions, delving deeper into the ways in which our businesses operated (made easier by the agreement that the details of our conversations would stay within the group).

Just like the career paths, the business models were widely different. One limited liability corporation, two bloggers and tweeters, two relatively avoidant of social media, one with project subcontractors, one with employees.   One with a foot outside of the museum world currently; another with former foot outside in the hospitality industry.   But we all agreed that our business models were pretty accidental as well.

The next day we re-convened and did a SWOT analysis for each of us, again devoting a half hour or so to each person. It probably worked best after we'd had part of a day and a long talky dinner together. Although we all knew each other before gathering, it was in different ways, to different degrees. I think a level of trust was really important in this conversation. It's hard to hear people talk honestly about you--and I will say I think we were all harder on our individual weaknesses than anyone else.

Lunch break and then we split up, spending about an hour creating, in whatever fashion, some sort of a plan. Big sheets of paper, on the computer, sketched out as a map--everyone designed it in their own fashion. Then of course, back together to share the plans for comment and final thoughts. And among those final thoughts? Some plans to work together in several different ways--an unexpected but not surprising outcome of our time together.

What made this process work?

Abundance
Anne Ackerson, who blogs over at Leading by Design, mentioned the idea of abundant organizations to us: that by sharing our time and talents, we create something that has more than enough--more energy, more creativity, more enthusiasm, more deep thinking.   The sum was definitely greater than the parts.

Familiar, not too familiar
We all knew each other, but all of us didn't know each other intimately. We didn't know the inside details of each other's business, nor in any great way, of our personal lives. This meant that we could approach something like a SWOT analysis with a degree of thoughtful distance.   We had about a ten- year age range between us, and I think the fact that we all thought of ourselves as mid-career meant that we related to each other's issues.

Commitment to Change
We had all experienced strategic planning processes where the organization board and staff were only doing it because they felt pressured in some way.   Those planning processes usually fail to produce real change. For all of us, we really wanted to think more deeply about our time and we wanted to make changes, to have control over rapidly changing, complicated work lives with cultural organizations.

A Sense of Humor
Enough said. The people you choose to work with really matter.

What's next? It's up to each of us to decide what form our plan will take and I hope to get mine into shape over the next few weeks. We've decided to meet a few times a year, to share ideas and continue providing encouragement and feedback. We're contemplating some ways we might work together, and how we might share both this process and our hard-won knowledge with emerging museum professionals. So many thanks to Anne, Gwen, Marianne and Christopher for a great time--and stay tuned!

Image: pie chart from Audrey Lapierre, via Flickr

Trickling Down My Way

2011-08-07T16:46:00.000-04:00

An article last week in the New York Times discussed the effect that state arts funding is having on organizations all over the country. Michael M. Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington was quoted as saying,

When any form of government funding is cut, the organizations that tend to get hit the most are rural, organizations of color, avant-garde institutions — those that have a harder time raising individual and corporate money.

Although I live just a few hours outside of New York City, I live in one of those poor (classified as Appalachia) counties. This weekend I went to two different events that made real the trickle-down power of arts funding. On Friday night, we drove just a few miles to Franklin, NY (population 1735) to see the Mettawee River Theater Company perform outdoors, underneath a clear sky and moon ("not quite a half-moon" said the little girl sitting next to me). The event was sponsored by the Franklin Stage Company, an organization founded on the principle that, "great theater should always be accessible to all." As the sun set and the sky darkened, the hillside was filled with all kinds of people--long-time locals, newcomers, kids, adults, seniors, teenagers--who were all swept into the traditional northern Japanese folk tales, told through masks, puppets, song and spoken word.

The next night, in the rain, we headed a bit further afield, down to New Kingston, NY (population 354) for the New Kingston Film Festival. where, despite the drizzle and some recalcitrant technology, we watched shorts and documentaries from around the world on a big blow-up screen, parked in our cars in a modern day drive-in movie. From a coming-of-age story in Spain to windpower battles in the next town over, the filmmakers brought many ideas of place and community to this very small place.

Both events are labors of love--and both were, wonderfully, free! It's easy to think about the arts in New York State as the Metropolitan Opera and the Museum of Modern Art. For decades, the New York State Council on the Arts has supported projects like these through its Decentralization Grant program. Maybe these events would have been possible without the small amount of grant funding they received, but maybe they wouldn't; very possibly the grant funding helped leverage other funding and the support, granted by a panel of county residents, (and administered by the Roxbury Arts Group) made sure that my neighbors and I, living in the beautiful Catskill mountains, have chances to look beyond our own front doors and our everyday lives.

Thanks to the passionate organizers of this weekend's events, to NYSCA for its funding, and for New York's taxpayers, who make NYSCA possible. Remember the field full of cars, watching a story of Spain, or a child's excited gasp as the dragon puppet emerges from the lake, when you hear that the arts don't matter, that we can't afford them. We can and we should.

Best Conference Session Ever?

2011-07-27T20:47:00.000-04:00

Susie Wilkening of Reach Advisors and I are creating a session at the American Association for State and Local History conference in Richmond, in September, called The End of Powerpoint about how to make your conference presentations fun, engaging and meaningful (and less full of Powerpoint!). As we think about the session, we'd love to hear your opinions about what makes a great conference presentation. Is it the format? the topic? the interactivity? the room arrangement? a sense of humor? the other attendees?

Please share your best, and your worst, conference session experiences. I'll start off with two of mine from the last year or so. At one, I slipped in a bit early, and someone was speaking, on and on, with a single slide on the screen. "Okay, just an introductory slide," I thought. Until he suddenly looked up, and said, "oh, I'm supposed to wrap up now, so I'll show the slides," and then went high speed clicking through, saying, "oh, this isn't important, oh, you can ignore this..." Yikes! I couldn't even tell you what he was speaking about, I was so annoyed.

But then at that same conference I attended a session designed to be a bit more interactive; an Idea Lounge. At that session, two well-prepared and engaging presenters used a sense of humor, their research, and small everyday objects to involve all of us there in a thoughtful discussion about learning from objects. What made it work? They had clearly planned their presentation, they used different techniques during the course of the session, and they had a sense of humor (even after I broke an object!).

Comment away to help us create a great session!

Where do Volunteers Come From?

2011-07-13T02:47:00.000-04:00

In the United States, there's lots of conversation in non-profit organizations around volunteers--and particularly about how hard it is to recruit volunteers. Over the last two weeks in Ukraine, I've come across some volunteers that I think demonstrate some important lessons we may have forgotten.

At the top of this post is a photo of the residents of Ak Mechet, a Crimean Tatar settlement outside Simferopol, working, as volunteers, to repair their badly potholed (driving on it sort of felt like riding the waves) road. This was an entirely volunteer effort, organized by Neshet, a builder, who brought clean fill out from a building he was demolishing, and recruited volunteers. It happened informally, through word of mouth, people saw people working and came out, even those without cars, said Neshet's teenage son, Serdar. These were really hot days, and these men worked really hard on something that is rightly the responsibility of city government.

I talked with an American friend living in Ak Mechet about why, particularly when volunteering is still a relatively new Ukrainian concept in its post-Soviet independence. She thought it was because the Crimean Tatars, deported to Uzbekistan by Stalin have had to work together as a community just to survive. After independence, hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars made the decision to return to their homeland and have made lives and communities here. So for these residents of Ak Mechet, repairing the road was one more step.

And here's Svetlana and her family in Kyiv. As we walked upstairs in her bloc apartment, she said she was working to organize her neighbors to clean and paint the hallway--it was taking a long time, but she was determined. Svetlana and her husband had spent a bit of time in the US and she appreciated the volunteer work undertaken by many there. As a result, she, like Neshet, was working to make her corner of the world a better place.

In Donetsk, we met Ania, who served as one of our volunteer interpreters. She was a child psychologist in her 20s and she volunteered because she thought it was an important way to gain different perspectives--to understand more about children and families and to appreciate different points of view.

And so Neshet, Svetlana, and Ania helped reinforce to me some important points about recruiting and retaining volunteers:

Have volunteer jobs that matter. I've certainly asked more than my share of volunteers to spend a day sticking on mailing labels. But consider what kinds of really meaningful work you can ask volunteers to do. I think all of us increasingly want to have meaningful lives, including our volunteer efforts (and if you can't make it meaningful, at least make it fun!)
Be flexible about choices. In all of these cases, the volunteer decided what was important. That doesn't work everywhere, and I know volunteers often want to do things that aren't appropriate in a museum sense. But provide volunteers, as you can, with some level of decision-making power.
Expanding a world view. Encourage volunteers to think about how volunteering can expand their world view--and then recognize and celebrate those volunteers.

None of these lessons are earth-shattering, but increasingly I find that the time I spend in Ukraine gives me time not only to understand Ukraine, but to also reflect on my work in the United States. It's been my experience that people whose parents volunteer are more likely to volunteer themselves. As I think about Neshet, Svetlana and Ania, I can see their efforts not only benefitting their communities and neighborhoods now, but resounding down the generations.

And speaking of volunteers, a big shout-out to our tremendous volunteer translators on this trip. You've all been incredible!

Why Don't Museums have SuperFans? Should We?

2011-07-04T16:19:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, strolling in downtown Donetsk, in Eastern Ukraine, we saw an outdoor exhibit and went over to take a look--and it was about superfans, those people who love, love, love, Donetsk's football team, Shakhtar (the miners, in tribute to the region's mining past and present). Fans with their scarf collection, with their team mascot, the mole (underground, get it?) fans getting married, and much more.

But it made me wonder why museums can't be so appreciative of what the people who support us do? This was not an exhibit about big donors, but rather featured everyday people, who, in their leisure time, loved the team. Do any museums have members that feel that way about them? Jasper Visser has mentioned about the importance of creating tribes who care about and support museums and other cultural organizations--and soccer fans are definitely tribes, but highlighting those fans who support the team seemed like something that could transfer to another setting. Should museums recognize their fans? How?

And, a brief shout-out to Donetsk for their many new information kiosks, with maps in three languages, including English, as a run-up to the Euro 2012 event!

"Is John Your Brother?" or Why Stories Matter

2011-06-23T20:57:00.000-04:00

The title of this post is a question I got at the end of a presentation to a board of directors about a new long-term exhibit. It's not quite as strange as it seems, because this was at the historical society where I began my museum career at age 14, in the community where I grew up. The staff and I had proposed an exhibit that really encouraged and sought out community memories framed around a 20th century topic. The board and I laughed about some shared memories of high school traditions--and then we focused on who local history museums are for.

I realized how strongly I feel that local history museums are for locals. I think many organizations (and communities) went on an unsuccesful hunt for tourists for a number of years. But think about it. Do tourists become members at local history museums? Do they donate artifacts? Do they bequeath endowments? Do they volunteer? Those are the crass reasons to focus on involving your local community.

But there's other reasons that are more important. Real stories really matter. They allow us to put our lives in perspective; to understand people different from us, but from the same place; and when carefully sought out and engagingly told, they provide a place where everyone in your community can belong. And a focus on community means those local stories can be the core of your work--and you might be surprised how local stories, compelling told, can connect with other people.

My family has all moved away from the place I grew up but today reminded me that those connections are life-long ones. And yes, John is my brother and I heard a couple funny stories about him today!

Do You Need a Museum? A Ukrainian Alternative

2011-06-13T07:22:00.000-04:00

Last week brought word that more than 275,000 organizations lost their non-profit status from the Internal Revenue Service. Among that group, not surprisingly, were a number of organizations that, in name at least, were museums, including a Toaster Museum, the American Museum of Business Culture, and Blow-Up, the Inflatable Museum (do you think it's inflatable or about inflatable things?)

And then this weekend a lovely post about an alternative, put together by an inspired Ukrainian, came into my Facebook feed, thanks to an article by Kateryna Kuchar at Rukotvory, Ukrainian Folk Art Online, where some of the articles are now in English (many thanks, Rukotvory!). The website featured an interview with Volodymyr Kitselyuk, described as "an ordinary enthusiast from Hutsul region, a doctor by profession and an ethnographer by vocation." His love for his region in the mountains of western Ukraine has led him to two different projects. First, with a colleague, he has established a website with historic photographs from the region. He doesn't collect and store these photos. They go out into the villages with a computer and a scanner, scan the images and collect information. Volodymyr says:

We go from a house to a house asking for ancient photographs. As a rule, the main thing is to catch hold of something interesting, and then villagers start to send for each other or even see us to different people. We have a special formula for explaining people what we want from them. Since it is difficult to reach understanding in small mountain villages using such words as “Internet” and “scanning” and the people we deal with are often elderly women we simply say that we would like to take photos of their old photos for a museum. When people are sure we are not taking anything from them, they certainly help us with pleasure.

The website, Hutsul Images, in both English and Ukrainian, has a beautiful design with photos organized by region. When asked if his efforts were supported by the state, he noted, "The experience shows that it’s much easier to directly communicate with people in villages than with the staffs of state bodies." Given the complicated history of western Ukraine, it's amazing that these photos survived and wonderful that they are now shared widely. It's also wonderful to see an initiative that's not a grand plan with many pronouncements and no support, but rather a small initiative that grows organically.

But Volodomyr has taken his enthusiasm one step further, restoring several small houses in his home village and opening them up for tourism. At one house visitors can cook, bake, churn butter and other activities. The second house provides more modern accommodations. But he's not a re-enactor: as he describes it, "It’s not my objective to completely revive ancient ways of life because it is impossible. The main thing is to let people see the difference at least a bit and to have a rest from the city." From childhood, he's been interested in a home museum, and is collecting as well. This informal approach is far different from the vast majority of museums in Ukraine, although it shares much with the approach of Ivan Honchar, whose private museum is now a public one in Kyiv. So the museum may someday have a more public component. But perhaps not.

As I read the article I wondered about the future. His efforts are similar to the way in which many museums begin, from a personal passion and interest. Would it be better if it eventually became a formal institution? or is it better to have a passionate commitment and then, if the commitment wanes and no one steps forward, for such an effort to decline? What's clear however, is that the online project will have a long life and that the eco-tourism effort will provide memories, and a link to a rapidly vanishing past, for those who visit (and I hope that includes me one of these days).

I'm sure many of those museums on the IRS list began with the same enthusiasm--for everything from railroads, fire engines, katydids, surfing and the unexplained (one actually was the Museum of the Unexplained). But something inevitably happens along the way. So if you're sitting at home contemplating starting a museum in the United States--be sure you check out this great publication from the Museum Association of New York, What Comes First: Your Guide to Building a Strong, Sustainable Museum or Historical Organization (With Real Life Advice from Folks Who’ve Done It). Consider whether your work is best done within a museum setting or in an individual way--does it need an institution to be meaningful or can a passionate individual or "tribe" commitment be enough? It seems that both passion and planning are both needed to make a project long-lived.

Photos from Hutsul.com.ua and http://vlotko.livejournal.com/

Quick Update

2011-06-10T08:07:00.000-04:00

Finally, a Facebook page for the Uncataloged Museum. It'll feature links to regular blog posts, tweets, and even more. I'm continually taking photos of great museum ideas put into practice (and a few bad ones as well) and I'll be putting albums up. I hope you'll also use it as a place to share your own ideas, thoughts and more.

What's Next?

2011-06-08T22:49:00.000-04:00

Not long ago, a colleague told me she had spoken at a graduate museum studies program and was astonished at how many students envisioned their future as a consultant, rather than working in an institution. That's a big change from my own graduate school career where we imagined being directors, curators and an educator or two.   I never quite imagined the path that my career has taken, and this summer, I'm taking the opportunity to join with several other colleagues in a consideration of what's next.

The idea for a consultants' retreat came about from a conversation where I was asked, in an overall conversation about strategic planning, if I had a plan myself. I laughed, and despite extensive work on strategic and interpretive planning, sheepishly said no. And then I called four other museum consultants in New York State whose work I value and admire--and guess what--none of them had a plan either.   So we decided to have a little mini-retreat where we all brought our concerns, hopes and ideas to the table to get feedback and assistance from the rest of the group.

We're still working out how our time together will work. We'll do some sort of career review--both the short-term and the long term (as one participant said, "I'm big on overarching narratives).   We'll think about the work we liked best and the work we liked least--and how to generate more of the former and less of the latter. We'll talk about if and when collaborative consulting works, and how our various frameworks for both organizing and promoting our work serve us. We may even come out with some frameworks for individual plans. And I'm sure that we'll have a great time reflecting, talking and laughing over food and drink.

But I want to hear from blog readers out there. If you're a consultant, what do you wish you had time to think about? If you want to work as a consultant, why and what do you imagine your career will be like? And for all of you, what's the next act in your museum life?

Every Day Surprises

2011-05-31T20:06:00.000-04:00

At an AAM session last week, newly-minted director Nina Simon talked about wanting to offer free admission--some of the time--to her museum so those who came on that particular day would view it as something special--not an everyday thing, but a real surprise (and by the way, love the idea of seeking sponsorships for one day--what a great birthday gift for the person who has everything!)

And then today I came across this review of an exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Holland Cotter begins his review,

On a recent nothing-special weekday afternoon, I walked into the Asian Art Museum here and found a Balinese gamelan concert in progress: clanging gongs, pulsing drums, jazzy flutes, the whole real heavenly thing, with musicians settled cross-legged on a fabric-draped platform and a rapt crowd of museumgoers, many quite young, on benches, folding chairs and the floor.

Another surprise. There's something I like about walking into a museum that's familiar to me--it's the idea of an old friend--but I'm also really intrigued by how we can make places that are surprising every day. Not just surprising in the big permanent exhibit as spectacle way, but surprising in the little ways that museums can connect with visitors. One answer of course, is visitor-created content. But I wonder what other answers there are.

Could you put different single object in a case in your lobby each week? Could you have pop-up curators giving impromptu talks? And of course, here's Improv Everywhere's King Philip autograph signing at the Met. Could your admissions person hand each visitor a page from a historical diary, written that week decades ago, to read aloud and share? Could you offer a free cookie, or at a history museum, a taste of a cooling historic drink (long ago, I remember making switchel for an event)? How about a free return ticket? What else could museums do?

What Can You Do Besides Start a Museum?

2011-05-16T17:33:00.000-04:00

Last week, my co-presenter and I had a great conversation about our session at the AASLH conference in Richmond this fall about whether local historical societies are dinosaurs. I've volunteered to take the position in our debate that they are rapidly becoming so. As a result, I've been trying to find alternative models--and hope to highlight examples that have come across my desk.

In Tompkins County, NY, a local group, spear-headed by county historian Carol Kammen (known to many readers of History News for her regular column) has established scholarships at the local community college to honor four local Civil War nurses. It would have been easy to say, "oh, we should have a museum of nursing, or a museum of civil war nursing!" Then a non-profit would have been established, a board of directors established, a building donated, a small group of objects obtained, and then...and then what? It would join the dozens of other small organizations that are struggling to find adequate financial resources, volunteers, and community interest.

Instead, the proposed $80,000 scholarship fund (of which more than half has already been raised) will provide support for nurses and "reminds us of the sacrifices made by many - both past and present. Your support creates scholarships, rewards those seeking an education, aids faculty with their own professional development, and strengthens the quality of life for all" (from the college website).

Susan Emily Hall of Ulysses, Sarah Graham Parker of Enfield, Sophronia Bucklin of Auburn and Julia Cook--names that otherwise might have been forgotten will be remembered through acts, not just through a static display.

If you have examples of ways in which we can engage our communities in history outside the framework of a historical society--please let me know!

Image: Sophronia Bucklin, via the Tompkins History Center

Walk the Walk, not Just Talk the Talk

2011-05-10T15:01:00.000-04:00

A colleague (thanks Linda KM!) passed along a recent article by Carol Sanford in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about a new process by which the New Mexico Grantmakers Association is exploring whether--and how--philanthropic support meets the goals set out, or whether grantmaking sometimes produces unintended consequences, just the opposite of real, responsible change. The grantmakers group is looking at their work within a framework of five guidelines (quoted directly below):

Consider and fund with an eye to nested, whole systems rather than fixes for specific issues or problems.
Find “nodes of leverage”—conditions that can be changed with little effort in order to produce big results—rather than shotgun or priority-setting approaches.
Focus on developing personal agency by supporting the efforts of individuals to take accountability for their own lives, and to exercise entrepreneurship in creating businesses and in serving their communities
Measure effectiveness by how well systems change, not by the efforts made in pursuit of change.
Ensure foundations have integrity in all of their activities (for example, by fostering personal agency within their staffs).

I first read this thinking about different kinds of support for projects in Ukraine--watching international aid programs from a closer perspective has been a fascinating process. But then I read it again--and realized that these five guidelines provide a road map, not just for funding, but for the development of a thoughtful, engaged museum. Let's take a look.

Consider and fund with an eye to nested, whole systems rather than fixes for specific issues or problems.
I remember reviewing a long-ago grant application where a museum requested funding to purchase reproduction costumes--but it was clear that the site lacked substantive research and planning to even establish a time period. I think of these projects as band-aids. Because I work on the interpretive side of things, I always hope that institutions will put everything on the table when we begin a conversation about new tours and other elements so they can make the kind of systematic change needed to create more engaging institutions. I'm sure my collections colleagues would agree--conserving one object has to be balanced against system-wide efforts to improve environmental conditions. And we're all familiar with those new outreach programs that exist for a year, due to funding, and then disappear. Thinking holistically and sustainably make a big difference--and of course, that's what planning is for. A clear strategic plan, that's understood by all and referenced often can help ensure that change, not band-aids becomes the way forward.

Find “nodes of leverage”—conditions that can be changed with little effort in order to produce big results—rather than shotgun or priority-setting approaches.
When I read this I thought first about museum entrances--both virtual and real. Those are the places that your audiences first encounter you--they are "nodes of leverage" and often changes take little effort. Updating your website calendar or news. Just a few weeks ago I went to look for something on a service organization's website and found their latest news--from 2007! Make your entrance friendly, have your open hours posted, and train your staff and volunteers to be friendly greeters. Huge differences in public perception could ensue. Then, keep going with the changes.   This has to go hand-in-hand with the whole systems approach above.   It's a version of thinking globally (whole systems) and acting locally (those nodes of leverage).

Focus on developing personal agency by supporting the efforts of individuals to take accountability for their own lives, and to exercise entrepreneurship in creating businesses and in serving their communities
If you're a museum leader, do you regularly say "no" to your staff's ideas? Do you insist on micro-managing every decision (I know one museum where the director has to approve every single Facebook post)? Or do you encourage, mentor and facilitate new ideas and accomplishments by staff, no matter what their position? Can you make staff meetings places to share ideas and new approaches?   Despite tight budget conditions, is there still some funding and commitment to professional development?

Measure effectiveness by how well systems change, not by the efforts made in pursuit of change.
Ensure foundations have integrity in all of their activities (for example, by fostering personal agency within their staffs).
I've had some conversations lately with colleagues about what values are embedded in museums. I don't just mean the ones that your values statement says, if you have one. I mean the ones that are sneakier, hidden in your history and organizational structure. Do you divvy up your jobs into a number of part-time positions so you don't have to pay benefits? That's a value judgment about your employees and their value. If you're a director, do you hoard information from both your board and your staff? That embodies a value. Do you actively seek out collaborations and partnerships. That's also a value in action.   I think we tend to think about values as warm, fuzzy things, when in fact, all values are not positive ones--and it's the not-so-positive ones we sweep under the carpet.

Do you work hard to attract family audiences and make your workplace family-friendly for your staff? Recently I had a conversation with a colleague who remarked about how much she hated strategic planning, because often it seemed all thunder and lightning--in pursuit of change--rather than actual change. That's where a plan that has accountability and benchmarks really comes in--you need to be able to measure real change.

What five guidelines would you propose for a healthy, responsible organization?

Whose Story?

2011-05-02T22:03:00.003-04:00

I've been working on my presentation for a session on narrative at the upcoming AAM conference. Ken Yellis, Deborah Trout-Smith, Susie Wilkening and I will be coming at the topic from different perspectives. I'm working on thinking about how narrative worked in Soviet museums, how post-Soviet museums in Ukraine have maintained, adapted or jettisoned that structure, and what thinking about how a different place and culture view narrative might mean for my own work. Big thoughts all, and not yet in a cohesive place (if you're at AAM, please join us at our session, Imagining the Past Remembering the Future: The Role of Narrative in Museums on Sunday, May 22 from 4:15-5:30 for some thoughtful conversation around the topic.)

But narrative...I thought of it today as I went through the focus group notes for a local history museum I'm working with. It happens to be a community I know well, and I was struck by how many narratives had emerged. Participants shared hints of compelling narratives about first jobs and first dates; about teen tragedies and loss; about the things you did that your parents wouldn't have approved of; about the influence of well-loved teachers and coaches; and about how bicycles opened the world to you when you were a kid.

But fascinatingly, the narratives from high school students were very different--more circumscribed in some ways. They felt that there was not much ethnicity in the community (despite the fact that the census tells me residents claim more than two dozen ethnicities in their heritage). One student thought immigrants, to his definition, were only from Latin America; and another thought immigrants just weren't relevant! Narratives about ethnicity seemed absent from the students' mindsets, but narratives about economic status seemed much more front and center; and some ideas about race were couched in those economic terms. Of course, it may just be that teenagers don't see very far beyond their own immediate concerns. In a diverse adult focus group, participants were much more willing to share their own narratives about race, discrimination, economic status and change. One of the participants commented about residents who lived in a different part of the city, "You hated them...because they had everything and I had nothing. I didn't even know them but I didn't like them."

So how does all this connect to my thinking about post-Soviet narratives? This local history museum's soon-to-be-redone and outdated permanent exhibit tells a single, straightforward narrative, from settlement forward. The Soviet system mandated the single narrative approach; many American museums arrived at single narrative without any dictate from a ministry of culture. But this museum, like so many others, now has a tremendous opportunity to reach out into the community; to listen to those stories, to find those narratives, and to, as one participant said, "Open the front door and be bold!"

That's an opportunity no matter where you are.

Images: FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress. From a single small farming community, top to bottom: Mr.and Mrs. Ben Harris, Mr. Miller, Mr. D'Annunzio, Mr. Mirki.

Leave Your Desk Behind: Thoughts on Outdoor Exhibits

2011-04-20T19:22:00.000-04:00

I've been in several conversations about outreach lately, a word that seems perhaps a bit outdated--sort of colonialistic, I think. But the idea of getting outside your museum doors to reach visitors is never outdated--and a project I worked on in Kyiv this past month reminded me that sometimes connecting with visitors doesn't necessarily require the bells and whistles of mobile apps, hugely expensive permanent signage or the like.

I collaborated on the outdoor exhibit of Borderlands, a project of fellow Fulbrighter Olga Trusova. The exhibit, supported by the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, was mounted in Shevchenko Park, a beautiful park in the center of the city. Borderlands is a comic book that tells 7 stories of human trafficking--you can read more here. The use of the comic book format (drawn by Dan Archer) is an unusual way to tell compelling, important human stories, and equally unusual to then convert it to an exhibit.

So on a cold, misty morning in early April, we installed the exhibit frameworks--and then, amazing things began to happen. People walk by; they're busy; but something in the exhibit catches their eye. Someone stops, reads a panel, walks around the corner of the framework, reads the next panel, then goes to the next. Another couple read, and turn and talk to each other, pointing at a panel. Those passersby are an audience who might never visit a museum, might never think about human trafficking. By choosing a public location (as we did for an earlier project, about Chernobyl in 2009) we help ensure that we reach, not just those dedicated free-choice learners, but a cross-section of the community that uses this park. (and, by the way, I highly recommend Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud as a great way to expand thinking about exhibits and what we do). I'm enough of a museum nerd that I find it incredibly exciting to watch people stop and read and think about what we do.

Over the last two years, with the support of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, I've worked with the Montgomery County Historical Society in Rockville, MD on a project that also got history out into the community. Montgomery Connections uses banners, bus stop ads, and a website to engage, in three different languages, non-yet museum visitors in the history of the county. Using the tag line, Did You Ever Wonder? the print materials introduced visitors to authentic characters from county history and invited them to call a phone number to learn a bit more. In our formative evaluation, we learned some surprising things about what interested who.

But a voice message (after listening to the audio, callers were invited to leave a comment) reinforced for me how important it is that we get out of our offices, out of our museums, and out into the community. After listening to an audio about the first Chinese immigrant to the county in the early 20th century, a Spanish-speaking listener commented (this is a rough paraphrase) "I am here in this country alone--and listening to this has given me hope for my future."

Think history doesn't matter? Think again.

What's the Story? A Straight Line?

2011-04-13T11:12:00.000-04:00

While in Kyiv, I decided to try an experiment. My Ukrainian language skills are still very weak and I wanted to see what I could learn about history by just looking at objects in a museum exhibition. After all, we all know that many museum visitors don't bother to read labels. With English labels, I automatically read them, but with labels written in Cyrillic, it's a different story. So I went off to the National History Museum, just down the block from my apartment, to see what I could learn. Like many museum visitors, I had a broad outline of Ukraine's history already, but certainly not many details. What did I discover?

First there were people who used stone tools and wore beaded necklaces. But a map told me where those people might be located.

Then settlements began, in huts, where people hunted animals--but then we got to a settlement that's kind of recognizable--the second photo below is a big diorama of the early settlement of Kyiv.

Then in somewhat rapid succession, people farmed, Christianity became important, factories opened and people had fancy furniture. But some people still lived in traditional ways.

Then there were wars.

And then, looming on the horizon, independence.

As I went through the museum, I was struck by how similar a narrative this is to the permanent exhibitions in many history museums anywhere. I think some museums are still drawn to a straight line narrative of history like this. Interestingly, Ukrainian museums almost never use the center of their gallery spaces and the cases you see in some of the photos here are often the same dimensions, so history gets reduced a bit to case-sized bits so the straight line has even a greater emphasis. Plows, Victorian furniture, military service: I could be anywhere! And of course, without me being able to read labels, the narrative was reduced to its simplest terms.

The photo at the top of the post, a bas-relief as you enter the museum, reminded me of a long-ago comment to a museum colleague. In teaching fourth graders about primary sources she asked them how they would find out about what something in the past was like. "I'd go to the historical society," said one. "How would they find it out?" she asked. The student's reply, "They look it up in a big book in the back." To me, this exhibit represents the big book approach to museum-story telling with a straight line narrative that brooks few doubts or questions.

But then I saw an exhibit there that I thought of as not a big book, but a beautiful little short story. There was a temporary exhibit on Serge Lifar, one of the great male ballet dancers of the 20th century. I hadn't known anything about him, but this small exhibition just had so much life to it in ways that were hard to explain. Dancing shoes, tiny models of ballet sets, wings, drawings of connections--he felt alive in the room.

So if you work in a history museum or a historic site, try going through your gallery or site without reading labels or a guided tour. Imagine that you know only what the objects tell you. Is it a straight line narrative? or do the objects themselves and the exhibition design allow visitors to consider the twists and turns of history?

Marketing is Not a Dirty Word

2011-04-03T04:05:00.001-04:00

In a post last month about creating change, I wrote that marketing was not the answer. And marketing has continued in my thoughts. Jasper Visser commented in response to that post,   "Marketing might be the first step, but then marketing in the sense of building tribes, keeping promises, not in the sense of more flyers and noise (which is not really marketing)."

And at another workshop here in Kyiv, Vlad Pioro, director of the Ukrainian Center for Museum Development commented, "Marketing is not a dirty word," as he introduced the Ukrainian version of Museum Strategy and Marketing : Designing Missions, Building Audiences, Generating Revenue and Resources by Neil, Philip and Wendy Kotler.   Marketing is particularly problematic in a post-Soviet society: even the words consumers, marketing, branding, all smack of capitalism (though of course the Soviets did a pretty good job at staying on message, in the broadest sense).   And although there's plenty of advertising everywhere here, old habits die hard.

Vlad's comment came on the heels of my presentation about voluntary museum standards in which I referenced both AAM's Standards of Excellence and AASLH's StEPs program and asked my museum colleagues here to consider whether such standards would be useful for Ukrainian museums.    Among the questions and comments that ensured in an open discussion.

But we have laws on museums here in Ukraine!
But the laws don't work!
Preserving collections is our only work, the most important.
Why is that function (preserving collections) only one among many in these U.S. standards?
We have particular issues here.
Who would write them? How could we agree?
We need to change, to look at our museums in the way that the rest of the world looks at theirs.

So how do standards and marketing connect? Exactly in the way that Jasper reminded me--that we need to build tribes of people (and that includes the ongoing work of building professional organizations here in Ukraine) and that we need to be responsible to our audiences. If we're opposed to marketing, we need to think about why, to consider what that says about the values of our organizations. If we're marketing in terms of "flyers and noise," we need to think about how to change that, how to become more responsible, not more showy.

It may be "the government" who is responsible for museums here in Ukraine, but in fact, the museums, their collections, and their activities belong to the Ukrainian people, who, as in any country or culture, have a right to access, information, and even sometimes, a little fun when they visit!

Images
Top by Ky_Olsen on Flickr
Bottom by Pawel Loj on Flickr

Click: Natural History Museum, Kyiv

2011-03-25T03:13:00.002-04:00

This week I wandered into the Natural History Museum in Kyiv--it's a place I'd been by many times, but had never gotten around to entering. And inside, I found both a time capsule of natural history presentation, but also the most lively museum-goers I've seen in Ukraine. What was in the time capsule?

Cases, lots of cases.

Dioramas, lots of dioramas, including my favorite, of this scene of trolley buses crossing the Dnieper River here in Kyiv.

Specimens and taxidermied animals, lots of specimens and taxidermied animals. But what I was most struck by were the beautiful illustrations and graphics, showing a hand-done style that is almost gone from museums now that we use computers for illustration. In the dioramas and in graphics throughout the cases, there were many illustrations, all hand-done, in numerous different styles, from these black and white stylized graphics to more formal botanical illustrations.

And it wouldn't be an old-school museum here in Ukraine without at least one really long label and portraits of distinguished scientists.

And of course, the natural habitat of the museum guard.

But, and this is the part that fascinated me, people were really engaged in this museum. Kids shared things with other kids; parents and grandparents talked with children--more than anywhere I've seen here. So--why? Is it that the natural world is inherently more interesting than art or history for children? Is it the contextual material--ie, do dioramas really help us imagine worlds we don't know? Or is there another reason entirely? Your thoughts, readers? For any reason, it was a pleasure to spend an hour or two watching museum-goers enjoy themselves.

These two boys were my favorites--they looked at and talked about everything!

From Conference to Change

2011-03-21T06:09:00.001-04:00

Last week I had the honor of being the plenary speaker at a conference, The Reform of Museum Management and Marketing, in Kyiv, Ukraine, sponsored by the Anti-Crisis Humanitarian Program of the International Renaissance Foundation, the Ukrainian Center for Museum Development of the Ukraine 3000 Foundation, and the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation for the Development of Ukraine (who generously sponsored my appearance here). I joined a group of distinguished speakers from Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and of course, Ukraine itself, to consider how museums can change and adapt to the 21st century. Attending the conference were more than 120 museum professionals from all over Ukraine. The conference's sponsors made particular efforts to reach out to museums in the regions, rather than just in Kyiv. It was great to see old friends and colleagues--and to meet new ones as well.

But the conference raised the same issues for me that much training in the US does. How do we encourage museums to really embrace what they've learned, to make change and reflection a part of daily work? Since I began coming to Ukraine two years ago, I do see signs of change--but I also see a willingness to attend workshops (and for organizations and embassies to present workshops) but not so much readiness to make real change in an institution. I'm pleased that this conference opened up some conversations about creating real change in organizations.

I'm far from having any real answers to this, but a few thoughts (and by the way, I think the same issues exist for many American museums).

Marketing is not the first step
I often think that museums think that if they just produce the latest four-color brochure or have more money to allocate for advertising, then people will flock to their museum. It's much harder to get the point across that your product (a word I know that will meet some resistance here in Ukraine) needs to be better--your exhibits more interesting, your programs more engaging, your lobby staff friendlier--BEFORE new marketing commences.

Practice, not theory
I have pretty clear ideas about the process of exhibit development--but I also know that talking about it doesn't generate the best understanding. Museum colleagues here can see my slides of interactive, hands-on exhibits, but until people have the opportunity to actually work on a project that involves, for instance, thinking about a big idea for an exhibition, writing engaging exhibit labels, and developing a creative installation, those theoretical new ideas just stay theory.

I think some of the next steps in Ukraine are about beginning to integrate real practice into training to follow upon theoretical experiences--and I'd love the opportunity to work with colleagues here on the practical applications. Some of my best memories here come from the start of those practical discussions in some organizations and a real hands-on project at the National Museum of Books and Printing in 2009 where I taught staff simple paper and book-making activities that are now offered on a weekly basis.

Interested in what audiences think? The same thing holds true. We need to find ways to move the discussion from talking about talking to audiences to actually talking TO audiences. Recently, in the US I did some community conversations with an organization who had been a little resistant about doing them--but afterwards, said a staff member, "I'm a convert--these were great!" There's the old saying,

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

We need to move from giving the fish of pure information to actually providing museums with a rod, a hook and a worm, and sitting on the bank with them as they learn to fish. Then, I think, real learning will occur. And the museum with its own efforts, will sustain its community--and its community, in return, will help sustain the museum.
Change comes from the top and from the bottom

As Ludmyla Gubianuri, director of the Bulgakov Museum here in Kyiv, said during her presentation, "if you want to have a great museum, give people creative freedom." Many directors everywhere guard their prerogatives closely and resist change. For real change, systematic change, to happen in an organization, the director (and board of directors, or department heads if appropriate) need to believe in the idea of change--and learn to not be threatened by it. I told the conference audience that I come from a family of enthusiastic learners (not scholars, perhaps, but learners) and that for us, lifelong learning in our careers and in the rest of our lives is something that gives us all great joy--I hope all directors could consider it the same.   And Ludmyla also reminded all of us that the public doesn't really care about your problems, they care about their experience at the museum.

So not matter where you are in the hierarchy, you can think differently, in large or small ways.

Creating Knowledge Networks
One of the best results of the Dutch-funded MATRA museum training project here in Ukraine was the development of an informal network of colleagues who learned together and continue to share ideas and information. I have always found the museum field in the US (and now, increasingly, all over the world) incredibly generous with information, ideas and support. I think an important next step here is building these knowledge networks to share information and ideas in inexpensive ways (I'm not necessarily a fan of expensive publications in this context).

From Contest to Competency
AAM, for instance, and AASLH's Award of Merit program. But both those programs recognize multiple winners and make the submissions and winners available to the entire field.   I wonder whether resources might be better allocated towards small improvement grants rather than prizes and at the very least, a system developed to clearly share the winning efforts and highlights best practices so others can be inspired.   And that gets back to the whole idea of sharing skills and knowledge, as above.

More posts to come about other lively discussions at the conference--but the best part for me--was, I think, that most Ukrainian museum professionals now understand that my commitment to them and their work is a increasingly deeper one.   Who would have thought that two years ago!

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined House Tour

2011-03-07T09:27:00.000-05:00

Last week, I spent a great deal of time on the road, a not unusual occurence, and in the early morning, I'm always happy to hear Garrison Keillor come through my car radio with the Writers' Almanac.
On March 2 it was Dr. Suess's birthday--but it was also Tom Wolfe's birthday and Keillor shared a bit of Wolfe's essay on journalism, in which he suggested that reporters needed to employ four technical devices more commonly used in fiction to get at the emotional core of any story. As the story continued, I realized that Wolfe's four rules were exactly in line with what makes a great guided tour (something I've been pondering lately for a couple different organizations, including the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY).
So, what did Wolfe, the author of both fiction and non-fiction classics such as Bonfire of the Vanities, The Right Stuff and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby think journalists (and by my extension, historic site tour developers) do to engage their audiences? It's pretty simple.

Construct scenes
Dialogue, lots of it
Carefully noting social status details everything from dress and furniture to the infinite status clues of one's speech.
Point of view in the Henry James' sense of putting the reader inside the mind of someone other than the writer (or tour developer).

Those, said Wolfe, are the devices that give fiction its absorbing, gripping quality, making the reader feel present in the scene described or even inside the skin of a particular character. I suspect that Wolfe, when he wants a writer to note details such as dress and furniture doesn't mean to imply that those details are the most important part of the narrative, but rather that those details support the larger emotional connection.

Think about the last tour you took and compare it to the last novel you read. A novel requires a significantly greater investment of time but we stick with it, because the rewards, those emotional connections, may be far greater. I'd love to hear from readers about tours that made those strong emotional connections--where have you been?

Photos from Flickr
Top by Lachlan Hardy; bottom by Mo Riza

Click: National Zoo

2011-02-26T10:18:00.001-05:00

Several weeks ago, I spent an enjoyable few hours at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. It had been a long time since I'd visited and I was intrigued by the level of exhibitry I found. And as I looked, I realized that the engineering of many of the exhibit elements was substantial--to withstand the outdoors, repeated use by huge numbers of people, and in one case, a design for a fascinating people/animal interaction. Here's a bit of what I saw. First, the elephant exhibit--although we didn't see any actual elephants out that day!

A tilt-it, pin-ball like game about dangers in habitats that really encouraged people, even toddlers, to figure out how to work cooperatively in moving a ball through a maze.

Giant models of dung. Who wouldn't want to see these!

I'm not usually a fan of lift-up tabs, but this slider design meant that you had the ability to think about

the two choices, rather than just a random flip-up. Nice design--and super sturdy.

I found the cell phone trivia game not very exciting compared to both the animals and all the other interactive elements in this section, but I could imagine, for certain kinds of learners, particularly a restless kid in a group with others, it might really be intriguing.

Throughout the zoo, an emphasis on what we can do to help protect the world's wildlife. I'd love to know if there have been studies that see whether this kind of signage and education really does encourage citizen action.

Now, on to the Think Tank, an indoor exhibit about how, why and if animals think. There weren't many visitors inside on the sunny day I was there, and I think the exhibit probably is of greatest interest to visitors other than moms with strollers, of which there were many that day.

I loved that in the section on using tools, the designer used bright red tool chests as exhibit furniture. And those yellow Post-its? A design element, not real post-its, but a great element that most visitors understand as a place to look first. Here's a close-up.

And finally, one of the most intriguing interactives I've ever seen. The visitor could sit on something that looked like a rowing machine and play tug-of-war with the great apes who were on the other side of the glass--but it was totally up to the ape whether he or she wanted to play with you. They weren't interested in playing that day, but absolutely almost every visitor to the space wanted to try. It was just a one-person interactive, but it made it possible for others to watch and consider and the uncertainty was a great element.

But of course, you go to the zoo to see animals. And seeing 7 young lion cubs out to play trumped all the exhibit elements!

YES! the crowd WILL fund our project: Kickstarter Lessons #3

2011-02-16T10:58:00.000-05:00

On February 1 at 5:00 PM, Sarah Crow and I closed the book on our effort to fund the Pickle Project on Kickstarter. We were amazed, humbled and thrilled to exceed our goal of $5000. 119 fabulous backers pledged a total of $5775 to make further research and documentation a reality.

I've written before here and there about some of the lessons we learned along the way but wanted to share some additional thoughts with my readers here.

Slow and steady wins the race

Our Kickstarter period was 50 days and our goal was $5000. In most Kickstarter efforts there's a jump in pledges at the beginning, they level off, for a long middle period, and then, if successful, jump up again at the end. We seemed to be a bit of an exception in that we plugged along the entire time, slow and steady.

Figure the Math
We had figured that we needed $100 per day to reach our goal and we kept a pretty close eye on that number. Good days, we exceeded it, and a few not-so-good days went by with no backers at all. But what we didn't do, and I think would be useful for anyone embarking on Kickstarter to do, is that math about how many backers at what levels we needed to be successful. Here's how it played out for us--see the pie chart above.

Fully fifty percent of our donors were at the $25 level and another twenty-five percent at the $50 level, with smaller amounts both above and below those numbers. I suspect most Kickstarter project developers dream of those big anonymous backers coming through. We didn't receive any backers at our highest level, but our two largest pledges were from people we don't know.

And what about people you know and don't know?
Our backers fell into several different categories.

Friends and family
Museum colleagues (and this including friends I know in person and colleagues who know me through this blog, Twitter or some other means)
Peace Corps Volunteers who have been or are stationed in Ukraine
Former Fulbright Scholars and Students
The Ukrainian community in North America
People interested in food and sustainability
People who are regular backers of Kickstarter projects
And people we don't know at all!

What this list tells me is that we did a pretty good job at putting all of our networks to work. One single network or only one avenue of approach would not, for us at least, have gotten the word out to enough people.

And how did we get the word out?
One great thing about Kickstarter is that it made it easy for others to help. If you became a backer, it was easy to share the link on your Facebook feed and/or email it to others. So great backers were also great boosters, encouraging others to join them, even going so far as to offer home-made pickles to backers in one city!

The layout of the Kickstarter site also provides a very professional, welcoming and accessible aesthetic (see above) that lends additional credibility to the effort. The Pickle Project already has a well-developed social media presence but the Kickstarter site might be particularly useful for efforts that do not have good information online. (and it always made me smile to see Treadwell, population 250, listed up there with cities like New York and San Francisco in the Cities bar for project locations)

You can follow the Pickle Project on Twitter (@PickleProject) and midway through the project we began tweeting (using twitpic) a Pickle Pic of the Day, which we also posted on Facebook. We heard from a number of people who really enjoyed seeing that picture, of food, of people, of a place, every day and it's something we'll try to keep up.

I came to appreciate the value of Twitter as numerous backers and other tweeters took up our cause. Everyone from PoPinDC and ArchivesInfo (museum colleagues both) to Ms. Marmite Lover, from London, who shared our work with her almost 7000 followers.

We of course, continued to blog and to share updates on Kickstarter. This kept our backers engaged and made it easier for them to share our work with their circles as new information came in. The support of other blogs was also great. Melissa Mannon offered me a guest spot on her Archives Info blog, and blogs such as Brooklyn Baba, Brooklyn Brine and the blog of the Agricultural and Food Law Program at the University of Arkansas each gave the project short features, raising the project's profile. Sarah did an interview on Nash Holos, a Ukrainian focused radio show from Vancouver and I appeared on Simona David's show on WIOX here in the Catskills. The Watershed Post did a great feature where we talked about the similarities between the Catskills and rural areas in Ukraine.

In short, every single day of those 50 days, except for Christmas, we did something--and usually more than one something. And we used old media, new media, and everything in between. An unexpected bonus is that this concentrated effort expanded our audience in the long run.

Why did people back us?
The answers to that are as varied as our backers--and backers, if you're blog readers here, we'd love to have you weigh in with your thoughts. Some cared about Ukraine, some cared about food, some cared about us (thanks Moms!) but we think most importantly, people were excited to back a passionate idea, an idea about something new, that we managed to convey that in all of our efforts. A project like this is a risk, and we're honored by the trust and confidence all our backers have placed in us.

Is Kickstarter Right for Your Project?
That's something only you can answer. About 50% of the thousands of Kickstarter projects have been funded (remember, it's all or nothing). We can guarantee that the money just won't come pouring in--but I think, with my museum hat back on, that it could be a tremendous platform for some types of museum projects: exhibits, efforts to engage new audiences, mobile apps--but only if the museum/history organization is willing to push hard for backers--that's no different than any other kind of fundraising! I also think it's potentially a great vehicle for history-related projects that don't have an institutional base, but rather, represent more individual passions and interests.

Was It Right for the Pickle Project?
Absolutely. Just in case you missed it, here's our Kickstarter video to see what we hope to do. And our thanks go out to all our tremendous backers from around the world--we appreciate you all!

The Word from 8th Grade: That was Awesome!

2011-02-06T12:46:00.000-05:00

The term focus group often seems scary or off-putting to some groups I work with--but really, it's just a term for listening to what visitors--and potential visitors--have to say. Last week, as part of a new IMLS-supported project at the Ontario County Historical Society, staff members and I spent two days listening to community members talk about the museum and about the concept for the new exhibition, "Greed and Other Human Desires: The Early History of Western New York." You can check out the project blog here to learn more.

Much of the visitor research work in the museum field focuses on larger institutions as those museums have the funds to commit to full-scale evaluation. The work by Reach Advisors, particularly their survey of Connecticut cultural consumers, begins to bring audience perspectives from all kinds of museums, including small ones, into the picture. So I was interested to see what our groups had to say both as it related to larger contexts as well as our particular project.

All the conversations were fascinating, but I was particularly struck by the comments of two groups of 8th graders. These were students, chosen by their social studies teacher, with a particular interest in history: many of them were History Day participants and all were headed towards AP history courses. Here are some of their thoughts on what museums do.

On labels

Kids don't really like reading. [but then some disagreement from several others who did like to read.]
They had like the artifact and a small description—not too small, but not like a history lesson.
I had to go on a field trip that I liked up until my teacher told me I had to be reading a lot because if I wasn’t reading I wouldn’t learn. I’ve learned more from museums than having to read right off a wall.
Part of a museum is seeing it, otherwise it would be a library.

On computers

If you go somewhere with your family, you don’t want to be stuck at one computer screen, you want to be able to pass it around and talk about it.
I don’t like them that much.
It’s weird that it’s dirty. [this was a conversation about germs]
I feel like with the computer—it’s only one answer you can get.
At a museum, you clicked on a computer and read about it—it was a cartoon, Ice Age and seemed kind of boring…clicking.
There was 100% agreement in both groups that computers were the least interesting part of a museum visit.

On Hands-On Interactives

You could get to feel like what they were doing and how they were doing it and what went through their mind. You get the sense of “whoa, that was hard for them!"
Pops out more in my memory when you’re actually holding stuff
It’s easy to forget words and pictures; easy to remember when you’re actually doing stuff; touching.

They all felt that the use of reproductions for interactives was critical, as it was important to touch and feel.

On the Power of Imagination, Immersion and the Individual Story

Like with the Holocaust, you know that people died, you know these things happened, when you focus on one person, like Anne Frank hiding and stuff, it makes it real.
I always find it interesting when I see pictures of a long time ago, to imagine—how things used to be.
Being able to go in, see what it was like.
The longhouse—that was awesome [at Ganondagan State Historic Site]
I like real life examples—if you’re telling about how they dressed, they had mannequins—the visual was really cool.
You can find different answers if you look around.
I always like it when an expert can tell you something about it.

Several comments highlighted what's often a shortcoming of local history museums. The students very much wanted to understand local events in the context of a larger picture, to understand, as one put it, "More the quieter events during a larger period of time." That's something many local museums can be better at.

Most boring museum?

For one, it was an art museum. “The most boringist thing I’ve ever gone to—they’re hanging on the wall. Art is art. You stand around with a whole bunch of people, it’s quiet, you can’t even talk to your other family members, don’t talk, and don’t scuff your feet.” For another, a sports hall of fame. "My dad made me go. I just didn’t think anything was interesting. You just stand there and read."

On the role of parents and museum-going

My parents have never really gone anywhere of their own will, actually.
Went to Albany for basketball tournament—and went to state museum. She [my mother] was really was interested—They [parents] don’t have as much time. When we want to go, they go, so they just go too.
There are some adults that are just naturally interested in history.
My dad likes things in the advertisement, that say you can do something.

And how could the museum let you know what's going on?

I don’t read the newspaper
Facebook, my home page
Posters and flyers, because kids go around town; some kids don’t go on Facebook, just coming to school you see posters

Facebook generated a fair amount of discussion. They didn't quite see why a museum would be on Facebook or why they would want to like a museum there. However, they were more interested in the idea of seeing historic photos of where they live on Facebook and were most interested when we told them, if their parents granted permission, their group photo would be on the museum's page. Said one boy, "You should make those blogs and facebook things more known! "

Our conversation also included their thoughts on the topics of greed, survival and ambition--the subject for another post. But what I hope my readers take away from these great students (aside from the thought that parents have no lives of their own) is that these conversations are easy to do--and that they can easily become a part of a local history museum's work.

And the how-to: check out the resources at the Committee on Audience Research as a starting point. It's critically important to be clear in your own mind about what you want to know and design questions that reflect that. And it's even more important to LISTEN! The goal in these sessions is to hear from the group, not to share what the museum's up to or the problems you have. An evaluation professional can be immensely helpful in the process, but these simple conversations are something a museum of virtually any size can undertake on its own and still learn a great deal of useful information.

All of us on the project team agreed that we all learned some surprising things--and that these students now have a connection to the new exhibit. It's a terrific two-way street that benefits all. These simple conversations are just one way to prevent local history museums from becoming those dinosaurs. Thanks, 8th graders for teaching me something new!

Feeling Bogged Down?

2011-01-31T14:40:00.000-05:00

In a post last fall, I wrote about whether local history museums are in danger of becoming dinosaurs. It became my most read post, by a huge margin, so obviously, there's a big concern about organizations that are bogged down, stuck in the mud. But there are answers out there. Today, I want to encourage small and mid-sized US museums--of all types-- to consider taking part in an easy, thoughtful way to get unstuck. It's the American Association of Museum's Museum Assessment Program.

I've been a MAP reviewer to two separate organizations over the past year or so. Very different places, very different organizations. One was a very small history organization in a very small town in the mountainous west; the other a historic house part of a larger organization in the Mid-West. Both applied for the MAP program (which does not cost your organization anything) because they knew they could be better. The MAP process is an easy application, followed by a self-study and a consultant visit. In reviewing the self-study documents for my two museums, I found that it gave each organization a chance to really think about its work: about what they do, who they involve, what they collect, and critically, from my perspective, how they connect with their communities. And I hope my site visit gave them a chance to ask questions, to hear how other museums organize their work and connect with their communities, to brainstorm a bit and consider the "what ifs" that should be a part of all of our work. The site visit isn't a judgment--it's a chance for you to work with an experienced museum professional and gain her perspective. After the site visit, the consultant completes a written report, which can provide important information and guidance as the museum moves forward.

(And by the way, as a reviewer, I've loved the chance to learn about a new museum, meet new colleagues, and see new parts of the country.)

You can apply for one of three MAP assessments:

Organizational
Collections Stewardship
Community Engagement

Each one has a slightly different focus--and a different focus on the roots and how your organization grew--and can grow. Check out the website to find out what's right for you. Still confused? The MAP staff is ready and willing to speak with you--just contact them at map@aam-us.org or 202-289-9118. But don't delay! The postmark deadline for this year's applications is February 18.

Photos from Pie-Town, New Mexico, FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress

Kickstarter Lessons, Part 2

2011-01-16T13:09:00.004-05:00

Several weeks ago, as the Pickle Project's Kickstarter effort launched, I wrote about what we had learned as we did the planning and began. And now, with just two weeks left, I wanted to update about what I learned about raising money in this way--and how it connects to so much else we do.

Some background: the Pickle Project is an effort by fellow Fulbrighter Sarah Crow and I to document and share Ukrainian foodways with American audiences because we think we all have much to learn from a culture where many people grow, eat, forage, cook and preserve in sustainable, seasonal, local ways. About a year ago we began a blog, which has been enriched greatly by guest posts by friends and colleagues who are, or who have, lived and worked in Ukraine. But we're just two people with an idea--we're not a non-profit--hence, Kickstarter, a way for creative people of all types to crowdsource funding for projects.

So what else have we learned?

Your own network is the best network. This type of funding really relies on networks and we've discovered that our own networks are the best way. My network of museum colleagues, both those I really know, and those who know me virtually--as well as both our networks of friends (thanks Book Club members!) have been incredible supporters. Neither Sarah or I have Ukrainian roots, so it's been a bit harder to break into the Ukrainian diaspora, but with some assistance, including Sarah appearing on a Canadian Ukrainian radio show, Nash Holos, over the weekend and a listing in a weekly Ukrainian email update, we're beginning to see more support there. The lesson is that it's hard to jump cold into a network. And of course, networks are built one by one by one. If you're contemplating any project, consider who your organization knows and who knows you.

It takes time. Every day, as anyone who follows me or the Pickle Project on Twitter knows, we tweet, update the Pickle Project Facebook page, and encourage people to support us. We've appeared on radio shows, emailed to our lists of contacts and friends' contacts, and done press releases and flyers. We knew this already, but it's really hammered home that the big wide world of the Internet is only as big as you make it. And that takes time.

But global is global. We've had supporters from Hawaii to Sweden to Ukraine and everywhere in between. Amazing!

Givers are givers. I would say that the biggest groups of supporters to date are museum colleagues, students or recent students, and Peace Corps volunteers. I suspect none of those groups are distinguished by having fancy cars, big houses, or even in some cases, jobs. As a result, Sarah and I have been incredibly touched by their support. And of course, there's plenty of statistics that demonstrate that people with lower incomes donate a higher percentage of their incomes to charity than those with larger incomes.

Pictures, stories--and passion--count. A bit into the effort, I started posting a food picture a day, either historic or contemporary, on Twitter and on Facebook.   We've heard from several people that they love seeing those little pictures arrive every day. Just words aren't enough. On Kickstarter and on the blog, we try make the topic fun, interesting, and even moving. Our Kickstarter video is a little homemade effort which took a great deal of time but hopefully reaches out to those who know Ukraine--and those who don't.   I think giving is connected with passion. I was reminded of this as I looked at year-end fundraising letters in my mailbox. One from a local organization moaned about money and proposed nothing new. But another was full of optimism and plans. One felt full of passion, one did not.   I suppose what this means is that whining is not a fundraising strategy!

Take the jump! As we've begun some conversations with possible funders, the fact that we already have a presence via social media is proving to be of interest to them. I often hear from people who say they don't have time to do a blog, or a website, or a Facebook page at their organization. It takes time, but isn't that what museums and history organizations do? involve people in our work? If you're one of those museums who say they don't have time, try keeping track of all staff and volunteers do over the course of a week or month. If you're a staff member, could you let that fundraising committee plan without you? perhaps. If you're a volunteer or potential volunteer, do you want to learn something new? probably. In particular, I think small museum leaders can really take a jump here and begin to involve people in new ways.   The web is an equalizer for small organizations.

So how are we doing? With just two weeks left to go, we've reached more than 50% of our goal.   For the next two weeks, we'll be tweeting, updating our status, and doing even more to get there. We hope you'll join us! If you're contemplating a Kickstarter project and want to know more--please get in touch and we're happy to share more of what we've learned, as Kickstarter veterans did with us.

And our biggest takeaway? It's a big, wide, generous world out there.

Thanks to Grace Eickmayer for the top and bottom photos.

Click! Mobile Media at the MFA

2011-01-05T21:38:00.001-05:00

Over the holidays, I took a trip to Boston and visited the new Art of the Americas wing at the Museum of Fine Arts. I'm not a huge fan of audio tours, but thought I would try out their new multimedia guide after I read about it online (and by the way, having found that information once, it now seems hard to find there).

After the recent discussion by Arianna Huffington and Nina Simon's thoughtful, impassioned rebuttal, I thought it made sense to think about this guide from a visitor's perspective. What did I want from it? What did I expect? Was it easy to use? and most importantly of all, did it deepen or change my experience? Did I bug other visitors?

The front desk attendant gives you a brief verbal introduction to using the player. I don't know how that would have worked if it had been really crowded when we entered. There was a charge for the guide, but a discount for members. I sat down and played with a bit before entering galleries. This is most definitely not a tour, but rather a tool to use as you go through the galleries, as the only way you find a piece to learn more about is by seeing the headphone symbol on the label. I expected to be guided from place to place, but then, once I figured it out, just went in the galleries and explored. I found myself juggling the media player, my camera, and a map; occasionally pulling out a notebook to make a note. So it seemed like a lot to handle--I wonder if the next step in media players in museums is one that allows you to take pictures as well. Wouldn't that wind some people up!

I found myself not so interested in the audio, as usual for me. But two particular components I found really compelling--they drew me in and I'll remember them for a long time--I think they illustrate what these kinds of guides may be best at for visitors--or at least visitors like me.

At Mary Cassatt's In the Loge (above) I got to see a sketch for the painting and also learned that this woman's curious look at other operagoers was not considered appropriate behavior and saw a painting (Renoir, perhaps?) that depicted what was appropriate behavior. So in a very short time, I learned a bit about Cassatt's artistic process; appreciated the work and thought that goes into creating a painting, saw the work of another artist on the same topic, and even learned a bit of social history. It would have made for a long label, but it was a perfect sized bit.

And then there was Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley. One of the masterworks in the Americas wing, it had a bustling crowd around it. I sat for a minute and listened (and watched) to an African American community member (and member of the board of trustees, I think) discuss this painting on my little media player. He remembered seeing it as a young man and was struck by the authority of the black man commanding the boat--and how rare it was to see, in life or in art, an African American shown in a position of authority. I was touched by the memory--but it also caused me to look closer at the painting--to really look at that man commanding the boat.

These two pieces reflected what I often want when I visit a museum. I want some context (that's the history museum part of me) and I want to connect emotionally. Honestly, I don't care so much about dates or styles so that sort of catalog entry available on the guide didn't encourage me to explore more than a couple of those. And of course, I liked being able to explore at my own pace and in my own way. Disturb other visitors' experiences? I don't think so.

I didn't have a kid with me so I can't speak for the kids' guide (above) from a kid's perspective. But from an adult perspective, I found it pretty so-so. Somehow an adult narrator speaking from a kid's perspective made it all seem both dull and a bit phony.

And a quick shout-out to the MFA's member program. We were enthusiastically greeted at the door and asked if we were members and the free admission, discount parking, discount on the media guide, and discount in the restaurant made that Christmas present to my husband seem like a great thing!

More and More: My New Year's Resolutions

2010-12-31T09:35:00.000-05:00

I thought about a year-end review, or a top-ten list but decided instead, to share my professional resolutions for the coming year. The past year has been an incredible one, full of adventures and a year that this blog seemed to find its footing with readers...so first, a big thank-you to all of you who read, commented and shared with others. In 2011, I hope to:

Risk More
There's always a temptation to play it safe: to tell the interpretive story that is the non-controversial one, to not say something when you really should speak out, and to just stay in your comfort zone. When I applied to be a Fulbright Scholar to Ukraine, one of my goals was to go outside, way outside, my comfort zone. The professional and personal rewards of that risk have been immense for me--allowing me to see things in new ways and develop new networks and connections. I want to keep taking more risks in my professional life--saying yes to risky projects, trying something new, and encouraging others to do the same. I'll try to ban the words, "Yes, but...." from my vocabulary this year. My post about local historical societies as dinosaurs generated huge readership and many comments--and the best way to avoid that dinosaur fate might just to be, for each museum, to resolve to do at least one risky, visitor-centered thing this year. I'm always on the lookout for great, innovative projects to share here--and for guest bloggers so if you undertake that risky new thing, be sure and let me know.

Read More
I feel like every day brings more and more I should be reading. Tweets send me to fascinating articles, bloggers old and new continue to draw me in with their thoughtful perspectives on our work, and every morning, online newspapers beckon with their random assortment of news (and all that's ignoring whatever Stumble Upon brings). But at the same time, I have a growing pile of books that sit unread--and those are the focus of this resolution.

My goal is to set aside time to fully dive into books--and perhaps I'll start by joining Nina Simon's newest book club effort and read Sustaining Innovation with all of you. For a new exhibition project, the small project team and I have decided to divide up the secondary source reading and share our thoughts on the ongoing project blog (by the way, it's about greed in the early settlement of Western NY, a potentially risky topic) as a way of expanding our knowledge and, we hope, involving our audience. My book club continues to inspire me to read books I wouldn't otherwise have read; over a Florida vacation, my nephews encouraged me to join Goodreads. It appears that reading is for me, becoming a community, a collaborative effort--a long way from those days reading books underneath my covers with a flashlight.

Write More
Thanks to the patience of editors Gretchen Jennings and Bob Beatty, the Exhibitionist and History News each published articles about my experiences in Ukraine. They proved an unexpected workout as I shifted from the informal, short-form blog entry to a longer, more sustained series of thoughts. Blog posts will continue, of course, but I'm also contemplating whether there's a book in my future. The writing process made me ponder whether the future of more academically-oriented journals about the museum field when so much good, reflective work is being produced all the time, on-line. First up for me though: some entries for the revised Encyclopedia of Local History. What do you think should be included in the entry on exhibits?

Connect More
The best thing about blogging and tweeting is the connections to people. For a long time this felt like a bit of a one way street, but this year it seemed to have changed, for reasons I'm not quite sure of. It's been great to have more comments, to meet some of you at conferences, and to read my fellow bloggers work (of course, Museum 2.0 but also Jasper Visser and many others). I've been contemplating attending some sort of international conference or workshop this year as I'm continually interested in what's happening other places--suggestions?

I suspect I'm at the far end of the age range for museum bloggers, and one vital aspect of my work is the chance to make connections with people coming up in the field, with new ideas, perspectives and skills. It's made me a bit impatient with my peers who grouse about those newcomers, or who harumph about social media. I mean, who wants to connect with a harumpher! So I'm not quite sure about how I'll connect more, or who those connections will be with, but I feel sure there will be new people to meet, talk, and share ideas with.

(Above, one of my favorite places, an abandoned building turned bar, I had great conversations and re-connections this year, in Budapest, with my longtime friend Gyorgyi Nemeth).

Give More
At the end of 2010, my colleague Sarah Crow and I launched the Pickle Project on Kickstarter. We're at 25% of our goal, with just a month left to reach it. I've been touched by the generosity of friends, colleagues and even perfect strangers in supporting our project (and of course, you can join them!) It's made me resolve to be a better giver myself. I'll be supporting one project a month on Kickstarter and will try to increase my local giving as well, particularly to museums and history organizations that are those risk-takers.

To all of you, a happy, risk-filled New Year!

It's a Girly, Girly World: Barbie and Avedon

2010-12-27T11:38:00.000-05:00

I saw the Barbie exhibit at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis several weeks ago and just saw the Richard Avedon fashion retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and combined, they provided much food for thought. Although I might guess that the cross-over audience isn't necessarily much larger than me. The Barbie exhibit had raised so many issues for me and then, combined with the Avedon exhibit made me think about the ways in which museum exhibits, intentionally or not, convey messages about our culture. And as a visitor, sometimes you can only guess what those messages are intended to be.

Eerily, both exhibits had very similar opening images--giant, hot pink, close-ups of a woman. It's been a long time since I saw an exhibit I felt as conflicted about as I did about Barbie. What did I like about the exhibit? It did appeal to all kinds of people. I liked the share your Barbie memory story--and in fact, as I've told other women about the exhibit, we've shared our own Barbie stories as well.

The exhibit used real objects in addition to interactive elements. I don't remember noting whether these were museum collections or objects acquired for the exhibit. So you get some sense of Barbie's change over time.

The interactive were great. This simple draping one, on a kid-sized mannequin, worked so beautifully. I saw several girls deep in thought as they tried it.

Several of the interactives made me a bit sad, because they were museum-based versions of the kinds of things we did on a regular basis at home growing up. A round table with supplies to create Barbie clothes? That was the regular playroom table of my childhood, but I think fewer and fewer families have fabric scraps around the house (my mom sewed many of our clothes) and fewer and fewer families put the focus on hands-on creative work. Good news for museums though, as the hands-on, direct tactile, meaningful creative experience is something we can do very well.

The exhibit appealed not only to girls (though it was hard to get past all that pink!). Here's a young boy intent on tracing a fashion drawing.

But--and this is a big BUT for me. I left the exhibit thinking, "But what happened to feminism? Did we not accomplish anything in the last fifty years?" Nothing about how Barbie's body image sets up an impossible ideal for young girls. Just a passing glance at Barbie's many careers over time but nothing about how she performs all of them in those tiny high heels. I didn't notice anywhere where visitors were invited to rethink Barbie; or to consider alternatives to the way Barbie presents women. Not the stuff of a children's museum exhibit you say? Perhaps, but at the same museum, a meaningful exhibit The Power of Children: Making a Difference takes on big, complex issues through the stories of Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges and Ryan White. To its substantial credit, it's not as if this museum is afraid of challenging content for their visitors.

And then just last week I saw Avedon Fashion 1944-2000 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (the show was organized by the International Center for Photography). There's some similarities to the Barbie show--it's about women, and fashion, and certainly both shows are about consumerism, about material goods. But I left this show feeling that I experienced entirely different perspectives on women in the second half of the 20th century. Barbie is somebody's idea of perfection--and although Richard Avedon's images of women are breathtakingly gorgeous, they are not perfect. And certainly Avedon's job was to sell us clothes, or the idea of a life women could have if they had the clothes.

But why so different? The audience for the show? Families, particularly those with young girls, in one case and art/fashion lovers in the other? The fact that perhaps a show about a commercial product needs permission? (for some non-permissioned art shows, check out Altered Barbie). The idea that one thing is art and the other is product? Art show vs. children's museum? (there's possibly an entire book about corporate sponsorship and children's museums that could be written). Corporate design vs. an individual artistic vision? or just what I brought to each exhibition?

But I hope that each exhibit team would be happy that after seeing the Avedon show, the three of us sat down over coffee to talk about the two shows and what they meant. Two former Barbie owners, two photographers, one exhibit developer, and all three museum-goers: we all brought our respective personal histories and viewpoints into the conversation. And that would make each, in its own way, a successful show.

Will the Crowd Fund Our Project? A Kickstarter Story

2010-12-16T15:51:00.000-05:00

Crowdsourcing--that's outsourcing your tasks to a large, unknown group of people presents a range of opportunities for museums--citizen science, mapping, identifying photo collections. But in a way, crowdsourcing of fundraising is one thing that I think small museums in particular may find very useful. My colleague Sarah Crow and I have begun a project on Kickstarter and I'll use a series of entries on this blog to reflect on what we're learning in the hopes that it may be useful to others.

What's Kickstarter?
It is "a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors." And it's framed around two core beliefs:

• A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.
• A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.

What's Our Project?
We're the Pickle Project and you can find us here on Kickstarter and the Pickle Project blog here. It's a project that sprang from our separate experiences in Ukraine as Fulbright Scholars. We both love food and bring complementary interests in food--mine around food as cultural expression; Sarah around issues of sustainability, and both of us in terms of how it shapes communities. Our long term goal is to create innovative traveling exhibitions in Ukraine and here in the US that encourage community conversations about food, culture and sustainability.

Why Kickstarter?
The great thing about Kickstarter is that you don't need to be a non-profit to seek funding. For us, that's perfect. We're in the earlyish stages of the project and although we will seek a non-profit partner, at this phase, it made great sense to venture out on our own.

How Do You Get People to Pledge?
Kickstarter is all or nothing so we need to raise our goal by February 1 in order to receive any of the money. Kickstarter is all about your ability to get the word out. Kickstarter doesn't do that for you, you need to. How are we getting the word out? We blog, we tweet, we email friends and encourage them to share it, we have a Facebook fan page, we use our groups on LinkedIn, we're pursuing traditional media coverage--anything and everything we can think of.

How Could This Work for Small Museums?
There's only been a few museum projects on Kickstarter. One of the most successful was the Neversink Valley Museum in Narrowsburg, NY and Seth Goldman, their director, was incredibly generous in sharing his lessons learned during the process of successfully raising funds for architectural drawings and other work for a new building. The World of Witches Museum in Salem raised almost $5000 for exhibits and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art also raised exhibit funds. Unsuccessful? A Teachers Museum and the Museum of Hawaiian Shirts.

Local history museums already have networks--your members and others in your community. You also have those people who grew up in your community and moved away and those enthusiastic genealogist who email you seeking information. And don't say that older people don't use the Internet: an updated Pew Charitable Trust study shows that email is almost ubiquitous, even with those over age 74. So your audience or network is out there!

What Have We Learned So Far?
Some simple lessons for us and we're only four days into our project.

Research: look at other similar and different Kickstarter projects; find someone who's done Kickstarter before to talk to and share their perspectives; read Kickstarter's materials and other blogs about what works and what doesn't.

Ask Before Leaping: We sent our initial narrative off to about a dozen or so friends and colleagues to read, long before we posted. (You know who you are--thanks!). Their thoughtful feedback told us one thing--that we needed to more clearly connect the story of food in Ukraine with people here, today, in the United States. So we did.

Make That Video Work: Neither of us were video experts (even though I have one in the house) but we knew we needed a video to draw visitors into the story. Thanks to our work and the generosity of friends who have also spent time in Ukraine, we put together a simple slide show with great photos using iMovie. Looks simple, but took far more time than I expected. We didn't need it to be perfect--but we did need it to be compelling--take a look and see what you think.

Cool Premiums: We also looked at what other successsful projects has offered for premiums and tried to balance the cost and effort of the premium with the amount pledged. And so, if you, generous reader, pledge $1000 Sarah or I will bring a Ukrainian dinner to your house!

All or Nothing Means no Messing Around: Kickstarter is all or nothing. You set the amount, you set the time frame (up to 90 days) and then, boom! you launch the project. You only get the money if you raise the full amount. We know how much money we have to raise every single day between now and February 1 and that means no coasting, that every single day we'll be out there tweeting, facebooking or otherwise connecting with our networks. So far, we're on target.

And finally, Don't be Shy!
As any fundraising professional knows, you don't get support if you don't ask. So here's my ask.
Head on over to Kickstarter and support the Pickle Project because:

You love food
You're interested in cross-cultural understanding
You want to see how it works
You wish we understood more in this country about how to grow, cook and eat sustainably
You're interested in Ukraine
You've had a great time reading this blog this year
You want to support a passionate project in its emerging state
and of course, if you love pickles!

Thanks to all those who have already stepped up to the plate (the dinner plate perhaps) and supported us. I'll continue to post our lessons learned--if you have specific questions, please comment away. You can track our progress on the widget to the right and of course, we look forward to seeing you as a supporter!

Photos, top to bottom:
Market vendor, Opishne
At a Crimean Tatar feast. photo by Barb Weiser
Milking in the Carpathian Mountains, photo by Christie Nold
Strawberry picking, photo by Grace Eickmeyer
Women at the pottery festival, Opishne
Riding home from school in Crimea, photo by Grace Eickmeyer

Click! It's in the Details

2010-12-09T21:28:00.002-05:00

At the Children's Museum of Indianapolis I was struck numerous times at how thoughtful so many parts of the museum were. There wasn't necessarily a single graphic identity and there were not a great many staff out on the floor, but effective signage and design really provided a sense that this was a museum that cared about its visitors. Above, both the simple step and the tunnels underneath (with some objects installed down there) mean that small visitors really get to appreciate the model train layout. Some other examples:

Next to a very big locomotive, a label with the kinds of questions that visitors really have, not the questions that we as museum people might have.

An area for stroller parking near the carousel. Many of these family-friendly amenities are probably a part of any big children's museum but I was reminded today of my experience at a very well-visited museum where the staff member, with a shrug, suggested to my sister-in-law that she just leave the stroller on a busy city street.

I liked that interactive stations had these stools that could be easily moved around by almost any age visitor. Easy for parents to take a break and for kids to work together.

In the elevator a sign that is both about visitor services and about safety. I appreciated knowing what sort of staff id to look for--and the elevator was a useful place to convey that information. And below, two public examples of a museum that relies on, and appreciates its volunteers.

As you can see, design that's all over the block in terms of typography, color, and more, but that seemed very much in line with the museum--it's a place with so much to think about and explore that a more highly managed approach to design and signage might seem out of place. And a final image: in the special winter/holiday exhibit, everyone having a great time with all kinds of kitchen, family, cooking and more roleplay.

Click! Dinos in Indianapolis

2010-12-07T07:08:00.000-05:00

This past week I was in Indianapolis for a few days and took the chance to visit the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, a place I'd been interested in seeing for a long time. I found a busy museum that had thought about so many ways to connect with visitors. So here, the first of several posts, this one focusing on the dinosaur exhibit; others to come about Barbie and more. The thoughtfulness begins with the entrance to the exhibit: it's a spectacular walk down a ramp, with the biggest introductory label I've ever seen.

But that big label also expresses the exhibit's big idea very clearly. Up close, it says,

Right! A big idea with a subject, a very, and a consequence (that's the we learn part). And then the exhibit provided so many different ways to learn and explore. Active questioning really provided ways for kids old enough to read--and any parent or caregiver--to delve deeper.

There were touch screens, but they were placed at kid height. Other interactives were placed at varied heights, so everyone could enjoy them. Although the space was theatrically lit, and the big fake rocks and bigger dinosaurs must have been important elements--and were for several of the kids I saw while visiting, the whiz-bang of that had less interest for me--and perhaps for kids--than the things scaled to their size, that they could engage with.

I didn't get a picture of a great section about dinosaur babies that toddlers loved, diving in and out of big nests. There was a lab, where scientists were at work (or were sometimes at work, not today) In the lab, there were various games, puzzles and other items--but each label said, "Today in the lab." Those labels might say that day after day, but it made this space feel a bit special. This struck me as such an easy thing to do in all kinds of exhibits. You could have just a few items to change out on a regular basis.

And this exhibit had a rare thing: a sense of humor shown best in a series of miniature dioramas--really miniature period rooms for dinosaurs, as it were.

Why of course, they take the baby for a walk! I don't have any huge interest in dinosaurs, but every element in this exhibit felt thoughtful, without being precious or controlling. Lovely.

What Really Happens Out on Those Guided Tours?

2010-11-30T19:06:00.002-05:00

Many historic sites spend a great deal of time thinking about, planning, moaning about the guided tours at their site. Although there’s definitely mixed opinions about guided tours (see Susie Wilkening’s post here), there’s no doubt that they’re still the primary way that many visitors experience historic homes.

I’m working with the Thomas Cole National Historic Site on a new interpretation of their historic house, thanks to the support of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. As a part of the project I created an assessment form and staff and a small group of board members have headed off to visit variety of historic homes and museums.

Because not everyone on the planning team could make all the site visits, the visitors have written visit reports for all of us, and as a group, they present a great picture of what’s right and what’s wrong with guided tours. I won’t name the sites here, but as you read these excerpts, remember that these visitors are people who are already inclined to be historic house goers—they are college-educated, have a passion for art, history, or architecture, and already spend a substantial chunk of their professional or volunteer time involved with a historic house. Their thoughtful reports made me want to visit some places; put some places on my don’t bother list, and most of all, reminded me that what we think is happening is only sometimes happening in our visitor experiences. And a caveat as well, these were visitors without families, so there certainly is an entire other layer of experiences that are had by visitors.

A few of their thoughts:

Again and again, the guide would urge the visitors to imagine what [a president, the house resident] might have been feeling or thinking as he walked up the very stairs we were walking up, or moving throughout the very same rooms we were moving through. The house served almost as a minimalist stage for the drama of [the president], the experience being very much like participating in a one-man show, something along the lines of a somber version of “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding.” The guide was theatrical and captivating, excited about his subject and eager to connect to his audience.

I came away feeling that the goal, president or not, is conveying the importance of the individual’s ideas and achievements in the most powerful way possible.

One of the most interesting aspects of our visit to [historic site] was that each of us came away with very different experiences. This was one of my favorite visits for it had originality and took a very bold risk in its approach to presenting and interpreting the site.

The risk was this: the onus of the quality of a visitor’s experience rested entirely on the virtuosity of the tour guide. Ours was a young post-grad type who I found totally resistable, perhaps due to his cornball jokes starting out. But once we were underway, his animation, knowledge and sheer passion for his subject took over and captivated his audience, at least me.

Our guide was an affable man who couldn’t hide his pride and admiration for the project but warned us that he tended to ramble on and ramble on he did…. Though our guide did a decent job of discussing life at [historic house] and the restoration process, his lack of discipline in presentation made me wonder if I had reacted too harshly to the swiss watch precision of the other tours. The second floor was supposedly self-guided with some miscellaneous displays about the building but our eager guide followed us upstairs and kept talking.

This was the least satisfying of any of the tours I took on our junket, so it serves an important purpose of establishing an example of what to avoid. The guide seemed to be a staff person pressed into service perhaps due to a shortage of docents. She was not unpleasant but had a perfunctory, somewhat unsure and occasionally apologetic tone in her delivery. She did make it clear that they were undergoing some rethinking and re-organizing of their interpretive plan, but meanwhile “this is what we have” seemed to by the M.O.

The lesson learned here was clearly about the importance of defining your purpose to yourself before presenting it to others. What story is most important about your place? What story do you want the public to take away with them? What contribution does the existence of your place make to the greater understanding of our culture, our world, our history? None of these questions were even approached, much less answered by this muddled and directionless tour. We couldn’t wait to leave.

Our guide was the dream docent that any museum would covet. A local woman of a certain age, she had been with the house for twelve years, since its opening to the public. She had such a wonderful comfort level with her material that I felt immediately well taken care of. She just had it in her bones. And yet there was not a trace of smugness – just a warm, chatty style ,no sense of memorizing a script, always ready to field any question at any time, and then expound upon it.

The team shared several take-away lessons about the work of interpretive planning. They included:

The lesson learned for me here was clear: go big or go home
The entire experience draws the visitor into a very defined and vivid world with a very specific point of view. Lesson: a strong clear mission that is presented with consistency, both physically and thematically, is very powerful.

And there’s another important take-away for me—I often hear complaints about boards not understanding the work that museum professionals do. These site visits deepened a group of board members' understandings not only about their own site, but about the work of interpretation. Try taking your board members on a field trip—even to a nearby museum or historic site. Anne Ackerson, in her blog, Leading by Design recently wrote a great post about fostering good ideas on a board—it’s exactly this kind of experience that can help lead to those new ideas and discoveries about the work your organization does. How do you encourage your board to learn?