Museum Professionals in Conversation

IntroductionIn regional Australia and New Zealand, museums and art galleries are increasingly becoming primary sites of cultural engagement. They are one of the key tourist attractions for regional towns and expected to generate much needed tourism revenue. In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were three million visitors to regional galleries and museums (MGNSW 13). However, apart from those (partially) funded by local councils, they are often run on donations, good will, and the enthusiasm of volunteers. Regional museums and galleries provide some paid, and more unpaid, employment for ageing populations. While two-thirds of Australia’s population lives in capital cities, the remainder who live in regional towns are likely to be in the 60+ age cohort because people are choosing to retire away from the bustling, growing cities (ABS). At last count, there were about 3000 museums and galleries in Australia with about 80% of them located in regional areas (Scott). Over the last 40 years, this figure has tripled from the 1000 regional and provincial museums estimated by Peter Piggott in his 1975 report (24). According to a 2014 survey (Shaw and Davidson), New Zealand has about 470 museums and galleries and about 70% are located outside capital cities. The vast majority, 85%, have less than five, full-time paid staff, and more than half of these were run entirely by ageing volunteers. They are entrusted with managing the vast majority of the history and heritage collections of Australia and New Zealand. These ageing volunteers need a diverse range of skills and experience to care for and interpret collections. How do you find the time and budget for professional development for both paid staff and volunteers? Many professional development events are held in capital cities, which are often a significant distance from the regional museum—this adds substantially to the costs of attending and the time commitment required to get there. In addition, it is not uncommon for people working in regional museums to be responsible for everything—from security, collection management, conservation, research, interpretation and public programs to changing the light bulbs. While there are a large number of resources available online, following a manual is often more difficult than learning from other colleagues or learning in a more formal educational or vocational environment where you can receive timely feedback on your work. Further, a foundational level of prior knowledge and experience is often required to follow written instructions. This article will suggest some strategies for low cost professional development and networking. It involves planning, thinking strategically and forming partnerships with others in the region. It is time to harness the power of modern communications technology and use it as a tool for professional development. Some models of professional development in regional areas that have been implemented in the past will also be reviewed. The focus for this article is on training and professional development for workers in regional museums, heritage sites and keeping places. Regional art galleries have not been included because they tend to have separate regional networks and training opportunities. For example, there are professional development opportunities provided through the Art Galleries Association of Australia and their state branches. Regional galleries are also far more likely to have one or more paid staff members (Winkworth, “Fixing the Slums” 2). Regional Museums, Volunteers, and Social CapitalIt is widely accepted that regional museums and galleries enhance social capital and reduce social isolation (Kelly 32; Burton and Griffin 328). However, while working in a regional museum or gallery can help to build friendship networks, it can also be professionally isolating. How do you benchmark what you do against other places if you are two or more hours drive from those places? How do you learn from other colleagues if all your colleagues are also isolated by the ‘tyranny of distance’ and struggling with the same lack of access to training? In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were 8,629 active volunteers working in regional museums and galleries giving almost five million hours, which Museums and Galleries NSW calculated was worth over $150 million per annum in unpaid labour (MGNSW 1). Providing training and professional development to this group is an investment in Australia’s social and cultural capital.Unlike other community-run groups, the museums and heritage places which have emerged in regional Australia and New Zealand are not part of a national or state branch network. Volunteers who work for the Red Cross, Scouts or Landcare benefit from being part of a national organisation which provides funding, support workers, a website, governance structure, marketing, political advocacy and training (Winkworth, “Let a Thousand Flowers” 11). In Australia and New Zealand, this role is undertaken by the Australian Museums and Galleries Association AMaGA (formerly Museums Australia) and Museums Aotearoa respectively. However, both of these groups operate at the macro policy level, for example organising annual conferences, publishing a journal and developing Indigenous policy frameworks, rather than the local, practical level. In 1995, due to their advocacy work, Landcare Australia received $500 million over five years from the federal government to fund 5000 Landcare groups, which are run by 120,000 volunteers (Oppenheimer 177). They argued successfully that the sustainable development of land resources started at the local level. What do we need to do to convince government of the need for sustainable development of our local and regional museum and heritage resources?Training for Volunteers Working in Regional Museums: The Current SituationAnother barrier to training for regional museum workers is the assumption that the 70:20:10 model of professional development should apply. That is, 70% of one’s professional development is done ‘on the job’ by completing tasks and problem-solving; 20% is achieved by learning from mentors, coaches and role models and 10% is learnt from attending conferences and symposia and enrolling in formal courses of study. However, this model pre-supposes that there are people in your workplace whom you can learn from and who can show you how to complete a task, and that you are not destroying or damaging a precious, unique object if you happen to make a mistake.Some museum volunteers come with skills in research, marketing, administration, customer service or photography, but very few come with specific museum skills like writing exhibition text, registering an acquisition or conserving artefacts. These skills need to be taught. As Kylie Winkworth has written, museum management now requires a [...] skills set, which is not so readily found in small communities, and which in many ways is less rewarding for the available volunteers, who may have left school at 15. We do not expect volunteer librarians to catalogue books, which are in any case of low intrinsic value, but we still expect volunteers in their 70s and 80s to catalogue irreplaceable heritage collections and meet ever more onerous museum standards. That so many volunteers manage to do this is extraordinary. (“Let a Thousand Flowers” 13)Workers in regional museums are constantly required to step outside their comfort zones and learn new skills with minimal professional support. While these challenging experiences can be very rewarding, they are also potentially damaging for our irreplaceable material cultural heritage.Training for museum professionals has been on the agenda of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) since 1947 (Boylan 62). However, until 1996, their work focused on recommending curricula for new museum professionals and did not include life-long learning and on-going professional development. ICOM’s International Committee for the Training of Personnel (ICTOP) and the ICOM Executive has responded to this in their new curricula—ICOM Curricula Guidelines for Professional Museum Development, but this does not address the difficulties staff or volunteers working in regional areas face in accessing training.In some parts of Australia, there are regional support and professional development programs in place. For example, in Queensland, there is the Museum Development Officer (MDO) network. However, because of the geographic size of the state and the spread of the museums, these five regionally based staff often have 60-80 museums or keeping places in their region needing support and so their time and expertise is spread very thinly. It is also predominantly a fee-for-service arrangement. That is, the museums have to pay for the MDO to come and deliver training. Usually this is done by the MDO working with a local museum to apply for a Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF) grant. In Victoria there is a roving curator program where eligible regional museums can apply to have a professional curator come and work with them for a few days to help the volunteers curate exhibitions. The roving curator can also provide advice on “develop[ing] high quality exhibitions for diverse audiences” via email, telephone and networking events. Tasmania operates a similar scheme but their two roving curators are available for up to 25 days of work each year with eligible museums, provided the local council makes a financial contribution. The New South Wales government supports the museum advisor program through which a museum professional will come to your museum for up to 20 days/year to give advice and hands-on training—provided your local council pays $7000, an amount that is matched by the state government—for this service. In 2010, in response to recommendations in the Dunn Report (2007), the Collections Council of Australia (CCA) established a pilot project with the City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in West

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that can be used to provide personalized and contextualized information regarding physical objects in form of digital overlays. We use this technology in our research project Ambient Learning Spaces (ALS) to provide museum visitors with specific additional digital 3D information regarding the exhibits presented. With this technology, we enable museum curators to use a new form of transporting contextualized information without the need for additional physical space. However, the use of AR brings up new challenges for the creation and placement of digital contents into the museum space. In this context, we ran an anonymous survey on the use of AR in museums throughout Germany and studied responses of (N = 133) museum professionals. The results indicate that, although many museum professionals are interested in using AR technology, currently the integration is very costly and complex. This paper proposes a system we developed in a user-centered design process with a museum. This system provides an interface that helps museum professionals to cope with the complexity when placing and aligning digital 3D objects in their exhibition using mobile devices. Through this solution, visitors have the chance to experience the virtual objects spatially embedded in the exhibition by the curators themselves. In multiple user studies during the development phase we measured the usability of the interface. The findings show that the system provides a high degree of usability and can be applied effectively by museum professionals.

It has been observed that the fast pace of the adoption of ICT in the museum sector concluded to a detachement between formal education or training and the labor market. Museum professionals need to acquire new skills and competences in order to deal with the digital challenges in their everyday work life. The adoption of new technologies and the continuous vocational development for the scientific personnel of a museum is considered a great asset. For this reason, the goal of Mu.SA (Museum Sector Alliance) project is to underline and deal with the lack of digital and transferable competences in the sector [1]. In this paper, will be presented the aim, the action plan, the main outputs and the first research results of Mu.SA, a Sector Skills Alliances EU funding project. The Mu.SA project develops an updated training programme adapted to the needs of museum professionals based on surveys and interviews conducted within the project across Europe. Also, it produces a range of innovative outcomes, including European profiles of emerging job roles in museums that serve as a common reference at European level, a staged VET methodology based on learning outcomes, policies and tools for assessment and validation of non-formal/ informal learning as well as modular VET curricula. The MOOC delivered in the first trimester of year 2019 raised the interest of participated museum professionals from all over the world

<p>Before 1940, few of the nation’s museums actively collected or displayed artefacts associated with the history of European settlement in New Zealand. Over the following three decades, an interest in ‘colonial history’ blossomed and collections grew rapidly. Faced with the challenge of displaying material associated with the homes of early settlers, museums adopted the period room as a strategy of display. The period room subsequently remained popular with museum professionals until the 1980s, when the type of history that it had traditionally been used to represent was increasingly brought into question. Filling a gap in the literature that surrounds museums and their practices in New Zealand, this thesis attempts to chart the meteoric rise and fall of the period room in New Zealand. Taking the two period rooms that were created for the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition in 1939 as its starting point, the thesis begins by considering the role that the centennials, jubilees and other milestones celebrated around New Zealand in the 1940s and 1950s played in the development of period rooms in this country, unpacking the factors that fuelled the popularity of this display mode among exhibition organisers and museum professionals. The thesis then charts the history of the period room in the context of three metropolitan museums – the Otago Early Settlers Museum, the Canterbury Museum, and the Dominion Museum – looking at the physical changes that were made to these displays over time, the attitudes that informed these changes, and the role that period rooms play in these institutions today.</p>

The paper elaborates the model of collaborative terminology contribution to the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) through the cooperation of university teachers, students and museum professionals. The elaborated model can accelerate the otherwise time-consuming process of developing multilingual thesauri through greater student engagement while achieving multiple educational goals on real-world tasks. This model includes a statistical selection of the most frequent Croatian art and heritage domain terms and their links to relevant AAT concepts (accompanied with references to relevant literature and lexicographical sources). This process is conducted by students. Subsequent quality control methods include peer-checking and teacher supervision. Mapping of Croatian and English terms for specific concepts was further implemented through semantic technologies (SPARQL queries). Concepts that are particularly demanding are examined by scholars and museum professionals in the corresponding field. After the quality check, the terms would be included in the AAT and made available to open access as Linked Open Data (LOD), provided by the Getty Research Institute. The methods of quality control and student engagement are applied from crowdsourcing projects methodologies, but they were revised and improved concerning the specific needs and requirements of the educational context.

The events of the Second World War left considerable material remains in Finnish Lapland, ranging from the remnants of structures that were destroyed in the 1944–45 Lapland War, through to small, portable objects connected to soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians. These material remains have variously been saved and cherished by survivors and their families, disregarded as ‘war junk’, ‘discovered’ by hobbyists exploring the landscape, amassed and exchanged by private collectors, and accessioned into official museum collections. These various processes represent transformations of material culture to take on various meanings and embodiments, depending on the different individuals and organizations involved. In this article we present and analyse data collected through ethnographic fieldwork in and around the Lapland village of Vuotso: primarily interviews and observations. We have conducted interviews with history hobbyists and museum professionals who engage with the WWII history of Lapland, and observed the treatment of ‘war material culture’, for example through exhibitions (both public and hidden) and through personal meaning-making practices. These encounters have centred around the material remains of the Second World War, and the ways in which different actors perceive, value and otherwise understand those remains. While some objects are transformed through musealisation, others remain ‘officially’ unknown and unrecognized (although known – even traded and exchanged – through private channels). Furthermore it may be as important for some actors to leave material culture in situ – for example as testimony to the past conflict or trauma – as it is for others to exercise personal ownership. Within this context, we deconstruct the notion of ‘expert’ as it relates to the local and historical knowledge. Being regarded by peers and others as an expert is not necessarily the same thing as having professional authority and status, for example as a museum curator or university-affiliated scholar. We draw upon theories of relational materiality, and suggest different typologies of engagement with the material culture. Different networks of interest and expertise emerge, dependent on the actors involved (including their status – e.g. museum professional, survivor, ‘incomer’, local activist – and how their knowledge is thus accepted, challenged or rejected by others), the context of ownership, situationality and perceived levels of authenticity.

From open-source software for collection management to open access initiatives for public reuse, the museum community is experiencing an ongoing transformation in what the concept of openness truly means. Adopting the social construction of technology as a theoretical framework and analytical method, this study investigates the changing attitudes and practices among museum professionals, especially how the intellectual precepts of the “new museology” have influenced the conceptualisation and operationalisation of openness. Methodologically, this study explores the archive of the Museums and the Web conference and conducts a qualitative content analysis of papers presented between 1997 and 2020 related to the topic of openness. By identifying and comparing how these papers discussed open-oriented practices, this study demonstrates how museum professionals have socially constructed the changing meanings of openness in the past twenty years and provides empirical evidence about how the new museology discourse has been realised in practice.

This study presents a prototype for visualizing artifact information, allowing museum professionals to manage and utilize it without needing computer science expertise. The proposed prototype enables users to enter and manage data pertaining to artifacts and visualize the information in various methods using the entered data. Therefore, museum professionals can use it in various practical settings, such as discovering new relationships between artifacts, deriving research and exhibition topics, and developing content. This study utilized data from approximately 270 traditional paintings and 70 painters from the Joseon Dynasty of Korea to implement the visualization. Users can identify the association between the works using the patterns depicted in the paintings and their implied meanings based on the network graphs. The region of activity, period of activity, and frequency of pattern usage can be visualized by artists by combining maps, timelines, and word clouds, depending on the characteristics of the data. The developed prototype was compared with Gephi and Neo4j, commercial network graph generation tools, to determine whether it had sufficient functions for visualizing artifact information. The main process of data visualization was divided into data management, data visualization, and data exploration, while the necessary details for each step were determined as the criteria of the comparative analysis. They were compared after entering the same data into each software. The comparative evaluation was conducted in the process of creating and exploring network graphs.

Acceptability, Acceptance and Adoption of Telepresence Robots in Museums: The Museum Professionals' Perspectives

This thesis looks at the current state of digital reproductions for contemporary photographic artworks—how they are made, the purposes they serve, and how they are disseminated by cultural institutions. Using four selected photographic installation artworks by Canadian artist Michael Snow, this research examines how museums pursue reproductions of artworks that are installative by design and possess elements that are not easily reproducible like sound or the use of time. The reproduction process and terminology used at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada (two institutions with significant collections of Snow’s artworks) are both examined, as well as how digital reproduction is currently discussed and theorized by museum professionals and digital specialists. Reproductions are used for outreach, research, advertising, and conservation, but between texts and institutions alike there lacks consistent terminologies and purposes for reproductions due to the dearth of research into this type of imagery.

Challenging Exclusion and Museum Doctrine

This research aims to analyze the approximations or distancings to the category "City Museum" seeking to problematize its use in the context of the Historical Museum of the City of Rio de Janeiro -MHCRJ. The intention was to verify if the relationship with the surrounding community contributes to the musealization process, in order to broaden the debate about city museums, their interface with the educational dimension and cultural heritage. Based on the literature review, it was possible to verify an incipient production on the theme of city museums and education, which demonstrates the need for research in this field in order to enable a fruitful approximation between these areas. There are some guiding questions that guide the research, such as: the museum is in the city, but is the city in the museum? Does carrying the category of City Museum enable an effective and affective dialogue with this territory of which it is a part? Is Parque da Cidade also a museum? The reflection upon the city museum, musealization and cultural heritage, based on the relationship with the surroundings, was based on the theoretical perspectives of Meneses, Varine, Brulon, Desvalls and Mairesse, Gonalves and Poulot. The debate on the educational dimension of the museum was guided by the studies of Carvalho, Chagas, Cristina Bruno and Valente. It is assumed that, more than exposing its objects, the museum needs to create communication channels with its audiences and with the surrounding community, thus becoming a privileged space for discussion about the development of the city. Therefore, a qualitative investigation was prioritized using the following methodological resources: semi-structured interviews with nine residents of the Vila Parque da Cidade and Parque da Cidade community, a Park worker and five Museum professionals, observation of the surroundings (Park and community), of an educational activity carried out by the Museum, the opening of its technical reserve and analysis of documents available on the web about the Museum. The results show how much the surrounding community, especially the older ones, know the history of that Museum, the community and the Park and highlight aspects that can contribute to bringing them closer. Parque da Cidade presents itself as a space of belonging to most of the interviewed residents. It can be said that in addition to being the place of residence and extension of the Museum, the Park is also a Museum. Although the Historical Museum of the City of Rio de Janeiro is classified by its professionals as a historical museum and has a specific function, it is concluded that it still seems to be in a process of building its identity and that the integration with the extramural surroundings is in development. The experiences of the people who were interviewed, that were related to so many stories about the Museum, also point to the need of a process of musealization that incorporates the public, taking into account the living, cultural and natural heritage of that location.

for Basic Education teachers, highlighting the importance of Museum Education as a strategy for teachers' continuing professional development.The research adopts a qualitative approach, with methodological development through interviews with museum representatives, observations of professional development initiatives for teachers, and an investigation into the perceptions of participating educators, generating data for content analysis.To map the museums and their professional development strategies, questionnaires were applied to museum representatives and Basic Education teachers.The selection of indicators is based on theoretical references that directly connect teacher training initiatives to the museum context, considering cultural, social, and scientific aspects.The data analysis reveals that museum experiences not only enrich teachers' curricula but also foster a deeper understanding of cultural and scientific education, which is essential for contemporary pedagogical practice.The findings emphasize the need for training that integrates theoretical and practical aspects, in alignment with the guidelines of the National Museum Education Policy (PNEM).Additionally, the study highlights the challenges in implementing professional development initiatives that effectively integrate museum spaces into school routines, suggesting that museums can serve as valuable allies in building a more contextualized and pluralistic education.The research concludes that continuing professional development and collaboration between educators and museum professionals are fundamental for updating curricula to meet contemporary educational demands.Museums emerge as significant institutions in teachers' professional development, serving as spaces for learning and reflection that support the construction of knowledge and innovative educational practices.Furthermore, the study advocates for a continuous dialogue between schools and museums, proposing that expanding this interaction can play a crucial role in enhancing teachers' professional development and enriching the educational process.

Sports are intertwined with American society. Since the earliest forms of native games to today’s extreme competitions, sports have left an indelible mark on the fabric of American culture. Today, sports are a multibillion-dollar industry. Social media provides a never ceasing outlet for community interaction surrounding sporting events and discussions. At their core, sports are an opportunity for self-exploration through the lens of competition, social structures, and community building. Interpreting Sports at Museums and Historic Sites encourages museums, historical sites and cultural institutions to consider the history of sport as integral to American culture and society. Sports provide a vehicle to understanding the growth and development of America from colonization to globalization. Central to this work is a call to bring a balanced view of humanity to the sports commemoration conversation. Museums can and should be places of advocacy and inclusion for all athletes and sports figures: young & old, ametuer & professional, past & present. Practitioners are encouraged to consider museums as safe spaces to approach empathetic, complex, enthralling conversations that allow for both celebratory and challenging topics. This comprehensive study provides analytical direction and practical application for interpreting sports history at a variety of sites; guiding sports and non-sports museum professionals alike. A robust series of essays illuminate the innovative, forward thinking nature of sport exhibition and programming that is an active part of the American museum experience. Thirty-two national and international authors take an honest look at the ways sports impacts culture and culture impacts sports. Six thematic essays uncover the particularities of navigating the sports historical landscape alongside an actively engaged, present-day audience. Then, a wide selection of case studies explore successful and unsuccessful attempts at attracting the public and engaging in educational discussion around both uplifting and difficult sports topics. Opportunities for including sports in exhibition planning and programmatic development are a key benefit of this practical guide. You’ll discover an astounding variety of viewpoints and methods for offering popular sports programming into your institutional programming and outreach efforts. From a fun mix of museum professionals, historians, and sports personnel comes this complete guide to developing and implementing a more cohesive story of sport history within your institution.

Museums have become fully active cultural agents, pursuing educational aims but also trying to attract the largest number of visitors. Exhibition press announcements (EPAs) issued by museums reflect this tendency and address journalists as if they were ‘customers’ in a very competitive market. Building on Bhatia’s work on promotional genres (1993, 2004) and recent corpus-based studies devoted to press releases (Catenaccio 2008; Lindholm 2008; McLaren and Gurâu 2005), this paper investigates lexico-grammatical forms typical of EPAs with the aim to demonstrate that they carry a strong promotional intent and reflect the value-system of the professional communities involved, i.e. art journalists and museum professionals. The study was carried out on a corpus of contemporary Anglo-American EPAs and shows the recurrent use of linguistic features that express positive evaluation of the exhibition, especially with regard to the semantic areas of novelty, quality, extensiveness and exclusiveness. Emotional linguistic features are also used in order to create ‘news value’ and excite curiosity around the artists and their artworks.