Challenges for Directors of University Natural Science Museums

Universities and natural science museums have a long, productive history; however, this has been an uneasy alliance in the United States at least since the 1880s. Decreasing resources and increasing expectations have made the position of all museum directors extremely difficult, but the situation for university natural science museum directors is probably the most complicated among these because they direct museums that are small administrative units within larger university organizations. Some of their challenges include conflict between museum and university missions, governance issues, relationship between director and the university administrator/board member, lack of understanding of museum functions, middle management role of the director, lack of control of staff time, lack of staff support, public access to museum, and limited public and fiscal support. Solutions offered to meet these challenges include a written mission statement, recognition of education as the primary goal of the museum, a written strategic plan, accreditation, a highly active faculty/staff, documentation of the museum's economic impact, the creation and building of a public support organization, the formation of alliances with local cultural organizations, continuing education for staff, and an open decision-making process.     

The Museum Profession: Protecting and Promoting Professional Commitments

Throughout their history, museums have performed diverse public services: from preservation, collection, and exhibition, to interpretation, education, and civic engagement. As Stephen E. Weil ( 2002 ) explains, since the mid‐twentieth century, museums have experienced two major revolutions. First, a revolution in focus from collection‐oriented to visitor‐oriented practices, and second, a revolution in public expectations as museums secured a position within the nonprofit sector (81–82). With competition for public, private, and philanthropic support resting upon measurable results, the evaluation of museums depends upon its ability to “accomplish its purpose” (5). However, the question remains: what is the museum's purpose? Which is the more important: collection and artifact preservation, or public engagement and education? An overview of museum practices reveals a multiplicity of professional tasks distributed among three imperatives: preservation, scholarship, and programming (Weil 2002 , 11). The competition for resources devoted to each of these imperatives can spark controversy—particularly if museum professionals answer the question of the purpose of museums differently. Organizational communication scholar, Janie M. Harden Fritz, developed a theoretical framework that seeks to respond to such controversies in Professional Civility: Communicating Virtue at Work. This essay considers Fritz's “professional civility” in the context of the American museum sector, lending insight to the question of museum purpose and function.     

Function Follows Form: How Mixed‐Used Spaces in Museums Build Community

Abstract This article examines three elements largely overlooked by the museum profession when thinking about community building—space, space mix, and unexpected use of space. It suggests that if museum planners were to pay overt attention to these, they could greatly enhance the community‐building role museums increasingly play. When considering museums and communities, writers in the museum field have focused on broadening audiences, public programs, collections and exhibitions. Physical spaces have been regarded as necessary armature but not as catalysts themselves. There are many subtle, interrelated and essentially unexamined ingredients that allow museums to play an enhanced role in the building of community and our collective civic life. The article describes the characteristics of the Livable Cities Movement and New Urbanism and suggests ways in which museums could encourage these characteristics—and thereby consciously use their interior and exterior spaces to build community.     

将博物馆展览策划做成一项文化创意活动 ——《博物馆展览策划:理念与实务》书评

展览是博物馆的核心工作之一,也是博物馆服务社会最普遍和最直接的途径。《博物馆展览策划:理念与实务》一书作者结合多年的博物馆理论研究和博物馆展览策划实践经验,直击当下我国博物馆展览策划的核心问题,对现代博物馆陈列展览策划所应遵循的理念、工作流程和工作规范进行了详细阐述,为当前及未来一段时期内我国博物馆的展览策划工作提出了极为具象的实践指南。     

Great Expectations: Museums and Regional Economic Development in England

This polemic addresses the political expectations of museums in England. Its starting point is the premise of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport that museums make a significant contribution to regional economies, if not to the national economy. Political expediency requires museums to provide evidence for their economic worth. But it could be argued that estimates of museums' economic impact are devalued by being blatantly constructed for the purposes of advocacy. This paper explores various issues that inform the practice of associating museums with economic development. It considers whether the government's cultural policies and aspirations have served to misrepresent (if not exaggerate) the economic impact that museums currently exert, or are deemed capable of exerting. It closes by suggesting that there are some ambiguities in the commitment of the DCMS to the premise that museums are economically important, and by examining implications for the future.     

Museum Fever in France

In the 1980s, a wave of construction and renovation swept through the French museum world. It was driven by the need to renovate badly deteriorating museums and a growing awareness of the importance and potential of museums for tourism, economic dynamism, and local prestige. Until the early 1990s, a new museum opened every month, covering an impressive scale of subjects from art and archaeology to salt and combs. The French museum has witnessed many relatively sudden changes, some of them bringing French practice closer to American methods. But change is selective, and the French museum remains typically French. Recent developments are here evaluated in the dual context of the history of French museums and the ways in which they differ from the American style.     

For Whom Are We Building These Gems? Redefining Impact at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca

Abstract Can museums still be valuable to populations that don’t visit them? The city of Oaxaca, Mexico is home to a flourishing museum scene, but despite a desire by those museum professionals to serve the Oaxacan community, the city’s museums largely lack a local visiting base. This article, which reflects on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oaxaca in 2010, explores the implications of the disjunction between intention, assumption, and reality in some of Oaxaca’s museums, especially the Museo Textil de Oaxaca, a small private textile museum in the city’s historical center. By considering the museum’s inherent value and its innovative attempts to tangibly impact a specific community outside of the museum edifice, I suggest a way to rethink impact in museums by, in effect, turning them inside out: shifting the focus away from “public value driven by a universal right to cultural access” ( Stein 2012, 219 ), toward more tangible, external outcomes, including direct interventions in the dynamic world beyond the quiet galleries.     

观众究竟在博物馆里参观到了什么？

在当今社会,博物馆为提升全民素质起到越来越重要的作用。为了更好地发挥博物馆的社会教育功能,博物馆馆员在教育活动设计或者展览设计的过程中有必要了解观众的参观需求以及参观偏好。因此,为了体现“以观众为中心”的工作理念,作者从“观众”的视角,对一次博物馆的参观体验进行观察和反思。本次探索发现,由于观众自身所处的社会文化背景的差异,他们面对同一件展品有着不同的关注点和兴趣点。这种差异性提醒博物馆馆员在与观众进行互动的过程中,需要了解观众的不同需求和不同偏好。并且,这种参观视角的多样性也为博物馆的教育工作提供了创意的源泉。     

Are Museums Still Necessary?

Museums today face a crisis of confidence arising from two issues: (1) the erosion of a historically unreliable funding base, and (2) a challenge for audience by entrepreneurial elements in the culture. Other issues center on a growing public idea that museum work can be shared by entities such as theme parks and exhibition halls and the perception that education should be shaped as recreation. Museum responses to these problems have exacerbated their vulnerability as unique institutions. Certain dichotomies in the museum world help to explain this situation: (1) professionalism versus the audience, (2) connoisseurship versus the public experience, (3) the centrality versus the peripherality of objects in museums, (4) museums as businesses versus museums as educators, and (5) visitor expectations versus available resources. Resolution of the conflicts requires museums to remember that they are communication systems capable of teaching hard information, to stop emulating the forces that threaten to destroy them, and to pay attention to certain lessons understood in the business world. Museums also must find stable and reliable funding, reinvigorate the museum accreditation program, and pay attention to what museums really exist for. Museums are still necessary only when they function as true museums.     

Public memories and private tastes: The shifting definitions of museums and their visitors in the UK

There is no doubt that museums now operate in a distinctly different market to those of the past. Rottenberg [Rottenberg, B. (2002). Museums, information and the public sphere. Museum International, 54(4), 21-28] identifies the two major trends in museums in the latter years of the 20th century as being ‘the prevalence of a new market-orientated ideology that stressed the importance of revenue generation’ and ‘the introduction of new technologies that transfixed not only the museum profession, but also the world’. The main impact, which these and other changes have had is the revision of the museum into a setting for recreational experiences [Foley, M. and McPherson, G. (2000). Museums as leisure. International Journal of Heritage Studies 16(2), 161-174; Stephen, A. (2001). The contemporary museum and leisure: Recreation as a museum function. MuseumManagement and Curatorship 19(3), 297-308], rather than an educative one. This paper attempts to address some of these shifts in ideology and purpose.The main concern that museums face as they become more ‘recreation-focused’ is that they will lose what has long been believed to be their ‘integrity’, and thus stray from their original missions to preserve and educate, with critics suggesting that they may simply become arenas for pleasure rather than education.This paper concludes that in future, it seems inevitable that museums will become ‘hybrid places, combining recreation and learning, allowing visitors diversions from the intense stimuli of strolling through galleries and viewing multitudinous objects’ [Kotler, N. (2004). New ways of experiencing culture: the role of museums and marketing implications. Museum Management and Curatorship, 19(4), 417-425], with entertainment and education working together to fulfil the museum's mission. Museums need not be afraid of using entertainment, but should embrace it as a tool for learning, potentially attracting a wider and more diversified public.     

Evaluation, Research and Communities of Practice: Program Evaluation in Museums

Museums present different contexts for learning, particularly when compared with places such as schooos, universities and libraries. They have been described as free-choice learning environments visited by a broad range of people. Museums have the opportunity to shape identities—through access to objects, knowledge and information visitors see themselves and their culture reflected in ways that encourage new connections, meaning making and learning. However, across the world museums are finding themselves competing with other leisure and learning experiences in an increasingly global world. The long history of audience research in the cultural sector demonstrates the interest museums have had in their visitors over time. This paper outlines the development of audience research in museums, the context within which it operates, and describes the processes of audience research through a series of case studies drawn from the work of the Australian Museum Audience Research Centre. It is argued that the shift in museums from mission-led program development to balancing content and audience needs through a transaction approach requires a broader research-focused agenda. While traditional ways of conducting evaluations are necessary and useful, to remain viable audience research needs to be more strategic, working across the sector in new ways and utilising new methods. How programs impact on users and facilitate learning about a wide range of key issues that museums are concerned with is a leadership role that audience research can take across both the cultural sector and other free-choice learning contexts. To achieve this, a communities of practice approach is suggested as a potential framework for audience research in the contemporary museum.     

Writing the History of Humanity: The Role of Museums in Defining Origins and Ancestors in a Transnational World

This article explores the question of how transnational audiences experience anthropology exhibitions in particular, and the natural history museum overall. Of interest are the ways in which natural history museums reconcile anthropological notions of humanity's shared evolutionary history—in particular, African origins accounts—with visitors' complex cultural identities. Through case studies of British, American, and Kenyan museum audiences, this research probed the cultural preconceptions that museum visitors bring to the museum and use to interpret their evolutionary heritage. The research took special notice of audiences of African descent, and their experiences in origins exhibitions and the natural history museums that house them. The article aims to draw connections between natural history museums and the dynamic ways in which museum visitors make meaning. As museums play an increasing role in the transnational homogenization of cultures, human origins exhibitions are increasingly challenged to communicate an evolutionary prehistory that we collectively share, while validating the cultural histories that make us unique.     

A Research Vision for Museums

Abstract The museum family in America is in danger, and perhaps other museum families across the globe are, as well. Management has failed our mission by focusing on outputs like attendance numbers, and audience researchers have failed management by not shedding light on the connections between the pleasure of learning and attendance—or, if you will, between individual gains and a museum’s public value. This research vision for museums looks at how you can make that connection and save museums in their hour of need.     

The Gift of the ISE Frameworks: A Better Language for Museum Learning

Abstract The publication of Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits has garnered well‐deserved attention from the whole museum profession. It has become a point of discussion and debate, as well as a new tool for museum leadership and advocacy. Thinking of it only as a landmark report for science‐based museums, however, would be a mistake and a lost opportunity. This report has important content for cross‐disciplinary impact. It offers the gift of new language and thoughtful frameworks through which we can tell our individual stories more compellingly while supporting a shared definition of museums as valid places of learning. It gives fresh substance to the role of museums as effective learning resources.     

“异化”与“创新” ——当代科技类博物馆面临的挑战与对策

自然史博物馆是公共博物馆初创时的主要形态,其后发展演变出多种形态。本文通过分析国际科技类博物馆发展历程及其背景,指出科技类博物馆的实质是构建和传播理性科学知识,其存在意义是奠定人作为世界主体的现代社会的知识基础;科技类博物馆呈现显著的发展阶段性,其收藏价值、组织目标、社会作用相应调整和改变。在此基础上,本文认为当代科技类博物馆需要坚持构建和传播理性知识的信念,拓展成年观众群体,鼓励观众参与科学研究过程,服务所在地地域发展需求。     

University Natural History Museums: The Public Education Mission

University‐based natural history museums are specialized cultural institutions that serve diverse constituencies. On one hand, these museums promote scientific research and collections through the work of curators and students and must advance the universities' missions. On the other hand, they must provide exhibition and public programs for the local community, or if they are a state museum, serve the citizens of the entire state through these activities. The challenge for university‐based natural history museums is to achieve a balance among their activities and services, given available resources. In the twenty‐first century, university natural history museums must further adapt by promoting social awareness of topics such as biodiversity and fostering learning in informal and formal settings. The Florida Museum of Natural History, an official State museum located at the University of Florida, is a prime example of a comprehensive university museum with a broad spectrum of programs that promote and enhance learning activities.     

Children's Museum Experiences: Identifying Powerful Mediators of Learning

This article reports on a study of young children and the nature of their learning through museum experiences. Environments such as museums are physical and social spaces where visitors encounter objects and ideas which they interpret through their own experiences, customs, beliefs, and values. The study was conducted in four different museum environments: a natural and social history museum, an art gallery, a science center, and a hybrid art/social history museum. The subjects were four‐ to seven‐year old children. At the conclusion of a ten‐week, multi‐visit museum program, interviews were conducted with children to probe the saliency of their experiences and the ways in which they came to understand the museums they visited. Emergent from this study, we address several findings that indicate that museum‐based exhibits and programmatic experiences embedded in the common and familiar socio‐cultural context of the child's world, such as play and story, provide greater impact and meaning than do museum exhibits and experiences that are decontexualized in nature.     

走向科学博物馆

广义的科学博物馆包括自然博物馆、科学工业博物馆和科学中心三种类型,狭义的科学博物馆指其中的科学工业博物馆。本文通过对比分析国内外科学博物馆的发展历程与现状,认为近年来中国的科学博物馆事业过于偏重于科学中心的发展,缺失了科学工业博物馆这一类型。本文提出:因科学工业博物馆在展示内容、展示方式上的独特优势,中国的科学博物馆应补上这一课,大力建设科学工业博物馆。     

Art and National Identity: Some Museums in Prague

In histories of the art museum, Prague has only a minor place. Yet at one crucial early moment, Prague played an important role in what we might call the prehistory of European public museums. There is a close link between art museums and nationalism. One necessary condition for being a country, it might be said, is that its people have a distinctive artistic tradition and therefore reason to build a museum in which to house it. What, then, is the relationship between Prague’s art museums and the identity of the Czech people?     

Finding the Natural Interface: Graduate and Public Education at One University Natural History Museum

University natural history museums are much like their public museum counterparts, yet they differ in some important ways including how they are funded and staffed and how they serve their parent institutions. These circumstances provide some unique opportunities for university‐based natural history museums but they also present challenges, especially for their public education goals. While there are surely a variety of creative solutions for resolving these dilemmas, this article explores how the graduate program at the University of Colorado Museum may be seen as an example serving as an interface between diverse facets of the Museum and its several audiences and constituencies. The usefulness of the program as a model and as a means of training and nurturing future museum professionals is discussed.