The Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Cultural Heritage Policy in Colombia: A Case Study

As Colombia began to develop its Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) policy, it signed an agreement with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to collaborate on a Smithsonian Folklife Festival of Colombia's national living traditions, to be shown on the National Mall in 2011. This essay addresses the role of the Smithsonian Folklife Center in advocating for a cultural heritage policy grounded in cultural democracy and intercultural dialogue, as well as its collaboration with UNESCO in crafting the 2003 convention for the protection of intangible cultural heritage. We focus on the Center's signature collaborative program, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and on our experience with the 2011 Festival program, Colombia: The Nature of Culture. We examine the relationship between the Festival and Colombia's intangible cultural heritage communities, policies, and practices, through intercultural dialogues that contribute to shaping Intangible Cultural Heritage policy from the bottom up.     

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings: The Role of Music in Breaching the Barriers of the Box

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, the United States national museum. Folkways pairs with the Smithsonian's annual Folklife Festival in honoring and bringing to public attention the keepers of intangible cultural heritage traditions from many parts of the world. At the Folklife Festival, which takes place on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. each summer, the culture bearers speak for themselves in a presentational environment designed to promote interaction among the participants and audience members. In 2011, Folkways recordings of regional music from Colombia sparked an entire Folklife Festival program.     

Making Meaning on the Mall: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival as a Constructivist Museum

George Hein, museum education theorist, asserts that there are five qualities a “constructivist exhibition” must have (1998, 35). The authors, assembling observations of visitor engagement and qualitative data from the 2013 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, compare the event to Hein's constructivist exhibition criteria, to assess whether the Festival allowed visitors to “make meaning,” and to see whether visitor meaning‐making meshed with the goals of the curators. The answers have the potential to help improve visitor experiences and learning outcomes at museums and other curated cultural events.     

Cultivating Connectivity: Folklife and Inclusive Excellence in Museums

Today there is a growing global awareness of the need to address issues related to the safeguarding and use of both tangible and intangible heritage. By engaging with communities in the documentation of local cultures—especially their folklife, or in other words, their traditional intangible cultural heritage—museums can create collections that will serve as foundations for museum research, exhibitions, and programs that have more resonance with and relevance for those communities. Interactions of these kinds—in particular those of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the Michigan State University Museum, home of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program, as well as collaborations between the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the Great Lakes Folk Festival, and other programs around the world—have served as important platforms for public discourse about a variety of issues and have produced programs and exhibitions both at home and around the world.     

Building a Community-Based Identity at Anacostia Museum

A historian explores the construction of Anacostia Museum's identity from the 1960s to the present by examining the history of its exhibitions. Direct community accessibility was part of the museum's founding mission, but Smithsonian administration, museum staff, and community residents all seemed to have different ideas about the meaning of the “neighborhood museum” concept. Designated a “Smithsonian outpost,” and intended to draw African-American visitors to the Smithsonian museums on the Mall, the new museum's mission was instead shaped by community advisory groups to focus broadly on African-American history and culture. Staff efforts to “professionalize” and upgrade museum operations later threatened community access to the exhibition-development process, and most community/museum interaction was relegated to the program and outreach activities of the education department. The 1994 Black Mosaic exhibition provided an opportunity to devise new ways of integrating the perspectives of a changed community into the exhibition-development process.     

The Power of Expectation

Abstract In 1999, the first author and his colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution published an article in Curator: The Museum Journal introducing research on the experiences visitors find satisfying in museums. Subsequent data collection has expanded on these findings, as this Research Note will elucidate. In general, the team found that experiences that visitors were looking forward to on entrance tended to have a distribution similar to that of the experiences they found satisfying on exit. The aim of this note is to present data that demonstrates this consistency, and to observe that visitors’ expectations that they would have certain types of experiences upon entering a museum or exhibition were a much larger factor in determining their responses than were minor differences in museum or exhibition content or presentation. In other words, on the whole they came in knowing what experiences they expected, and they left having found them, regardless of what museum personnel presented to them inside.     

Smithsonian Team Flickr: a library,archives, and museums collaboration in web 2.0 space

The Flickr Commons was created as a forum for institutions to share their rich photographic collections with the emerging Web 2.0 audience of Flickr; the Smithsonian Institution was the fourth member of the Commons. The Smithsonian effort was a direct collaborative effort of the libraries, archives, museums, and information technology staff that generated new pathways for collaboration between these units. As the world’s largest museum complex, these Smithsonian units serve as a microcosm for collaboration in the information age. The Flickr Commons project provided insights into how the knowledge, skills, and abilities of libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) can converge in the Web 2.0 environment to provide collection access to new, and in some cases unknown, audiences. Simultaneously, by putting “LAM” content into an environment that allows for direct interaction by these audiences, the knowledge of the content for holding institutions is enriched. By exposing Smithsonian content within the Flickr environment, the Institution is learning what content is desired by the Web 2.0 world, how to bring crowd-sourcing into professionally curated collections, and how to bring diverse institutional skills together in a collaborative project.     

Images of Native Americans

This article summarizes a background study conducted for museum staff planning the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Through interviews we identified attitudes of Smithsonian visitors toward Native Americans. Three results stand out: First, although most visitors have had some minimal contact with contemporary Native Americans, imagery of the past dominated their responses. This past is characterized as a period in which Native Americans had freedom of movement, had control over their destiny, and lived in harmony with nature. This peaceful existence was destroyed with the arrival of the Europeans. Second, current Indian life is seen as grim, except in those cases where Native Americans have fully assimilated into urban environments. Implicit is an assumption that traditional life and values can only be maintained on reservations. At the same time, reservations are associated with poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, and poor health care. Third, visitors would like the new museum to emphasize aspects of Native life and culture that are unique or different from their own. Overall, visitors have only a cursory familiarity with Native philosophy, history, or current conditions. Very few express strongly held beliefs or positions about Native Americans.     

New Directions,New Relationships: The Smithsonian's Twenty‐first Century Learning in Natural History Settings Conference and the Natural History Museum,London

The Twenty‐first Century Learning in Natural History Settings Conference at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2012) has been more influential than similar conferences, resulting in new work streams and international collaborations for the Learning Research and Evaluation team at the Natural History Museum, London (NHM). The conference offered a rare opportunity to discuss issues relevant to our unique workplace and to be surrounded by an instant peer group. Although the event itself brought personal and professional satisfaction, it is the impact of the conference on our institution that has been most fulfilling. The conference has enabled us to think bigger—to think about the sector as a whole and the role the NHM can play as a large national museum.     

Research and Practice: One Way,Two Way,No Way,or New Way?

As learning institutions, museums have long been buffeted by currents, coming mostly out of formal education, defining what counts as learning. The field has struggled to find its way in these waters. In this article I propose a strategy for gaining a firmer footing and indeed (shifting metaphors) for beginning to shape the very landscape, in educational and cultural policy, that currently constrains how our work is perceived and understood as contributing to learning within broader educational ecosystems. Research‐practice partnerships represent a new, more equitable and perhaps more ethical, strategy for producing evidence‐based knowledge and practice. Leveraging perspectives and expertise of both researchers and museum practitioners, RPPs can help the field begin to redefine what learning looks like and how museums both support and expand it. This paper discusses the need to participate in this new approach to research and provides some strategies for getting started.     

The Challenges of Understanding Science Learning in Informal Environments

Abstract The National Research Council report Learning Science in Informal Environments provides a much‐needed synthesis of what research says about informal learning. LSIE makes key observations about science learning and emphasizes the challenges faced in trying to understand and document those complex processes. Yet assumptions about how—and under what conditions—people learn science are not necessarily universal constructs. Such assumptions are driven by the theoretical perspectives of the researchers, as well as the culture of the learners themselves. The limited scope of the volume prohibits it from fully addressing such cultural and historical contexts, and the subsequent implications for methodological approaches. Nevertheless, the report is an important starting point for informing educators, researchers, and policy‐makers who work with or within informal science institutions.     

Nation and National Museums,a Contested Relationship: An Analysis of U.S. National Museums in the Twenty‐first Century

The motivation for this article arose from the wish to share our outside perspectives on how national museums in the U.S. mediate ideas of national identity. We are four students out of a larger group of 15 German students in Cultural Studies at Leuphana University of Lueneburg. We conducted empirical research on various national museums within the Smithsonian Institution and also on the soon‐to‐be‐opened National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York City. The objective of our research was to explore the role that American national museums play in a globalized world by investigating how such museums address changing national identities over time.     

美国加州州立大学图书馆见闻

文章介绍了在CSUN图书馆做交换馆员期间的一些感受,分析了国内大学图书馆在基础管理和规范性建设上与美国加州州立大学图书馆存在的差距.希望能对国内高校图书馆工作起一定的借鉴和指导作用.     

Strategies against Architecture: Interactive Media and Transformative Technology at the Cooper Hewitt,Smithsonian Design Museum

After being closed for three years, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum reopened at the end of 2014 a transformed museum in a renovated heritage building: Andrew Carnegie's former home on the Upper East Side of New York City. New galleries, a collection that was being rapidly digitized, a new brand, and a desire for new audiences drove the museum to rethink and reposition its role as a design museum. At the core of the new museum is a digital platform, built in‐house, that connects collection‐ and patron‐management systems to in‐gallery and online experiences. These have allowed the museum to redesign everything from object labels and vitrines to the fundamentals of the “visitor experience.” This paper explores in detail the process, the decisions made—and resulting tradeoffs—during each stage of the process. In so doing, it reveals the challenges of collaborating with internal and external capacities, operating internationally with online collaboration tools, and rapid prototyping.     

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.     

IPOP: A Theory of Experience Preference

The theory and practice of IPOP emerged from structured observations and interviews with visitors to the Smithsonian Institution museums in Washington, D.C. from the 1990s to the present—a dataset useful in constructing a long view. This research has had one overarching intention: to serve museum visitors better, that is, to provide visitors with experiences that are above average, special, significant, and memorable. In numerous studies and interviews during the last 16 years, visitors have repeatedly spoken about their reactions to Smithsonian museum exhibitions in four typologies distilling their primary interests: I = ideas, P = people, O = objects, and—as we were obliged to add at a later stage—a second P for “physical.” The evidence suggests that exhibitions that strongly appeal to all four visitor typologies will be highly successful with visitors.     

Visitor Meaning‐Making at Grand Canyon's Tusayan Museum and Ruin

Abstract Meaning‐making describes a process by which visitors transform museum experiences into new knowledge and memories. Meaning‐making is influenced by visitors' leisure motivations, prior knowledge, socio‐cultural context brought to the experience, personally‐guided interpretation, and events since the visit. In this study, visitors' long‐term recollections included contextual references to how and why they remembered what they experienced. Forty visitors were interviewed by telephone six months after attending a Native American interpretive program at Grand Canyon National Park's Tusayan Museum. Two patterns associated with a constructivist view of meaning‐making were discerned: a) visitors' integration of indoor and outdoor exhibits and b) visitors' comparisons of modern family and community with a more ancient culture. The presence of contextual indicators within visitor recall suggests that new knowledge may be constructed from factors carried forth from the meaning‐making process. Evidence within the data suggests that exhibits made more relevant to visitors' socio‐cultural identity may enhance on‐site experiences.     

“My Child is Your Child”: Family Behavior in a Mexican Science Museum

Abstract In this paper we describe the particularities of Latin American museum visitors as learners through an exploratory study that took place at Universum, Museo de las Ciencias, a science museum located in Mexico City. The exploration of the learning experiences of Latin American family groups was carried out by means of a case study approach and from a socio‐cultural theory perspective. This inquiry of 20 family groups reveals that nuances of the concept of “family,” in the Mexican context, are important in studying family learning in museum settings. The prominent roles of the extended family and interactions within family groups are discussed as intrinsic traits of a family’s museum learning. In addition, the outcomes of this study highlight the impact that the Latin American notion of educación has on museum education and research, as it encompasses issues that relate to the perpetuation of socio‐cultural values, child‐rearing, and ultimately, cultural identity.     

再论编辑学的基本原理是文化变现——兼答复邵益文先生、何晓林先生

文化变现规律属于文化活动范畴,在出版活动产生之前,即已开始指导编辑活动;出版活动具有文化和经济双重属性,其文化属性源于其内含的编辑活动,其呈现的文化变现特性于其文化属性,所以文化变现规律是编辑学原理,而不是出版学规律.编辑行为虽然不是文化变现的唯一途径,但在社会文化变现动中居于绝对主导地位,其他途径均属于个别现象,不足以影响编辑行为在文化变现活动中的主导地位,不足以否定编辑行为的文化变现本质.文化变现原理与编辑道德、编辑理想并不矛盾.基于编辑道德、编辑理想及社会背景的影响,文化变现原理作为编辑活动的基本规律只能决定编辑活动的发展方向,指导编辑活动的过程,并不能完全控制编辑活动的结果.事物个别运动结果也不是衡量事物运动规律是否科学的依据.以编辑活动的结果来判断编辑规律是否科学是不合适的.     

“Educate a Girl?? You Might as Well Attempt to Educate a Cat!”

Abstract

This article examines how materials collected by the Smith College Archives document the official life of the College, as well as the lives of undergraduates as they participate in student organizations, athletics, musical groups, and engage in other social relationships. It explores how the material has been collected, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the primary source material. It also examines how collections have been used to interpret what it was like to educate a woman in a single-sex institution at the end of the nineteenth century, and what it was truly like for the women who came to Smith to be educated. In addition, the article discusses a collaborative digitization project between the Five Colleges in the Pioneer Valley (Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts), funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation between 1996 and 1999, that made selected records on women's education available to the research community on the World Wide Web. [