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?     

National Narratives: Australia in Asia

Magill magazine was an influential current affairs magazine which was first published in Dublin in October 1977. The magazine was owned by journalist Vincent Browne, who was also its first editor. Having worked in Belfast in the early 1970s Browne saw the conflict in Northern Ireland as one of the main concerns of the news agenda. This article examines Magill's coverage of Northern Ireland which was largely driven by an interest in exploring thinking within the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The magazine's coverage was comprehensive but narrow. Exclusive interviews with republican paramilitaries, who were banned from the broadcast airwaves, were a regular feature as was an interest in hard-line unionist leader, Rev. Ian Paisley. The magazine's journalism in this period has proven to be a valuable historical record of the emergence of the Irish peace process.     

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.     

网上博物馆与传统博物馆

一、网络和博物馆一些媒体开始了新世纪倒计时,21世纪离我们越来越近,“网络”成为报纸、杂志和电视台使用频率最高的词汇之一。据说在中国,“上网”一词在近年所有流行词汇中名列前茅。今年1月ＣＮＮＩＣ(中国互联网络信息中心)公布的统计数,中国互联网用户截止到1999年底有890万,4月5日中央电视台晚间新闻播报的数字已经超过900万。根据ＩＤＣ预测,到2004年,中国互联网用户将发展到3989万。另外,2000年3月30日,我国第一个互联网交换中心———北京中国互联网交换中心正式开通,中国主要互联网间互联带宽由原来不足10兆比特每秒提高到100兆…     

Personal Beliefs and National Stories: Theater in Museums as a Tool for Exploring Historical Memory

How does what we remember about history relate to true historical understanding, and how can the museum become a location for these conversations? During the summer of 2011, the National Museum of American History challenged audiences to consider issues of historical memory and national history through the performance of an interactive museum theater program, The Time Trial of John Brown. Using the Time Trial approach as a case study, this article reveals that interactive theater in museums can provide a platform from which audiences assert their own historical understanding while learning firsthand about their role in creating a shared knowledge of American history. As the role of museums evolves in the twenty‐first century, new attention must be paid to this personal process of examining and creating history and memory through performance. It is through performance and participation that history and memory are both examined and created by the audience.     

Controversy and Challenge: British Funding Increases Nationally,But Not to National Museums

The United Kingdom's economic backdrop, according to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, has never looked better. Massive amounts of new funding are being invested in the National Health Service, Education and Social Services—tens of billions of pounds. Investment in the U.K.'s 10‐year Science and Innovation strategy has risen to over £3 billion per annum. Investment in Arts Council Funding will have increased 69 percent in the eight years since 1997, to over £410 million per annum by 2005–2006. And attendance at national museums and galleries has increased over 60 percent since admission charges were ended in 2001–2002. But in the field of science and technology there is a scattering of less‐well‐known data. More than 30 departments of chemistry and physics have closed at universities around Britain in the last few years. The take‐up rate of students entering science and mathematics, and subjects leading to technological, engineering, and medical degrees, among certain socio‐economic groups, has been falling dramatically. Even wealthy industries such as the oil and gas sector cannot attract young people—especially young women—to engineering, despite the fact that engineers with less than a decade of experience earn an average of U.S. $75,000 a year, and when fully experienced, an average of U.S. $127,000 a year. Overall, it seems that the ability of the public to interrogate issues driven by changes in science and technology, and their level of trust, are effectively decreasing.     

Creating a Business Strategy Evaluation Model for National Museums Based on the Views of Curators

The aim of this study is to find the critical factors that influence Taiwan's national museum business performance based on its curators’ views. The study explored the causal relationships among the criteria that emerged in the study and of each sub‐criteria. Since developing a business strategy is a multiple‐criteria decision‐making (MCDM) problem, this study adopted the causal‐effect model of decision‐making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique. The DEMATEL technique simplifies and visualizes the interrelationships among decision‐making criteria. The study identified four core criteria – benefits, opportunity, costs, and risks, as key influencers in the national museum business performance. Each key criteria was supported by a set of sub‐criteria which, when considered together, produced an influential network relations map. The results of this study provided Taiwan's national museum curators with an idea‐based understanding of how to create business and marketing strategies that could enhance exhibition features, experience activities, and facilities that could be linked to satisfaction of visitors’ desires and offer a potentials strategy for assessing likelihood of return visits.     

3D Representations in Museums

Abstract Museums have developed strategies to allow their visitors to “walk through” three‐dimensional replicas of great cathedrals and palaces, tombs and catacombs, stately houses and other architectural achievements from distant lands and ages, and to walk around the great sculptures of the past several millenniums. Casts (three‐dimensional replicas) provided these 3D experiences in the mid‐nineteenth century. In many respects, the older technology of casts retains its advantages over the present state of digital virtual reality, though it has fallen out of favor. This article examines the usefulness of this earlier way of viewing sculptural objects.     

Doing Identity Work in Museums

Abstract Museum visitors typically look at only about a third of the elements of an exhibition, and often give only limited attention to those. Can visitors really be getting something worthwhile from such partial usage of an exhibition? This article explores how visitors use exhibitions for “identity work,” the processes through which we construct, maintain, and adapt our sense of personal identity, and persuade other people to believe in that identity. Museums offer powerful opportunities for doing identity work, but the visitor does not need to engage with exhibition content deeply or systematically in order to gain the benefits that museum experiences offer for identity work.     

Exploring Satisfying Experiences in Museums

This article presents results from an ongoing research project that investigates the experiences visitors find satisfying in museums. Using a list constructed from interviews with visitors and surveys, data were obtained from visitors in nine Smithsonian museums. Analysis of the results showed that experiences can be classified into four categories: Object experiences, Cognitive experiences, Introspective experiences, and Social experiences. The article points out that the type of most satisfying experience differs according to the characteristics of museums, exhibitions, and visitors. It also proposes an interpretation for these data, and suggests some possible applications.     

博物馆与标准化

标准化是经济、技术、科学及管理等社会实践中，对重复性事物和概念，通过制定、发布和实施标准达到统一，以获取最佳秩序与效益的重要管理方法，是科学化、现代化管理的重要组成部分。标准化是一门古老而且实用性很强的学科，它的足迹与人类社会的发展历史紧密地同步前进。     

Museums and Impact

Since the 1980s, governments throughout the western industrialized world have required greater emphasis on fiscal and public accountability within the public sector. As a result, museum value has been constructed in response to economic rationalism and government policies without sufficient input from the museum sector itself. This paper asserts that any discussion of the role of museums, the contribution they make to societies and appropriate ways of evaluating their impact requires the perspectives and contributions of all stakeholders. It examines preliminary findings from a study that asked about the impact of museums from the perspective of museum professionals and end‐users. It reports significant areas of agreement between public and professional cohorts regarding the role museums play and the contribution they make both to individuals and to the social and economic development.