Redefining Successful Interpretation in Art Museums

Abstract This article aims to capture the spirit and content of a lively exchange among museum staff members at the Denver Art Museum. It began as a conference call and continued as an online dialogue about how definitions of success have evolved with advances in technology and changing expectations of visitors. Together we explored how DAM staff encourage more active participation in the museum and the creative tension that ensues between visitor co‐creation and institutional control. Woven throughout this conversation are examples that demonstrate the need to move fluidly between high tech and low tech interpretives, onsite and online experiences, and the impact of environments that break down museum stereotypes. It is our hope that this discussion will spark similar dialogues among colleagues in individual institutions and in the profession at large. Readers are encouraged to respond through the blog at Curator’s new website: http://www.curatorjournal.org .     

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.     

迈向多元取径：公众舆论、公共领域与公共性再辨析

李普曼的经典作品Public Opinion近来被再度重译,书名从《公众舆论》变成《舆论》,因为"舆论"被认为天然就来自"公众"。然而,哈贝马斯对于作为历史过程的"公众舆论"早有论证。对此新译书名的理解实际上反映出了长久以来中文学界对核心概念在语境和脉络上的混淆。因此,紧扣原典重读被广泛征引的哈贝马斯似仍有必要。该文立足于当前研究现状,更指出在数字媒介革命与公共生活议题甚嚣尘上的今天,我们还应竭力追求理论概念与观察视角的多样性,广泛汲取诸如言谈公共性、视觉公共性、具身公共性等路径。研究指出,就公众舆论、公共领域、公共性等议题而言,对其历史范畴的丰富性不加辨析当然不可取,而固执守定某一种公共性的倾向同样值得反思。     

工业遗址博物馆与工业企业博物馆的文化塑造:同与不同

本文以工业遗址博物馆和工业企业博物馆两类博物馆为例,探讨不同类型工业博物馆的建设路径。在界定两类博物馆概念和内涵的基础上,分析它们在文化塑造方面的异同,讨论两类博物馆的工业文化塑造模式,以期为两类博物馆的建设提供参考。     

Museums,Corporatism and the Civil Society

Abstract The prevailing worldview in North America is grounded in the belief that continuous economic growth is essential to individual and societal well‐being. One result of the dominance of this worldview is the rise of museum corporatism, characterized by the primacy of economic interests in institutional decision making. This paper provides a critical overview of the growing dominance of marketplace thinking in museum affairs, and argues that this market‐oriented viewpoint is enfeebling or diverting otherwise competent museums from realizing their unique strengths and opportunities as social institutions in civil society. The meaning and implications of the “civil society” are discussed with particular reference to museums, along with several examples of museums and galleries that are currently playing key roles as agents of the civil society. This paper contends that departing from the status quo of marketplace imperatives opens the door to more creative definitions of museums as social institutions. Rather than becoming more like businesses, museums must exploit their uniqueness, resisting the domination of marketplace thinking, and testing alternative means of achieving meaning and sustainability within their communities.     

TIJAH: Embracing IR Methods in XML Databases

This paper discusses our participation in INEX (the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval) using the TIJAH XML-IR system. TIJAHs system design follows a standard layered database architecture, carefully separating the conceptual, logical and physical levels. At the conceptual level, we classify the INEX XPath-based query expressions into three different query patterns. For each pattern, we present its mapping into a query execution strategy. The logical layer exploits score region algebra (SRA) as the basis for query processing. We discuss the region operators used to select and manipulate XML document components. The logical algebra expressions are mapped into efficient relational algebra expressions over a physical representation of the XML document collection using the pre-post numbering scheme. The paper concludes with an analysis of experiments performed with the INEX test collection.     

Access to Research: the experience of implementing a pilot in public libraries

The Access to Research project is a collaboration between scholarly publishers and librarians to provide free licensed access to research journals via terminals in public libraries. The project is an element of the ‘balanced package’ proposed by the Finch Working Group on how to expand access to published research in the UK, which reported its recommendations to the UK government in June 2012. We describe the setting up of the project and the findings from a three‐month technical pilot prior to the launch of a two‐year national pilot in February 2014. The project has already attracted support from the major scholarly publishers, with about 8,400 journal titles now available. The access platform has been shown to be usable by public librarians and library patrons. We are now addressing the challenge of understanding how the public will make use of the system and exploring how best to provide training and education for librarians and users.     

Children's Museums: The Serious Business of Wonder,Play, and Learning

If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused—a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love—then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimiliate. Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder     

Embracing Hybridity: The Merged Organization,Alt/Ac and Higher Education

ABSTRACT

This article is based upon a decade of experience as the director of a merged organization. It includes the author's insights he has gained while working as Dean of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship in Academic Libraries and as a founding member of the CLIR/CIOs group. The article suggests ways to think about the ecology of higher education in a digital age and what role libraries and allied departments in a college or university might play. It proposes that useful steps forward include inviting differently positioned and credentialed individuals into the world of libraries and working together with computing organizations to create temporary structures within which to revise ideas and approaches to our work.     

Museums and Indigenous People in Australia: A Review of Previous Possessions,New Obligations: Policies for Museums in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

Previous Possessions, New Obligations was launched by Museums Australia Inc. in 1993, the International Year for the World's Indigenous People, as a policy framework to guide the development of relationships between museums in Australia and Indigenous Australians. The policy was based on consultation with Indigenous people to develop protocols, policies and procedures for more sensitive collection management and for including Indigenous people in research and public programs; and to address issues of governance. It expressed the values that would underpin new relationships between museums in Australia and Indigenous Australians. An evaluation of the policy was conducted in 2000 in a collaboration between the Australian Museum Audience Research Centre, Sydney, and Museums Australia Inc., Canberra. The evaluation found that the policy had substantially met its goals, particularly in establishing the primary rights of Indigenous people to control their cultural material in museum collections. However, a range of substantially new issues emerged which require new policy responses and initiatives.