首页 | 本学科首页   官方微博 | 高级检索  
相似文献
 共查询到20条相似文献,搜索用时 156 毫秒
1.
The ways that museums measure the success of their exhibitions reveal their attitudes and values. Are they striving to control visitors so that people will experience what the museum wants? Or are they working to support visitors, who seek to find their own path? The type of approach known as “outcome‐based evaluation” weighs in on the side of control. These outcomes are sometimes codified and limited to some half‐dozen or so “learning objectives” or “impact categories.” In essence, those who follow this approach are committed to creating exhibitions that will tell visitors what they must experience. Yet people come to museums to construct something new and personally meaningful (and perhaps unexpected or unpredictable) for themselves. They come for their own reasons, see the world through their own frameworks, and may resist (and even resent) attempts to shape their experience. How can museums design and evaluate exhibitions that seek to support visitors rather than control them? How can museum professionals cultivate “not knowing” as a motivation for improving what they do?  相似文献   

2.
Abstract Describing actual museum‐wide events developed for the culturally charged arena of the Brooklyn Children's Museum, this article explores the philosophical and pedagogical double binds that have brought multiculturalism to a political impasse. Museums have strived to be valued resources in an increasingly diverse society. In aspiring to broaden their audience base, their work has shifted from developing educational policies that are “object‐centered” to those that are “community‐centered” — a change of strategy affecting everything from programs to exhibit design. Children's museums — distinct (if not marginalized) from the serious work of the traditional art or ethnographic or natural history museum — know and indeed say in their very name — “children's museum” — that they are for the sake of someone and not about something. They have always already been attuned to the visitor at the threshold.  相似文献   

3.
Abstract George Brown Goode, a former Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian in the late 1880s, said that the nature of museum work is not only knowledge creation, but also knowledge dissemination, and, ultimately, learning: “The museum likewise must, in order to perform its proper functions, contribute to the advancement of learning through the increase as well as through the diffusion of knowledge” (1991, 337). Elaine Heumann Gurian noted that: “The use of the Internet will inevitably change museums. How museums respond to multiple sources of information found on the Web and who on staff will be responsible for orchestrating this change is not yet clear. The change, when it comes, will not be merely technological but at its core philosophical” (2010, 95). The catalyst for this change—and for accelerating the pace of change—is Web 2.0.  相似文献   

4.
Abstract This paper explores the theory of “communities of practice” and how the ideas contained in it could be applied to museums, by demonstrating how a key stakeholder group, Indigenous people, have been involved with and engaged in the work of the Australian Museum, Sydney, over the past 30 years. It is suggested that the processes museums have developed in building relationships with Indigenous people, particularly at the practitioner level, could form a template for how museums make themselves relevant to broader communities through active engagement with multiple communities of practice.  相似文献   

5.
Abstract Interviews conducted during the summer of 2006 with people in and around the international museum community suggest that the interests natural history museums share in common with each other and with other kinds of organizations and communities are creating an array of new links across institutional, social and cultural boundaries. These links are active, complex, networked relationships directed toward common purposes. Museums that are taking advantage of this emerging environment are becoming “hyperconnected hubs” across which knowledge is exchanged and action initiated. In forging a multitude of “weak ties” outward at different institutional levels, museums are finding that their shared activity with others brings to themselves new and often unexpected value across the “strong ties” that bind them together internally as institutions. Those natural history museums most able to participate as members of larger, interconnected entities are finding powerful new opportunities to more vigorously engage the world they study and the constituencies they serve. In the process, they are becoming increasingly open, active and relevant.  相似文献   

6.
There are an estimated 17,500 museums in the United States. If people think these institutions are pretty much the same once you get inside or that the differences between them are unimportant, it might be hard to persuade them that all 17,500 are needed. Exhibitions can have great transformational power; why don’t they exercise that power more often? Have museums not fully understood exhibitions as a medium? Have we not devoted enough attention to the full repertoire of visitor feelings? Have visitors been telling us this and we have failed to listen? For many people, museums play many roles in their lives; for most others few or none. How can this be? “Museum‐adept” visitors seem to prize museums as theaters in which their own emotional and spiritual journeys can be staged, but what about the non‐museum‐adept? Can the museum‐adept teach us how to realize our medium’s full potential?  相似文献   

7.
Evaluation of instructional materials, environments, and programs is an undertaking that is difficult to design and initiate due to its complexities. This paper seeks to offer guidance by presenting techniques that are gaining recognition within qualitative research. This is an area of study that characterizes learning by examining the products that learners create in response to instruction. These products are often referred to as “student work.” By using protocols that facilitate a study of student work, museums can learn much about their own attempts to meet their educational missions, in addition to getting to know their audiences better. This paper offers a brief overview of published resources for examining student work along with ideas for implementing them in museum settings, and outlines the procedures for using two specific protocols.  相似文献   

8.
A recent lecture series at the Harvard University Art Museums titled “Art Museums and the Public Trust” marked the eightieth anniversary of the founding of Harvard's famed Museum Course. A graduate seminar begun in 1921 by the Fogg Art Museum's associate director, Paul J. Sachs, the Museum Course became the primary training ground for art museum leadership in the first half of the twentieth century. The 2001 commemorative lecture series was intended to foster a healthy debate on the place of the art museum in Anglo‐American culture. Instead, the speakers, veteran directors of America's and England's most prestigious art museums, invariably returned to one concern: authority—theirs and that of the art museum itself in contemporary society. Authority was at the heart of the Museum Course decades earlier, tellingly explored in annual debates around two significant topics. The first debate involved the pros and cons of including period rooms in American museums. In the second, students argued about whether America's established art institutions should collect the work of living artists. Questions of how museums should respond to the interests of audiences and communities, their responsibility to contemporary artists, and the meaning of a public trust trouble America's museum leadership now as then. This article explores the common ground between the Museum Course debates of the 1930s and Harvard's recent commemorative “debates” by America's contemporary museum leaders and comments on its significance for today's museums.  相似文献   

9.
Abstract Sociologists have described “scenes” as voluntary social groupings or figurations that are “… thematically focused cultural networks of people who share certain material and/or cognitive forms of collective stylization,” according to Hitzler, Bucher, and Niederbacher (2001, 20). This terminology is quite useful for thinking about Stephen Weil's assertion that visitors play a role in shaping museums. Through “scenes,” we see how this might happen, and how visitors might already be exerting subtle pressure on the forms and contents of museums. The study of scenes could help us develop a tool that would offer a unique vision of the influences that visitors have on museums.  相似文献   

10.
Our certainty about the definition of museums is disappearing and with it goes our assurance about where we are and what we are becoming. Observing visitors' use of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum could cause us to change our understanding about how people use and act in museums. Further boundaries are blurring as the native communities worldwide ask museum personnel to change their methods of collections care and alter rules of accessioned objects' use. Without acknowledging it, museum personnel are becoming more comfortable with reproductions and purposebuilt material. Technology is making us a “paperless” society. Our need for and understanding of “authenticity” is changing, and we no longer rely purely on our objects to define our work. Are we destroying museums, changing with the times, or creating some new and potentially more vibrant and useful institutions? Can a new realignment and new definition of our institutions help us to create a more civil society? Do we wish to continue on this road?  相似文献   

11.
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.  相似文献   

12.
Museums have the fine task of collecting and preserving history for future generations. By presenting the collections to the public, museums not only document different epochs but also try to look at them via new aspects, widening cultural understanding. In the Municipal Museum of Rüsselsheim, German industrial culture in the Rhine‐Main region is described and understood as a “route” that serves as a conceptual key identifying crucial architectural, historical and cultural resources of the region. In this cultural model, past, present and future are directly intertwined, and the invisible door between the world of museums and the “outside” world has vanished.  相似文献   

13.
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.  相似文献   

14.
Museums today grapple with the reconciliation of traditional models of authority with the expectation to incorporate new voices in cultural interpretation. At the same time, society is increasingly empowered by a social Web that provides collaboration, connectivity, and openness. This paper frames the dialogue of authority and openness around parallel theories within the museum and technology communities, offering Wikipedia as a platform for facilitating new perspectives in collaborative knowledge‐sharing between museums and communities. Expanding on the metaphors of the museum as “the Temple and the Forum” and the Web as “the Cathedral and the Bazaar,” this essay argues that issues of democratization, voice, and authority in museums can be addressed through Wikipedia's community, process, and its potential as a model for a new Open Authority in museums.  相似文献   

15.
目前,国外捆绑提供不同机构的合作数字化资料,正在向大型“文化遗产门户”方向推进,目的是尝试将图书馆、博物馆、档案馆等公共文化机构拥有的数字化资料公开。欧洲联盟(European Union:EU)在构筑跨越国界大型门户方面起步较早,并取得了很大的成功。文章对代表EU文化遗产门户的“Europeana”及其发展趋势进行了论述。  相似文献   

16.
Abstract While rooted in a tradition stretching back to the late eighteenth century, aerospace museums have enjoyed a period of extraordinary growth over the past three decades. Throughout this period, they have struggled to achieve a balance between their role as “shrines” that celebrate, memorialize and inspire, and “schools” that can help visitors to better understand the complex nature of technological change and its impact on the world. A survey of exhibitions that have sought to portray the history of flight as something more than a story of unalloyed progress, or that depart from traditional master narratives focusing solely on achievement and valor, provides both examples of success and cautionary lessons. If museums of flight are to present a useful and historically accurate portrait of the aerospace enterprise, they must continue the struggle to achieve a balance between these sometimes competing goals.  相似文献   

17.
In his recent book, “The World is Flat”, Thomas L. Friedman reviews the impact of networks on globalization. The emergence of the Internet, web browsers, computer applications talking to each other through the Internet, and the open source software, among others, made the world flatter and created an opportunity for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. Friedman predicts that “connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network… could usher in an amazing era of prosperity and innovation”. Networking also is changing the ways by which libraries and museums provide access to information sources and services. In the flat world, libraries and museums are no longer a physical “place” only: they are becoming “virtual destinations”. This paper discusses the implications of this transformation for the digitization and preservation of, and access to, cultural heritage resources.  相似文献   

18.
Abstract What does the term “interpretation” mean when it's encountered in museums of modern and contemporary art — and is something missing? Studies conducted by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the University of Leicester in England reveal that visitors want more information about art. In this article, interviews with the directors of the Phillips and the Walker (as well as other museum professionals and academics) examine interpretative practices today and suggest plans for tomorrow. When preparing future interpretive materials, the author advocates that museums expose visitors to the idea that they make their own meaning when viewing art.  相似文献   

19.
20.
Abstract Museums have become adept at working with giving allies in foundations, corporations and government agencies who prefer to make grants for specific projects. This works well for discreet activities such as planning an exhibition, cataloguing a collection, or setting up a new store designed to eventually strengthen earned income. It even worked well as museums began to experiment with creating new products such as curriculum kits that would “reach out” to specialized audiences. However, truly providing museum‐wide public service for a broad audience and creating social capital in our communities is not a discreet project, therefore the project‐funding model can thwart the mutual goals museums and institutional funders are trying to achieve. This article explores the problem and suggests that museums work with philanthropic allies to find better ways to create and sustain true public service.  相似文献   

设为首页 | 免责声明 | 关于勤云 | 加入收藏

Copyright©北京勤云科技发展有限公司  京ICP备09084417号