Essential reading for all professionals concerned with museums and the cultural heritage, with the architecture and design of museums and for those providing service for the disabled. The volume provides access to some of the best practice in the provision for the disabled, and sets out an agenda for future action in museums worldwide.

An important and critical re-evaluation of the Galerie Espagnole, this book presents new interpretations of the special collection of Spanish (or purportedly Spanish) paintings formed under Louis-Philippe and exhibited in the Louvre from 1838 through 1848. Alisa Luxenberg undertakes a new examination of the Parisian collection in relation to its lesser-known Spanish homologue, the Museo Nacional in Madrid, a collection of mostly old master Spanish paintings and sculptures that was formed at the very same time. Revealing the political agendas behind each museum, and the different manners in which their goals were pursued, Luxenberg analyzes the critical and visual reception of the collections as well as their intersection with contemporary debates about aesthetics and patrimony, the role of the art museum, and national and international politics.

Situated in a Mediterranean landscape, the Maeght Foundation is a unique Modernist museum, product of an extraordinary collaboration between the architect, Jose Luis Sert, and the artists whose work was to be displayed there. The architecture, garden design and art offer a rare opportunity to see work in settings conceived in active collaboration with the artists themselves. By focusing on the relationship between this art foundation and its Arcadian setting, including Joan Miro's labyrinth, George Braque's pool, Tal-Coat's mosaic wall and Giacometti's terrace, Jan K. Birksted demonstrates how the building articulates many of the ideas that preoccupied this group of artists during the culminating years of their lives. The study pays special attention to the ways in which architecture can shape the experience of time, and addresses the Modernist desire for wilderness and its problematic roots in the classical Mediterranean ideal. In showing how the design of the Maeght Foundation is a Modernist representation of Mediterranean culture, the author has developed an interpretation of architecture that accommodates not only the architect's handling of material or function, but shows as well how it can be the embodiment of a particular vision of space and time.

The redecoration of the exhibition spaces at the Borghese palace and villa, undertaken together with the reinstallation of the family's vast art collections, was one of the most important events in the cultural life of eighteenth-century Rome. In this comprehensive study, Carole Paul reconstructs the planning and execution of the project and explains its multifaceted significance: its place in the history of Italian art, architecture, and interior design at a complex moment of transition from baroque to neoclassical style, as well as its unrecognized but profound influence on the development of the modern art museum. The study shows how the installations and decorations worked together to evoke traditional themes in innovative ways. Addressed primarily to a new audience of tourists from abroad, the thematic content of the spaces celebrated the greatness of the Borghese family and of Roman tradition, while their stylistic diversity and sophistication made a case for the continued vitality - even modernity - of Roman art and culture. Designed for the exercise of a highly refined social performance, these sites helped to model the experience of art as a form of enlightened modern civility.

Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-Century New England Photography Collections examines the evidence left behind from a famous first encounter-that of prominent New England Americans with the remnants of feudal Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. The study reveals that, despite these Americans' varied reasons for traveling to Japan and studying its culture, a common desire united all of their collecting activities: to gather photographic documentation of a Japan they believed was disappearing under the pressures of trade and industrialization. Eleanor Hight focuses on the case studies of six New Englanders, whose travel and photograph collecting influenced the flowering of Japonism in the late nineteenth-century Boston area-still visible today in institutions such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The book also explores the history of Japanese photography and its main themes, from images of travel and historic sites, to exotic subjects such as geisha and samurai. The first history of its kind, this study makes fundamental points about the ways photographs, seeming conveyors of fact, imprint mental images and suppositions on their viewers.

How can museum educators and higher education tutors enhance the way HE students use museums? There are many examples in the UK of museums and universities working together in productive and innovative ways, but these relationships tend to be based on individual enthusiasm and opportunistic arrangements. Despite the growing importance of museum education departments, higher education tends to be overlooked by museums. This book looks at the interaction between design students and museums, and explores issues, projects and emerging ideas about how museums can better support HE students. It illustrates the general lessons that can be learnt, both strategic and practical, which can help to bring about long-term and constructive relationships between museums and universities in order to enable effective student learning.

Tokyo lives up to its reputation as a modern metropolis and, as this book shows, it is also one of the most exciting and diverse places on the planet. Focusing on Tokyo and its surrounding areas, photojournalist Stephen Mansfield brings this buzzing place to life within these pages. He presents all the well-established sights along with many new ones that are not "discovered" yet. This book will provide inspiration for every traveler--whether your interests are J-culture, fashion, food, traditional crafts, gardens or nature trails (or all of the above!). This visual guide is the perfect introduction for anyone planning a trip to Tokyo, reminiscing about time spent there or those hoping to go in the future.

In Learning at the Museum Frontiers, Viv Golding argues that the museum has the potential to function as a frontier - a zone where learning is created, new identities are forged and new connections made between disparate groups and their own histories. She draws on a range of theoretical perspectives including Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, Foucauldian discourse on space and power, and postcolonial and Black feminist theory, as well as her own professional experience in museum education over a ten-year period, applying these ideas to a wide range of museum contexts. The book offers an important theoretical and empirical contribution to the debate on the value of museums and what they can contribute to society. The author reveals the radical potential for museums to tackle injustice and social exclusion, challenge racism, enhance knowledge and promote truth.

The nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of museums in towns and cities across Britain. As well as providing a focus for collections of artifacts and a place of educational recreation, this work argues that municipal museums had a further, social role. In a situation of rapid urban growth, allied to social and cultural changes on a scale hitherto unknown, it was inevitable that traditional class and social hierarchies would come under enormous pressure. As a result, urban elites began to look to new methods of controlling and defining the urban environment. One such manifestation of this was the growth of the public museum. In earlier centuries museums were the preserve of learned and respectable minority, yet by the end of the nineteenth century one of the principal rationales of museums was the education, or 'improvement', of the working classes. In the control of museums too there was a corresponding shift away from private aristocratic leadership, toward a middle-class civic directorship and a growing professional body of curators. This work is in part a study of the creation of professional authority and autonomy by museum curators. More importantly though, it is about the stablization of middle-class identities by the end of the nineteenth century around new hierarchies of cultural capital. Public museums were an important factor in constructing the identity and authority of certain groups with access to, and control over, them. By examining urban identities through the cultural lens of the municipal museum, we are able to reconsider and better understand the subtleties of nineteenth-century urban society.

A helpful and informative guide for librarians responsible for local studies collections covering the key issues in the twenty-first century. Each chapter is written by a different specialist, covering: resource providers; management of service provision; management of the collection and its materials (from books and pamphlets to microforms, CD-ROMs and websites); information access and retrieval; marketing; dealing with enquiries. Introductory and concluding chapters consider the local collection within its library context, the wider cultural, social, political and economic setting, the international local studies perspective and the future for this specialism in the UK. The guide is aimed principally at public librarians but will be of interest to academic, school and special librarians, library school students, archivists, those working with local history and related societies, and those in charge of private collections.

Reconstructing Empress Eugenie's position as a private collector and a public patron of a broad range of media, this study is the first to examine Eugenie (1826-1920), whose patronage of the arts has been overlooked even by her many biographers. The empress's patronage and collecting is considered within the context of her political roles in the development of France's institutions and international relations. Empress Eugenie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century also examines representations of the empress, and the artistic transformation of a Hispanic woman into a leading figure in French politics. Based on extensive research at architectural sites and in archives, museums, and libraries throughout Europe, and in Britain and the United States, this book offers in-depth analysis of many works that have never before received scholarly attention - including reconstruction and analysis of Eugenie's apartment at the Tuileries. From her self-definition as empress through her collections, to her later days in exile in England, art was integral to Eugenie's social and political position.

The Industrial Heritage is the first integrated approach to the assessment, conservation, interpretation, financing and management of the complex heritage of industrial cultures. It breaks new ground, as the authors (both active workers in the field) suggest that concepts of heritage defined to deal with pre-industrial cultures must be modified to deal with the very different demands presented by industrial objects and the societies which produced them. The essence of this book is practicality, offering examples of the real issues which confront those concerned with preserving and managing the industrial heritage.

Browsing for information is a significant part of most research activity, but many online collections hamper browsing with interfaces that are variants on a search box. Research shows that rich-prospect interfaces can offer an intuitive and highly flexible alternative environment for information browsing, assisting hypothesis formation and pattern-finding. This unique book offers a clear discussion of this form of interface design, including a theoretical basis for why it is important, and examples of how it can be done. It will be of interest to those working in the fields of library and information science, human-computer interaction, visual communication design, and the digital humanities as well as those interested in new theories and practices for designing web interfaces for library collections, digitized cultural heritage materials, and other types of digital collections.

Two of the key theoretical shifts over the past two decades of critical work have been the 'visual turn' and the 'material turn'. This book argues that these hitherto distinct fields should be understood as in continual dialogue and co-constitution and focuses on reconceptualising the visual as an embodied, material, and often politically-charged realm. This edited volume elaborates this conceptual argument through a series of contemporary case studies, drawn from the disciplines of Architecture, Sociology, Media Studies, Geography and Cultural Studies. The case studies included are paired around four themes: consumption, translation, practice and ethics. As well as exploring the bringing together of visuality and materiality studies, the contributors raise questions of social identity and social critique, and also focus on the ethics of material visualities.

In the past twenty years digital technology has had a radical impact on all the disciplines associated with the visual arts - this book provides expert views of that impact. By looking at the advanced ICT methods now being employed, this volume details the long-lasting effects and advances now made possible in art history and its associated disciplines. The authors analyze the most advanced and significant tools and technologies, from the ongoing development of the Semantic Web to 3D visualization, focusing on the study of art in the various contexts of cultural heritage collections, digital repositories and archives. They also evaluate the impact of advanced ICT methods from technical, methodological and philosophical perspectives, projecting supported theories for the future of scholarship in this field. The book not only charts the developments that have taken place until now but also indicates which advanced methods promise most for the future.

Through the analysis of several commemorative acts in space, matter and image, namely museums and memorials, this book reflects on the ways in which architecture as a discipline, a practice and a discourse represents the Holocaust. In doing so, it problematises how one presents an extreme historical case in a contemporary context and integrates the historical into actuality. By examining several cases, the book defines the issues faced by various architects who dealt with this topic and discusses their separate and distinctive approaches. In each case, it analyses the ways in which the cultural and political contexts of commemoration led to a different interpretation of the condition. Focusing on the Ghetto Fighters' House, the world's first Holocaust museum; Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem; the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the book discusses how the representation of history by architecture creates a dialectic process in which architecture mediates the past to the present, while at the same time creating a present saturated with historical contexts. It shows how, together, they are incorporated into one another and create a new reality: past and present intertwined.

In his first full collection for six years, Peter Finch, premier exponent of modernism, works once more at the brink of culture. Employing a range of styles, techni ques and forms, he explores what late 20th century life is l ike. '

This groundbreaking book is the first to provide a critical overview of the relationship between contemporary ceramics and curatorial practice in museum culture. Ceramic objects form a major part of museum collections, with connections to anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines that engage with the cultural and social history of humankind. In recent years museums have provided the impetus for cutting-edge artistic practice, either as a response to particular collections, or as part of exhibitions. But the question of how museums have staged contemporary ceramics and how ceramic artists respond to museum collections has not been the subject of published research to date. This book examines how ceramic artists have, over the last decade, begun to animate museum collections in new ways, and reflects on the impact that these new initiatives have had in the broad context of visual culture. Ceramics in the Expanded Field is the culmination of a three-year AHRC funded project, and reflects its major findings. It brings together leading international voices in the field of ceramics, research undertaken throughout the project and papers delivered at the concluding conference. By examining the benefits and constraints of interventions and the dialogue between ceramics and museological practice, this book will bring focus to an area of museology that has not yet been theorized, and will contribute to policy debates and art practice.

Museum activity has, in recent years, undergone major and rapid development in the Arabian Peninsula, with the regeneration of existing museums as well as the establishment of new ones. Alongside such rapid expansion, questions are inevitably raised as to the new challenges museums face in this region and whether the museum, as a central focus of heritage preservation, also runs the risk of overshadowing local forms of heritage performance and preservation. With contributions from leading academics from a range of disciplines and heritage practitioners with first-hand experience of working in the region, this volume addresses the issues and challenges facing museums in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen and the UAE. It focuses on the themes of politics, public engagement and the possibility of a new museum paradigm which might appropriately reflect the interests and culture of the region. The interdisciplinary approaches analyse museum development from both an inside and outside perspective, suggesting that museums do not follow a uniform trajectory across the region, but are embedded within each states' socio-cultural context, individual government agendas and political realities. Including case study analysis, which brings the more marginal nations into the debates, as well as new empirical data and critical evaluation of the role of the museum in the Arabian Peninsula societies, this book adds fresh perspectives to the study of Gulf heritage and museology. It will appeal to regional and international practitioners and academics across the disciplines of museum studies, cultural studies, and anthropology as well as to anyone with an interest in the Gulf and Middle East.

Radiography can be an invaluable tool for the study of a diverse array of cultural materials including metals, ceramics, paper, paintings and human and animal remains. In this book, experts in the field bring to life their experiences with the different materials, describing the techniques that can be employed to discover the stories behind the objects. This second edition, available in paperback for the first time, includes new case studies and images, as well as whole new sections on digital imaging, quality control and animal mummies.

Memory is a fundamental aspect of being and becoming, intimately entwined with space, time, place, landscape, emotion, imagination and identity. Memory studies is a burgeoning field of enquiry drawing from a range of social science, arts and humanities disciplines including human geography, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, heritage and museum studies, psychology and history. This book is a critically theorised practical exposition of how media and technology are used to make memories for museums, archives, social movements and community projects, looking at specific cases in the UK and Brazil where the authors have put these theories into practice. The authors define the protocol they present as social memory technology. Critically, this book is about learning to deal with our pasts and learning new methods of connecting our pasts across cultures toward a shared understanding and application of memory technologies.

What is the relationship between creativity, cultural heritage institutions and copyright? Who owns culture and cultural heritage? The digital age has expanded the horizon of creative possibilities for artists and cultural institutions - what is the impact on legal regimes that were constructed for an analogue world? What are the tensions between the safeguarding of cultural heritage and the dissemination of knowledge about culture? Inspired by a three year research project involving leading European universities, this book explores the relationship between copyright and intellectual property, creativity and innovation, and cultural heritage institutions. Its contributors are scholars from both the humanities and the social sciences - from cultural studies to law - as well as cultural practitioners and representatives from cultural heritage institutions. They all share an interest in the contribution of intellectual property to the role of cultural institutions in making culture accessible and encouraging new creativity.

Museums are among the iconic buildings of the twenty-first century, as remarkable for their architectural diversity as for the variety of collections they display. But how does the architecture of museums affect our experience as visitors? This book proposes that by seeing space as common ground between architecture and museology, and so between the museum building and its display, we can illuminate the individuality of each museum and the distinctive experience it offers - for example, how some museums create a sense of personal exploration, while others are more intensely didactic, and how the visit in some cases is transformed into a spatial experience and in other cases into a more social event. The book starts with an overview of the history of museum buildings and display strategies, and a discussion of theoretical and critical approaches. It then focuses on specific museums as in-depth case studies, and uses methods of spatial analysis to look at the key design choices available to architects and curators, and their effects on visitors' behaviour. Theoretically grounded, methodologically original, and richly illustrated, this book will equip students, researchers and professionals in the fields of architecture, museum studies, curating, exhibition design, and cultural studies, with a guide for studying museums and a theoretical framework for their interpretation.

Focusing on three secular institutional building types: libraries, museums, and cinemas, this book explores the intricate interplay between culture and architecture. It explores the cultural imperatives which have seen to the formation of these institutions, the development of their architecture, and their transformation over time. The relationship between culture and architecture is often perceived as a monologic relationship. Architecture is seen to embody, represent and/or reflect the values, the beliefs, and the aesthetic ideals of a culture. Ameri argues that this is at best a partial and restrictive view, and that if architecture is a cultural statement, it is a performative one. It does not merely represent culture, but constructs, reifies, and imposes culture as the unalterable shape of reality. Whereas the concept and the study of cultural performatives have had an important critical impact on the humanities, architecture as a cultural performative has not received the necessary scholarly attention and, in part, this book aims to fill this gap. Whereas building-type studies have been largely restricted to elucidating how best to design building-types based on historic and contemporary precedents, studies in the humanities that analytically and critically engage the secular institutions and their history as cultural performatives, typically cast a blind or perfunctory glance at the performative complicity of their architecture. This book aims to address the omissions in both these approaches. The library, the museum, and the movie-theater have been selected for close critical study because, this book argues, each has been instituted to house, 'domesticate,' and restrain a specific form of representation. The aim has been to protect and promulgate the metaphysics of presence as Jacques Derrida expounds the concept. This book proposes that it is against the dangers of unconstrained cohabitation of reality and representation that the library, the m

Almost all museums hold photographs in their collections, and museum professionals and their audiences engage with photographs in a myriad of ways. Yet despite some three decades of critical museology and photographic theory, and an extensive debate on the politics of representation, outside art museums, almost no critical attention has been given specifically to the roles, purposes and lives of these photographs within museums. This book brings into focus the ubiquitous yet entirely unconsidered work that photographs are put to in museums. The authors' argument is that there is an economy of photographs in museums which is integral to the processes of the museum, and integral to the understanding of museums. The international contributors, drawn from curators and academics, reflect a range of visual and museological expertise. After an introduction setting out the range of questions and problems, the first part addresses broad curatorial strategies and ways of thinking about photographs in museums. Shifting the emphasis from curatorial practices and anxieties to the space of the gallery, this is followed by a series of case studies of exhibitionary practices and the museum strategies that support them. The third section focuses on the role of photographs in the museum articulation of 'difficult histories'. A final section addresses photograph collections in a digital environment. New technologies and new media have transformed the management, address and purposing in photographs in museums, from cataloguing practices to streaming on social media. These growing practices challenge both traditional hierarchies of knowledge in museums and the location of authority about photographs. The volume emerges from PhotoCLEC, a HERA funded project on museums and the photographic legacy of the colonial past in a postcolonial and multicultural Europe.