The systematic management of records is an important activity for information businesses such as museums and galleries, but is not always recognized as a core function. Record keeping activities are often concentrated on small groups of records, and staff charged with managing them may have limited experience in the field.
Records Management for Museums and Galleries offers a comprehensive overview of records management work within the heritage sector and draws on over a decade of experience in applying fundamental principles and practices to the specific circumstances of museums. It introduces readers to the institutional culture, functions, and records common to museums, and examines the legislative and regulatory environments affecting record-keeping practices. The book is comprised of eight chapters, including: a history of records keeping in the UK museum and gallery sector; the basics of records management; making a business case for records management; requirements of legislation for records management; how to conduct a records survey; strategy and action planning; how to develop a file plan, retention schedule and records management programme; and a guide to useful additional resources.
Gives practical and tested solutions to real world issuesFills a gap in the literature as a handbook in this important sectorProvides an overview of the sector as a whole"

The Museum Environment is in two parts; Part I: intended for conservators and museum curators and describes the principles and techniques of controlling the environment so that the potentially damaging effects of light, humidity and air pollution on museum exhibits may be minimised. Part II: the author brings together and summarises information and data, hitherto widely scattered in the literature of diverse fields, which is essential to workers in conservation research.
Since the timely publication of the first two editions of this book in hardback, interest in preventive conservation has continued to grow strongly making publication of this paperback edition all the more welcome. Those whose responsibility it is to care for the valuable and beautiful objects in the world's collections have become increasingly aware that it is better to prevent their deterioration, by ensuring that they are housed and displayed in the best possible environmental conditions, than to wait until restoration and repair are necessary. The changes for the second edition have been mainly concentrated in the sections on electronic hygrometry, new fluorescent lamps, buffered cases, air conditioning systems, data logging, and control within historic buildings. A new appendix, giving a summary of museum specificiations for conservation, provides a useful, quick reference.
* New paperback edition of successful text
* Now at lower price
* Essential reading for conservators and museum curators and scientists

For more than three centuries the collections of the Ashmolean Museum have occupied a position of primary importance in the history of collecting in Great Britain and an honourable position in the development of museums on a European scale. Many collection catalogues (especially those of the natural sciences), compiled by curators over the past two or three hundred years, have never before been published. This volume - a further volume, designated Part II is to follow - starts to bring these collections to a wider audience. Their independent importance is considerable, for they provide not only a record through time of the fluctuating content of the Ashmolean but also an index of the changing preoccupations of the collectors and donors who progressively enriched the museum, of the curators who tended it, and of the wider community of scholars for whom the collections represented a fundamental resource.

The relationship between science and the public is one of the great contemporary debates, involving questions of accountability, resource, the construction of knowledge and its legal implications. Mutual understanding between scientists and non-scientists is a key figure in the dialogue and here the interpretation of science in museums has a significant part to play.

In 1921 Blair Mountain in southern West Virginia was the site of the country's bloodiest armed insurrection since the Civil War, a battle pitting miners led by Frank Keeney against agents of the coal barons intent on quashing organized labor. It was the largest labor uprising in US history. Ninety years later, the site became embroiled in a second struggle, as activists came together to fight the coal industry, state government, and the military- industrial complex in a successful effort to save the battlefield-sometimes dubbed 'labor's Gettysburg'-from destruction by mountaintop removal mining. The Road to Blair Mountain is the moving and sometimes harrowing story of Charles Keeney's fight to save this irreplaceable landscape. Beginning in 2011, Keeney-a historian and great-grandson of Frank Keeney-led a nine-year legal battle to secure the site's placement on the National Register of Historic Places. His book tells a David-and-Goliath tale worthy of its own place in West Virginia history. A success story for historic preservation and environmentalism, it serves as an example of how rural, grassroots organizations can defeat the fossil fuel industry.

Due to the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence technologies, schools, museums, and art galleries will need to change traditional ways of working and conventional thought processes to fully embrace their potential. Integrating virtual and augmented reality technologies and wearable devices into these fields can promote higher engagement in an increasingly digital world. Virtual and Augmented Reality in Education, Art, and Museums is an essential research book that explores the strategic role and use of virtual and augmented reality in shaping visitor experiences at art galleries and museums and their ability to enhance education. Highlighting a range of topics such as online learning, digital heritage, and gaming, this book is ideal for museum directors, tour developers, educational software designers, 3D artists, designers, curators, preservationists, conservationists, education coordinators, academicians, researchers, and students.

In 1921 Blair Mountain in southern West Virginia was the site of the country's bloodiest armed insurrection since the Civil War, a battle pitting miners led by Frank Keeney against agents of the coal barons intent on quashing organized labor. It was the largest labor uprising in US history. Ninety years later, the site became embroiled in a second struggle, as activists came together to fight the coal industry, state government, and the military- industrial complex in a successful effort to save the battlefield-sometimes dubbed 'labor's Gettysburg'-from destruction by mountaintop removal mining. The Road to Blair Mountain is the moving and sometimes harrowing story of Charles Keeney's fight to save this irreplaceable landscape. Beginning in 2011, Keeney-a historian and great-grandson of Frank Keeney-led a nine-year legal battle to secure the site's placement on the National Register of Historic Places. His book tells a David-and-Goliath tale worthy of its own place in West Virginia history. A success story for historic preservation and environmentalism, it serves as an example of how rural, grassroots organizations can defeat the fossil fuel industry.

Microclimate for Cultural Heritage: Measurement, Risk Assessment, Conservation, Restoration, and Maintenance of Indoor and Outdoor Monuments, Third Edition, presents the latest on microclimates, environmental issues and the conservation of cultural heritage. It is a useful treatise on microphysics, acting as a practical handbook for conservators and specialists in physics, chemistry, architecture, engineering, geology and biology who focus on environmental issues and the conservation of works of art. It fills a gap between the application of atmospheric sciences, like the thermodynamic processes of clouds and dynamics of planetary boundary layer, and their application to a monument surface or a room within a museum. Sections covers applied theory, environmental issues and conservation, practical utilization, along with suggestions, examples, common issues and errors.

This book documents and interprets the trajectory of ethnographic museums in Tunisia from the colonial to the post-revolutionary period, demonstrating changes and continuities in role, setting and architecture across shifting ideological landscapes. The display of everyday culture in museums is generally looked down upon as being kitsch and old-fashioned. This research shows that, in Tunisia, ethnographic museums have been highly significant sites in the definition of social identities. They have worked as sites that diffuse social, economic and political tensions through a vast array of means, such as the exhibition itself, architecture, activities, tourism, and consumerism. The book excavates the evolution of paradigms in which Tunisian popular identity has been expressed through the ethnographic museum, from the modernist notion of 'indigenous authenticity' under colonial time, to efforts at developing a Tunisian ethnography after Independence, and more recent conceptions of cultural diversity since the revolution. Based on a combination of archival research in Tunisia and in France, participant observation and interviews with past and present protagonists in the Tunisian museum field, this research brings to light new material on an understudied area.

While digital tools are not new to museum management, more activities are being performed through their use in order to attract visitors, enrich the cultural experience, vary the experience context, and innovate the cultural industry. However, these tools need to be tested in order to understand the effects they have on both museum offerings and visitors. Further perspectives and insights are needed on the implementation of these digital instruments in museums. Museum Management in the Digital Era combines theoretical efforts and empirical research to contribute to the debate on museum management in a digital context. It further observes, tracks, and assesses the ongoing changes brought on by digital solutions. Covering topics such as organizational change catalysts, sustainability of cultural heritage, and phygital experience, this book is an excellent resource for museum managers, museum curators, computer specialists, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

This impressive and inspiring volume has as its modest origins the documentation of a contemporary collecting project for the British Museum. Informed by curators' critiques of uneven collections accompanied by highly variable information, Sillitoe set out with the ambition of recording the totality of the material culture of the Wola of the southern highlands of Papua New Guinea, at a time when the study of artefacts was neglected in university anthropology departments. His achievements, presented in this second edition of Made in Nuigini with a new contextualizing preface and foreword, brought a new standard of ethnography to the incipient revival of material culture studies, and opened up the importance of close attention to technology and material assemblages for anthropology. The `economy' fundamentally concerns the material aspects of life, and as Sillitoe makes clear, Wola attitudes and behaviour in this regard are radically different to those of the West, with emphasis on `maker users' and egalitarian access to resources going hand in hand with their stateless and libertarian principles. The project begun in Made in Niugini, which necessarily restricted itself to moveable artefacts, is continued and extended by the newly published companion volume Built in Niugini, which deals with immoveable structures and buildings. It argues that the study of material constructions offers an unparalleled opportunity to address fundamental philosophical questions about tacit knowledge and the human condition.

For well over a half century, Norman Whitten has spent a third of his professional life undertaking ethnography with Afro-Latin American and Indigenous peoples living in tropical forest-riverine environments of northern South America. He has spent the other two thirds engaged with theory construction in anthropology in institutional settings. In this memoir, he tells of his contributions to ethnography as a theory-constructive endeavor, and depicts an academic and practical environment in which strong support exists, but where obstacles and strong resistance must also be navigated. Ethnographers construct theory within and sometimes against disciplinary frameworks, working back and forth between explication and explanation to make contributions to diverse and sometimes divergent literatures. This book traces Whitten's career from graduate student through a long and productive career as an anthropologist and ethnographer. Along the way, the reader gains valuable and sometimes surprising perspectives on American anthropology from 1950s to the present day, and insights into the different roles of the professional anthropologist. Whitten poignantly describes and analyzes the wrenching experience of moving from immersion in an Amazonian shamanic universe to administrative duties in a dysfunctional academic setting. As a mentor, author and editor of prominent books and journals, he highlights the importance of connecting a local study with the wider world. As a museum curator, he argues that it is above all a deep connection with living people that gives resonance to objects on display and agency to those studied. Throughout, Whitten makes a resounding case for serious, longitudinal ethnography as the foundation of anthropological theory, past, present and future. Patterns Through Time offers a moral and intellectual compass for all those who are embarking, traveling, looking back upon, or otherwise navigating the journey from casual observer of human life worlds to engaged ethnographer and accomplished professional anthropologist. This thoughtfully crafted, imaginative, and powerfully written memoir by a respected elder with more than five decades of experience as an ethnographer, author, editor, and beloved mentor should be required reading for all anthropologists and anyone who cares about the future of the discipline's unique blending of scientific rigor and humanistic values. Jonathan D. Hill, Professor of Anthropology, SIUC and President, Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (2014-17)

In The Jewish Museum: History and Memory, Identity and Art from Vienna to the Bezalel National Museum, Jerusalem Natalia Berger traces the history of the Jewish museum in its various manifestations in Central Europe, notably in Vienna, Prague and Budapest, up to the establishment of the Bezalel National Museum in Jerusalem. Accordingly, the book scrutinizes collections and exhibitions and broadens our understanding of the different ways that Jewish individuals and communities sought to map their history, culture and art. It is the comparative method that sheds light on each of the museums, and on the processes that initiated the transition from collection and research to assembling a type of collection that would serve to inspire new art.

Via the Smithsonian Institution, an exploration of the growing friction between the research and outreach functions of museums in the 21st century. Describing participant observation and historical research at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History as it prepared for its largest-ever exhibit renovation, Deep Time, the author provides a grounded perspective on the inner-workings of the world's largest natural history museum and the social processes of communicating science to the public. From the introduction: In exhibit projects, the tension plays out between curatorial staff-academic, research, or scientific staff charged with content-and exhibitions, public engagement, or educational staff-which I broadly group together as "audience advocates" charged with translating content for a broader public. I have heard Kirk Johnson, Sant Director of the NMNH, say many times that if you look at dinosaur halls at different museums across the country, you can see whether the curators or the exhibits staff has "won." At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it was the curators. The hall is stark white and organized by phylogeny-or the evolutionary relationships of species-with simple, albeit long, text panels. At the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Johnson will tell you, it was the "exhibits people." The hall is story driven and chronologically organized, full of big graphic prints, bold fonts, immersive and interactive spaces, and touchscreens. At the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where Johnson had previously been vice president and chief curator, "we actually fought to a draw." That, he says, is the best outcome; a win on either side skews the final product too extremely in one direction or the other. This creative tension, when based on mutual respect, is often what makes good exhibitions.

How would our understanding of museums change if we used the Vintage Wireless Museum or the Museum of Witchcraft as examples - rather than the British Museum or the Louvre? Although there are thousands of small, independent, single-subject museums in the UK, Europe and North America, the field of museum studies remains focused almost exclusively on major institutions. In this ground-breaking new book, Fiona Candlin reveals how micromuseums challenge preconceived ideas about what museums are and how they operate. Based on extensive fieldwork and analysis of more than fifty micromuseums, she shows how they offer dramatically different models of curation, interpretation and visitor experience, and how their analysis generates new perspectives on subjects such as display, objects, collections, architecture, and the public sphere. The first-ever book dedicated to the subject, Micromuseology provides a platform for radically rethinking key debates within museum studies. Destined to transform the field, it is essential reading for students and researchers in museum studies, anthropology, material culture studies, and visual culture.

The status of photographs in the history of museum collections is a complex one. From its very beginnings the double capacity of photography - as a tool for making a visual record on the one hand and an aesthetic form in its own right on the other - has created tensions about its place in the hierarchy of museum objects. While major collections of 'art' photography have grown in status and visibility, photographs not designated 'art' are often invisible in museums. Yet almost every museum has photographs as part of its ecosystem, gathered as information, corroboration or documentation, shaping the understanding of other classes of objects, and many of these collections remain uncatalogued and their significance unrecognised. This volume presents a series of case studies on the historical collecting and usage of photographs in museums. Using critically informed empirical investigation, it explores substantive and historiographical questions such as what is the historical patterning in the way photographs have been produced, collected and retained by museums? How do categories of the aesthetic and evidential shape the history of collecting photographs? What has been the work of photographs in museums? What does an understanding of photograph collections add to our understanding of collections history more broadly? What are the methodological demands of research on photograph collections? The case studies cover a wide range of museums and collection types, from art galleries to maritime museums, national collections to local history museums, and international perspectives including Cuba, France, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK. Together they offer a fascinating insight into both the history of collections and collecting, and into the practices and poetics of archives across a range of disciplines, including the history of science, museum studies, archaeology and anthropology.

Originating from the 16th edition of the Conference on Studies, Repairs and Maintenance of Heritage Architecture, this volume brings together latest contributions from scientists, architects, engineers and restoration experts dealing with different aspects of heritage buildings, including the preservation of architectural heritage. The importance of retaining the built cultural heritage cannot be overemphasised. Rapid development and the inappropriate conservation techniques are threatening many built cultural heritage unique sites in different parts of the world. This current volume covers a wide range of topics related to the historical aspects and the reuse of heritage buildings, as well as technical issues on the structural integrity of different types of buildings, such as those constructed with materials as varied as iron and steel, concrete, masonry, wood or earth. Material characterisation techniques are also addressed, including non-destructive tests via computer simulation. Modern computer simulation can provide accurate results demonstrating the stress state of the building and possible failure mechanisms affecting its stability. The included papers focus on such topics as: Heritage and tourism; Heritage architecture and historical aspects; Management and assessment of heritage buildings; Modern (19th/20th century) heritage; Re-use of heritage buildings; Adaptability and accessibility; Social, cultural and economic aspects; Material characterization; Learning from the past; Industrial heritage; Heritage masonry structures.

"So you're the one getting this gift? Lucky you! Someone who knows you has visited the museum. They searched out things they thought you would care about, and they took photos and left messages for you." This is the welcoming message for the Gift app, designed to create a very personal museum visit. Hybrid Museum Experiences use new technologies to augment, expand or alter the physical experience of visiting the museum. They are designed to be experienced in close relation to the physical space and exhibit. In this book we discuss three forms of hybridity in museum experiences: Incorporating the digital and the physical, creating social, yet personal and intimate experiences, and exploring ways to balance visitor participation and museum curation. This book reports on a 3-year cross-disciplinary research project in which artists, design researchers and museum professionals have collaborated to create technology-mediated experiences that merge with the museum environment.