Traditionally, city museums have been keepers of city history. Many have been exercises in nostalgia, reflecting city pride. However, a new generation of museums focuses increasingly on the city's present and future as well as its past, and on the city in all of its diversity, challenges, and possibilities. Above all, these museums are gateways to understanding the city-our greatest and most complex creation and the place where half the world's population now lives. In this book, experts in the field explore this 'new' city museum and the challenge of contributing positively to city development.

The biggest trend in museum exhibit design today is the creative incorporation of technology. Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience: Handheld Guides and Other Media explores the potential of mobile technologies (cell phones, digital cameras, MP3 players, PDAs) for visitor interaction and learning in museums, drawing on established practice to identify guidelines for future implementations.

In contrast to a significant recent volume in this area (Labadi, ed. 2019 see below), this volume does not focus only on international aid, but instead considers a range of different actors with diverse approaches to and understandings of 'development'. This volume does not only engage with formalised heritage, such as museums, monuments, and memorials. Contributions consider a range of ostensibly past-focused practices and interventions that may not be explicitly referred to as 'heritage' by the actors concerned. This marks a contrast with significant earlier work in the field (e.g. Basu and Modest eds., 2014 see below). Contributors to this volume include both scholars from a range of fields and practitioners, working in museums, UNESCO, and local government. This will help to ensure the content is engaged with contemporary practice as well as theory, and the relevance of the volume to students and practitioners. This volume will not comprise a set of disparate case studies. Rather, authors will critically review how heritage informs the pursuit of development within a broad general field, illustrating this with examples drawn from their own research. This will ensure consistency in focus across the contributions and the forum style conclusion will allow leading scholars from both Critical Heritage Studies and Development Studies to identify the key thematic points commonalities emerging from ostensibly diverse areas of scholarship and practice.

Especially in the last several decades, Museum Studies has expanded enormously to become an internationally recognized and highly interdisciplinary academic field. It draws on subjects from across the humanities and social sciences, including Art History, Cultural Studies, Ethnography, Cultural Geography, History, Sociology, Economics, Business, Marketing, and Tourism Studies. (And, beyond the academy, it has also benefited from significant contributions made by cultural policy-makers.) While intellectual diversity is a great strength of Museum Studies, its complex heritage makes it extremely challenging for the uninitiated to navigate and comprehend the subject's major works. Indeed, even those who are very familiar with particular disciplinary domains may be unaware of other important parallel debates taking place elsewhere. This new five-volume collection from Routledge, edited by Rhiannon Mason of the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, Newcastle University, responds to that challenge by making readily available in one panoptical 'mini library' the foundational and the very best cutting-edge research from the entire range of disciplines and subjects that contribute towards Museum Studies. In five volumes, the collection addresses the philosophical, theoretical, and ethical concerns of museums-alongside the equally important practical, organizational, and operational issues-to understand how they operate today. The collection also reflects the fact that many of the issues faced by contemporary institutions can only be understood in the context of the philosophy and history of museums as they have developed since the earliest collections of the European Renaissance. The major works brought together in Volume I ('Museums: Histories and Theories') provide a historical and philosophical context for the development of museums. They furnish a comprehensive introduction to the ideas of 'the new museology', which are so crucial to current trends in anglophone Museum Studies, and provide a conceptual framework for a fuller understanding of the following volumes. The scholarship gathered in Volume II ('Museums: Economics and Management') situates museums in the everyday context within which they operate, and investigates the different purposes that museums are said to possess by their various stakeholders, for example, as engines of economic regeneration, tourism, or 'place branding'. Volume II also focuses on the financial costs and practicalities of making museums work, enabling readers to grasp the day-to-day realities of museum work alongside the more philosophical and ethical issues raised in Volume I. Volume III ('Museums: Materiality and Practice'), meanwhile, explores the specifics of museum practice to address questions such as: how are exhibitions and displays produced? How is interpretation understood? How are collections managed? And how are objects deployed and architectural spaces navigated? The pieces collected here also tackle other areas of museum practice, including institutional context and staffing. Issues around how institutions behave and develop an ethos, and how museum staff nurture their professional skills and careers, are vital to understanding the broader museum world. As are new trends in curation, such as community co-production, and the increasing range of ways in which museums are being reconceptualized beyond their physical walls, for example, as performance spaces or platforms for user-generated digital content. Volume IV ('Museums: Visitors, Audiences, Communities, and Publics') assembles vital research on our interactions with museums. The materials collected here introduce users to the many different ways in which a museum's public can be understood, imagined, and addressed across the whole gamut of a museum's activities, from its programming and interpretation to marketing. The volume also takes full cognizance of recent attempts to expand and diversify museum audiences. The final volume in the collection ('Museums: Identities, Controversies, and Difficult Histories') brings together landmark and contemporary studies to interrogate many of the concerns which have repeatedly drawn museums into controversy over recent years. Ways in which museums find themselves caught up in public outrage and censorship include dealing with thorny issues around identity politics and sensitive historical events, such as the Holocaust, colonialism, and slavery. With a detailed and comprehensive introduction and commentary to each volume, Museum Studies is destined to be welcomed as an essential work of reference and a crucial research tool.

This book provides a glimpse of what has happened in the preservation movement in 130 years, from the lawns of Mount Vernon to the row houses of Mount Auburn. It discusses the need to continue refining standards, identifying weaknesses, and extolling excellence in the marketplace of preservation.

Cultural Diplomacy and the Heritage of Empire analyzes the history of the negotiations that led to the atypical return of colonial-era cultural property from the Netherlands to Indonesia in the 1970s. By doing so, the book shows that competing visions of post-colonial redress were contested throughout the era of post-World War II decolonization. Considering the danger this precedent posed to other countries, the book looks beyond the Dutch-Indonesian case to the "Elgin (Parthenon) Marbles" and "Benin Bronzes" controversies, as well as recent developments relating to returns in France and the Netherlands. Setting aside the "universalism versus nationalism" debate, Scott asserts that the deeper meaning of post-colonial cultural property disputes in European history has more to do with how officials of former colonial powers negotiated decolonization, while also creating contemporary understandings of their nations' pasts. As a whole, the book expands the field of cultural restitution studies and offers a more nuanced understanding of the connections drawn between postcolonial national identity making and the extension of cultural diplomacy. Cultural Diplomacy and the Heritage of Empire offers a new perspective on the international influence of the UNGA and UNESCO on the return debate. As such, the book will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners engaged in the study of cultural property diplomacy and law, museum and heritage studies, modern European history, post-colonial studies and historical anthropology.

1. This book explores the diversity of Africa's cultural heritage, analyses how and why this heritage has been managed and considers the factors that continue to influence management strategies and systems throughout the African continent. 2. This book includes contributions from a cast of prominent scholars and heritage professionals working across Africa. 3. This book examines the ideological influence of independence movements on the African continent's management and remembering of heritage. 4. This will be essential reading for those engaged in the study of museums and heritage, development, archaeology, anthropology, history and African studies. It will also be of interest to heritage and museum professionals who wish to learn more about the issues of decolonisation of heritage.

The use of new media in the service of cultural heritage is a fast growing field, known variously as virtual or digital heritage. New Heritage, under this denomination, broadens the definition of the field to address the complexity of cultural heritage such as the related social, political and economic issues. This book is a collection of 20 key essays, of authors from 11 countries, representing a wide range of professions including architecture, philosophy, history, cultural heritage management, new media, museology and computer science, which examine the application of new media to cultural heritage from a different points of view. Issues surrounding heritage interpretation to the public and the attempts to capture the essence of both tangible (buildings, monuments) and intangible (customs, rituals) cultural heritage are investigated in a series of innovative case studies.

A Bible, an officer's mess kit, a cane arm chair and a blood-stained note... at first glance, these items might not seem to have much in common. But on closer examination they prove to be some of the most interesting artifacts from the Civil War. This volume searches out and details memorabilia in museums spread over 21 states and the District of Columbia. Beginning with an overview of the Civil War, the book provides a state-by-state guide to various museums and historical societies with particular focus on matchless Civil War objects in their collections. Chapters provide the description of each museum and details on how each artifact came to be in that location. A chronological narrative centering on each rare item is then provided, placing the object within the timeline of the war and linking it to a specific event. An appendix contains a guide to battles which are known by various names.

Museum Informatics explores the sociotechnical issues that arise when people, information, and technology interact in museums. It is designed specifically to address the many challenges faced by museums, museum professionals, and museum visitors in the information society. It examines not only applications of new technologies in museums, but how advances in information science and technology have changed the very nature of museums, both what it is to work in one, and what it is to visit one.

To explore these issues, Museum Informatics offers a selection of contributed chapters, written by leading museum researchers and practitioners, each covering significant themes or concepts fundamental to the study of museum informatics and providing practical examples and detailed case studies useful for museum researchers and professionals. In this way, Museum Informatics offers a fresh perspective on the sociotechnical interactions that occur between people, information, and technology in museums, presented in a format accessible to multiple audiences, including researchers, students, museum professionals, and museum visitors.

At the beginning of the 21st century museums are challenged on a number of fronts. The prioritisation of learning in museums in the context of demands for social justice and cultural democracy combined with cultural policy based on economic rationalism forces museums to review their educational purposes, redesign their pedagogies and account for their performance. The need to theorise learning and culture for a cultural theory of learning is very pressing. If culture acts as a process of signification, a means of producing meaning that shapes worldviews, learning in museums and other cultural organisations is potentially dynamic and profound, producing self-identities. How is this complexity to be 'measured'? What can this 'measurement' reveal about the character of museum-based learning? The calibration of culture is an international phenomenon, and the measurement of the outcomes and impact of learning in museums in England has provided a detailed case study. Three national evaluation studies were carried out between 2003 and 2006 based on the conceptual framework of Generic Learning Outcomes. Using this revealing data Museums and Education reveals the power of museum pedagogy and as it does, questions are raised about traditional museum culture and the potential and challenge for museum futures is suggested.

Few beyond the insider realize that museums own millions of objects the public never sees. In Lost in the Museum, Nancy Moses takes the reader behind the Oemployees onlyO doors to uncover the stories buried-along with the objects-in the crypts of museums, historical societies, and archives. Moses discovers the actual birds shot, stuffed, and painted by John James Audubon, AmericaOs most beloved bird artist; a spear that abolitionist John Brown carried in his quixotic quest to free the slaves; and the skull of a prehistoric Peruvian child who died with scurvy. She takes the reader to Ker-Feal, the secret farmhouse that Albert Barnes of the Barnes Foundation filled with fabulous American antiques and that was then left untouched for more than fifty years. Weaving the stories of the object, its original owner, and the often idiosyncratic institution where the object resides, the book reveals the darkest secret of the cultural world: the precarious balance of art, culture, and politics that keep items, for decades, lost in the museum.

Rethinking Evolution in the Museum explores the ways diverse natural history museum audiences imagine their evolutionary heritage. In particular, the book considers how the meanings constructed by audiences of museum exhibitions are a product of dynamic interplay between museum iconography and powerful images museum visitors bring with them to the museum. In doing so, the book illustrates how the preconceived images held by museum audiences about anthropology, Africa, and the museum itself strongly impact the human origins exhibition experience. Although museological theory has come increasingly to recognize that museum audiences 'make meaning' in exhibitions, or make their own complex interpretations of museum exhibitions, few scholars have explicitly asked how. Rethinking Evolution in the Museum, however, provides a rare window into visitor perceptions at four world-class museums-the Natural History Museum and Horniman Museum in London, the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Through rigorous and novel mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) covering nearly 500 museum visitors, this innovative study shows that audiences of human origins exhibitions interpret evolution exhibitions through a profoundly complex convergence of personal, political, intellectual, emotional and cultural interpretive strategies. This book also reveals that natural history museum visitors often respond to museum exhibitions similarly because they use common cultural tools picked up from globalized popular media circulating outside of the museum. One tool of particular interest is the notion that human evolution has proceeded linearly from a bestial African prehistory to a civilized European present. Despite critical growths in anthropological science and museum displays, the outdated Victorian progress motif lingers persistently in popular media and the popular imagination. Rethinking Evolution in the Museum sheds light on our relationship with natural history museums and will be crucial to those people interested in understanding the connection between the visitor, the museum and media culture outside of the museum context.

This single-volume museum studies reference title explores the ways in which museums are shaped and configured and how they themselves attempt to shape and change the world around them. Written by a leading group of museum professionals and academics from around the world and including new research, the chapters reveal the diverse and subtle means by which museums engage and in so doing change and are changed. The authors span over 200 years discussing national museums, ecomuseums, society museums, provincial galleries, colonial museums, the showman's museum, and science centres. Topics covered include: disciplinary practices, ethnic representation, postcolonial politics, economic aspiration, social reform, indigenous models, conceptions of history, urban regeneration, sustainability, sacred objects, a sense of place, globalization, identities, social responsibility, controversy, repatriation, human remains, drama, learning and education. Capturing the richness of the museum studies discipline, Museum Revolutions is the ideal text for museum studies courses, providing a wide range of interlinked themes and the latest thought and research from experts in the field. It is invaluable for those students and museum professionals who want to understand the past, present and future of the museum.

Museums have moved from a product to a marketing focus within the last ten years. This has entailed a painful reorientation of approaches to understanding visitors as 'customers'; new ways of fundraising and sponsorship as government funding decreases; and grappling with using the internet for marketing. This book brings the latest in marketing thinking to bear on the museum sector taking into account both the commercial issues and social mission it involves. Carefully structured to be highly accessible the book offers:
* A contemporary and relevant and global approach to museum marketing written by authors in Britain, Australia, the United States, and Asia
* An approach that reflects the particular challenges museums of varying sizes face when seeking to market an experience to a diverse set of stakeholders:
audience; funders; sponsors and government.
* A particular focus on museum marketing in the 'Information Age'
* Major case studies at the beginning and end of each section of the book, and smaller case studies within chapters
The hugely experienced author team, includes both leading academics and practitioners to ensure the book has broad appeal and is both relevant, innovative and progressive in approach. It will be essential reading for students in museum studies, non-profit marketing, and arts management and marketing. It will also be equally relevant for professionals working in and managing museums and galleries, heritage attractions and ministries of arts.
* The most up-to-date treatment of marketing museums with a global approach
* Blend of academic and practitioner expertise to appeal to students and professionals seeking a contemporaryand relevant approach
* Features a range of international case studies that demonstrate the museum experience and draw out the particular challenges that museums and galleries of varying sizes and types face in the global marketplace

In October 1860, at the culmination of the Second Opium War, British and French troops looted and destroyed one of the most important palace complexes in imperial China-the Yuanmingyuan. Known in the West as the "Summer Palace," this site consisted of thousands of buildings housing a vast art collection. It is estimated that over a million objects may have been taken from the palaces in the Yuanmingyuan-and many of these are now scattered around the world, in private collections and public museums. With contributions from leading specialists, this is the first book to focus on the collecting and display of "Summer Palace" material over the past 150 years in museums in Britain and France. It examines the way museums placed their own cultural, political and aesthetic concerns upon Yuanmingyuan material, and how displays-especially those at the Royal Engineers Museum in Kent, the National Museum of Scotland and the Musee Chinois at the Chateau of Fontainebleau-tell us more about European representations and images of China, than they do about the Yuanmingyuan itself.

The science museum field has made tremendous advances in understanding museum learning, but little has been done to consolidate and synethesize these findings to encourage widespread improvements in practice. By clearly presenting the most current knowledge of museum learning, In Principle, In Practice aims to promote effective programs and exhibitions, identify promising approaches for future research, and develop strategies for implementing and sustaining connections between research and practice in the museum community.

The science museum field has made tremendous advances in understanding museum learning, but little has been done to consolidate and synethesize these findings to encourage widespread improvements in practice. By clearly presenting the most current knowledge of museum learning, In Principle, In Practice aims to promote effective programs and exhibitions, identify promising approaches for future research, and develop strategies for implementing and sustaining connections between research and practice in the museum community.

Collection Conundrums: Solving Museum Registration Mysteries provides guidelines for investigating the oddities found in every museum collection - objects without record, identification or sometimes even a location - and determining what to do. Written by registrars Rebecca Buck and Jean A. Gilmore, editors of the best-selling The New Museum Registration Methods, this new volume contains essential information for museums large and small, new and old. The text offers solutions to the problems of old loans, undocumented objects found in collections, items lost in inventory, supplementary collections and more, as well as guidelines on how to keep problems from occurring in the first place. Features a history of registration methods and the standards for collection documentation and care, along with sample documents such as loan agreements, co-tenancy agreements, storage agreements and deed of gift. Recommended for everyone involved in collections planning and management.

Concentrating on the explorer and naturalist Joseph Banks (1743-1820), this book explores the early history of collections at the British Museum. Taking Banks' extraordinary career as its basis, it examines the changes that took place during a period of transition that led to collecting on an increasingly global scale.

It is widely believed that the practice of ancient Egyptian religion ceased with the end of pharaonic culture and the rise of Christianity. However, an organised reconstruction and revival of the authentic practice of Egyptian, or Kemetic religion has been growing, almost undocumented, for nearly three decades. Profane Egyptologists is the first in-depth study of the now-global phenomenon of Kemeticism. Presenting key players in their own words, the book utilises extensive interviews to reveal a continuum of beliefs and practices spanning eight years of community growth. The existence of competing visions of Egypt, which employ ancient material and academic resources, questions the position of Egyptology as a gatekeeper of Egypt's past. Exploring these boundaries, the book highlights the politised and economic factors driving the discipline's self-conception. Could an historically self-imposed insular nature have harmed Egyptology as a field, and how could inclusive discussion help guard against further isolationism? Profane Egyptologists is both an Egyptological study of Kemeticism, and a critical study of the discipline of Egyptology itself. It will be of value to scholars and students of archaeology and Egyptology, cultural heritage, religion online, phenomenology, epistemology, pagan studies and ethnography, as well as Kemetics and devotees of Egyptian culture.

Nina Möntmann's timely book extends the decolonisation debate to the institutions of contemporary art. In a thoughtfully articulated text, illustrated with pertinent examples of best practice, she argues that to play a crucial role within increasingly diverse societies museums and galleries of contemporary art have a responsibility to 'decentre' their institutions, removing from their collections, exhibition policies and infrastructures a deeply embedded Euro-centric cultural focus with roots in the history of colonialism. In this, she argues, they can learn from the example both of anthropological museums (such as the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne), which are engaged in debates about the colonial histories of their collections, about trauma and repair, and of small-scale art spaces (such as La Colonie, Paris, ANO, Institute of Arts and Knowledge, Accra or Savvy Contemporary, Berlin), which have the flexibility, based on informal infrastructures, to initiate different kinds of conversation and collective knowledge production in collaboration with indigenous or local diasporic communities from the Global South.  For the first time, this book identifies the influence that anthropological museums and small art spaces can exert on museums of contemporary art to initiate a process of decentring.

"Museums and the Combating of Prejudice" addresses an increasingly significant issue for museums internationally but one which has, to date, received very little theoretical or empirical investigation. In recent years there has been a growing interest, within the academy, and amongst cultural policy makers and practitioners, in the social role, impact and responsibility of museums. It is possible to detect a growing confidence amongst practitioners, internationally, in articulating goals which position museums as agents of positive social change. The volume is not focused on a singular, specific type of prejudice but is concerned rather more broadly with the ways in which the "other" is constituted and perceived resulting in wide-ranging forms of prejudice on the basis of, for example, sexual orientation, race, gender, disability, religious faith and so on.
Though there is considerable rhetoric surrounding the museum's role in this area there is both a paucity of empirical evidence anda lack of theoretical interrogation with which to inform and substantiate these assertions. "Museums and the" "Combating of Prejudice," uniquely, blends leading-edge theory with in-depth empirical research to investigate the processes through which museums inform audiences' values and attitudes and, alongside other media, contribute towards broader social change.
Interest in the social role of museums and their potential to combat prejudice extends to many parts of the world. Alongside a small but growing number of specialist museums whose primary purpose and rationale is built around the combating of prejudice, museums of all kinds are increasingly concerned to represent variously constitutedforms of cultural difference through their collections and displays. The book reflects this by drawing upon a wide range of international examples including those in the US (e.g. initiatives at the Smithsonian Museums, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Museum of Tolerance), Canada (e.g. the proposed Canadian Museum for Human Rights), South Africa (e.g. Constitution Hill and the Apartheid Museum), Australia (Migration Museum, National Museum of Australia). In addition, the book draws on empirical data generated from interviews with museum audiences and staff at the Anne Frank House (Amsterdam, Holland) and St Mungo's Museum of Religious Life and Art (Glasgow, Scotland).
"Museums and the Combating of Prejudice" brings together contemporary theoretical developments in sociological, media and audience studies, combined with in-depth field research (from a number of different research projects), to explore the ways in which museums might achieve their goals of combating prejudice. It focuses, in particular, on the ways in which audiences "read," engage with, and construct meaning from museum exhibitions and displays that purposefully seek to combat prejudice but also considers the curatorial implications arising from the museum's engagement with these issues.
"Museums and the Combating of Prejudice" addresses issues of critical importance for those working in and thinking about museums and make a unique contribution to live debates within sociology, media and audience studies.

Living history museums are cultural institutions that merge historical exhibits with live costumed performance. While unique and vitally important, they often compromise historical accuracy and authenticity for the sake of tourism and entertainment value. Many also pursue methods of performance and historiography that are becoming increasingly outdated. Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance examines the performance practices used by institutions such as Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg, and offers a new genealogy of living history museum performance in the U.S. and Europe. Currently, existing scholarship on living history museums addresses the subject from a museum-studies or anthropology perspective. Author Scott Magelssen, however, approaches the material from a background in theatre history and theory, analyzing living history museums using postmodern methodology. Considering performance as a method for the study of history and exploring emergent non-traditional theatrical practices, the book offers suggestions for performance in an increasingly postmodern landscape. Concluding with an international listing of living history institutions and a complete list of sources, Living History Museums is a valuable resource for students and teachers of theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, folklore, popular culture, American studies, and museum studies.