Assessment as Information Practice provides information about a range of collection and service-based assessment approaches that can be applied in different contexts to benefit institutions and the users they serve by enhancing quality, efficiency, and effectiveness. With contributions from practitioners and researchers in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the United States, the chapters discuss practical and theoretical aspects of assessment in collecting institutions. Each chapter focuses on specific assessment approaches or contexts while providing guidance on method and use. The chapters can be read alone or as a series to gain an appreciation of assessment approaches, including assessment-oriented research; storytelling; design thinking; data visualisation; mixed methods assessment for digital resources; data for institutional repository assessment; bibliometric methods; and impact assessment. Assessment as Information Practice serves as a resource for practitioners involved in assessment activities. Detailing the processes and considerations that will contribute to more effective and sustainable assessment programmes, the book is also relevant to faculty, researchers, and students working in the information sector.

Museum professionals' increased focus on visitors in recent years has been demonstrated by, among other things, the enhanced practice of evaluation and the development of interpretive plans. Yet too often, these efforts function independent of one another. This book helps museums integrate visitors' perspectives into interpretive planning by recognizing, defining, and recording desired visitor outcomes throughout the process. The integration of visitor studies in the practice of interpretive planning is also based on the belief that the greater our understanding, tracking, and monitoring of learners, the greater the impact museums will make on public understanding of the science and humanities disciplines. An approach that advocates thoughtful and intentional interpretive planning that constantly integrates visitor perspectives is the next step in working with, rather than for, our communities; a step toward truly becoming visitor-centered and impactful as essential learning institutions of the 21st century.

American nationalism, patriotism and citizenship are proudly on display at historical sites across America-but they are also contested and reshaped by visitors and their engagement with those places. In Exhibiting Patriotism, Bergman analyzes exhibits, interpretive materials, and orientation films at major US sites, from Mt. Rushmore and to the USS Arizona Memorial, where controversy has erupted over the stories they tell about the past. She shows how historic narratives are the result of dynamic relationships between institutions and the public, and how these relationships are changing in an era when museums are becoming more visitor-centered, seeing visitors as partners in historical interpretation. Drawing on film theory, memory studies, visual communication, and visitor studies, Bergman offers an important analysis for scholars and professionals in American studies, museum studies, public history, and communication and media studies.

American nationalism, patriotism and citizenship are proudly on display at historical sites across America--but they are also contested and reshaped by visitors and their engagement with those places. In Exhibiting Patriotism, Bergman analyzes exhibits, interpretive materials, and orientation films at major US sites, from Mt. Rushmore and to the USS Arizona Memorial, where controversy has erupted over the stories they tell about the past. She shows how historic narratives are the result of dynamic relationships between institutions and the public, and how these relationships are changing in an era when museums are becoming more visitor-centered, seeing visitors as partners in historical interpretation. Drawing on film theory, memory studies, visual communication, and visitor studies, Bergman offers an important analysis for scholars and professionals in American studies, museum studies, public history, and communication and media studies.

This book describes the methods of conservation, preservation and restoration of the thousands of artefacts contained within the buildings that house the museums, which also require constant care and attention. The Vatican Museums are enormous, nearly 4 miles of passages through galleries, rooms and internal gardens. A museum system that includes many specific collection types - frescoes, sculptures, metals, textiles, ethnographic, Etruscan and Egyptian artefacts, fine and contemporary art, carriages and cars - that all require expert attention, whilst they are viewed daily by some of the 6 million visitors a year, who all breathe amongst the treasures, and spread dust throughout the buildings. The book will be of great interest and value to anyone involved in, or training to be involved in the professional management of a museum or collection.

For cultural and heritage institutions around the world, sustainability is the major challenge of the twenty-first century. In the first major work to analyze this critical issue, Barthel-Bouchier argues that programmatic commitments to sustainability arose both from direct environmental threats to tangible and intangible heritage, and from social and economic contradictions as heritage developed into a truly global organizational field. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews over many years, as well as detailed coverage of primary documents and secondary literature, she examines key international organizations including UNESCO, ICOMOS, and the World Monuments Fund, and national trust organizations of Great Britain, the United States, and Australia, and many others. This wide-ranging study establishes a foundation for critical analysis and programmatic advances as heritage professionals encounter the growing challenge of sustainability.

In this book, Dan Adler addresses recent tendencies in contemporary art toward assemblage sculpture and how these works incorporate tainted materials - often things left on the side of the road, according to the logic and progress of the capitalist machine - and combine them in ways that allow each element to retain a degree of empirical specificity. Adler develops a range of aesthetic models through which these practices can be understood to function critically. Each chapter focuses on a single exhibition: Isa Genzken's "OIL" (German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2007), Geoffrey Farmer's midcareer survey (Musee d'art contemporain, Montreal, 2008), Rachel Harrison's "Consider the Lobster" (CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, 2009), and Liz Magor's "The Mouth and Other Storage Facilities" (Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 2008).

Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage explores how the everyday experiences of children, and their imaginative and creative worlds, are collected, interpreted and displayed in museums and on monuments, and represented through objects and cultural lore. Young people constitute up to half the population of any given society, but their lives are inescapably influenced by the expectations and decisions of adults. As a result, children's distinct experiences are frequently subsumed within the broader histories and heritage of their families and communities. And while adults inevitably play a prominent role in children's lives, children are also active creators of their own cultures. As this volume so vividly demonstrate, the cultural heritage of children is rich and varied, and highly revealing of past and present attitudes to children and their work, play, creativity, and human rights. The essays in this book span the experiences of children from classical Rome to the present moment, and examine the diverse social and historical contexts underlying the public representations of childhood in Britain, Europe, North America, Australia, North Africa and Japan. Case studies examine the heritage of schools and domestic spaces; the objects and games of play; the commemoration of child Holocaust survivors; memorials to Indigenous child-removal under colonial regimes; children as collectors of objects and as authors of juvenilia; curatorial practices at museums of childhood; and the role of children as visitors to historical sites. Until now, the cultural heritage of children and the representations of childhood have been largely absent from scholarly discussions of museology, heritage places and material culture. This volume rectifies that gap, bringing together international experts in children's histories and heritage. Aimed at a wide readership of students, academics, and museum and heritage professionals, Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage authoritatively defines the key issues in this exciting new field.

Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage explores how the everyday experiences of children, and their imaginative and creative worlds, are collected, interpreted and displayed in museums and on monuments, and represented through objects and cultural lore. Young people constitute up to half the population of any given society, but their lives are inescapably influenced by the expectations and decisions of adults. As a result, children's distinct experiences are frequently subsumed within the broader histories and heritage of their families and communities. And while adults inevitably play a prominent role in children's lives, children are also active creators of their own cultures. As this volume so vividly demonstrate, the cultural heritage of children is rich and varied, and highly revealing of past and present attitudes to children and their work, play, creativity, and human rights. The essays in this book span the experiences of children from classical Rome to the present moment, and examine the diverse social and historical contexts underlying the public representations of childhood in Britain, Europe, North America, Australia, North Africa and Japan. Case studies examine the heritage of schools and domestic spaces; the objects and games of play; the commemoration of child Holocaust survivors; memorials to Indigenous child-removal under colonial regimes; children as collectors of objects and as authors of juvenilia; curatorial practices at museums of childhood; and the role of children as visitors to historical sites. Until now, the cultural heritage of children and the representations of childhood have been largely absent from scholarly discussions of museology, heritage places and material culture. This volume rectifies that gap, bringing together international experts in children's histories and heritage. Aimed at a wide readership of students, academics, and museum and heritage professionals, Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage authoritatively defines the key issues in this exciting new field.

Preeminent museum education theorist George E. Hein explores the work, philosophy, and impact of educational reformer John Dewey and his importance for museums. Hein traces current practice in museum education to Dewey's early 20th-century ideas about education, democracy, and progress toward improving society, and in so doing provides a rare history of museum education as a profession. Giving special attention to the progressive individuals and institutions who followed Dewey in developing the foundations for the experiential learning that is considered best practice today, Hein demonstrates a parallel between contemporary theories about education and socio-political progress and, specifically, the significance of museums for sustaining and advancing a democratic society.

MUSEUM MEDIA Edited by Michelle Henning Museum Media explores the contemporary uses of diverse media in museum contexts and discusses how technology is reinventing the museum. It considers how technological changes--from photography and television through to digital mobile media--have given rise to new habits, forms of attention and behaviors. It explores how research methods can be used to understand people's relationships with media technologies and display techniques in museum contexts, as well as the new opportunities media offer for museums to engage with their visitors. Entries written by leading experts examine the transformation of history and memory by new media, the ways in which exhibitions mediate visitor experience, how designers and curators can establish new kinds of relationships with visitors, the expansion of the museum beyond its walls and its insertion into a wider commercial and corporate landscape. Focusing on formal, theoretical and technical aspects of exhibition practice, this in-depth volume explores questions of temporality, attachment to objects, atmospheric and immersive exhibition design, the reinvention of the exhibition medium, and much more.

In this comparative, international study Marilena Alivizatou investigates the relationship between museums and the new concept of "intangible heritage." She charts the rise of intangible heritage within the global sphere of UN cultural policy and explores its implications both in terms of international politics and with regard to museological practice and critical theory. Using a grounded ethnographic methodology, Alivizatou examines intangible heritage in the local complexities of museum and heritage work in Oceania, the Americas and Europe. This multi-sited, cross-cultural approach highlights key challenges currently faced by cultural institutions worldwide in understanding and presenting this form of heritage.

Preeminent museum education theorist George E. Hein explores the work, philosophy, and impact of educational reformer John Dewey and his importance for museums. Hein traces current practice in museum education to Dewey's early 20th-century ideas about education, democracy, and progress toward improving society, and in so doing provides a rare history of museum education as a profession. Giving special attention to the progressive individuals and institutions who followed Dewey in developing the foundations for the experiential learning that is considered best practice today, Hein demonstrates a parallel between contemporary theories about education and socio-political progress and, specifically, the significance of museums for sustaining and advancing a democratic society.

Dr Isabel Grant (1887-1983) was a pioneer who, early in life, was intrigued by the lives and ways of living of her fellow Highlanders. She eventually pursued this by collecting objects - farming, fishing, crofting and domestic - from across the Scottish Highlands and presenting them to the public, initially as an exhibition in Inverness in 1930, then in Iona, and later in a dedicated museum Am Fasgadh ('the Shelter'). The tenacity shown by Dr Grant in pursuit of an idea that first struck her while on a childhood visit to Sweden is revealed in her own words. In the face of indifference, little money, sexism and the erratic Scottish climate, Dr Grant succeeded in presenting items which told of the working and home lives of the people she so admired. Am Fasgadh continues today as the popular Highland Folk Museum at Kingussie and Newtonmore, Inverness-shire, Scotland.

Shaila Bhatti's immersive study of the Lahore Museum in Pakistan is one of the first books to offer an in-depth historical and ethnographic analysis of a South Asian museum. Bhatti thus presents an alternative example of visitor experience and museum practice to that of the West, which has been the dominant museological model to date. This examination of the Lahore Museum's objects, staff, and visitors (past and present) provides an informative case study that reveals local perceptions and uses of museums in non-Western societies to be fraught with social, political, and cultural implications and appropriations. Through Lahore, Bhatti examines the history of exchange between Britian and South Asia and advances our current understanding of what constitutes postcolonial museum interpretation and its public.

From the opening of The Louvre to the launch of Tate Modern and beyond, this accessible and succinct publication traces the development of the museum concept - encompassing curatorial, scholarly, political and cultural spheres - and its evolving role within society. In the first section, Schubert looks at the complex history of the museum in specific cities at critical moments, for instance New York between 1930 and 1950 as the Metropolitan Museum of Art expanded and the Museum of Modern Art was founded. The second section focuses on the success and unprecedented development of the museum in the 1980s and 1990s in Europe and the United States, highlighting the need for cities and institutions to revise their programmes in response to a surge of interest in the arts. The final section looks at the museum's predicament nearly a decade after The Curator's Egg was originally published in 2000, exploring the museum's evolution in a post-9/11 environment.

This Element addresses the cultural production of ancient Egypt in the museum as a mixture of multiple pasts and presents that cohere around collections; their artefacts, documentation, storage, research, and display. Its four sections examine how ideas about the past are formed by museum assemblages: how their histories of acquisition and documentation shape interpretation, the range of materials that comprise them, the influence of their geographical framing, and the moments of remaking that might be possible. Throughout, the importance of critical approaches to interpretation is underscored, reasserting the museum as a site of active research and experiment, rather than only exhibitionary product or communicative media. It argues for a multi-directional approach to museum work that seeks to reveal the inter-relations of collection histories and which has implications not just for museum representation and documentation, but also for archaeological practice more broadly.

This Element looks at the relationship between heritage and design by way of a case study approach. It offers up ten distinct portraits of a range of heritage makers located in Goa, a place that has been predicated on its difference, both historical and cultural, from the rest of India. A former Portuguese colonial enclave (1510-1961) surrounded by what was formerly British India (1776-1947), the author attempts to read Goa's heritage as a form of place-ness, a source of inspiration for further design work that taps into the Goa of the twenty-first century. The series of portraits are visual, literary, and sensorial, and take the reader on a heritage tour through a design landscape of villages, markets, photography festivals, tailors and clothing, books, architecture, painting, and decorative museums. They do so in order to explore heritage futures as increasingly dependent on innovation, design, and the role of the individual.

Preventive Conservation in Museums makes available and comprehensible the diverse literature and ideas of preventive conservation to an audience with a limited scientific background, principally those studying museum studies or engaged in the museum profession. It bridges the gap between the basic museum generated literature and technical and detailed conservation literature.

The area of preventative conservation has developed greatly in recent years and has adopted a far more holistic approach. The development of the concepts of risk analysis, management of conservation and how preventative conservation relates to the importance of traditional beliefs and approaches to artefacts have all made an impact on the subject in recent years along with the advance of instrumentation over the last thirty years. The next generation of ideas that will affect preventive conservation practice are just starting to emerge, including: detailed modelling of the environments of buildings and the sustainability of the artefactual and building heritage.

Preventive Conservation in Museums highlights the wide variety of threats, develops the concept of an holistic appreciation of these threats, and too appreciates the need to prioritise the appropriate forms of response. It uses a careful balance of sources, some technical, some theoretical, some practical as well as case studies to explore threats and their mitigation. For all those people involved in preventive conservation, be they students or professionals, this volume will be an invaluable summary of the past, present and future of the discipline.

Collection ethics - the third rail of the museum profession. What are the encompassing issues museum face regarding how they acquire, keep and work with their collections? Museum Collection Ethics discusses the complexities inherent in preserving and interpreting the extraordinary range of culturally significant objects entrusted to museums. The book presents an encompassing look at every aspect of the intellectual and stewardship duties museums by definition assume. The differences between ethics, laws, customs, and expectations are discussed. They are not synonymous. Ethics vary widely and are fluid. Essential factors include: *Defining a museum as an ethical pursuit *The role of museum governing authorities regarding ethics *The ethics of collection authority: who is responsible for collection truths *How museums collect and how ethics influences that activity *The ethics of assuring collection authenticity *The ethical access to collections, be it physical or digital *Ethics and conservation *Exhibition ethics *The ethics of collection removals be they voluntary or involuntary This is the first book devoted solely to the ethical concerns museums face regarding their collections.

Towards the Museum of the Future explores, through a series of authoritative essays, some of the major developments in European museums as they struggle to adapt in a rapidly changing world. It embraces a wide range of European countries, all types of museums and exhibitions and the needs of different museum audiences, and discusses the museum as communicator and educator in the context of current cultural concerns.

Heritage is all around us, not just in monuments and museums, but in places that matter, in the countryside and in collections and stories. It touches all of us. How do we decide what to preserve? How do we make the case for heritage when there are so many other priorities? Playing with the Past is the first ever action-learning book about heritage. Over eighty creative activities and games encompass the basics of heritage practice, from management and decisionmaking to community engagement and leadership. Although designed to 'train the trainers', the activities in the book are relevant to anyone involved in caring for heritage.

Twenty-first-century views of historical violence have been immeasurably influenced by cultural representations of the Second World War. Within Europe, one of the key sites for such representation has been the vast array of museums and memorials that reflect contemporary ideas of war, the roles of soldiers and civilians, and the self-perception of those who remember. This volume takes a historical perspective on museums covering the Second World War and explores how these institutions came to define political contexts and cultures of public memory in Germany, across Europe, and throughout the world.

Featuring over fifty illustrations and twenty-three original chapters that explore cases from a wide range of fields, including library and archival studies, literary studies, art history, media studies, sound studies, folklore studies, game studies, and education, Collection Thinking builds on the important scholarly works produced on the topic of the archive over the past two decades and contributes to ongoing debates on the historical status of memory institutions. The volume illustrates how the concept of "collection" bridges these institutional and structural categories, and generates discussions of cultural activities involving artifactual arrangement, preservation, curation, and circulation in both the private and the public spheres. Edited collaboratively by three senior scholars with expertise in the fields of literature, art history, archives, and museums, Collection Thinking is designed to stimulate interdisciplinary reflection and conversation. This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in how we organize materials for research across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. With case studies that range from collecting Barbie dolls to medieval embroideries, and with contributions from practitioners on record collecting, the creation of sub-culture archives, and collection as artistic practice, this volume will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about why and how collections are made.