How to Close a Museum: A Practical Guide answers your questions about closing a museum. Even if you are just considering your options during difficult times and planning for your future, this book takes you through all the legal, ethical, and operational questions to start thinking about. It clearly lays out all the steps to follow to dissolve the nonprofit corporation, how to work with the board, disperse assets, create a final staffing plan, media relations, archival materials, community relations, and how to deal with donors and preserve the legacy of the organization. Included in the book are valuable forms, creative ideas, and sample documents to save you time. Written by Dr. Susana Bautista, an experienced museum administrator, curator, and museologist, who personally went though this process of closing a museum as the last executive director of the Pasadena Museum of California Art in 2018. She will recount her experiences and lessons learned, as well as those of other museum leaders who have gone through similar experiences, so that all museum professionals will be better prepared for what is always a stressful and emotional experience.

How to Close a Museum: A Practical Guide answers your questions about closing a museum. Even if you are just considering your options during difficult times and planning for your future, this book takes you through all the legal, ethical, and operational questions to start thinking about. It clearly lays out all the steps to follow to dissolve the nonprofit corporation, how to work with the board, disperse assets, create a final staffing plan, media relations, archival materials, community relations, and how to deal with donors and preserve the legacy of the organization. Included in the book are valuable forms, creative ideas, and sample documents to save you time. Written by Dr. Susana Bautista, an experienced museum administrator, curator, and museologist, who personally went though this process of closing a museum as the last executive director of the Pasadena Museum of California Art in 2018. She will recount her experiences and lessons learned, as well as those of other museum leaders who have gone through similar experiences, so that all museum professionals will be better prepared for what is always a stressful and emotional experience.

Museums in the Digital Age: Changing Meanings of Place, Community, and Culture showcases how the use of technology in museums should be understood as factors directly related to the museums' notion of community, local culture, and place, whether these places are in mid-America, urban metropolises, or ethnically diverse and underserved communities. Here, museum expert Susana Smith Bautista brings more than twenty years of experience in cultural institutes in Los Angeles, New York, and Greece to propose a social understanding of why museums should be adopting technology, and how it should be adapted based on their particular missions, communities, and places. This book is timely because we are in the midst of the digital age, which is rapidly changing due to rapidly changing developments in technology and society as well, with social adaptations of technology. Theory is always racing to catch up with practice in the digital age, but theory remains a critical - and often neglected - component to accompany the practical application of technology in museums. In order to illustrate these points, the book presents five case studies of the most technologically advanced art museums in the United States today: *The Indianapolis Museum of Art *The Walker Art Center *The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art *The Museum of Modern Art *The Brooklyn Museum Each case study ends with a Lessons Learned section to bring these points home. While the case studies focus on museums in the United States, and also on art museums, this book is relevant to all types of museums and to museums all over the world, as they equally face the challenge of incorporating technology into their institutions. Although these case studies are all well-established and well-endowed museums, Bautista reveals valuable insight into the difficulties they face and the questions they are asking which are relevant to even the smallest museum or community cultural center.