A Note of Thanks from the Editor

Abstract

If you’ve been a reader of Curator: The Museum Journal over the last few years, you know that these are times of growth and change for the journal. One year ago, we inaugurated a publishing relationship with Wiley-Blackwell and began publishing simultaneously in print and online. We invited our readers and authors to join us at a new community website, http://www.curatorjournal.org, to share responses to articles, forums, and exhibition, digital, and book reviews. We’re working to add podcast interviews with museum opinion leaders and critics. This month’s issue marks two other milestones in the journal’s evolution. Our 53-year inventory of articles can now be viewed in its totality online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111(ISSN)292151-6952/issues, putting a long tradition of rigorous thinking about museums at the fingertips of today’s and tomorrow’s scholars and museum professionals. We are very much indebted to Tom Baione, acting director, Department of Library Services at the American Museum of Natural History, and Bonnie Warren, Karlie Mitchell, and the entire digitization team at Wiley-Blackwell for helping to make this herculean digitization process happen. Deep thanks to our own associate editor John Fraser for guiding this momentous task from the beginning. This is also our first issue displaying Curator’s new look. When our exhibitions editor, Tom Hennes, volunteered his busy firm’s graphic design skills to redesign the journal, I was delighted. The new logo presents the journal’s name in a new format, one that shifts emphasis from the well-recognized short-form title, Curator, to the more complete and descriptive The Museum Journal. This graphic change underscores in visual terms an editorial transformation that has been underway throughout my eight-year tenure as editor: the shift from narrowly defined and sometimes technical museum discourse to a broader conversation about museums as cultural institutions operating within a larger ecology of ideas, values, and practices. With this redesign—which we also hope brings greater readability to the inside pages of the journal—we signal our plan to continue broadening our readership and embracing contemporary issues both within and around the museum sector. (One concession to economic realities: photos in the print edition must continue to be in black and white; the online version, however, is published in full color.) We want to express the gratitude of the editorial staff and board, and of our colleagues at Wiley-Blackwell, to Tom Hennes for his wise guidance and clear vision during the redesign, and to Tom’s colleague Greg Blackburn, a senior graphic designer at Thinc Design, whose expert work you now hold in your hands. In keeping with the theme of rethinking and redesigning, we decided that this issue would feature a range of reflections on the future. We invited thoughtful practitioners—including a few not directly situated in the museum sector—to write about the trends, fads, and follies they see shaping the future of museums and other cultural institutions. In retrospect, we probably should have issued those invitations earlier. These are busy people. A few of their papers, which could not be completed in time for this issue, will be published in future issues. Among the contributors to this exploration are Kio Stark, whose interview with Mark Allen, founder of the non-profit community space in Los Angeles known as Machine Project, identifies the limitations of museum space and suggests what is possible in and outside of it (see cover); Sherri Wasserman, whose thoughts on and examples of mobile connectivity show the diverse, inventive possibilities of the medium; and Elizabeth Merritt, who directs the Center for the Future of Museums at AAM and who shows us how to think about futures (plural) through scenario planning. We recruited a number of observers to weigh in on the future of 3D imaging in museums, and the result is a suite of articles introduced by our own digital editor, Nancy Proctor. A report by Laurence F. Johnson and Holly Witchey is a launch pad for discussion. Leonard Steinbach, David Bearman, and Adam Metallo and Vince Rossi offer insightful and provocative twists on the 3D discussion. There is also a section we’ve dubbed The Thoughtful Museum, with wide-ranging essays by Tiffany Jenkins, Roy Ballantyne and David Uzzell, and Hallie Preskill. Our regular columnists, Tom L. Freudenheim and Andrew J. Pekarik, foreshadow this section with comments of their own. We hope that you enjoy and profit from all of their perspectives, and that you join us in looking forward to many more provocative analyses in future issues of the always evolving Curator: The Museum Journal.