Forvaltning, fortolkning og forhandling af autenticitet i et husmuseum

Historic house museums allow for reconceptualization of the meaning of tangible objects around us. We establish this new relationship with materiality through our sensory bodies. We conceive of ourselves differently and allow ourselves to move and behave in ways that are not acceptable in the world outside of the museum. We perform our new selves with permission granted by the sense of place that cannot be understood other than through embodied experience–of things, of selves, of the environment that brings it all together. In the coming together of all these elements in the immediate, intimate present, the notion of the past is defined as cultural heritage as mediated through the historic house museum curatorial work and space. I approach historic house museums as socially created and lived kinds of spatiality and sites of social practices and focus on the experiences of people that spend considerable amounts of time there–the museum staff. As a researcher, I have inserted myself within the environment of a historic house museum and attempted to open it to social inquiry through various ways of being within it–observing, writing, interviewing, interacting, sensing, entering it and leaving it. I have carried out a form of phenomenological ethnography, which included a two-year autoethnographic study at the Mackenzie House Museum, in Toronto, Canada, where I volunteered in the position of an interpreter and a historic cook; 24 participant observation visits to other historic house museums in Toronto; and 13 in-depth unstructured interviews with museum staff from various historic house museum sites in the city. The three methods addressed the key conceptual clusters–emplacement, materiality, and performance, which form three analytical chapters of the dissertation. The dissertation positions historic house museums as forms of heterotopia that function as contestations of the accepted spatial, social, and temporal norms within an urban environment. These museums come forth as attempted reconstructions of anthropological places, in the form of domestic sites that assert significance of material manifestations of familial relations and historical heritage. These sites are immersive environments bridge the gap in the current experience of body, time, and space.

Historic house museums allow for reconceptualization of the meaning of tangible objects around us. We establish this new relationship with materiality through our sensory bodies. We conceive of ourselves differently and allow ourselves to move and behave in ways that are not acceptable in the world outside of the museum. We perform our new selves with permission granted by the sense of place that cannot be understood other than through embodied experience–of things, of selves, of the environment that brings it all together. In the coming together of all these elements in the immediate, intimate present, the notion of the past is defined as cultural heritage as mediated through the historic house museum curatorial work and space. I approach historic house museums as socially created and lived kinds of spatiality and sites of social practices and focus on the experiences of people that spend considerable amounts of time there–the museum staff. As a researcher, I have inserted myself within the environment of a historic house museum and attempted to open it to social inquiry through various ways of being within it–observing, writing, interviewing, interacting, sensing, entering it and leaving it. I have carried out a form of phenomenological ethnography, which included a two-year autoethnographic study at the Mackenzie House Museum, in Toronto, Canada, where I volunteered in the position of an interpreter and a historic cook; 24 participant observation visits to other historic house museums in Toronto; and 13 in-depth unstructured interviews with museum staff from various historic house museum sites in the city. The three methods addressed the key conceptual clusters–emplacement, materiality, and performance, which form three analytical chapters of the dissertation. The dissertation positions historic house museums as forms of heterotopia that function as contestations of the accepted spatial, social, and temporal norms within an urban environment. These museums come forth as attempted reconstructions of anthropological places, in the form of domestic sites that assert significance of material manifestations of familial relations and historical heritage. These sites are immersive environments bridge the gap in the current experience of body, time, and space.

ABSTRACTCultural heritage education promotes children's interest in society, especially their immediate surroundings and history. Traditionally in Finland, history is learned through visits to local historic house and city museums, where the learners' role might be quite passive and their only activity a worksheet. However, evidence indicates that visits and educational information are better enjoyed and remembered when they involve activities and children can analyze the experience through interactions and continued learning at school. We examined a preschool field trip to a local historic house museum with arts-based activities continued at school. We evaluated 14 students' follow-up stories and craft products as cultural heritage education and museum pedagogical tools. A detailed qualitative analysis showed that follow-up stories function similarly to worksheets; they were easy to implement and effectively collected information on children's experiences during museum visits. However, writing stories allowed children to freely express their thoughts and experiences. Craft products provided a cognitive strategy for reflecting on field trips. It seems that the field trip to the historic museum acquired meaning through active interpretation by children and through combining the experiences and the information, which became real in the follow-up stories and craft products.

As immersive technologies have become ubiquitous today, traditional museums are finding success augmenting existing exhibits to increase visitors’ satisfaction. However, due to the immutable nature of house museums, and their tendency to place visitors in direct contact with historical artifacts, museum managers are seeking original approaches to cultural preservation. Implementing mixed reality systems into historic house museums is one such approach. The goal of this study is to develop and test a conceptual matrix that guides how designers use the affordances of mixed reality systems to create experiences that align with the range of historical narratives found in house museums. Experiences that can contribute to improving visitors’ satisfaction, self-interpretation, and understanding of the homeowner’s life and the community within which they lived. Building on human-centered design methods, the researcher developed and tested a prototype of an augmented reality (AR) mobile application centered on the Pope House Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. The outcome of the research suggests house museum visitors should have agency in deciding the lens through which they experience the variety of historical narratives present in the home.

The goal of this paper is to prepare a phenomenological research, with a view to the spatiality of “historic house museums”. This character is revealed through the consideration that any object has a multitude of meanings that only if limited at the moment that it enters into this relationship. Our starting point is the duplication of the object "historic house museums”: as an object to the inhabitant of the house and its constructions of meaning; and as an object facing the look and visitor expectation of the house, one who scrutinizes the shifting and intangible border that separates and unites time, space and significances woven by home-resident-visitor relationship. It is known that it is impossible to reconstruct with absolute and unquestioned loyalty the "aura" of the house of former times. The absence of residents and the spatio-temporal displacement are some of the factors that prevent a direct look at the house per se. What differentiates the "historic house museums”of other museums and stimulates the visitor, a peculiar receptivity, namely the curiosity to know, although displaced from their space-time and move themselves, the secret spaces of a historical character. Unlike the elements revealed by the inhabitant of the house, which belong to the scope of the public and exposed, we have with the "historic house museums”, the opportunity to access the intimate universe of the inhabitant, recreating the data, re-coloring environments. In this regard, the house open to visitors is revealed as favorable platform to a aestheticize that makes objects expressions, as does the visitor active artist intimate space. Keywords: Phenomenology, intimate space, "historic house museums”, Aesthetics

RESUMO Este artigo apresenta os resultados da pesquisa “Desenvolvimento de metodologia para catalogação dos ambientes de um museu-casa, compreendidos como objetos museológicos”, desenvolvida no âmbito do Programa de Incentivo à Produção do Conhecimento Técnico e Científico na Área da Cultura da Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa. A metodologia da pesquisa incluiu revisão bibliográfica e aplicação de questionários. Primeiramente discutimos a categoria museu-casa e a relevância do estudo dos interiores domésticos. Posteriormente, discutimos a concepção do cômodo enquanto museália e a importância do registro da trajetória social dos artefatos museológicos. Na quarta seção do artigo, apresentamos e refletimos sobre a coleção de cômodos-objetos do Museu Casa de Rui Barbosa, localizado em uma construção de 1850, que serviu de residência a Rui Barbosa e sua família entre 1895 e 1923. Os questionários foram respondidos por profissionais de museus-casas e pelo público do Museu Casa de Rui Barbosa. No primeiro caso, o objetivo foi investigar as metodologias de documentação museológica; já com a pesquisa de público, buscamos incluir as demandas e percepções dos visitantes sobre o museu-casa. Após essas reflexões e investigações, foi possível elaborar a metodologia de catalogação dos cômodos, que inclui as etapas de observação e leitura dos compartimentos da casa, análise de suas propriedades e preenchimento da ficha catalográfica. Até o presente momento, a pesquisa demonstrou o possível ineditismo desta metodologia, que tem potencial para ser adaptada à realidade de outros museus-casas.

In December of 2003 the following post made its way around on the Museum-L mailing list: "I am within a few credits of finishing my masters degree in Library and Information Science, but my true interest is in history and historic conservation, special collections, and archival work. I felt that an MLIS degree might give me flexibility with regard to geographic location and the duties of a job, which is why I did not originally pursue a degree in Museum Studies. I was also told by several LIS professors that I could possibly make the transition into museum work with an MLIS degree. I would like to ask for the opinion of museum professionals about this before I make any post-masters plans. Would someone holding an MLIS possibly be considered for a position in a museum?" This question prompted many days worth of debate over the place of LIS professionals in museums, with a variety of people – researchers, academics and practitioners – weighing in on all sides. Does an MLIS qualify one to work in a museum? Does one need a museum studies degree to be a museum professional? Are MLIS degree recipients qualified to be curators, registrars, archivists or none of the above? Should one get a specialized degree in addition to the MLIS? Does one need experience interning in particular types of museums in order to get a job? (For details of the debate, please see the online archives of Museum-L at http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/museum-l.html.) The fact that there was a debate at all was very interesting, especially since the importance of information science for museums has been long established; certainly most museum professionals understand the importance of museums caring for information about artifacts as well as the objects themselves (see "For Further Reading" for these references and others). The museum literature is full of examples of the nightmares that befall museums with poor information management skills; my personal favorite is the 2002 "rediscovery" of the bones of a Neanderthal child, physically scattered and informationally lost – the victim of poor record-keeping – which turned up in a French museum nearly 90 years after it was first discovered as detailed by Whitehouse. For the past year I have been pursuing research to determine what the museum community believes to be the necessary responsibilities of information professionals working in museums. In the summer 20031 conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with information professionals working in museums, asking them about the information resources, tools and technologies they use daily on the job. The study participants worked at 17 different museums, including cultural heritage, science and technology, art,natural history and children's museums. They varied widely in technical skills and expertise and ranged from one to 30 years worth of experience in the museum field. Each interview lasted approximately 60 to 90 minutes. The interviews were transcribed for qualitative data analysis and analyzed using grounded theory methodologies. The goal of the study was to develop a conceptual framework (to be published in a forthcoming article) for evaluating the role of information professionals in museums and the value of these individuals for information-oriented projects in museums. The results of this study led me to believe that we are dealing with a seminal shift in the responsibilities of information professionals who work in museums, where individuals find themselves unexpectedly acquiring new skills as they face new information-oriented challenges. This appears to be an evolutionary process with its own form of "survival of the fittest," where information professionals with certain skills are more likely to cope with new and unexpected demands. Most recently, this evolutionary shift has occurred in the world of online museums, involving a change in emphasis from the technical skills of Web page creation to the ability to assess and meet the information needs of the users of museum data. The best place to see this process in action is by looking at the evolution of the museum Web master, which I have discussed in detail in a recent article. Over the past few years, the skills and responsibilities of museum Web masters have changed dramatically as more museums seek to provide online access to organized, structured information about museum resources. In this new environment, the ability to do basic Web design has taken a back seat to the more complex problems of information organization, access and architecture. As one of the museum Web masters interviewed in this study put it, "Design is becoming lessand less of the powerhouse it was in the early days of the Web ... those skills are less important than the overall architecting of the website, which is the much harder skill." This shift in perception has led to many changes in the job of the museum Web master. We will explore these changes by looking at four key areas (illustrated with quotes from the above study) that highlight the evolving role of museum Web masters as information professionals working in museums: New skills and responsibilities Changing expectations and new demands Changes in attitude and shifting job requirements Meeting user needs as information professionals "As Web master I have to manage the flow of information from server to workstation, managing and coordinating the review policies and review committees. I also have to do some development for our museum systems. I have to manage our collections information system as it relates to approved Web data from that system. I have to pay attention to administrative tasks, security rules set forth [by the IT office], and I have to do periodic system administration on servers. I have to test products, review products. I sit on several working groups for product assessment [including] digital asset management systems, Web content management systems, collections information systems and those sorts of things." This quote demonstrates clearly the diverse skills and capabilities required of museum Web masters. The idea that the museum Web master can exist in an isolated office, constructing websites while partitioned off from the rest of the museum staff, is as anachronistic as the notion that all Web masters do is simple HTML coding. The world of the museum Web master today reflects the skills and responsibilities of the information professional in any information organization, where all aspects of museum work are integrated into the over-all task of providing access to museum information resources throughout the museum's information systems. These increased responsibilities have brought new pressures on the museum Web master. "Five years ago, we [the museum Web staff] went around looking for people to put things on the website, now we have a list that reaches out almost a year [. . . back then] the time horizon for a new project was about two weeks. If you came to mewith a brand new idea, and we thought it was a perfectly good idea, we might get to it in a year." The above quote shows the increasing pressures and demands on museum Web masters, who have come a long way from the days when they had to actively seek out online pro jects and convince museum employees of the value ofthe Web. Museum Web masters now are so overwhelmed by the demand for online projects that they must find new ways to prioritize their responsibilities. New expectations have led many museum Web masters to rethink their roles in the museum hierarchy and the contributions they bring to the museums' staffs. "You know we really thought in terms of HTML in the beginning, very simple Web pages that didn't involve any scripting. They weren't really relying on dynamic content. [Now] we've stretched that to the point where that same medium is behaving more like a set of applications. It's gotten far more complex. That was around before, but what needed to happen was an attitude shift. We needed tostart thinking about how can we make this medium serve the needs of the entire staff." This quote illustrates the importance of museum Web masters being able to cope with evolutionary changes on the job while simultaneously recognizing the importance of their role in the museum. More than a shift in technical capabilities, the move from static to dynamic content for museum websites reflected a changing attitude with respect to the users of museum resources. These users include not only online visitors, but internal museum staff, and museumWeb masters must be prepared to meet the needs of all who access the museum's internet or intranet. "You need to be able to receive the requirements given to you and be able to query and find out in more detail what the real requirements are. A lot of time people think they are telling you what they need, but you need to be able to probe it to find out really what's underneath that. I think the requirements gathering for specific needs is the most challenging part of any information job." The above quote underscores the importance of requirements analysis as well as the inherent difficulties of assessing and meeting user needs. In recognizing this problem, the museum Web master is assuming some ofthe most important, underlying responsibilities of information professionals in the museum. This is not a new problem; museum professionals have long had to deal with changing expectations from their visitors and their employees as to the kinds of information museums should provide, whether on the gallery floor or online. Nevertheless, these changing expectations reflect the new needs and new demands brought to museum staff by increasingly information-savvy museum users. While dealing with these changes inside the museum can be hard enough, dealing with the changing needs, demands and expectations of online museum visitors is much harder. Why? Simply put, we do not as of yet have a suitably detailed understanding of our online visitors' needs – despite many excellent and worthwhile studies. The magnitude of this problem becomes clear when one starts to compare what we know about face-to-face visitors to physical museums with what we know about online visitors to virtual museums. What we know of the needs,behaviors and characteristics of the face-to-face museum visitor would fill a room, thanks to years of excellent visitor studies. Our attempts to answer the same questions about online museum visitors pale in comparison. While this disparity may not havebeen as significant a problem five years ago, many museums have now crossed the threshold where they have more online visitors than face-to-face visitors; the Smithsonian Institution, for example, now has five times as many virtual visitors as physical visitors, nearly 100 million visitors last year alone. This situation has the potential to have catastrophic consequences for online museums. All information professionals know that not knowing our users' needs means not meeting our users' needs. This seemingly simple statement has two profound implications for museums entering the online world. First, projects that do not meet user needs will ultimately reflect wasted time, money and effort. Second, users whose needs are not met will often become upset, alienated and angry at the museum. The following two examples are composite narratives that provide a representative picture of the problems many museums are facing today. Example 1. A natural history museum invests heavily in a project to develop online materials for students. Since the majority of the museum's face-to-face student visitors are grade school students,the museum's curators and educators develop a series of online learning modules specifically geared for fourth graders. After a great deal of time, money and effort, museum staff members make the modules available online, only to discover that no one seems interested in them. Perplexed, the museum professionals commission a study of their online visitors, the first such study ever run by the museum. From this study, the museum staff discovers that the majority of their online visitors are college students. Example 2. An art museum's website, while once cutting-edge, is now many years out-of-date. When asked for funds to redesign and improve the website, museum staff members are told that the museum's monies would be betterspent improving the museum's physical resources. The museum's director, an infrequent viewer of the museum's website, believes that the quality of the museum's website should be a low priority for the museum's budget. From the server transactionlogs, museum staff members learn that 10 times as many people view the museum's website each year as walk through the front door of the museum. For every individual impressed by the quality of the museum's physical facilities, 10 are left with the feeling that the museum does not care about meeting their needs. There is a very simple solution to these problems, and it concerns user advocacy. Someone in the museum needs to stick up for the rights of the museum's online visitors. Someone needs the skills to assess the visitors' needs and evaluate the museum's online offerings to see if these needs are being met. The virtual visitor typically has no voice within the museum, and if the museum is truly to meet these users' needs, someone must argue from the users' perspectives. The museum Web master is the individual most ideally suited to evolve into the role of user-centered mediator between the museum and its online visitors. Museum Web masters are already developing the user advocacy skills and responsibilities necessary to understand users' needs and argue for users' best interests. Theskills museum Web masters have had to learn in order to survive the increasing responsibilities and changing demands already being thrust on them are ideally preparing them for this new role. They are acquiring the skills in this area that they need: from usability analysis to information needs assessment to online visitor studies. In acquiring these skills, they are making the evolutionary transformation into an information professional working in a museum with a unique perspective on the information needs of the museum's users, in house or online. This transformation is a valuable, yet difficult, one, and the museum Web master needs support, encouragement and, above all, the authority necessary to ensure that users' needs are both identified and met, now and in the future. Perhaps the best way to provide this support is to encourage LIS students to pursue careers in museums and encourage museum studies students to learn more about LIS. If one needs a reason, look no further than the dedicated work already being done by museum Web masters worldwide. Their efforts, better than anything else, demonstrate the need for information professionals in the museum. Through their own initiative, museum Web masters, with their new skills and expertise in evaluation and user studies, are already rendering obsolete the debate which began this article. While the world debates whether LIS students have a place in museums, the future museum information professional is already emerging out of the constantly changing and challenging world of the online museum. Paul F. Marty is assistant professor, School of Information Studies, Florida State University and can be reached at marty@fsu.edu.

Although other types of cultural sites are experiencing growth, Historic House Museums (HHMs) are seeing declining visitation, financial instability, and misguided Board stewardship. (Rocco 2013) All too often, HHMs are places where a well-intended docent points at obscure portraits, and gestures into barren rooms while sharing a seemingly fact-based, exclusive narrative about the great deeds of the great, white man who once lived in the home. There are few actual signs of habitation or the complexity of family life, and any opportunity for a shared, meaningful, and human connection across generations disappears in the stark museum atmosphere. Frozen in a pre-determined period of historic interpretation, HHMs fall harshly out of sync with the larger community as demographics change around them. They have become autonomous, self-referential and insular in an era defined by social media, mass communication and the collaborative process. The well-meaning Board and staff leadership of HHMs, with expertise primarily in museum studies, history and collections management, is ill equipped to deal with either the contemporary understanding of context, or the civic engagement expertise of urban designers and architects. The Anarchist Guide for Historic House Museums (AGHHM) attempts to bridge some of those disciplinary boundaries and offers a comprehensive strategy for reorienting HHMs from a curated museum setting to a new paradigm of real-life habitation. This more inclusive re-orientation is organized under four guiding themes of Community, Experience,Habitation and Shelter, and is illustrated as The Anarchist Guide for Historic House Museums Graphic ManifestoThe Historic House Trust of New York City has tested the AGHHM concepts at several of its historic house sites. AGHHM inspired events have been undertaken at NYC's Morris-Jumel Mansion and have led to substantial increases in the number of first-time visitors, press, and funding/earned revenue A follow-up study funded by a $100,000 grant from the New York Community Trust is now underway to design, launch and evaluate an Anarchist Plan for the Latimer House Museum in Queens. The former home of African-American inventor and electrical pioneer Lewis Howard Latimer, the house is located in what has become a Chinese/Korean community, and offers a compelling narrative that has the potential ability to bridge the past and the present, and act as a center of social history, explorative experienceand common identity.

Historic House Museums in the United States and the United Kingdom: A History addresses the phenomenon of historic houses as a distinct species of museum. Everyone understands the special nature of an art museum, a national museum, or a science museum, but “house museum” nearly always requires clarification. In the United States the term is almost synonymous with historic preservation; in the United Kingdom, it is simply unfamiliar, the very idea being conflated with stately homes and the National Trust. By analyzing the motivation of the founders, and subsequent keepers, of house museums, Linda Young identifies a typology that casts light on what house museums were intended to represent and their significance (or lack thereof) today. This book examines: • heroes’ houses: once inhabited by great persons (e.g., Shakespeare’s birthplace, Washington’s Mount Vernon); • artwork houses: national identity as specially visible in house design, style, and technique (e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Modernist houses); • collectors’ houses: a microcosm of collecting in situ domesticu, subsequently presented to the nation as the exemplars of taste (e.g., Sir John Soane’s Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum); • English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained thanks to primogeniture but threatened with redundancy and rescued as museums to be touted as the peak of English national culture; English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained for centuries thanks to primogeniture but threatened by redundancy and strangely rescued as museums, now touted as the peak of English national culture; • Everyman/woman’s social history houses: the modern, demotic response to elite houses, presented as social history but tinged with generic ancestor veneration (e.g., tenement house museums in Glasgow and New York).

Historic House Museums in the United States and the United Kingdom: A History addresses the phenomenon of historic houses as a distinct species of museum. Everyone understands the special nature of an art museum, a national museum, or a science museum, but “house museum” nearly always requires clarification. In the United States the term is almost synonymous with historic preservation; in the United Kingdom, it is simply unfamiliar, the very idea being conflated with stately homes and the National Trust. By analyzing the motivation of the founders, and subsequent keepers, of house museums, Linda Young identifies a typology that casts light on what house museums were intended to represent and their significance (or lack thereof) today. This book examines: • heroes’ houses: once inhabited by great persons (e.g., Shakespeare’s birthplace, Washington’s Mount Vernon); • artwork houses: national identity as specially visible in house design, style, and technique (e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Modernist houses); • collectors’ houses: a microcosm of collecting in situ domesticu, subsequently presented to the nation as the exemplars of taste (e.g., Sir John Soane’s Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum); • English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained thanks to primogeniture but threatened with redundancy and rescued as museums to be touted as the peak of English national culture; English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained for centuries thanks to primogeniture but threatened by redundancy and strangely rescued as museums, now touted as the peak of English national culture; • Everyman/woman’s social history houses: the modern, demotic response to elite houses, presented as social history but tinged with generic ancestor veneration (e.g., tenement house museums in Glasgow and New York).

In this article, we present and discuss a user-study prototype, developed for the Bakkehuset historic house museum in Copenhagen. We examine how the prototype—a digital sound installation—can expand visitors’ experiences of the house and offer encounters with immaterial cultural heritage. Historic house museums often hold back on utilizing digital communication tools inside the houses, since a central purpose of this type of museum is to preserve an original environment. Digital communication tools, however, hold great potential for facilitating rich encounters with cultural heritage and in particular with the immaterial aspects of museum collections and their histories. In this article, we present our design steps and choices, aiming at subtly and seamlessly adding a digital dimension to a historic house. Based on qualitative interviews, we evaluate how the sound installation at Bakkehuset is sensed, interpreted, and used by visitors as part of their museum experience. In turn, we shed light on the historic house museum as a distinct design context for designing hybrid visitor experiences and point to the potentials of digital communication tools in this context.

Any scientific or pedagogical operation concerning heritage is a metalanguage. It does not make objects speak, but it talks about them, in the words of Magaly Cabral. The historic house museum is not just a house that is a ... museum. In historic house museums, the actual building, the collection and the person who lived in the house are so closely linked as to practically fuse. This makes for a relationship that is conducive to communication, according to the author. Magaly Cabral’s analysis of the problems encountered in deciding what to communicate in setting up house museums is both pertinent and pithy. The anecdote about the Comte sisters’‘museumizing’ their house by putting it under glass in France, and her comment that ‘setting up an entire house in its original state is only the beginning of a long path’, force us to reflect on the museological commitments involved in transforming living spaces into house museums. The author clearly ‘intends to provoke some thought about the educational purpose of the historic house museum, taking into consideration some of the tools that help in the process of communicating with the public and with which objectives they are employed’.Magaly Cabral, who holds a Master’s degree in museum education, is director of the Memory and Documentation Centre of the House of Rui Barebosa Foundation/Ministry of Culture, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the DemHist regional co‐ordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean, former CECA regional co‐ordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean and former Brazilian National Committee Treasurer.

Reviewed by: Exhibitions for Social Justice by Elena Gonzales Sarah J. Seidman (bio) Exhibitions for Social Justice By Elena Gonzales. New York: Routledge, 2019. 212 pages, 6" × 9", 45 b&w illus. $128.00 cloth, $37.56 paperback, $37.56 e-book. Elena Gonzales's Exhibitions for Social Justice is a valuable handbook on museums that mount exhibitions explicitly engaged with social justice. Not intending to rationalize the need for this kind of work, Gonzales instead seeks to provide support and evidence-based examples for people working in this field. By drawing a bit on neuroscience, Gonzales focuses on how best to engage viewers; what leaves the most lasting impression with them; and how that can lead to an array of impact and actions over time. Although the book was published in 2019, it remains as relevant as ever, as museums and their employees have grappled with their content, collections, and in some cases their very existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gonzales presents an optimistic take on the importance of museums, arguing that socially engaged work is both doable and meaningful. A range of scholars and readers may find Gonzales's work compelling. The book is directed at people who study or work in museums, with worksheets and checklists at the back of the book. The introduction offers a useful engagement with literature in the field, but overall, the book is accessible and readable to practitioners with a range of backgrounds and training. It is also valuable to public historians and to historians who want to think about how the narratives they craft are received by broad audiences. That said, there is not much specific to New York history or institutions—other than a brief mention of the early iteration of the Museum of Chinese in America—as a deliberate choice on the author's part. Gonzales focuses on inland and international institutions, with Chicago museums (art museums, history museums, zoos, and aquariums) at the heart of the book. Still, the case studies, of which there are a lot, both speak to, and transcend, place and allow Gonzales to make the larger points that animate her work. Chapter 1, "From Empathy to Solidarity," introduces foundational terminology for the book. As someone who has written about solidarity and social movements, I was fascinated to see this term being used in the museum context. Gonzales argues that before we reach solidarity between museum staff and visitors, we must work to propagate empathy in museums. To do that, we must challenge "groupness"—through bringing in those historically considered outsiders to museums or to a particular museum's community—and engage in hospitality. Hospitality initially sounded like a for-profit consumer model, but the example Gonzales gives, of the historic house museum Hull-House serving tea to visitors in what [End Page 408] was activist and Hull-House founder Jane Addams's bedroom, makes a powerful case for the application of this concept (30). The crux of the first chapter shows how exhibition content that emphasizes individual narratives can engender empathy. Gonzales gives several examples, but dwells on the children's exhibition at the Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam, dedicated to Dutch resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II. Gonzales discusses Holocaust museums throughout the book with admirable nuance, and here shows how the exhibition provides glimpses into Dutch experiences by physically building house-like structures for four people who were children during the war. She moves toward solidarity using her own experience as a curator on the show Roots, Resistance, and Recognition: Who Are We Now? (2006) at the National Museum of Mexican Art, which explored Mexican and African Americans solidarity in the United States and Mexico and created an institutional priority to extend solidarity to African American museum goers. She also shows how solidarity can function between institutions themselves, through networks such as the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, which left me curious for more examples of employee and institutional solidarity and how that can shape content. The second chapter argues that physical experiences, in addition to "resonant content," imparts visitors with lasting memories of their museum visits (58). In addition to touching on Stephen Greenblatt's classic essay "Resonance and Wonder...

‘Houses, however resplendent, are part of everyone’s common experience,’ and this, according to Dr Rosanna Pavoni, helps to simplify the presentation of history to the visitors of historic house museums. This article presents a starting point for defining house museums based on the wide professional experience of Dr Pavoni, who is administrative secretary of the International Committee for Historic House Museums (DemHist). The rediscovery of Renaissance forms and culture during the second half of the nineteenth century has been the basic theme of all her research, conferences, exhibitions, publications and professional activities for the past fifteen years. This theme, also linked to the history of collections and the evolution of taste in interior decoration, uses the artistic whole of the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in Milan (Italy) (house and art collections) as a model and also as a source of very important documents. Dr Pavoni has written extensively, and has also edited works, on the Neo‐Renaissance and on art collecting as exemplified in the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum. She has also founded, and is the editor of, the Italian/English publications of the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum under the title of Appunti del Museo Bagatti Valsecchi (Notes of the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum), the fifth and most recent volume of which deals with the restoration of nineteenth‐century decorative art and culture. Since 1988, she has been director of the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum.

This substantially enlarged and expanded second edition of New Solutions for House Museums: Ensuring the Long-Term Preservation of America’s Historic Houses provides advice for historic site stewards that have concerns about the financial sustainability of their historic house museum and its relevance to its local audience. Seven new case studies have been added for the second edition. The new case studies reinforce the book’s central argument that not every historic house museum, whether founded 100 years ago or last month, can be sustained long-term. Three of the new case studies are from diverse historic sites, showcasing how African American, women, and other minority-focused historic sites are pioneering new ways to commemorate their histories and interpret fascinating stories to visitors, with the end goal of creating financially sustainable historic sites that are relevant to their audience. New interviews have been conducted with the ten existing case studies from the first edition to bring them up to date. The new edition adds two new reuse options to the eight introduced in the first edition. This chapter describes how to identify and implement a reuse decision, costs and advisors needed, and tips on decision making. There is a new chapter-long interview with Tom Mayes, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, on recent legal and ethical issues facing historic sites. Another new chapter provides advice on the essential role of the historic site’s Board of Directors as the decision maker for any reuse exploration. The second edition of New Solutions for House Museums contains a new introduction to the second edition, an updated conclusion, bibliography, and index.