Museum funding as critical practice

Save the Ukrainian People First: They Carry their Culture in their Hearts

Alors que de plus en plus de musees cherchent a fournir un acces en ligne a une information structuree sur leurs collections, le role et les responsabilites des professionnels de l'information travaillant dans ces musees sont amenes a evoluer profondement. A partir d'enquetes et d'entretiens menes aupres de professionnels, l'A. explore les changements intervenus dans le travail du webmestre de musee, en considerant quatre perspectives : les nouvelles competences et responsabilites, l'evolution des attentes et des demandes, les changements d'attitudes, la reponse aux besoins des utilisateurs.

This article is on museum studies, not on museums. Museum studies is defined as the interdisciplinary engagement in critical examination of the history, functions, and roles of museums in society. Although the name museum studies began to be used in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an older term, museology, is more commonly used in non-English speaking countries and is a more appropriate and descriptive term for the field, despite the widespread use of museum studies. In this article, museology and museum studies are used synonymously. When Jay Rounds set out, nearly in the 1990s, to empirically determine whether museum studies had a core body of literature, he did so among skeptics who claimed the field was underdeveloped and lacked a foundation of knowledge. The results of Rounds’s analysis contradicted these assertions and revealed a substantial core literature and a significant body of discipline-specific knowledge. Over the last two decades, the museological knowledge base and quantity of core literature continued to grow exponentially. Museum studies has a robust foundation and a diverse, healthy, growing body of core literature. Since their origin in the late 1700s, modern museums have evolved and diversified extensively, but the museum profession did not emerge as a distinct field of endeavor until the early 1900s. Nevertheless, the earliest museological publications date back to the precursors of modern museums in the mid-1500s. Far and away most of the bibliographic growth in museum studies has occurred in the last three decades, resulting in a historically sparse, but contemporaneously rich, museological literature.

The Necessity of Research Practice

Augmented Reality (AR) is increasingly present in several fields, including the museological space, where the challenges of presenting objects interactively and attractively are constant, especially with the sociocultural changes of recent decades. Although there are numerous studies on AR in museums, the perspective of museum professionals on the technology still needs to be explored. Thus, in this study, we use a qualitative design and conduct in-depth interviews with professionals from 10 Portuguese museums involved in creating or applying AR within these environments. Applying the grounded theory, the researchers propose a framework to understand Portuguese museum professionals’ practices, perceptions, and experiences with AR in museum environments. The findings allow the creation of a theoretical framework divided into four levels, namely the perceptions of museum professionals on the role and use of AR, the understanding of departments, museum teams, and digital strategies, the perceived challenges, limitations, and advantages in the use of augmented reality technologies, and the future perspectives of AR in museums. The theory resulting from this study may also contribute suggestions for the design and implementation of AR in museums, which both museum professionals and designers can use.

When the journal Museums & Social Issues (MSI) journal was launched over five years ago, it was an effort from within the museum community to help refocus, or at least broaden, the work of museums. It reflected a belief amongst the organizers that museums need to build their public activities on a foundation of public relevancy that addresses the evolving needs and opportunities of a changing world. “Social issues” are manifestations of the forces that define a time and place and, therefore, offer museums focuses for achieving this goal. Far from being an isolated development, MSI was part of a phenomenon of selfdirected change by museum professionals themselves. Many American Association of Museums publications helped prepare the soil for this type of journal, not the least of which were Museums for a New Century, Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums, and Mastering Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums. For several decades, there has been an atmosphere of change both within the museum profession and through external forces (often associated with the funding of museums). At the same time, the field of audience research has matured in very significant ways over the past 30 years—thereby providing museums with powerful visitorbased feedback loops with which to better plan for and judge the impacts of public programs. Yet, despite these developments, systemic tensions continue deep within museums—often

Art museums, their antecedents, and, related exhibition spaces have produced texts of various kinds—catalogues, guidebooks, travel accounts—since their inception in Europe in the Early Modern period, and museums have been an important site of research since the beginnings of disciplinary art history in the 19th century. Courses of study aimed at museum professionals have also produced, over the past century, an abundant literature on the technical aspects of the various activities in which museums engage. But art museums have emerged as the object of sustained scholarly inquiry in their own right only since the 1980s. The scholarly study of art museums, moreover, is most fruitfully considered a subfield not only of art history, but also of an interdisciplinary field, critical museum studies. Contributions to this field come from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, history, literature, and sociology as well as art history. Critical museum studies focuses on the functions, practices, and ideology of museums in society, understanding these to be neither fully autonomous nor wholly derivative of social or political structures. While recognizing that different museum types, such as art museums, have distinct protocols and histories, scholars in critical museum studies have often looked to work on related museum types, such as history, natural history, and anthropology museums, for theoretical insight. Indeed, the role of institutions in constituting distinct categories of knowledge, and in delineating borders between them, has long been a significant area of inquiry in critical museum studies. As a contribution to Oxford Bibliographies in Art History, this article is not an introduction to the entire field of critical museum studies; it does not, for example, include works concerned solely with museums of science, history, or anthropology. The focus is on resources pertinent to the study of art museums within the parameters of art history, excluding primarily technical works (those related to conservation, for example). In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of scholarly research on the history of museums, however, the titles surveyed include many that are not limited to museums of art. For among the signal insights of critical museum studies is that questioning the boundaries of art history and its institutions is a productive way of bringing art history to the forefront of humanist inquiry. The overriding, but not exclusive, emphasis on museums in Europe and North America reflects both the way the study of art museums has developed and the contours of the field, though the rapid proliferation of art institutions in other parts of the world has spurred scholarship worthy of attention.

News from the Pennsylvania Federation of Museums and Historical Organizations Deborah Filipi, Executive Director At the time of this essay, museums in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are faced with the economic woes that confront the rest of the nation. After September 11, 2001, financial support from foundations, corporations, and private individuals started to decline. However, during the early to mid-2000s, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania took the opposite route. State funding for museums increased to a high of $6.3 million. This money was allocated to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) for its Pennsylvania History and Museum Grant Program.1 PHMC awarded grants for projects, general operating support (GOS), technical assistance, historic markers, statewide organizations—such as the Pennsylvania Federation of Museums and Historical Organizations (PFMHO) and the Pennsylvania Historical Association (PHA)—and statewide conferences. The majority of the $6.3 million went to museums in the form of GOS grants though there was generous funding for the other grant categories as well.2 In addition to the peer-reviewed PHMC grant program, museums received grants [End Page vii] from the state legislature as well as other state agencies. Nine museums had separate line items in the yearly state budget and were recipients of GOS through that funding mechanism. They are familiarly known as the "non-preferreds." Once the United States economy began to weaken as this decade progressed and reached crisis status by the end of it, museums have coped by cutting back or eliminating staff, exhibits, and public programming. As can be expected, the Museum Assistance line item followed suit. By 2008, the appropriation had dropped to $3.8 million. The PHMC still awarded grants in every grant category, but GOS grants had lessened enough that PHMC no longer used a peer-review process based on institutional excellence for this type of grant. Instead, PHMC began utilizing a formula-based method based on a museum's operating budget. The other grant categories maintained the peer-review practice. In 2009 the Governor created a furor by recommending $0 for the Museum Assistance line item. What was more grievous was his allowing art museums (funded through the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts) and the nine non-preferreds to remain in his budget with slight decreases only. PFMHO, other related organizations, museum professionals and visitors, and concerned citizens sprang into action with a multi-month offense on the Pennsylvania General Assembly to reinstate the Museum Assistance line item. After a tortuous budget passage that took many iterations—as far as museum funding went—the Museum Assistance line item reappeared though with a reduced amount of $1.775 million.3 The museum community rejoiced and applauded state legislators who seemed to understand the importance of museums when the economy of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had plunged into a catastrophe. Though the PHMC's grant program4 survived another year, PHMC itself faces a struggle. As a state agency, it experienced a severe decrease in its annual appropriation in the 2009 budget with the consequential laying off of a significant number of employees and the elimination or rigorous pruning of public programming. Indeed, PHMC lost 43 percent of its annual budget and one-third of its employees. Hardest hit are the PHMC's museums and historic sites. Of the 22 museums and historic sites, only six of them operate on a full-time schedule. Some are closed for the winter; one is now administered by another museum; some are opened on a reduced and operated by volunteers; some are closed but have their property opened as parks by a [End Page viii] state agency; and some are closed completely. Another PHMC museum, The State Museum of Pennsylvania, is open with reduced hours.5 Warnings via the "grapevine" envisage next year's budget crisis to worsen. How will that affect PHMC and its many public offerings? How will it affect state grant money to the nonprofits that benefit from state support? In a recent news article in The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Governor Rendell was not sure if the Commonwealth should be a custodian of its history. A director of a Harrisburg-based foundation dedicated to lessening taxes opined that this was...

A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies

Museum professionals and the relevance of LIS expertise

Gambling with interests.

ABSTRACTThe University of Helsinki has made significant changes to its educational frameworks and degree programmes. For museum studies the changes have been particularly far-reaching. From autumn 2017 onwards there has been a reduction in the total number of study credits available, but also a move from bachelors- to masters-level teaching. This upheaval presented an opportunity to redesign the course in an inclusive way, consulting both with museum professionals and museum studies graduates in Finland and further afield. The resulting courses aim to implement collaboratively the preferences of these consultees, while staying true to the university’s own requirements. In this article, we reflect upon the evaluation process and offer insights that we hope are useful both to museum professionals that have (or wish to have) a relationship with a university museum studies programme, and also for the teachers and researchers involved in devising and delivering these programmes.

This thesis examines the perspectives of museum curators on the nature and description of archival material held in Croatian museums. The research emanated out of personal speculation that the arrangement and description of archival and other documentary material found in museum settings are dependent on how curators determine what constitutes archival material, what constitutes a museum object or museum documentation, and what might potentially be both. Arguing also that the path to any kind of interoperability starts with the people who implement these descriptive standards, this exploratory study uses ethnographic methods, including interviews, observation and autoethnography to investigate curators’ understandings of archival and documentary materials held in their museums (i.e., rather than in archives).The research was guided by the following questions: How do museum curators conceptualize archival records and other materials within their institutions? How and why do records and other archival materials come to be treated as museum objects? What happens to archival material in museum settings in terms of its description? Do museum professionals see any possible convergences between archives and museum materials in terms of description and access in museum collections, and if so, what might those be? The study identifies and analyzes their conceptualizations of and attitudes towards the records that surround them in their daily professional practice (both those they collect and those they create) as well as towards their description of those records. It also contemplates how museum curators perceive the role of the descriptions they create when these are to be placed online in an environment where there are no longer institutional boundaries and the anticipated audience is not socially restricted. The historical situation of archival material in Croatian museum collections is also discussed in a way that offers insights into national regulatory practices as well as the perspectives of both archival and museum professionals in Croatia. However the thesis also points out that these problems are not just the result of Croatia's historical particularities but are also present worldwide in any situation where archival material constitutes part of museum collections. 174 The findings of the study indicate that the conceptualizations of the museum curators who were interviewed regarding records, properties of those records, and how both are or should be represented through description, vary in relation to how they personally conceive of the concept of a record (their individual cognitive framework), how the concept of a record is discussed in contemporary archival discourse and practice (professional frameworks), the parameters set by relevant archival and museum laws and regulations in Croatia (juridical framework), and the contemporary socio-political context (societal framework). The thesis concludes that the matter of description in the end becomes the matter of access and that descriptive processes that take place in Croatian museums are indeed determined by museum professionals in the course of their daily work, although they are also circumscribed by institutional policies and practices and juridical requirements such as legislation and regulations, and influenced by both historical and contemporary societal contexts. These findings suggest that description could potentially serve as mechanism by which means the boundaries of individual repositories, professional communities and nations could be bridged. Given that curatorial conceptions are exercised in such a central way in museums, such bridging could only be successful, however, if it were based upon a robust understanding of what curators understand and internalize as significant concepts and values in the museum context, such as those that are surfaced through this research.

Critical reflection processes are fundamental to critical social work practice. Nevertheless, these processes have been criticized for lacking a coherent translation to direct professional practice. Existing models of critical reflection culminate in the formulation of critical professional perspectives, leaving the translation of critical perspectives into direct practice underdeveloped. This gap requires attention, specifically in the contemporary context of social services that operate under the hegemony of conservative and neoliberal discourses, which impede critical rationality and practice. Therefore, a nuanced conceptualization of the process that links critical reflection and critical practice is required. This article provides such a conceptualization by describing an undergraduate social work course that used a collaborative inquiry group to explore critical participatory practices. Building on our collaborative inquiry experiences and findings, we portray a process that included critical reflection, direct critical practice, and the development of a critical professional perspective. Based on the conceptual framework of action science, our conceptualization demonstrates how the process of addressing the tension between critical and hegemonic perspectives enables professionals to create critical practice within the hegemonic field. In this way, we provide a theoretical contribution to the construction of critical reflection models and a practical contribution to professional developmental processes that promote critical professionalism.

In this article we discuss whether it pays to invest ethically. Our aim is to examine corporate social responsibility from philosophical, moral and practical points of views. We focus on two main issues related to ethical investments. Firstly we discuss the moral dilemma of how capitalism has changed its shape in today’s world and from ‘blaming the business’ there is a general attempt to use the markets to promote ethics values and corporate social responsibility. Secondly, we analyze the growth of ethical investment funds in the UK today, and their performance, and highlight some of the institutional investors involved in the management of ethical funds. We discuss whether ethical investments really succeed in reducing the conflict between profit-making and social responsibility as they promise or whether they use commercial rhetoric and market mechanism to merely sell us our own perceived values back. We conclude that the paper has a key contribution in setting the scene for future research in an area that is evolving and of fundamental importance to companies, investors and various stakeholder groups.