Museum Staff Research Articles

Cultivating biodiverse futures at the (postcolonial) botanical garden

AbstractThis article examines ecological practices at the Palestine Museum of Natural History in Bethlehem, West Bank. Through an analysis of the museum's botanical gardens, the article explores what it calls ‘biodiverse futures’ as a spatio‐temporal alternative to the ecological domination of settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine. While much scholarship has focused on the environmental imaginaries that have informed colonial conquest in Palestine, this paper draws attention to the ways in which these relationships extend into constructions of the future. Combining the literature on environmental violence with the literature on futurity and decolonisation, this article develops an approach that foregrounds the relevance of ‘ecological temporalities’ in examining alternatives to settler futures in Israel/Palestine. To date, only a limited number of contributions have examined environmentalism as a powerful discursive tool for constructing the future. The case of the museum gardens highlights three interrelated aspects of the production of ecological counter‐futures: futures as knowledge, futures as (bio)diversity, and futures as survival. Drawing on ethnographic material and interviews with museum staff and volunteers, this paper contributes to the study of the temporalities of environmental violence and ecological resistance in Israel/Palestine.

Placing African American museums in the American tourism landscape

According to the Association of African American Museums (AAAM), there are more than 200 African American history and cultural museums—or other sites with substantial African American collections such as libraries and archives—across the U.S. Many of these museums had their start shortly after the height of the Civil Rights Movement, with a surge in establishments in the 1970s. Black museums serve to decenter White stories of America and refocus on Black experiences. While geographers have studied an array of memory, heritage, and tourism sites, museums remain understudied and under-theorized. Building upon the subfields of Museum geographies—particularly by considering the concept of museums as theatres of pain—and Black geographies, our research examines the ways these museums are integral to the relationships between Black placemaking and the tourism landscape, which remains steeped in anti-Black racism. Using museum exhibit documentation, semi-structured interviews of museum staff, and content analysis of online travel reviews (primarily TripAdvisor and Google Reviews), this paper analyzes two case studies: The National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio, and The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Through our two case studies, we show how Black museums enact curatorial practices of commemorative geographies and create redemptive spaces that cultivate not only a homeplace for visitors, particularly for Black Americans and people of the African diaspora but also serve as sites of belonging and joy.

‘Never forget’: examining changes in materiality and preservation practices at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, New York

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum commemorates specific traumatic moments in history—the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. The recovered realia, exhibiting damage from the attacks, consists of many objects never intended to be preserved. Now 20 years later, the plastics, newspapers and corroded metals which served as placeholders connecting us with both the past and the innocent lives lost are beginning to age. In addition, the people who care for these artefacts may no longer have personal associations with the trauma; that is, the lived experience of the events which motivated the original caretakers. This paper discusses the current research conducted by museum staff related to how the conservation community navigates our own experiences, memories and evolving biases in interpreting trauma collections and how a human-centred approach of involving family members and survivors defines conservation priorities for objects meant to stay frozen in time.

New approaches to photography in Holocaust exhibitions

ABSTRACT This article explores Holocaust photography at the interface of historical research and curatorial practice. It focuses on a case study, the touring exhibition The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust (EaW), which uses a range of different media and technologies to present photos as difficult and ideologically charged artifacts, and articulates a critique of current Holocaust exhibition practice and museum pedagogy. My analysis draws on my own experience of working with a team of academics and museum staff from the UK’s National Holocaust Centre and Museum (NHCM) on the making of this exhibition.

Young children’s agency in the science museum: insights from the use of storytelling in object-rich galleries

ABSTRACT This paper draws on a multi-phase project that sought to understand and increase young children’s engagement with Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) objects. The paper presents findings from one aspect of this project that involved using storytelling to support young children’s agency with STEM objects in a UK science museum. The qualitative research involved observing and interviewing 25 children aged 4–7 years in family and school groups. The findings demonstrate the importance of acknowledging and promoting young children’s agency in museum settings. They suggest that providing children with opportunities to exercise agency by them taking control and activating their prior knowledge and interests during museum visits increases their engagement, enjoyment, and confidence. The study also highlights the important role that adults, including parents, teachers, and museum staff, play in facilitating children’s agency and increasing their engagement with museum objects and spaces.

COVID-19 and museum social media content

Many museums turned to social media to host educational and outreach content as museums across the globe closed their physical doors to the public during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. While early research indicated museum staff increased the amount of social media posts they published and developed new online services (ODI; AAM), there has yet to be a more detailed description of these changes. This study identifies and clarifies these changes by analyzing public content published to the Facebook pages of the 20 museums with the largest number of social media followers. Results indicate these museums increased their number of posts in April and May 2020, but dropped by June 2020. In addition, the types of content published shifted significantly. Posts featuring video content proliferated while photographs and links declined. Moreover, findings suggest the continued use of videos – particularly for capturing live events – may persist after museums fully reopen to the public. As such, implications and suggestions for museum educators looking to incorporate video content into their programming are provided.

Robots onboard? Investigating what individual predispositions and attitudes influence the reactions of museums’ employees towards the adoption of social robots

ABSTRACT The digital transformation is affecting museums. New technologies such as applications, beacons, QR codes, virtual guides, holograms, touchscreens, and augmented reality are commonly adopted. Although much research was conducted on how visitors perceived the adoption of new technologies by museums, little is known about the reaction of the staff. Individual predispositions such as resistance to change, AI anxiety, and attitudes towards robots were used as the independent variables. This paper presents the research conducted on 220 museum employees. The results suggest that museum staff react to the decision on the adoption of social robots cognitively, emotionally, and behaviourally. Negative cognitive reactions are elicited by earlier negative attitudes towards interactions with robots. Negative emotional reactions are associated with earlier negative attitudes towards interactions with robots and the fear of being replaced. Ultimately, behavioural reactions are elicited by all of the above along with the anxiety of learning new technological skills.

Seismic performance assessment of nylon lines for protecting museum collections

While earthquakes pose a threat to both museum buildings and collections, the latter can be especially vulnerable. Seismic damage to museum collections can be minimized by securing objects with nylon lines, a widely used strategy in museums. However, this measure is usually adopted on the basis of the subjective interpretations by museum staff rather than scientific assessments of its efficacy, resulting in a lack of standardization. This paper aims to address this issue by proposing an appropriate assessment method on the basis of seismic risk analysis of museum collections. Specifically, the study first introduces a seismic fragility analysis method for the collection-showcase-museum system, which is a comprehensive method for evaluating the effectiveness of nylon lines in enhancing seismic performance. The seismic performance of the nylon lines can then be assessed through a seismic risk calculation of the museum collection. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a case study is conducted. Via numerical analysis, the study examined the impact of nylon line diameter, quantity, and tying angle on their seismic capacity. Moreover, this approach is used for an existing precious artifact in a Chinese museum to provide a practical reference for other museum collections. The findings of this study highlight the practical and scientific nature of the proposed method, indicating that larger diameter nylon lines significantly improve seismic performance. Additionally, collections secured with four nylon lines are more secure than those secured by fewer lines. The nylon lines with smaller tying angle may increases the probability of seismic damage to collections during strong earthquakes.

Creating Visitor-Centered Museum Experiences for Adults With Developmental Disabilities: A Collaborative Story

Museums have a history of being elitist institutions for educated, upper-class, White audiences. However, in recent decades, many museums have worked to overcome this idea by providing visitor-centered approaches to refocus their efforts and concentrate on the needs and interests of all visitors, rather than the objects on display. One population of visitors that is often overlooked by museums is adults with developmental disabilities. This audience serves as the primary participant group for this qualitative case study, along with their parents or caregivers and museum staff members. By using disability studies as a guiding framework, the participants in this study collaborated with the researcher and museum staff members to document their museum experiences through inclusive artmaking, interviews, discussions, and observations. The purpose of this research was to explore how such collaborations might create more inclusive and visitor-centered museum experiences for adults with developmental disabilities within a small regional local art center. The findings were used to make recommendations for future programming and consisted of several themes developed during the coding process. The themes included understanding, accessibility, interactive, collaboration, communication, and evaluation.

Designing and evaluating Reto Global, a serious video game for supporting global warming awareness

Nowadays, human activities are directly impacting the earth’s natural dynamics, resulting in climate alterations on a global scale, commonly known as Global Warming. Video games are a potential tool for global warming awareness due to their benefits to the learning process, such as improving cognitive skills, attention, and motivation to learn about a new topic. In this work, we present the design process of Reto Global, a video game to support global warming awareness in a museum exhibition context. We designed, developed, and evaluated Reto Global with the museum staff and potential museum visitors through the five stages of the Design Thinking methodology. Our results affirm the relevance of the use of interactive technologies to reinforce the process of raising awareness among potential museum attendees about the global warming phenomenon.

David Unaipon, Inventor

Unaipon descendant, Kym Kropinyeri, had promised to Unaipon and other Ngarrindjeri elders that he would pass on their history, including accounts of what happened to them at Point McLeay mission. This article addresses the Unaipon inventions. We provide a comprehensive account of Unaipon’s patent applications and the Protection-era restrictions that impacted Aboriginal inventors. The fate of Unaipon’s much celebrated 1909 shearing patent is fully explored. Exploitation of this invention is contextualised with reference to the patent activities of one of the most successful twentieth-century agricultural conglomerates that sold shearing handpieces, Cooper Engineering Ltd (Aust). Unaipon’s claim he was ripped off is considered in light of the demands made on him by the Chief Protector, politicians, religious groups, museum staff, and harassment by mission superintendents and police. All these factors impacted the capacity of Unaipon to pursue his scientific interests and delivered him into poverty.

Uncertainty as Affective State and Critical Engagement Strategy in Museum and Heritage Site Settings

Some pasts have long been uncertain—among those, prehistoric lives in areas where limited archaeological evidence has been unearthed. The Scottish Crannog Centre holds a collection of Iron Age artifacts that have been excavated from the bottom of Loch Tay, jigsaw pieces that are used to tell the story of the everyday lives of crannog dwellers two and a half thousand years ago. The visitor experience at the museum is built on direct interaction with the museum team as the visitors are guided through the site, presenting ample opportunities for critical questions to be raised and discussed about how the past can be understood in the present and how it can inform the future. Facilitating such conversations—and using Iron Age artifacts as points of connection and as conversational prompts—involves a careful balance between fact, interpretation, and imagination; what we know for certain, what is likely, and what we do not, and cannot, know. This paper focuses on how Scottish Crannog Centre museum practitioners employ uncertainty as a feeling, a process, and an engagement strategy in generating critical reflections and conversations among visitors. Drawing on data generated through twenty-five interviews with museum staff, apprentices, and volunteers, as well as ethnographic observations, we explore how the team manages uncertainty, how it is positioned and functions in interactions with visitors, and how uncertainty facilitates a sense of connection to the distant past. In so doing, we argue that uncertainty can be more clearly conceptualized as an affective state and a critical strategy when exploring how prehistoric and present-day life are connected in museum contexts.

DIGITAL KITAMBO: DECOLONISING NARRATIVES AND BRINGING THE PAST INTO THE FUTURE AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS OF KENYA

The Swahili word ‘kitambo’, which refers to occurrences in the past that are understood to be at least indirectly connected to the speaker, can be used to describe experimental museology through digital cultural heritage. There is a need to improve access and enhance conservation goals within African cultural heritage institutions, and the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) has been developing innovative technologies and communication tools with the Kenya Heritage Resource Information System (KEHRIS). This paper will discuss Digital Kitambo—a pilot project completed at NMK from 2013 – 2019 to create the spatially integrated database KEHRIS, digitise 10,000 artefacts and specimens from the archaeology and palaeontology collections, and develop digital learning programmes to engage a wider audience. Qualitative research methodology included participant observation, qualitative interviews and focus groups with museum staff as well as focus groups with primary and secondary teachers to develop curricula for local schools. This paper traces the evolution of Digital Kitambo from its inception and reflects on both the successes and shortcomings of the initiative with particular attention to its goals of decolonising the museum’s collections and contributing to new national narratives by engaging the public through digital initiatives.

DIGITAL KITAMBO: DECOLONISING NARRATIVES AND BRINGING THE PAST INTO THE FUTURE AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS OF KENYA

The Swahili word ‘kitambo’, which refers to occurrences in the past that are understood to be at least indirectly connected to the speaker, can be used to describe experimental museology through digital cultural heritage. There is a need to improve access and enhance conservation goals within African cultural heritage institutions, and the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) has been developing innovative technologies and communication tools with the Kenya Heritage Resource Information System (KEHRIS). This paper will discuss Digital Kitambo—a pilot project completed at NMK from 2013 – 2019 to create the spatially integrated database KEHRIS, digitise 10,000 artefacts and specimens from the archaeology and palaeontology collections, and develop digital learning programmes to engage a wider audience. Qualitative research methodology included participant observation, qualitative interviews and focus groups with museum staff as well as focus groups with primary and secondary teachers to develop curricula for local schools. This paper traces the evolution of Digital Kitambo from its inception and reflects on both the successes and shortcomings of the initiative with particular attention to its goals of decolonising the museum’s collections and contributing to new national narratives by engaging the public through digital initiatives.

Artful—An AR Social Self-Guided Tour App for Cultural Learning in Museum Settings

The cultural heritage sector has often acted as catalyst in allowing groups to coexist harmonically by investing in intercultural dialogue. Nonetheless, the vast majority of cultural experiences offered by cultural institutions rarely take provisions to make such experiences inclusive for groups with diverse sociocultural characteristics. In this context, this study explores the hypothesis that the adoption of Web 2.0 design patterns could enhance the public’s participation and inclusion by making visitors co-creators of the offered cultural experience, and help museums transform into more inclusive spaces by enhancing knowledge sharing and social learning. A self-guided tour tool with augmented reality and social features is proposed to facilitate the creation of an online learning community for museum staff and visitors, and to enable information sharing and interactions. Initially, the paper’s theoretical background is presented, focusing on the analysis of social educational theories. Next, a state-of-the-art analysis is conducted. The two aforementioned analyses provide both direction and impetus to the design process and research inquiry. Following this, the key functionalities of the proposed application are presented. A preliminary small-scale experiment conducted in an art exhibition showed that its use could be efficient, as positive feedback was obtained.

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

MUSEUM STAFF KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEPTIONS AS DRIVERS FOR GREEN BUILDING EDUCATION IN SCIENCE MUSEUMS

ABSTRACT Green building practices are on the rise, as is research into the drivers of green building adoption and the impacts of green building on occupants. Stakeholder knowledge, organizational culture, and cost have been shown to drive decisions about green building adoption, and occupant outcomes have been studied in terms of behavior and satisfaction. However, there is little consensus about how to communicate green building features to the public—that is, how the drivers for adoption can be communicated to potential building occupants. In science museums, sustainable architecture can support organizational values and initiatives surrounding environmental sustainability, but few studies identify how those values can best be communicated to museum visitors in a green building. To begin to address this question, this research engaged eight LEED-certified museums across the U.S. to examine how the museums leveraged their buildings to educate visitors about green building technologies. Site visit documentation revealed a disparity in interpretation strategies across the museums. Interviews with museum staff illuminated both challenges and opportunities for green building education, where staff decision-making was based on their own understanding of green technologies and perceptions of audience interest, age, and politics. This work highlights the importance of institutional actors in green building messaging, with implications for how public buildings such as museums could operate as sites for green building education.

Eudora Welty House & Garden

Eudora Welty House & Garden Jessica Russell If the past year had one theme, it would have been the gift of friendship. How heartening to reunite with fellow admirers of Eudora Welty on the grounds of her family home as our flagship events made their post-pandemic returns. Even so, among staff, 2022 brought challenges that, while unexpected, served to deepen our commitment to our mission and each other. Moreover, for every achievement to follow in this report, there is a friendship to thank—whether with the Eudora Welty Foundation, our colleagues at the Mississippi Department of Archives & History (MDAH), individual volunteers, or community partners too numerous to list—each one a treasured marvel. For, in Eudora Welty's words, "as is true of all friendships, it might not have happened—and it did." Although we were saddened to say goodbye to our dear friend and former director Lauren Rhoades, to our delight she has returned time and again, as a volunteer, a guest, and even a guest speaker. Most impactful, Rhoades now supports sites like ours in an official capacity as the new director of grants at the Mississippi Arts Commission, where she connects arts-based organizations with potential funding opportunities. In this role, Rhoades informed the Eudora Welty Foundation about the Building Fund for the Arts Grant, to which they successfully applied. Because of this very grant, we can make perhaps our biggest announcement of 2022, which is that the Eudora Welty Foundation will break ground on the much-needed community arts building behind our Visitor Center. The report in this volume by the Foundation, which is supervising construction, contains more details on this exciting development. After Rhoades's departure, I had the great honor of transitioning to director. By December, we welcomed Lauren Claret to fill my former role as Garden Projects Specialist, ending a lengthy staff shortage. We even grew our team, adding Mary Atchley as a part-time Visitor Center Associate to handle our gift shop and ticket sales. All the while, my seasoned colleagues, Special Projects Coordinator Rachel Lott, and Education Specialist Jennifer [End Page 189] Rose, continued to shine in their respective roles: Lott coordinates volunteers and plans exhibits, events, and social media. Rose leads educational programs for students of all ages, in groups large and small, onsite and away. With such a small team, our museum depends heavily on volunteers to lead house tours and maintain the Welty garden, and recruiting new volunteers is our greatest need as we look ahead to 2023. We saw a precipitous drop in volunteers at the onset of the pandemic. Although visitation has started a noticeable rise, volunteer numbers have not yet picked up. (On that note, if you or someone you know is interested in becoming a Welty House volunteer, please email info@eudoraweltyhouse.com.) To each of our house docents and Cereus Weeders, we say a heartfelt "thank you." Fortunately, we had the support of two interns last fall. Victoria Richard (Millsaps College, via the Eudora Welty Foundation) led Welty House tours and updated our digital plant records database with an emphasis on the rose collection. Meanwhile, Nikki Maxwell (University of Southern Mississippi, via MDAH) worked primarily off-site with the MDAH Eudora Welty Collection, noting the numerous references to gardening in the recently unsealed Welty family papers. The annual teachers' CEU workshop took place virtually in February of 2022, comparing the works of Welty and Poe. Michael Pickard, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Millsaps College, and Millsaps College Professor emerita Suzanne Marrs, led the course, and they will do so again on February 24, 2023—this time in person at the Eudora Welty House & Garden Visitor Center—comparing the work of Welty and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Thanks to support from MDAH and the Eudora Welty Foundation, teachers may attend the 2023 workshop at no charge. The in-person return of the Mississippi Book Festival in 2022 made for an exciting weekend in late August, when museum staff treated 110 festival panelists to private tours of the Welty House and Garden. We spent the next day seeing old friends, and making new ones, as 500 fellow book lovers visited our booth at the...

Designing and Evaluating Aventura Marina: A Serious Game to Promote Visitors’ Engagement in a Science Museum Exhibition

Abstract Museums have employed video games in their exhibitions to foster visitors’ participation and improve their learning process through a positive experience. In this work, we present Aventura Marina, a serious video game inspired by escape room game mechanics, composed of an app and an authoring tool, which aims to promote visitors’ engagement with the new exhibition Sea Hall of the Caracol Museo de Ciencias, a Mexican museum in the northwest of Mexico. To design Aventura Marina, we followed a user-centered design approach, based on the design thinking methodology. We evaluated the high-fidelity prototype of the game and the low-fidelity prototype of the authoring tool with museum staff and potential visitors. Our results indicate that Aventura Marina has the potential to promote visitors’ engagement with the Sea Hall exhibition as participants indicated having a positive experience, recognized that they were more interested in and less bored by the topics of the exhibition and that they were eager to play the game again. In relation to the authoring tool, museum staff mentioned how this project could be implemented in other halls of the museum. Finally, we discuss the improvements for a future iteration of the prototypes and how this kind of technology can complement the content of museum exhibitions.

Benefits of Museums as Media and Learning Resources in Social Studies Subjects for Junior High School Students

This study aims to examine the existence of the museum as a medium and source of learning for students, especially in junior high school. The author chose the museum as the object of study which is a medium and source of learning for students, namely because the museum has several functions such as: 1. Collection and safeguarding of natural and cultural heritage, 2. Documentation and scientific research, 3. Conservation and preservation and 4. Dissemination. and the distribution of knowledge to the public. Museums should provide various accesses for visitors so that they can have the opportunity to use facilities and services, research and study collections, including consultation with museum staff. The conclusion of this study is that the existence of museums in the world of education is so needed, including in learning Social Sciences at the Elementary School level to the Upper Advanced Level. In the museum they can observe the relics of the past directly. The learning process can also be carried out by visitors who are not from the education community. Visitors to the museum are also able to increase their mental and intellectual property to know the past of an ethnic or community group. In museums, collection research can also be done, which can provide opportunities to produce new findings. This research is useful to arouse students' interest in knowing the past through observations of historical objects. The results of the study show that museums can motivate students and make it easy for students in the social studies learning process. The research method used in this paper is a qualitative research method of literature study. With the qualitative method of literature study, the author first collects books from the library. Researchers also seek information about the museum by conducting a library study, namely making direct visits to the library. In addition to library studies, researchers also seek and collect sources by utilizing digital technology. From the results of the research and discussion it can be concluded that the use of the Huta Bolon Museum as a source and media for social studies learning for junior high school students in Samosir Regency has a pretty good impact and provides enthusiasm for students in participating in the learning process about historical objects. The Huta Bolon Museum which has various collections in the form of statues (Tunggal Panaluan, , Boras Pati, Pangulu Balang), Buku Lak-lak, war tools (Busur and piso), tools used at home (Panituan, Hurhuran , Gampil, Sondi, Piso Halasar, Sikkop), gambling game tools (Dadu Guling and Janggar-janggar etc). Utilization of the Museum Huta Bolon Museum as a source and media for learning social studies which is visual in nature in the form of a collection of museum objects is a source and media for learning history that is representative to add insight and knowledge about events in the past