Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (American Association for State and Local History Book Series)

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Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums (American Association for State and Local History Book Series)

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Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums (American Association for State and Local History Book Series)
Edward P. Alexander
Manufacturer: AltaMira Press
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0761991557

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This primary text on museum history examines the rise of museums since the eighteenth century in the fields of science, art, and history.

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Treasures of the British Museum
Marjorie Caygill
Manufacturer: Harry N Abrams
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0810916878

Museum Strategy and Marketing : Designing Missions, Building Audiences, Generating Revenue and Resources

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Curator: Spice Up Your Boring Museum with Kotler!
Modern Museum Marketing

Museum Strategy and Marketing : Designing Missions, Building Audiences, Generating Revenue and Resources
Neil Kotler , and Philip Kotler
Manufacturer: Jossey-Bass
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0787909122

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Museum Strategy and Marketing is the most comprehensive and level-headed presentation of its subject I have come across. The authors are sophisticated marketeers who really understand the differences between market-driven businesses and mission-driven museums. The book is not about selling widgets; it's about building museum audiences and strengthening institutions.
- Robert P. Bergman, director, The Cleveland Museum of Art
In a long-awaited answer of one of museum's most pressing challenges, Neil Kotler and Philip Kotler draw on unmatched expertise and experience to reveal how museums can build revenue, audiences, and resources while maintaining and advancing mission. In this first and only guide to planning strategy and marketing for museums, they offer an in-depth, hands-on guide to developing successful museums. The authors explain the strategic relationship between missions, audience and funding--and how managing this relationship is vital for a successful museum--and reveal how marketing tools can be used to grow healthy, vibrant museums.
The book's encyclopedic approach covers everything museum managers need to know--from strategic planning and budgeting to advertising, media relations, and fundraising--providing them with the tools to create and nurture a thriving museum.

Customer Reviews:

Curator: Spice Up Your Boring Museum with Kotler!.......2006-02-15

At the intersection of marketing strategy and museum administration, this is an absolutely necessary reading for any serious museum decision-maker. Neil and Philip Kotler are world-class marketing experts, who have been cultivating a parallel interest in non-for-profit organizations since the 1970s. This book is very useful, elaborating on each stage of the development of marketing strategy, with excellent examples and case-studies which provide a practical perspective on marketing tools applied on museums. The book is, at least, very insightful. Highly recommended.

Modern Museum Marketing.......2000-01-28

An up-to-date compendium of marketing analysis and techniques for all flavors of museum. This book includes detailed marketing strategies to find the visitor, determine their wants and meet those desires. All aspects of museum work is presented: fund raising, exhibit development, collection policy, staff development, etc. We have used the guidance of this book to frame future expansion of the Minnesota Transportation Museum in St. Paul, MN.

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When these essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, their impact was immediate. They were discussed, annotated, cited, collected, and translated--the three issues of Artforum in which they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. Having Brian O'Doherty's provocative essays available again is a signal event for the art world. This edition also includes "The Gallery as Gesture," a critically important piece published ten years after the others.
O'Doherty was the first to explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art as he sought to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery was based. Concerned with the complex and sophisticated relationship between economics, social context, and aesthetics as represented in the contested space of the art gallery, he raises the question of how artists must construe their work in relation to the gallery space and system.
These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of postwar art in Europe and the United States. Teeming with ideas, relentless in their pursuit of contradiction and paradox, they exhibit both the understanding of the artist (Patrick Ireland) and the precision of the scholar.

Interpretation for the 21st Century: Fifteen Guiding Principles for Interpreting Nature and Culture, (Second Edition)

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Thorough, but Dry and "textbooky"
Excellent handbook for Tour Guides and other Interpreters
Interpretation for the 21st Century

Interpretation for the 21st Century: Fifteen Guiding Principles for Interpreting Nature and Culture, (Second Edition)
Larry Beck , and Ted T. Cable
Manufacturer: Sagamore Publishing
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1571675221
Release Date: 2002-07-01

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Interpretation for the 21st Century-2nd edition is uplifting and inspiring as it enhances the reader's understanding of how to interpret our cultural and natural legacy. The 15 guiding principles in this book will assist anyone who works in parks, forests, wildlife refuges, zoos, musea, historic areas, nature centers and tourism sites to more effectively and joyously conduct their work. Interpretation for the 21st Century, now updated and in its 2nd edition, has been used internationally and has been translated into Chinese. It serves as inspirational reading for students.

Customer Reviews:

Thorough, but Dry and "textbooky".......2007-06-04

Someday there will be one book that sums up the field of interpretation. This is not it. This book is 'ok' as a reference book, but mine collects more dust than the others in my interpretive library. I was disappointed in how dry it was. Ironically, I felt it lacks the passion that is so crucial to interpretation. To me, it didn't say anything new that Tilden hadn't already covered (just regurgitated theory in different words). This is purely my opinion, but I don't think Beck's 'extra' principles are a significant contribution to the profession. Because of this, I choose not to include them in my introductory interpretive training class. For example, one chapter is on 'communicating in the information age'. Anyone who's the slightest bit computer-literate knows that interpretation, like any profession, needs to grow and change with time. Does it really require an entire chapter? It's already outdated, anyway, because it doesn't cover blogging or Myspace, which are two tools I use for passive interpretation.

If you haven't read the 'staples' of interpretation (Tilden, Cornell, Ham, etc.) yet, this book will be useful, because it contains 'cliffnotes' on those books. But I recommend reading Tilden for the basics, Cornell to get inspired, and Ham's book, 'Environmental Interpretation' (which isn't just for the natural history interpreter) for the hands-on application part, instead.

Excellent handbook for Tour Guides and other Interpreters.......2004-11-25

The authors of this book offered me exactly what I have expected: a concise and comprehensive insight into the Art of interpretation. They have used for their starting point some `classics' on this subject, such as Mills or Tilden (they did it in a wise and respectful way), and then they developed a much wider and contemporary context to display all aspects of interpretation - its meaning, principles, tools and practice.

According to the authors these are the 15 basic principles of modern interpretation (explained in separate chapters of the book):

1. Lighting a Spark
2. Interpreting in the Information Age
3. Importance of the Story
4. Provocation
5. Holistic Interpretation
6. Interpretation Throughout the Lifespan
7. Bringing the Past Alive
8. Modern Tools of Interpretation
9. Enough is Enough
10. Technique Before Art
11. Interpretive Writing
12. Attracting Support and Making Friends
13. Interpreting Beauty
14. Promoting Optimal Experience
15. Passion

Not only have they covered all relevant facets of their theme, but they also got it across in a clear, interesting and instructive way. Naturally, one could have expected that explanations regarding `interpretation' would be interpreted well. In the case of this book such expectations have completely been met. Simply, Beck and Cable did a great job. As a reader you will enjoy their accounts of what interpretation is or is not and how can it be effectively practiced in both natural and cultural environments.

A great deal of useful tips for interpreters, meaningful quotations, as well as some helpful notes printed in separate `boxes' give this book an additional flavor of seriously planned, thoroughly studied and fully executed task by the authors. This book may undoubtedly serve as an excellent tool for tour guides to improve their interpreting capabilities and their art of story-telling in order to give their audience really great tours!

Will this book become a `new Bible' in the field of interpretation in the 21st century?

Interpretation for the 21st Century.......2000-07-17

Larry Beck's and Ted Cable's "Interpretation for the 21st Century, Fifteen Guiding Principles for Interpreting Nature and Culture" is one of the best resources I have found for tour guides, museum professionals, educators, and anyone who builds programming around historical, cultural and natural sites or institutions.

It introduces the classics of interpretation (Tilden, Mills, etc.) and then covers everything from the bigger picture to the details of specific practices.

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Science museums can be illuminating, exciting, and disturbing--just like the collectors that make them possible. Scholar Stephen T. Asma turned his professional curiosity about preserving bodies into an engrossing, wide-ranging exploration of the nature of these places and their curators. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums brings a refreshing vitality to a subject usually thought boring, if not morbid. Asma's writing ranges from expositive to chatty, and it occasionally feels like a travelogue or memoir, as he investigates the American Museum of Natural History, the Galerie d'anatomie comparée, and other collections in the U.S. and Europe. This informality keeps the reader engaged throughout. Referring to the process of skeletonizing specimens--while maintaining his hold on all but the most sensitive--he writes:

I stepped into the foulest, most pestiferous stench you can imagine.... Inside each tank were thousands of dermestid beetles, otherwise known as flesh-eating beetles, blissfully chewing the meaty chunks and strands off the bones. Each bug was no bigger than a watermelon seed, but en masse they could strip a skeleton clean in two short days.

To Asma's credit, the bulk of the text is less a gross-out fest than a consideration of the hard, sometimes obsessive work of the men and women behind the displays. He examines the role of museums and collectors in the great evolutionary debates of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the future of these institutions as they come more and more to depend on corporate largesse. Equally enlightening and entertaining, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads is a perfectly exhibited specimen. --Rob Lightner

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The natural history museum is a place where the line between "high" and "low" culture effectively vanishes--where our awe of nature, our taste for the bizarre, and our thirst for knowledge all blend happily together. But as Stephen Asma shows in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, there is more going on in these great institutions than just smart fun. Asma takes us on a wide-ranging tour of natural history museums in New York and Chicago, London and Paris, interviewing curators, scientists, and exhibit designers, and providing a wealth of fascinating observations. We learn how the first museums were little more than high-toned side shows, with such garish exhibits as the pickled head of Peter the Great's lover. In contrast, today's museums are hot-beds of serious science, funding major research in such fields as anthropology and archaeology. Asma also points out that these museums actively shape our perception of nature, and that these efforts are swayed as much by politics as by science. In countless exhibits, for instance, the idea of the traditional nuclear family is evident in displays of everything from extinct animals to grizzly bears (in nature, alas, the male bear is more likely to devour its young than to nurture them). Where else but at a natural history museum could you find a T. rex, a high-tech planetarium, a Native American totem pole, and flesh-eating beetles--all under one roof. And in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, Stephen Asma reveals that what we don't see--the scientific research that is going on backstage--is just as fascinating as the exhibits on display.

Customer Reviews:

Bizarre and Brilliant!.......2004-02-26

This is an excellent and provocative book. Asma ranges widely, but also deeply, over the relatively uncharted territory of museum practices and theories --some mainstream and others quirky and idiosyncratic. One of the great virtues of the book is that it consciously avoids the typical postmodern cultural studies lingo that most of the other recent museum books invoke. This is clear and thoughtful analysis of the tradition of natural history collecting --analysis that brings us face to face with oddball curators like Peale and Hunter. But it also connects the older forms of edutainment (early taxidermy, etc.) with the more contemporary and controversial forms (Hollywood-type displays of dinosaurs, etc.). Two other important aspects of the book are scarcely mentioned in the promo blurbs, but they make for fascinating reading. One, is a fresh, if ocassionally dense, tour of European scientific classification theory --a philosophically important and often ignored area. And two, a powerful argument for evolution theory as against creationism and the increasingly popular "intelligent design" theory. Great writing and very intelligent!

The evolution of natural history museums around the world.......2001-08-08

Stephen Asthma's Stuffed Animals And Pickled Heads surveys the presence and evolution of natural history museums around the world, interviewing curators, scientists and exhibit designers and providing many observations of the history of these museums and how their contents and approaches have evolved. The result is an excellent and intriguing story of the evolution of natural history collections.

Mummies, Museums, and Metaphysics.......2001-04-23

If you do not want to know the nuts and bolts (or rather, the knives and molds) of the craft of taxidermy, but you want to know about why people might be interested in such an activity, what happens to their exhibits in museums, how museums express cultural and scientific philosophy, and how we come to categorize the biology that fills our world, then Stephen T. Asma's _Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums_ (Oxford University Press) will do nicely. It is an amusing ramble through museums, but since Asma is a professor of philosophy, it veers through much larger ideas.

Asma obviously likes museums, and he has gained entrance to the back rooms denied to other mortals. He is delighted to report his findings, such as the dermestid beetle room at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. These beetles, held in a stinky sealed room that has a door like a submarine hatch, swarm over the skinned bodies of specimens, literally gnawing them to the bone in a couple of days. He has interviewed curators and exhibition designers, and has them explain what they are trying to accomplish in their exhibits. But they may not know; how a display is arranged depends on scientific and social philosophy which varies from time to time and from nation to nation, and may be covert. Louis Agassiz displayed human racial artifacts at Harvard to emphasize that races were different, having been separately and specially created, rather than showing the continuity of human descent. The natural history museum in England have exhibits that emphasize Darwin, but the French hardly mention him. The Americans will have the most modern philosophy of taxonomy.

Book Description

A Companion to Museum Studies captures a fresh, multi-disciplinary approach to the study of the development, roles, and significance of museums in contemporary society. Expanding museum studies and presenting a wide range of theoretical perspectives, the volume brings together authoritative original essays by leading figures from disciplines including anthropology, art history, history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies, as well as museum studies.The book examines the complexity of the museum from cultural, political governance, curatorial, historical, and representational perspectives. From traditional subjects, including space, display, buildings, and collecting, to more contemporary challenges and concerns, such as visiting, commerce, community, and experimental exhibition forms, this Companion proves itself an indispensable reference for art historians, museum curators, and art and culture lovers.

Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage

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Destinations Discussed -- Culturally Speaking

Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Binding: Paperback

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MUSEUMS & COMMUNITIES PB

ASIN: 0520209664

Book Description

Destination Culture takes the reader on an eye-opening journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch. Posing the question, "What does it mean to show?" Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores the agency of display in a variety of settings: museums, festivals, world's fairs, historical re-creations, memorials, and tourist attractions. She talks about how objects--and people--are made to "perform" their meaning for us by the very fact of being collected and exhibited, and about how specific techniques of display, not just the things shown, convey powerful messages.
Her engaging analysis shows how museums compete with tourism in the production of "heritage." To make themselves profitable, museums are marketing themselves as tourist attractions. To make locations into destinations, tourism is staging the world as a museum of itself. Both promise to deliver heritage. Although heritage is marketed as something old, she argues that heritage is actually a new mode of cultural production that gives a second life to dying ways of life, economies, and places. The book concludes with a lively commentary on the "good taste/bad taste" debate in the ephemeral "museum of the life world," where everyone is a curator of sorts and the process of converting life into heritage begins.

Customer Reviews:

Destinations Discussed -- Culturally Speaking.......2006-11-18

The central theme in this book is an extended answer to the big question "What does it mean to show?" It's a very broad topic. But I like the way that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett focuses her discussion by posing engaging rhetorical questions and lucid statements of interesting research topics which provide a solid base for her analysis. The variety of topics is fascinating. It's intriguing to read a single volume that deals with the history of museums in connection to tourism, Jewish self-representation in worlds' fairs, Ellis Island as a tourist site, Plimoth Plantation's living history programs, arts and folklife festivals as forms of avant-garde theater, and scholarly analysis of a catalogue of bad taste. The disparate essays are actually pretty unified as they are arranged thematically to explore how the processes of exhibiting cultural artifacts is embedded in a vast network of academic and cultural institutions, how displaying material culture is related to the construction of heritage, how the tropes and schemes of ethnographic study and display are connected with wider issues in museums and festival presentations, and a concluding chapter that examines the shifting criteria for standards of taste and its inherent relationships to the circulation of value within society. The writing is interesting and often challenging, and it opens numerous questions for further reflection and discussion.

A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections, 2nd Edition

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The Museum Professional's Bible!

A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections, 2nd Edition
Marie C. Malaro
Manufacturer: Smithsonian
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1560987871

Customer Reviews:

The Museum Professional's Bible!.......2001-01-27

This book was required reading for a Museum Studies class at GW, and everyone who works in a Museum should be familliar with it! It is a great reference guide as well.

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