Museum Theory

MUSEUM THEORY EDITED BY ANDREA WITCOMB AND KYLIE MESSAGE Museum Theory offers critical perspectives drawn from a broad range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. This volume describes and challenges previous ways of understanding museums and their relationship to society. Essays written by scholars from museology and other disciplines address theoretical reflexivity in the museum, exploring the contextual, theoretical, and pragmatic ways museums work, are understood, and are experienced. Organized around three themes—Thinking about Museums, Disciplines and Politics, and Theory from Practice/Practicing Theory—the text includes discussion and analysis of different kinds of museums from various, primarily contemporary, national and local contexts. Essays consider subjects including the nature of museums as institutions and their role in the public sphere, cutting-edge museum practice and their connections with current global concerns, and the links between museum studies and disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, and history.

New Museum Theory and Practice is an original collection ofessays with a unique focus: the contested politics and ideologiesof museum exhibition. Contains 12 original essays that contribute to the field whilecreating a collective whole for course use. Discusses theory through vivid examples and historicaloverviews. Offers guidance on how to put theory into practice. Covers a range of museums around the world: from art tohistory, anthropology to music, as well as historic houses,cultural centres, virtual sites, and commercial displays that usethe conventions of the museum. Authors come from the UK, Canada, the US, and Australia, andfrom a variety of fields that inform cultural studies.

In a series of richly detailed case studies from Britian, Australia and North America, Tony Bennett investigates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums, fairs and exhibitions have organized their collections, and their visitors. Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, Bennett sheds new light upon the relationship between modern forms of official and popular culture. Using Foucaltian perspectives The Birth of the Museum explores how the public museum should be understood not just as a place of instruction, but as a reformatory of manners in which a wide range of regulated social routines and performances take place. This invigorating study enriches and challenges the understanding of the museum, and places it at the centre of modern relations between culture and government. For students of museum, cultural and sociology studies, this will be an asset to their reading list.

MUSEUM THEORY EDITED BY ANDREA WITCOMB AND KYLIE MESSAGE Museum Theory offers critical perspectives drawn from a broad range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. This volume describes and challenges previous ways of understanding museums and their relationship to society. Essays written by scholars from museology and other disciplines address theoretical reflexivity in the museum, exploring the contextual, theoretical, and pragmatic ways museums work, are understood, and are experienced. Organized around three themes—Thinking about Museums, Disciplines and Politics, and Theory from Practice/Practicing Theory—the text includes discussion and analysis of different kinds of museums from various, primarily contemporary, national and local contexts. Essays consider subjects including the nature of museums as institutions and their role in the public sphere, cutting-edge museum practice and their connections with current global concerns, and the links between museum studies and disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, and history.

Museum Exhibition is the only textbook of its kind to consider exhibition development using both theory and practice in an integrated approach. This comprehensive study covers care of exhibits, writing accompanying text, using new technology, exhibition evaluation, administration and content for a wide range of collections. It provides a complete outline for all those concerned with providing displays in musuems and other cultural heritage contexts.

Museums of contemporary art are expanding and in crisis. They attract ever-larger audiences, architects constantly redesign them, and the growing number of artists is producing more massively than ever; at the same time museum funds are dwindling in the economic crisis and an overheated art market. This text gathers together interviews with international artists, architects and curators of the contemporary art world.

This broad introduction to museums benefits all educators who teach introductory museum studies, addressing the discipline from a holistic, dynamic, and document-centered perspective. Museums serve to help us understand the past and navigate our future—as individuals, as societies, and as a global community. A careful and accurate assessment of a museum's purpose is crucial to its ability to serve its users effectively. Foundations of Museum Studies: Evolving Systems of Knowledge offers a holistic introduction to museums and the study of them from the perspective of specialization in museum studies within the context of library and information science (LIS). The book strikes a balance between theory and practice, examining museums from a systems perspective that considers museums to be document-centered institutions—that objects are documents that generate and convey information, meaning, and inspiration. The authors utilize examples drawn from their experience with institutions in the United States that can be applied to museums across the world. Future museum professionals who read this book will have a broader perspective, an expanded skill set, and the adaptability to span the spectrum of traditional academic disciplines.

Based on extensive research and decades of experience, museum analyst and planner John W. Jacobsen provides both the theoretical underpinnings and the operational pragmatics of measuring any museum's intentional impact and performance by using 1,025 indicators drawn from 51 expert sources. Measuring Museum Impact and Performance: Theory and Practice provides museum professionals internationally with a clear, very open process that will improve their museum's value and performance by selecting indicators that monitor whether they are realizing their desired public, private, personal and institutional values. The book is not prescriptive, but liberating, as the framework recognizes that each museum needs to decide on its own purposes and priorities. The book is organized in two parts: "Part 1: Theory" is scholarly and builds on the museum field’s rich literature; and "Part 2: Practice" provides step-by-step methods for any museum to set up its own dashboard of prioritized impact and performance indicators. Substantive attachments include: the list of the 51 source documents for the MIIP indicators; definitions of terms and data fields; a long list of precedented museum impacts; measurement formulas and worksheet templates, filled in for a sample museum; and the MIIP 1.0 database available online. Readers will get the following benefits: A literature review of prior work on measuring museum value An analysis of eleven well-established evaluation frameworks that synthesize into a revolutionary, yet practical, Museum Theory of Action A robust and searchable menu of 1,025 existing and aspirational indicators (the MIIP 1.0 database) that you can use to start your own selection An analysis of the MIIP database using the Theory of Action that reveals 14 areas of potential museum impacts and benefits A process to select and prioritize your museum’s intentional purposes and desired impacts A process to determine, measure and compare your museum’s key performance indicators (KPIs) A process to set-up and conduct peer museum comparisons Procedures and examples of how to capture and report data used in your selected indicators Principles for using indicator data to inform museum management decisions