Museums And Public Value

Public Value speaks to our time - to the role that museums can play in creating civil societies, to the challenges involved in using limited assets strategically, to the demand for results that make a difference and to the imperative that we build the kind of engagement that sustains our futures. This book assists museum leaders to implement a Public Value approach in their management, planning, programming and relationship building. The benefits are long term public engagement and support, which can be used to demonstrate that valuable returns result from public investment in museums. A range of authors from around the world unpack the concept of Public Value and examine its implications for museums. They situate Public Value within current management theory and practice, offer tools for implementation, highlight examples of successful practice and examine the evidence of Public Value that governments seek to inform policy and funding decisions. The book will be required reading for senior professionals in museums, as well as museum and heritage studies students.

The Value of Museums makes the case that the niche museums has always been public well-being. This guide shows museums how to assess and communicate that essential public value.

Over the last 10 years, the concept of value has emerged in both business and public life as part of an important process of measuring, benchmarking, and assuring the resources we invest and the outcomes we generate from our activities. In the context of public life, value is an important measure on the contribution to business and social good of activities for which strict financial measures are either inappropriate or fundamentally unsound. A systematic, interdisciplinary examination of public value is necessary to establish an essential definition and up-to-date picture of the field. In reflecting on the ‘public value project’, this book points to how the field has broadened well beyond its original focus on public sector management; has deepened in terms of the development of the analytical concepts and frameworks that linked the concepts together; and has been applied increasingly in concrete circumstances by academics, consultants, and practitioners. This book covers three main topics; deepening and enriching the theory of creating public value, broadening the theory and practice of creating public value to voluntary and commercial organisations and collaborative networks, and the challenge and opportunity that the concept of public value poses to social science and universities. Collectively, it offers new ways of looking at public and social assets against a backdrop of increasing financial pressure; new insights into changing social attitudes and perceptions of value; and new models for increasingly complicated collaborative forms of service delivery, involving public, private, and not-for-profit players.

This volume aims to shed light on how public service value is identified, managed, measured and reported. The chapters cover a range of topics, including theoretical reflections, practical case studies and empirical observations aimed at understanding the concept of public value.

"A focus on the museum as a model institution of the liberal nation state can reveal much about the ethics of where, why, and how, the public sector meets private interest. In a non-profit institution, the category of "the public" plays a role in establishing the symbolic value of art, yet this is what sustains its markets and its monetary value; the public is therefore a necessary component in art's profit potential, especially since art began yielding super-profits in the late 20th century. A shift in the structure and operation of non-profit institutions, following the economic crash of 2008, has accelerated the growth of the art market and the museum boom, affecting the economy and meaning of contemporary art in the 21st century. Shaked lays out and critiques the set of unprecedented historical conditions that have been converging since the 1970s, while reverting to models of criteria and judgment that existed in the 16th century, to demonstrate the exacerbated ethical problems we now face in the funding and operations of nonprofit museums. Through a Historical Materialism critique, observing the art object as both an historical object and as one produced in contemporary conditions, this book describes the collection, the market, and the institution as a set of social relations to get a total picture of the meaning of art within this oscillating constellation of social and monetary relations. Art moves from the level of individual or small-scale making, through the circulation systems of market and media, to the museum-the institution that confers the possibility of value in the name of the public. To understand this dynamic, Shaked traces the path of the art object, viewing it not as an individual object, part of an artist's oeuvre, or representative of a school, but in the context of the "public collection" as a category. Comparing different definitions and theories of value allows this book to connect historical, political, aesthetic, theoretical, and economic paradigms of inquiry."--

Preserving What Is Valued explores the concept of preserving heritage. It presents the conservation profession's code of ethics and discusses four significant contexts embedded in museum conservation practice: science, professionalization, museum practice, and the relationship between museums and First Nations peoples. Museum practice regarding handling and preservation of objects has been largely taken as a given, and it can be difficult to see how these activities are politicized. Clavir argues that museum practices are historically grounded and represent values that are not necessarily held by the originators of the objects. She first focuses on conservation and explains the principles and methods conservators practise. She then discusses First Nations people's perspectives on preservation, quoting extensively from interviews done throughout British Columbia, and comparing the British Columbia situation with that in New Zealand. In the face of cultural repatriation issues, museums are attempting to become more culturally sensitive to the original owners of objects, forming new understandings of the "right ways" of storage and handling of materials. Miriam Clavir's work is important for museum professionals, conservators, those working with First Nations collections in auction houses and galleries, as well as students of sociology and anthropology.

There are about 300 archaeological open-air museums in Europe, which do more than simply present (re)constructed outdoor sceneries based on archaeology. They have an important role as education facilities and many showcase archaeology in a variety of ways. This research assesses the value of archaeological open-air museums, their management and their visitors, and is the first to do so in such breadth and detail. After a literature study and general data collection among 199 of such museums in Europe, eight archaeological open-air museums from different countries were selected as case studies. Management and visitors have different perspectives leading to different priorities and appreciation levels. The studies conclude with recommendations, ideas and strategies which are applicable not just to the eight archaeological open-air museums under study, but to any such museum in general. The recommendations are divided into the six categories of management, staff, collections, marketing, interpretation and the visitors.

This two-volume set LNCS 13971 + 13972 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity, held in March 2023. The 36 full papers and the 46 short papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 197 submissions. They cover topics such as: Archives and Records, Behavioral Research, Information Governance and Ethics, AI and Machine Learning, Data Science, Information and Digital literacy, Cultural Perspectives, Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital, Social Media and Digital Networks, Libraries, Human-Computer Interaction and Technology, Information Retrieval, Community Informatics, and Digital Information Infrastructure.