Museum Definition
In Prague, on 24 August 2022, the Extraordinary General Assembly of ICOM has approved the proposal for the new museum definition with 92,41% (For: 487, Against: 23, Abstention: 17). Following the adoption, the new ICOM museum definition is: “A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.”
Time Banking: A Community Path to Addressing Social Exclusion
The time banking movement is growing and evolving rapidly. Adaptable to the needs of different kinds of communities, time banking is breathing new energy into families’ lives, supporting respite care providers, and increasing trust and a sense of belonging in neighborhoods. … Local community agencies and community-based organizations are deploying time banking as a new way to get more people involved.
What Happens When American Children Learn About Racism?
Americans have spent over 150 years arguing about what kind of history we should teach to our children. In “Schoolbook Nation,” a book that examines the history of conflicts over American curricula, historian Joseph Moreau noted that a variety of Americans have worried about the sky falling if the “wrong” versions of history were taught in our schools. Americans, as Moreau documented, were concerned about this in the 1870s, again in the 1920s and, as we’ve seen recently, they are still concerned today.
Which Social Media Channel Is Most Important for Cultural Organizations?
There are a lot of social media platforms out there and cultural organizations aim to be as efficient and effective as possible – so which platform leads to the most engagement and conversions among the most likely guests?
In Praise of Mission Creep
Looked at from a different perspective, “mission creep” is often a side effect of the mission itself. This happens, for example, when missions create artificially narrow constraints by focusing on the mechanisms of the work (collect, preserve, interpret) rather than on the change an organization wants to make in the world.
Don’t Let Your Calendar Dictate Your DEI Initiatives
A well-meaning manager sees a cultural moment — days, weeks or months throughout the year that have been designated as observances of various historically excluded communities on the calendar — and asks: What should we do for [X holiday]? We need to put something together for employees for [X holiday]. We need a flashy campaign so that we can show up on [X holiday]. Starting from these questions is always a mistake, leading to blunders and gaffes that at best earn eye rolls and at worst, leave employees or customers feeling unseen or misunderstood.
Your Self-care Prescription: News Positivity
While it may be tempting to retreat into a dark closet until the world begins to heal, you can play an important part in the healing process, if you can only maintain your energy and will. Where can you find positive stories that keep you engaged and informed?
Rewriting the Past: The Problem of Historic Language in Museum Collections
When it comes to large projects, it is often not a matter of if a complication will arise, but when. For this project, it was the realization that the photograph catalogs–written almost half a century ago by Marshall Family matriarch, Lorna–which we planned to use to write the titles for display in Collections Online, the Peabody’s online database, employed terms that are no longer in contemporary usage. The rigorously detailed description of the content of each image, as well as the identification of most individuals, is remarkable for an historical collection of this size; but we had to modify many of these due to the use of terms for and about Indigenous people that are racially coded, dated, and now considered derogatory.
Black Historians Know There’s No Such Thing as Objective History
Recent critiques of “presentism” fail to see that we can’t divorce the past from the present—and that supposedly objective scholarship has long promoted racist narratives and suppressed Black history.