Posts under ‘Uncategorized’

This long post–so long that you might want to print it out and take it with you–draws on research I undertook a few years back in 2002.  A shorter version of this post is available at the WestMuse blog. For the purposes of the paper I was writing, I interviewed a dozen employees of science [...]

(Cross-posted at BlogHer)
Think back to a time when you took a risk that succeeded. Now reflect on a time when you tried something and it bombed. What did you or others do differently in the first instance and the second? How did you recover from your failure in the second instance, and [...]

(Cross-posted at BlogHer)
Last week the “digilluminati” gathered in Washington, D.C. for an invitation-only gathering of minds dubbed “Smithsonian 2.0.” If you think the word “museum” denotes an institution that concerns itself only with the past, you’re in for a pleasant surprise because many museums the world over have been plunging into the social media [...]

(Cross-posted at BlogHer)
Late last month, formed National Endowment for the Humanities Chair William Ferris opined in the New York Times that the Obama administration needs a cabinet-level position “to provide more cohesive leadership” for several federal cultural institutions and programs, including “the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Library [...]

(Cross-posted at BlogHer)
In museums, who gets to represent whose culture? It’s an old question that in the U.S. tends to play out most publicly when Native American patrimony and culture are displayed in museums. When such cultural controversies become global, often ownership comes into question–who really owns the Elgin Marbles, for example? The [...]

This blog has gone too long without any new posts. It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about museums–far from it. But I have been thinking about museums from outside museums, from affiliated–or potentially affiliated–institutions rather than as a practitioner within the museum field.
In my ideal job, I would muse about museums all [...]