A Life In Museums

Download or read book A Life in Museums written by Greg Stevens and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012-04-20 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether you're an experienced leader, a mid-career professional hoping for a promotion, or a recent grad applying for your first internship, A Life in Museums: Managing Your Museum Career is the guide you need—full of sound advice, practical tips, and illuminating personal stories that span the array of museum disciplines. Topics range from personal branding and resume writing to managing from the middle and leadership at all levels; from professional writing to keeping a career journal; from navigating within your institution to knowing when it's time to move on. This is a book you are sure to reference—and share—for years to come.

Download or read book Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 written by Steven Conn and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conn's study includes familiar places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Academy of Natural Sciences, but he also draws attention to forgotten ones, like the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, once the repository for objects from many turn-of-the-century world's fairs. What emerges from Conn's analysis is that museums of all kinds shared a belief that knowledge resided in the objects themselves. Using what Conn has termed "object-based epistemology," museums of the late nineteenth century were on the cutting edge of American intellectual life. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, however, museums had largely been replaced by research-oriented universities as places where new knowledge was produced. According to Conn, not only did this mean a change in the way knowledge was conceived, but also, and perhaps more importantly, who would have access to it.

Download or read book Life on Display written by Karen A. Rader and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rich with archival detail and compelling characters, Life on Display uses the history of biological exhibitions to analyze museums’ shifting roles in twentieth-century American science and society. Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain chronicle profound changes in these exhibitions—and the institutions that housed them—between 1910 and 1990, ultimately offering new perspectives on the history of museums, science, and science education. Rader and Cain explain why science and natural history museums began to welcome new audiences between the 1900s and the 1920s and chronicle the turmoil that resulted from the introduction of new kinds of biological displays. They describe how these displays of life changed dramatically once again in the 1930s and 1940s, as museums negotiated changing, often conflicting interests of scientists, educators, and visitors. The authors then reveal how museum staffs, facing intense public and scientific scrutiny, experimented with wildly different definitions of life science and life science education from the 1950s through the 1980s. The book concludes with a discussion of the influence that corporate sponsorship and blockbuster economics wielded over science and natural history museums in the century’s last decades. A vivid, entertaining study of the ways science and natural history museums shaped and were shaped by understandings of science and public education in the twentieth-century United States, Life on Display will appeal to historians, sociologists, and ethnographers of American science and culture, as well as museum practitioners and general readers.

Download or read book Mastering Civic Engagement written by and published by American Alliance of Museums Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This call to action from AAM's Museums and Community Initiative challenges museums to pursue their potential as active, visible players in community life. Essays and reflections offer food for thought on the complex process of changing the terms of engagement between communities and museums.

Download or read book Do Museums Still Need Objects? written by Steven Conn and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this broadly conceived study Steven Conn examines the development of American museums across the twentieth century with a historian's attention and a critic's eye. He focuses on an array of museum types and asks illuminating questions about the relationship between museums and American cultural life.

Download or read book Imaginary Museums written by Nicolette Polek and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A collection of flash fiction that feels seemingly arbitrary with an ache of human longing for connection peppered in. . . . These bizarre but beautiful stories transport you elsewhere with no intention of bringing you back." —Ashleah Gonzales, W magazine In this collection of compact fictions, Nicolette Polek transports us to a gently unsettling realm inhabited by disheveled landlords, a fugitive bride, a seamstress who forgets what people look like, and two rival falconers from neighboring towns. They find themselves in bathhouses, sports bars, grocery stores, and forests in search of exits, pink tennis balls, licorice, and independence. Yet all of her beautifully strange characters are possessed by a familiar and human longing for connection: to their homes, families, God, and themselves.

Download or read book So You Want to Work in a Museum? written by Tara Young and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A One-Stop Guide to Museum Careers People who love art, are fascinated by archaeology, or are history buffs may have considered the idea of working in a museum. But experience as a museum visitor reveals only the public-facing side of the museum, and not its complex, dynamic internal structure. So You Want to Work in A Museum? helps to demystify museums as institutions and to prepare prospective museum staff to explore the field further. After reading this book, readers will be able to: Understand how non-profit museums are governed, funded, and staffed, and how they define and meet their missions. Explore museum divisions and departments and specific roles within them—not just prominent roles like directors and curators, but also less visible ones like registrars, preparators, development officers, conservators, and more. Consider the contemporary function of museums, and how yesterday’s cabinets of curiosity have evolved into today’s community catalysts. Examine how the contemporary function of museums has affected the types of positions available and the work museum staff do on a daily basis. Look at the skills required for different types of positions, and how readers aspiring to work in those positions can best prepare themselves to land their dream jobs and be successful in them. Understand the benefits and potential challenges of working in a museum, and Access a wealth of resources that will inspire further study of the field, and outline next steps to pursue a museum career.