This article describes and analyzes a cross-border, "simultaneous exhibition" collaborative project in six post-conflict western Balkan countries. Through a process of collaboration, active learning, and audience development, professional and personal trust developed among eleven museums. Previously identified barriers were overcome and…

The story of the Center for Digital Art in Holon is a story of innovation in the face of adversity. At key points of escalation in the Middle East conflict, this small-scale arts center managed to rise above and beyond the larger and more traditional museums in Israel to create new models for arts engagement. This article will present the critical…

Welcome to Port Discovery's "Tiny's Diner" where children can be seen doing the chicken dance or putting pickles on their heads. What do these activities have to do with promoting nutrition through early literacy activities? Educators know that young children learn through play, which can include using drama, games, movement, imagination, and…

Research demonstrates that children have vast potential to expand their knowledge base with simple supports from adults and older children. Children's museums have a heightened awareness of the value in and the need to reach out to support adults accompanying children, thus bringing about an emphasis on family learning. Iterative exhibition…

As museum professionals conceptualize community building, they must now consider the virtual realm. Websites in and of themselves will not generate a community, as it takes sustained communication and interaction by staff to encourage growth. Online communities are complex forces that bring about systematic dualities that in turn stimulate…

Created at the dawn of the social networking era, the International Museum of Women (IMOW) is an online museum that has consistently harnessed online technology in the service of its mission. Recognizing that online technology is evolving and ever changing, the museum must be flexible, adapting delivery of its content to the tools available at…

People attend museums to see artifacts and learn from them! Ideally, they want to see them, touch them, and learn the story about them. Artifacts have an uncanny ability to mute the passage of time, and unite young and old on common ground. During its sixty-plus-years in existence, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History has displayed…

Museums have an important role to both educate the public and also to preserve museum objects for the future. These two responsibilities often conflict with one another. Museums continuously struggle in deciding what objects in their collection must be placed in permanent storage as opposed to being on display and being used to educate the public.…

The goal of this paper is to express the views from the "outside," from laypeople who want to go to museums, but perhaps find themselves not going very often. Adult visitors to history museums are often treated as either toddlers or sticks-in-the-mud, where they are assumed to break anything they touch, or enjoy didactic lectures. As a result,…

Three years after the Detroit Institute of Arts opened with all new, "visitor-centered" galleries, the museum's executive director of learning and interpretation shares the processes, successes, and lessons learned at an institution that embraced an array of hands-on learning models. The models are discussed as components of a comprehensive…

This essay provides a theoretical framework for thinking about the role of objects in the 21st-century museum. It explores the interrelationship between experience and objects within museums from their 19th-century origins to the present, and looks at the implications of objects as experience generators. Along the way it considers the ways in…

This paper explores the potential of digital media technologies and new storytelling techniques in giving objects an emotional dimension and thus encouraging affective learning. The use of new immersive and participatory techniques is a means of contextualizing real objects, and perhaps a more effective way to reach diverse audiences and create…

Over the past three decades, open storage facilities have been established at four major museums in order to address the long-standing problem of lack of gallery space for putting collections on view. While making tens of thousands of objects available to visitors represents a great leap forward in accessibility, it raises inherent questions about…

In this article Bernstein and Gittleman address the role of risk in creating an exhibition that is of value to the public and is aligned with their cultural institution's core values. Through an examination of the development process, the authors present lessons that can assist others who are interested in undertaking an exhibition with similar…

Cynthia Harnisch shares her unique perspective on the revered place that museums and community arts organizations occupy in the lives of the people they serve. She relates how, as vice president of the Autry National Center in 1994, she came to be introduced to Inner-City Arts and through that introduction discovered a new respect and recognition…