The "You Are Here" digital drawing interactive is one of the most successful interpretive elements in the renovated Oakland Museum of California Gallery of California Art. This interactive grew from considering how visitors could see themselves in the gallery and how visitor awareness of the creative process could be increased. The renovation…

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…

The pages of this journal issue offer many inspiring technology projects and insights that support the everyday work of educators. But there remains the challenge of managing that work with tools that are ever changing and plentiful. Over the years of working with technology of all types, the author has adopted a specific stance toward technology…

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…

This article, which focuses on a 1913 Model T touring car in the permanent collection of the Staten Island Historical Society, looks at the challenges faced by historic sites in attempting to care for and preserve their artifact collections while still making them accessible to the public. It documents the step-by-step process undertaken by the…

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…

As Howard Gardner persuasively argued, movement, or kinesthetics, can be a powerful educational tool and one to which some learners are particularly attuned. Museums, however, are typically places that discourage movement (don't run, don't jump, watch out for the artifacts). This makes incorporating kinesthetic learning challenging. This article…

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…

Many new teacher professional development programs in museums are begun with external funding from government or private foundations. At some point the museum must develop a plan for sustainability when the original grant support is no longer available. Some programs are able to find long term support but many end due to lack of funding,…

In the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11th, 2001, Arab and Muslim Americans, already suffering from negative stereotyping, find themselves subject to greater hostility. The Arab American National Museum (AANM) has discovered that professional development and cultural competency training opportunities for law enforcement personnel,…