The Effective Museum: Rethinking Museum Practices to Increase Impact features practical suggestions for how to be more successful at achieving a museum’s intentional purposes. These practical suggestions can help you: revise your museum’s conceptual framework revitalize your audiences and supporters reorganize your museum reinvest in your resources (staff, collections, facilities, etc.) reposition your programming and restore management basics. This book seeks to help you rethink these key museum practice through a diversity of suggestions, not a single system. However, the suggestions share definitions and frameworks and a unifying voice and structure. While any museum can adopt whichever suggestions are appropriate, the last chapter helps you explore how the suggestions might be mutually reinforcing. Each chapter includes a) generalized statement of a problem and the need for new ideas; b) new suggestions implementable in many museums; c) the likely resistance; e) a summation of the idea’s potential impacts and benefits, and e) the start of an implementation process. The suggestions vary in form—some are suggested strategies, others lists of options or research questions or implementation steps. In attitude, The Effective Museum is not thou shall, but much more think about trying this suggestion Underlying all suggestions is a new way of thinking about museum practices as a basis for readers to build their own learning and legacy.

Visitor participation is a hot topic in the contemporary world of museums, art galleries, science centers, libraries and cultural organizations. How can your institution do it and do it well? The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to working with community members and visitors to make cultural institutions more dynamic, relevant, essential places. Museum consultant and exhibit designer Nina Simon weaves together innovative design techniques and case studies to make a powerful case for participatory practice. "Nina Simon's new book is essential for museum directors interested in experimenting with audience participation on the one hand and cautious about upending the tradition museum model on the other. In concentrating on the practical, this book makes implementation possible in most museums. More importantly, in describing the philosophy and rationale behind participatory activity, it makes clear that action does not always require new technology or machinery. Museums need to change, are changing, and will change further in the future. This book is a helpful and thoughtful road map for speeding such transformation." -Elaine Heumann Gurian, international museum consultant and author of Civilizing the Museum "This book is an extraordinary resource. Nina has assembled the collective wisdom of the field, and has given it her own brilliant spin. She shows us all how to walk the talk. Her book will make you want to go right out and start experimenting with participatory projects." -Kathleen McLean, participatory museum designer and author of Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions "I predict that in the future this book will be a classic work of museology." --Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums

Great exhibits are never an accident. Planning effective exhibits is a demanding process that requires the designer to consider many different aspects and navigate numerous pitfalls while moving a project from concept to reality. In Museum Exhibition Planning and Design, Elizabeth Bogle offers a comprehensive introduction and reference to exhibition planning and design. This book focuses on both the procedural elements of successful planning, like the phases of exhibit design and all associated tasks and issues, and on the design elements that make up the realized exhibit itself, such as color, light, shape, form, space, and building materials. This helpful guide includes: Breakdown of the design and development project phases used by professional planner/designers Principles of good design as they pertain to: color, light, shape, form, space, line, balance, accent, rhythm, proportion, and scale Criteria to evaluate an exhibit and measure its success Discussion of construction contracts and procedures Discussion of building materials and their advantages and disadvantages Glossary of museum and design terms for easy reference Bogle has translated her years of experience as an exhibition planner into a guide for practitioners of all sizes and levels of experience. For the solo practitioner, perhaps working with limited or no staff in a small institution, Bogle walks through every task that will be faced as the project develops. For the staff member of a larger institution or firm, this book serves as a checklist, reinforcing the instruction that comes from peers and previous experience. Museum Exhibition Planning and Design is a useful tool for anyone interested in or involved in bringing their exhibits to life.

This book centers on museum management with particular focus on risk management. It sees the museum as a modern institution that, in addition to its classical heritage function (collections management), also provides an educational function and implements this education through experience (the experiential function of the museum). It represents a combination of academic excellence and experience from real managers from museums and other public institutions. Additional topics such as strategic and operational museum management and museum research management are discussed and case studies from daily management practice are included.

Marketing the Museum is the ideal guide to the ways in which museums can overcome the numerous hurdles on the route to truly achieving a marketing orientation. The history of the museum is one of shifting purposes and changing ideals and this volume asks if it is possible to define the 'product' which the modern museum can offer. This book explores the crucial question: Are the theories of marketing developed for manufactured goods in any way relevant to the experience of visiting a museum? In covering one of the most highly disputed issues in the field, this book is essential reading for museum professionals, students and anyone who has dealing in the many branches of the heritage industry around the world.

Drawing together a selection of high quality, intellectually robust and stimulating articles on both theoretical and practice-based developments in the field, this Reader investigates the closely linked areas of management and marketing in the museum. The articles, from established and world-renowned contributors, practitioners and writers at the leading edge of their fields, deal with the museum context of management and how marketing and management practices must take account of the specifics of the museum and the not-for-profit ethos. Key writings from broader literature are included, and the collection of key writings on the investigation and study of management and marketing in the museum are of great benefit not only to those studying the subject, but also to professionals working and developing within the field.

The purpose of this study is to examine the many aspects of museums with a view to how each could contribute to changing the roles of museums from mere depositories of antiquities with historical relevance to effective educational institutions of history.