Relevance is the word, and other highlights from "Generation M"

"Your challenge is to make me
relevant to Generation M"

Earlier this week I attended the Ohio Museums Association's annual conference, presenting a session with two of my former students, and serving once again as an officer on OMA's board. This year's theme, "Generation M: Museums and Millennials" perfectly complemented the venue, as OMA was hosted by the Museums Studies Program at Walsh University, in North Canton, Ohio. While I admit to a certain amount of bias, I believe that from the special track of sessions developed specifically for faculty and students in Museum Studies, to the thought-provoking keynote address and follow-up break out session given by Beverly Sheppard, OMA met its goal of providing timely and practical professional development for its members and constituents.  For those of you who were unable to join us Sunday and Monday, here are a few of the take-away messages I noted from the sessions and discussions in which I took part.

1. Relevance is really starting to matter to museums.  To many of you being relevant may seem like an obvious notion and therefore a "duh" comment, but for a lot of museums, especially those in the small to medium sized categories, this has not always been the case. For much of their existence smaller museums have had a dedicated following of patrons and volunteers who made sure that the museum kept its doors open, even if no one else was coming through those doors. However, this week I heard rumblings from staunch members of the esoteric museum community, who usually profess not to care about people who aren't interested in... (insert narrow subject area here). Instead of curmudgeonly curses, I heard ideas about how they could relate to their communities and where they might find new partners. These conversations offer hope that relevance is finally becoming relevant to all museums.
2. Young professionals coming out of museum studies programs are smart, savvy, prepared, and driven. Hire them! It is certainly true that work experience matters. However, these recent museum studies grads will inject a dose of well-informed creativity, objectivity, and enthusiasm into your organization without costing you the 4 to 6 month learning curve typical of those unfamiliar with museum organizations.
3. Networking is still as important as ever. While social media has become an important link for sharing information between individuals and institutions, it has not yet usurped the lunch table as a forum for the face to face exchange of ideas, business cards, and calendar openings that leads to potential partnerships and expanded collaborations. I watched several budding partnerships grow over soup and sandwiches at lunch on Monday.
4. Conferences do have value, if we plan them with today's professionals in mind. Last year, as OMA conference attendance waned for a second year in a row, and the economy doggedly refused to release its grip on museum budgets across the state, I had a conversation with several of my colleagues on the organization's board about whether it was still important to hold an annual conference. A year later, the economy has begun to turn around, conference registrations were up, and the slate of sessions and programs selected to resonate with museums in the digital age inspired lively debate, hopefully sowing the seeds of purposeful change among attending museums. This conference was shorter, narrower in focus, and lighter on bells and whistles than those meetings of 5 to 10 years ago. However, as OMA has sought to change the conference format to reflect the needs of our membership, the high quality programming has remained. Content was top-notch, and participants were dynamic.
5. Change is inevitable, so make it happen. This was the take-away message of my session. Rather than rehashing all of it here in paragraph form, here are the slides. If you are interested in learning more about any of the concepts and ideas presented, please feel free to post a comment, drop me an email, or reach out to other the panelists via their email addresses listed on the final slide.

Embracing Change Presentation

View more presentations from jsouerschevraux

If you missed the conference this year, OMA's 2012 conference will be in Toledo next April, and of course we would love to have you join us. In the meantime, the Association of Indiana Museums is meeting in Richmond, Indiana this September and OMA members receive a discount when registering. OMA is a sponsor of this year's AIM conference and is encouraging its members to attend.

Program set for 2011 Ohio Museums Association Conference at Walsh University

The Ohio Museums Association has posted the program for this year's annual conference taking place April 10-11 on the campus of Walsh University in North Canton. Highlights include a special academic track for museum studies faculty and students, a series of sessions presented by the Ohio State University Extension on critical issues facing museums today, and the conference keynote address by Beverly Sheppard, President and CEO of the Institute for Learning Innovation and former director of IMLS. As an added bonus, Ms. Sheppard is providing a smaller break-out session, where participants will have the opportunity to ask her questions about programs, initiatives, and challenges at their own museums. Reading through the brochure I found lots of new content this year centered around the theme of keeping museums vital to Generation M: The Millennials, a challenge faced by all of our museums. Listening to visitors, responding to economic trends, taking a hard look at collection issues, and focusing on the role of our museums in the future are all issues tackled by one or more of the sessions.

Kicking off the conference on Sunday, April 10, Walsh University's Museum Studies Program is hosting an opening night reception at the Hoover Historical Center, while Monday's conference activities will take place across campus in the Barrette Center. Walsh's Museum Studies faculty and students are involved in planning and hosting the event.

With sessions focused on timely topics ranging from the practical to the visionary, and information museum staff can apply the next day at their own museums, this year's program is positioned to be one of the best. Please consider joining me and the rest of the board of the Ohio Museums Association in North Canton for this worthwhile professional development opportunity.

For registration information and links to the conference hotel click here.

The rise of Museum Studies: Are the rest of us esoteric dinosaurs?

I spent the past several days putting together an academic track of plenary sessions, roundtable discussions, receptions, and student programs for the Ohio Museums Association's annual conference being held this year at Walsh University. In my free time, I have been cranking out recommendation letters for a multitude of Museum Studies graduate programs to which my last semester's students are applying. Add to that, this week Walsh posted a brand new position, Director of the Museum Studies Program. All of this museum studies activity started me thinking about my own education, career path, and professional position as a "museum specialist." I don't personally have a degree in Museum Studies. Am I still the specialist I think I am, or fast becoming a museum dinosaur?

Teaching in the Museum Studies program at Walsh, I am convinced that my students today are better prepared for the special challenges presented by museum work than I ever was at their age. Still, I cannot help but wonder where all of the wonderful, esoteric majors have gone? As an undergraduate student I took courses in anthropology, art history, history, classic civilization, geology, and more.  Let's face it, I never met a humanities class I didn't like, and typically these classes were not electives, but required coursework in one of the two majors I assumed would prepare me well for a career in museums. During the fall semester of my junior year, I was interning at the Art Museum, volunteering at the Museum of Archaeology, and taking classes in the Natural History Museum. I graduated a year and a half later, and within a week began my first job on staff at a museum. Granted, it was a traveling art museum on a train, and I was serving as something resembling an art history carnie, but still I managed to ply my diverse liberal arts education and brief museum experience into a real career, stunning both of my parents along the way.

After a couple of months touring on the Artrain, I decided I needed to head to grad school, so I might eventually get a stationary museum job somewhere. I looked at two museum studies programs, there were not many to choose from back then, but decided upon an advanced degree program in anthropology. Believe it or not, I considered anthropology a more practical choice than museum studies, which seemed too narrow and confining for broader professional applications. I was not interested in a PhD in anthropology, which would lead to a career in academia and research. I wanted a masters degree as a doorway to a role in museum leadership. Anthropology seemed a sensible and interesting choice with wide-ranging applications, and in my case, it was.

How times have changed! Today, there are programs in museum studies at both my undergraduate and graduate schools. Neither existed when I attended in the nineties. In my own course in museum studies, I now teach skills and concepts to undergrads that took me years of on-the-job training to acquire. Knowing they will also need advanced degrees to land a decent museum job, these same students are going on to graduate programs in museum studies, and will soon have more textbook knowledge of museology than I.

The museum world seems to be brimming with these new specialists in museum studies, not to mention nonprofit management and arts administration. So, where does that leave the rest of us? What becomes of the anthropology, history, and classic civ majors, who landed museum jobs ten to fifteen years ago, before the new wave? Certainly, there is a wisdom that only experience can bring, but for those of us grandfathered under the pre-museum studies era exemption, can we expect to be outpaced by our younger museum colleagues in the know? Are we the new dinosaurs in our own museums?

These are all questions we hope to dig into at the upcoming OMA conference, and I invite you to attend and weigh in on the role that academic programs in museum studies may play in changing the face of museum administration. In the meantime, please share your thoughts about how you think museum scholarship and the education of museum specialists is, or isn't, changing our profession. I look forward to reading your comments.

Green up! museum workshop at OMA Conference 2010

Since today is Earth Day 2010, it seemed somehow appropriate to shamelessly plug the "Green Up!" museum workshop I will present next Monday, April 26th at the Ohio Museums Association conference.

Robert Stockham, LEED AP and Principal at the Great Lakes Design Collaborative, Sarah Stilgenbauer, Foundations and Government Relations Manager at Opera Cleveland, and I are planning an informative, but fun workshop full of first-hand examples and practical ideas for organizations dealing with the realities of going green. Workshop highlights will include an introduction to designing and implementing a green plan, a case study in going green--Opera Cleveland's Lucia di Lammermoor, and some practical first steps for museums ready to increase efforts toward reducing their environmental footprint.

Please join us at the OMA conference, or check MuseoBlogger again next week for a link to the powerpoint slides online.

In the meantime, check out Opera Cleveland's YouTube video explaining the how and why behind their decision to green up next month's production of Lucia.

Last call for 2010 OMA Conference registrations

There is still a very limited amount of time to register for the 2010 OMA Conference this weekend at Cherry Valley Lodge in Newark, Ohio.

Don't miss this opportunity to take advantage of great professional development programs, networking with colleagues, and planning for your museum's survival in the current economic climate and the realities of the "new normal."

Click here to download a registration form, and I'll look forward to seeing you there.

Another year, another OMA conference in the books.

Well, here it is another snowy spring night in Northeast Ohio and once again I find myself looking back fondly upon this year's Ohio Museums Conference. It was a great time, from the Sunday afternoon board meeting, where instead of being ushered out the door upon completing my 6-year term I agreed to stay on for two more (as Treasurer no less), to the end of the day yesterday when I presented a "Museum Career Toolkit for Emerging Professionals" with my friend Sarah Stilgenbauer from Opera Cleveland. Thanks again to Terri and Johnna, the OMA staff members who work so tirelessly to make it an annual success. Despite the rampant economic downturn, we still had around 100 participants and everyone I talked to seemed pleased at the chance to get in some quality professional development for just a few bucks.

I also want to thank all of you who participated in the online survey about museum careers. The data we collected via SurveyMonkey was a great framework for informing and encouraging young people who hope to enter our field. Along with the data, Sarah and I shared some information about places where students and other museum job-seekers might find employment opportunities. Besides a bevy of job posting websites, which I'll list later, we mentioned a job fair taking place in Cleveland tomorrow. Idealist.org is hosting a non-profit job fair on CWRU's campus at the Thwing Center from 11:00-3:00. You are supposed to pre-register, however the event is free and I am fairly certain that most who show up will be welcome. So, if you find yourself looking for a new position in the nonprofit field, click here to check out the entire list of over 40 organizations represented at the Cleveland job fair tomorrow.

As promised, here are the museum job sites we shared with the students in our session yesterday:

• AAM
• AASLH
• Smithsonian Museum Studies Program
• OMA Job Board
• MuseumProfessionals.org
• Museum Pods
• MuseumJobs.com
• MuseumMarket
• Idealist.org

Unfortunately, I know that too many of my colleagues are suddenly finding it necessary to look for new positions. Hopefully, this short list of job posting sites will be a starting place for any of you who need somewhere else to go to find additional vacancies. My best wishes to you all.

As a somewhat sad aside, I am currently researching an upcoming article on how the current economic climate is affecting museums in our region. If any of you have specific, or even general information you would be willing to share with me on this subject as it relates to your situation, your museum, or that of someone you know, please let me know. I would like to get a clearer idea of just how pervasive the recent spate of staff and budget cuts has actually been. Thanks for your interest and assistance.

Inspire. Empower. Connect. OMA Conference 2009

There is still time to register for this year's Ohio Museums Association Annual Conference April 5th and 6th at the Sheraton in Cuyahoga Falls. The conference is a great time to sharpen your skills, expand your horizons, and network with other professionals in our field. Plus, at only $155 for full registration (OMA member rate), the cost is a recession-proof bargain. Click here to register online to join me and the rest of the OMA in Cuyahoga Falls. See you there!