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

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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.

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.

Is online fundraising truly the wave of the future? Cogapp's Alex Morrison thinks so.

While conducting a search for information on museums using online fundraising to complement more traditional development approaches, I found this interesting SlideShare presentation by Alex Morrison Managing Director of Cogapp. From what I read on their website, Cogapp is a digital media consulting firm with offices in London and New York City. Based on their impressive client list, including The British Museum, The National Portrait Gallery in London, the National Archives in D.C., and one of my favorites The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the variety of projects described in their case studies, it appears Cogapp does have a wide ranging knowledge of digital media applications relating to museums.

In "Online Fundraising for Museums," Mr. Morrison includes some compelling statistics in support of his argument for elevating the presence and profile of online fundraising opportunities on your museum's website. At the end of his presentation, the SlideShare site suggests additional presentations on this topic available for immediate viewing.

Check out this presentation, and maybe one or two of the others and let me know what you think. Is this truly the future of fund raising, or just the proverbial flash in the pan?

Museums online fundraising

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