Museum Studies Capstone Project  

In this broadly conceived study Steven Conn examines the development of American museums across the twentieth century with a historian's attention and a critic's eye. He focuses on an array of museum types and asks illuminating questions about the relationship between museums and American cultural life.

What kinds of jobs are available in museums? How do museums work? What opportunities are there in museum research and collection, preserving and cataloging, exhibiting and interpreting, publicity, administration, event planning, catering, support? Creative Careers in Museums answers all these questions and many more, with full information on how everyone can pinpoint and showcase their existing skills--then turn those skills into a dream job at a museum or other cultural institution. Interviews with people who have made career transitions into the field are packed with practical and inspiring ideas, and there’s even information on starting new museums. Advice on targeting potential employers, putting together a resume, interviewing, and landing the job, plus an extensive resource list, make this the perfect starting point for anyone who wants to work in a museum.

Museums today are more than familiar cultural institutions and showplaces of accumulated objects; they are the sites of interaction between personal and collective identities, between memory and history. The essays in this volume consider museums from personal experience and historical study, and from the memories of museum visitors, curators, and scholars. Representing a variety of fields history, anthropology, art history, and museum scholarship the contributors discuss museums across disciplinary boundaries that have separated art museums from natural history museums or local history museums from national galleries.

This richly illustrated, oversize (9x11.5") volume presents a lively history of the museum in America, with special attention given to natural history and other educational museums such as the Smithsonian. Chapters are included on museum architecture, the history of collecting, sources of funding, and audience.

Fully updated and extended to include the many changes that have occurred in the last decade, this second edition of world-renowned text Museum Basics provides a basic guide to all aspects of museum work and staff experience from museum organization, through collections management and conservation, to audience development and education.

Drawing on a wide range of practical experience, the authors have provided an excellent tool that enable museums throughout the world to conquer a common challenge; to keep up-to-date with new ideas and changing practices.

Stephen E. Weil has long been considered one of the museum community's most insightful (and frequently wittiest) commentators. In this volume of twenty-nine recent essays, his overarching concern is that museums be able to "earn their keep"-that they make themselves matter-in an environment of pontentially shrinking resources.