Hi everyone and greetings from the 2009 AASLH Annual Conference in Indianapolis. More info to come from the conference later today, but I wanted to let everyone know that the HRC has taken advantage of the conference sale special--50% off all Altimira publications--and has just added some great new titles to the HRC Library. These books will be available for CT museums to borrow from the HRC on September 1: The Museum Educator's Manual: Educators...
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Creating an engaging, interactive web presence need not require a big budget or extensive technical know-how.The Public Humanities Toolbox shows how to take advantage of low cost (often free) web tools to build audiences and present information and collections online. The Toolbox's strength is its reliance on popular, easy to use applications such as WordPress, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, and Scribd, to provide cultural organizations with ways to interact with their communities and find...
"Historic properties are on the verge of a golden age. Over the next two decades Americans will turn to historic houses and sites as a source of learning, enjoyment, and fulfillment."As someone who visits, thinks about and listens to ideas about museums all the time, I found this article to be both confirming and inspiring. The Durels quickly warn that a golden age will only occur if we abandon the thinking of the 1980's. They...
After hearing a short interview on NPR with author Michael M. Kaiser about his work on saving arts organizations on the brink of disaster, I was intrigued enough to buy his new book The Art of the Turnaround.Although his book was written before our current era of bailouts and mortgage meltdowns, I hoped his work experiences from the mid-1980s to around 2007 might offer some assistance to arts organizations facing the current economic crisis.In a...
Some good from news from The Art Newspaper last week: In the UK and the US, visitor numbers to National Trust properties and artist homes have seen a sharp rise over the past year.For example:At Chesterwood, the home, studio and gardens of sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), which are nestled in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, attendance has risen 50 per cent in May aloneVisitor numbers to the home and studio of artists Jackson Pollock and Lee...
