Museums should serve a social purpose as they are products of the society that support them.

Robert R. Janes and Gerald T. Conaty used this premise to create Looking Reality in the Eye, a collection of case studies that explores how museums can move beyond education and entertainment to embrace new socially relevant missions.

The idea for this book emerged from a panel presentation on museums and social responsibility at the annual meeting of the Canadian Museums Association in 2002.  The text presents nine diverse case studies of successful civic engagement projects across a wide discipline of museums.

The authors of the individual case studies offer a diverse range of experiences and advice on connecting with a museum's community.  Contributions range from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in NYC to the Calgary Police Interpretive Center.  Some of the studies are more "academic" than others.

The variety of examples provided all describe thoughtful experiments at redefining what museums can be.

Perhaps most relevant to museums in Connecticut is the chapter by Ruth J. Abram about the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.  Abram highlights the museum's various efforts to be a proactive community member.  She talks about the successes (multi-lingual tours; offering community needs such as English classes that tie into the museum's mission) and inititatives that were more slow to take hold (Urban Museum Studies Program; low audience numbers for the Spanish language tour).

One great idea is that at the Tenement Museum, every staff member, regardless of job function, gives tours at the museum each week.  This reinforces why each person works there--to serve the public.

At a time when many museums worldwide are struggling to maintain their stability in the face of the complex challenges of today's economy, the editors stress the need to remember the important words that John Cotton Dana said more than ninety years ago: "learn what aid the community needs, and fit the museum to those needs."  As social institutions, museums need to heed Dana's message and take steps to become integral to their communities--or risk becoming irrelevant.