The HRC thanks Julia Baldini, museum educator at the Windsor Historical Society and steering committee member for the Connecticut Museum Educator Roundtable, for serving as guest author for the following entry.

With each passing year, more and more museums are evaluating and increasing the roles museum educators and education departments play in the overall mission of the museum. Colleges and universities offer degrees and certificates in museum education and museum educators are expanding their workload beyond school tours to include exhibition planning, online programs and classes, and marketing.

The Museum Educator's Manual by Anna Johnson, Kimberly Huber, Nancy Cutler, Melissa Bingmann and Tim Grove is a great resource for museum directors, educators working in small to mid-size museums, and future museum educators to start thinking or re-thinking the role education plays in today's museums.

The manual is broken down into three parts: Training and Management, Programs and Outreach, and Working with Others. Each part includes chapters written by a team of seasoned museum professionals with first hand knowledge of their subject. In Chapter 9, Education Online, Tim Grove gets readers thinking about their museum's online presence and what technology is right for their institution.

As the inaugural paid educator at my museum, I found this book to be personally invaluable. I've worked for several years in established and successful education departments but creating one from scratch was going to be a challenge.

The first four chapters focus on working with docents and volunteers, a topic that was new to me since I came from two museums with a paid staff in the education department. Pink highlighter marks, penciled babble and sticky notes now cover the pages focusing on helpful hints, like creating a quarterly newsletter to keep your volunteer team informed when their time restrictions make a group meeting impossible.

I also treasure the notes section with suggestions for further reading, a bibliography of "must have" books and articles, sample docent training curriculum and lesson plans, and templates that can be adapted for anyone's museum or cultural site. This helped my "education department from scratch" approach much easier to handle.

The manual is designed to be read cover to cover for museum studies students or so working professionals can grab topics and strategies as they need them. Overall, this all-in-one resource is the perfect way to jump-start education departments.

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