The HRC thanks Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, CEO of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine, for serving as guest author for the following entry. Cinnamon is an AASLH Council member and is program chair for the 2010 AASLH Annual Meeting in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Before joining the staff of the Abbe Museum, as director of the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana, Cinnamon guided the museum to a 2008 IMLS National Medal...




The Museum Forms Book, edited by Kenneth D. Perry, comes under the category of "why re-invent the wheel?" First published in 1980, and now in its 3rd printing, the book is a compendium of all types of forms collected from museums in this country and as far flung as Great Britain and New Zealand. The Museum Forms Book includes sections on collections management, development, education, exhibitions, maintenance and security, and rights and reproductions.In most...
Is your museum ready if disaster strikes? Do you know what to do if your library's books become soaked after a burst pipe? What about if a mold outbreak happens in your collection storage area?dPlan is a FREE online tool that will help you and your institution simplify the process of writing a disaster plan. Enter information about your institution using the comprehensive fill-in-the-blank template and dPlan will guide you through the steps necessary for...
One of my first assignments fresh out of graduate school was to create a student house tour of the Butler-McCook House in Hartford. And the first book I turned to for help was Great Tours!: Thematic Tours and Guide Training for Historic Sites. Great Tours! helps tour writers focus on the material culture and site specific significance of museums--and then turn around and train guide staffs to present the material to the public. The book...
Formative, summative, out-come-based, quantitative, qualitative, post-test, benchmarking ...Is this all jargon, or does it all really do something? Or does everyone do it just to please their funders? As a funder, I can tell you having some sort of measurement strategy in place is an important assessment tool--not just to please the Humanities Council, but for you and your institution as well. Figuring out a way to take a snap shot of your project or...
