More Good News from WMA!

WMA President Aldona Jonaitis

Dear WMA members-

The WMA Board just met up in Portland for two days of planning sessions at the Doubletree Hotel, site of this fall’s 75th meeting of the Western Museums Association.  The Board Meeting followed the Program Committee meeting that had met the two days before.  The Board Meeting was a truly wonderful meeting, for several reasons.

One, and perhaps of most immediate importance, is that we ended 2009 in the black.  We avoided the significant deficit we feared and thus are stable financially now and for this coming year.  Thanks for your support!

Two, we have been able to run the organization on a purely volunteer basis for several months.  Memberships are coming in, the conference is shaping up brilliantly, and the website is functioning well.  Let me once again thank our dedicated board for their work in keeping WMA going.

Third, we engaged in a good brainstorming session on the future of WMA.  A major result of this process was our decision to reinvigorate our efforts at reaching out to the state associations as well as other museum affiliated groups in order to learn how we can serve them better.  That will be a major goal this coming year.  We will need your help and your feedback.  And I look forward to the involvement of many WMA members in this effort.

Please visit this website frequently over the next months, as we post more information on our conference as well as our service to the museum community.

Warmly,

Aldona Jonaitis

President, WMA Board

Towards a New Mainstream: A Report on a CFM Webcast

by Allyson Lazar

This past Wednesday, the Center for the Future of Museums hosted a lecture/webcast entitled, “Towards a New Mainstream,” sponsored in part by Learning Times and, thanks to an anonymous donor, registration was free to all! For those who have not yet participated in a webcast, here’s how this one worked:

Up in the top left corner of my screen was a box where first CFM director Elizabeth Merritt appeared in a headset and introduced us to the topic and how it was all going to work. Later on that same box would show the number of all of the webcast participants and list them by sign-in name. Later still, this box would show the panelists who spoke via conference call after the initial lecture.

Below the top left corner box was a long narrow box that ran the rest of the length of my screen. This was sidebar chat area where all of the logged in participants could chat–about whatever, or in response to the topic questions that were posed during the lecture.

In the middle of the screen was where the main video of a lecture by Gregory Rodriguez played and James Chung presented his population data slides. Interactive polls were also posted there for participants to respond to. Below the video screen was a closed caption box so that people could read what was being said instead of or in addition to listening.

Along with the lecture and the webcast was a pdf discussion guide (available on the CFM website).

The agenda was as follows:

– Introductory comments by Elizabeth Merritt
– Overview of data by James Chung (Reach Advisors)
– Lecture by Gregory Rodriguez (Executive Director, Zocalo Public Square and LA Times columnist) with simultaneous sidebar chatting and polls
– Panel Discussion (Lisa Lee, Director, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum; Cecilia Garibay, Principal, Garibay Group; Tammie Kahn, Executive Director, Children’s Museum of Houston; Gregory Rodriguez)
– 3 live-chat rooms moderated by Phil Katz, Assistant Director for Research, AAM; Greg Stevens, Assistant Director for Professional Development, AAM; Gregory Rodriguez

Elizabeth invited participants to engage at their own level of comfort–from just watching the video and listening to the remarks of the panelists, to chatting in the sidebar, answering the polls and discussing ideas in the follow-up chatrooms. At the height of the event in the middle of the lecture, I noted that there were 233 participants logged in. That number did drop by the time we reached the follow-up chatrooms to about 153, but that was still enough to have some strong discussions.

Just briefly I will touch upon some of the key ideas that struck me as I participated.

A picture is worth a thousand words and James Chung showed this snapshot of museum visitorship versus the overall US population in terms of demographics.

He went on to “unpack” (a current favorite term) that data to explain that one of the fastest growing populations in the US is the Latino population. But what does that mean? He was quick to point out that there are huge differences both in terms of English fluency and educational attainment just between the 1st and 2nd generations of Latino immigrants. This is an important fact that Gregory Rodriguez later touched upon in his lecture, as he explained that integration is not about offering multi-lingual marketing or labels; integration means second generation immigrants all speak English–Spanish is not overtaking English. In fact, it is a “crutch” and somewhat patronizing to rely on multi-lingual marketing to try to “reach” “diverse” audiences.

So at the heart of the discussion were notions about ethnicity and how we currently understand it and how we can better understand it in order to better serve our communities. Rodriguez explained that past attempts by museums to be “inclusive” were good first steps, but they were just short of tokenism and were designed to keep people in their separate ethnically defined boxes.

But, he explained that ethnicity “means nothing” We are all individuals, and we are Americans and *that* is our frame of reference. He stated that museums were missing the boat by assuming that being Latino only meant being a 1st generation immigrant who didn’t speak English and therefore advertising in Spanish in the barrio. What about the rapidly growing English literate, educated Latino middle-class? They are currently being forgotten and ignored by museums. We have to allow for change and adaptability, he said, “it’s not a revolution–it’s an evolution”

Lisa Lee and Cecilia Garibay agreed with this idea of change and adaptability. Lee commented that identities were “fluid” and Garibay described identities as “multidimensional pieces.”

Meanwhile, over in the sidebar chat area there was a big discussion about multi-lingual labels, a step that panelist Tammie Kahn feels is crucial for making 1st generation immigrant parents feel comfortable in a museum setting. Sure, their kids will grow up to be English language speakers, but unless those children grow up visiting museums, it is less likely that they will visit them as adults.

Also in the sidebar it was mentioned that in Toronto (and soon to be all of Canada!) all new Canadians (immigrants) are offered a one-year free pass to all museums as a way to introduce them to the museums and make them feel welcome. It is difficult to tell how many of these new Canadians remain active museum-goers after that first initial year, but it is a very interesting concept nonetheless.

One sidebar chatter mused, “It would be interesting to compare ethnic specific museum visitor trends with mainstream museum visitor trends…” Another chatter replied that her thesis had focused on museum staff diversity but had also touched upon visitorship for different categories of museums. A third chatter posited that she felt that “museums that are family focused have better success in attracting diverse audiences.”

At the end of the lecture, in the chatrooms, I posed a question to Rodriguez:
“…we speak about America as being a ”melting pot” when really it is a ”patchwork quilt” that is largely stitched together by caucasian males–much as Gregory you mentioned that it is always the caucasian male who the moderator of the ”diverse” panel. The society into which immigrants are ”assimilated” and integrated is still largely the product of white men. At what point will this shift, do you think, and isn’t integration problematic because this has not adequately changed yet?”

His response: “not sure we’re a melting pot or quilt. hackneyed terms that never actually described the country. the truth is there was and never will be ONE Way to integrate into the u.s. ask the Amish”

But the best part about “Towards a New Mainstream”? The event may be over, you can no longer participate in the sidebar chatting, the polls or the chatrooms, but the *entire* event was recorded, which means that you can watch it all unfold–ever population data slide, every sidebar chat comment, the entire lecture video, everything! So if you haven’t already–go do it now!

Power of Art in Tucson

By Meredith Hayes

The Tucson Museum of Art is happy to include our good news with readers of westmuse. In fact we have lots of good news happening here. Our admissions have more than doubled over last year (of course Ansel Adams might have something to do with that, but we’ll take it in this day and age). And we have recently received a major grant for our education programs.

Along with other grantees, the Tucson Museum of Art was awarded a $50,000 grant from the MetLife Foundation’s Museum and Community Connections program. It’s a fantastic, national program – for more information click here.

MetLife Foundation’s Museum and Community Connections grant will help support the Museum’s ongoing commitment to free onsite and offsite programming for underserved populations. Some of the onsite programs that will benefit include the popular Picture This! Art for Families, a free monthly program with gallery tours and art making for children and their adult companions; scholarships for the Summer Youth Art program, which annually awards free multiple art classes to nearly 35 children from low-income families each summer; and weekly gallery tours and art making for people with dementia.

Outreach programs such as Creative Connections, a program that brings weekly art projects to critically-ill children at Tucson Medical Center and University Medical Center, and art history and art education programs in area schools, libraries, and senior living community centers will also benefit.

Programs designed to attract Tucson’s growing immigrant communities was specifically targeted in the grant. These programs will help them learn about Tucson and be more involved in activities and events meant to expose their art and culture to the community at-large.

We are so pleased to be a part of this grant whose goal is to broaden arts programming and promote museums as centers of education without boundaries. All of us in the museum world know how important community outreach and education are to what we do everyday. We are not just buildings with art. We are a thriving part of our communities. With support and recognition from major foundations like MetLife, we can continue to help educate our children and citizens on the beauty and power of art.

AAM Annual Meeting Comes West, Goes Global

By Dewey Blanton

The AAM Annual Meeting will bring 5,500 museum professionals to LA this May for the 104th edition of the largest museum gathering in the world.

This year’s American Association of Museums (AAM) Annual Meeting is coming west, slated for Los Angeles May 23-26. And the 104^th edition of the largest museum gathering in the world will be more international than ever.

Seeking to take advantage of both the meeting’s geographic location and the changing nature of museum issues, AAM has launched its first Global Issues Track. Ten of the more than 160 program sessions will be simultaneously translated into Spanish and Mandarin, making the session content on collections care and global issues more accessible to both domestic and international colleagues.  For a glimpse of the array of program sessions, the Advance Program is available online at www.aam-us.org/am10.

In addition, AAM wants to make the meeting more accessible to Westerners and all museum professionals, offering big savings for those who take advantage of the Early Bird promotion (up to $240 off regular registration for those who register before February 5). Visit www.aam-us.org/am10 for details. And see you ─ along with many of your WMA colleagues ─ in LA in May

Do you care if your visitors are comfortable and happy? A proposal

By Steve Tokar

Participants at the MOPA visitor comfort workshop, October 2009 #wma09

Museums: Do you care if your visitors are comfortable and happy? If they are able to read your labels, find the special exhibition or the restroom, sit down when they’re tired? If those with disabilities feel accommodated? If your visitors are inclined to return? Would you like to test a potentially easy and inexpensive way to find out?

We are putting together a panel for the WMA meeting in Portland in October 2010, and would like your help. The idea is to test a simple method of assessing comfort and accessibility — a method that was developed for a workshop at the WMA ’09 meeting and first tested at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. The results were positive, but now we need to try it out in different venues with different people.

You can do it with half a dozen or so staff members over the course of a couple of days — setting aside about half a day total for each staffer. The only other investment in time is what it would take for (probably) one person to write a brief report on your institution’s experience and, if you wish, present the report at the session. The presenting part is optional!

If you agree to participate, you’ll receive prompt and cheerful guidance the whole way through from the experts who created the tools.

In the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego #wma09 (click for video)

What you would get in return is a detailed snapshot of the ways in which your institution most likely is and is not meeting the basic physical, intellectual, neurological, and emotional needs of your visitors — what works, what doesn’t work, and what might be improved fairly easily.

You might ask: how can a bunch of my staffers tell me what the visitor experience is like at my museum? The secret is role-playing. Yes, we who designed and hosted the workshop were kind of skeptical too, until we tried it.

Come on – what have you got to lose? You can be a part of museum history! But you must act quickly — the deadline for putting the proposal together is fast approaching! Please contact me, Steve Tokar, for more details. Thanks — I look forward to hearing from you soon.

steve@stevetokar.com

http://stevetokar.wordpress.com/

WMA Survey 2010

We need your input and ideas if we are going to reshape the Western Museum Association to effectively serve your needs.   That is the purpose of this survey which you can take through this link:  WMA Survey. By completing this 10 minute survey you will give the Association critical input towards our efforts to redesign our programs, processes and communications for the coming decade. Please respond by January 12.   Thank you for taking the time to help us make the WMA a truly useful partner to you and all the other Museum professionals in our region.

Happy New Year!: Physician, Heal Thyself

By James G. Leventhal

Panel on Innovation at WMA09 San Diego: Lori Fogarty, Director, Oakland Museum of California; Douglas Fogle, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Hammer; Ted Russell, Senior Program Officer for the Arts, James Irvine Foundation; and Angelina Russo, Associate Professor, Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

Please join for an amble through some issues of interest…  (The last time I did this here it was about technology issues and museums.  This time it is about a couple of things that have arisen about the state of museums generally.)

A very important conversation just happened here on the radio this week, and we want to be sure to help further both the broadcast and the on-going, necessary exchange through westmuse.

Scott Shafer hosted a dialogue on KQED’s Forum entitled Museums in Recession. KQED notes:

The number of adults attending arts and cultural events in the U.S. has dropped to its lowest level since 1982, when the National Endowment for the Arts began tracking it. While there is some good news – California ranked near the top among states for art museum attendance – the study found the decline to be especially prominent among Latinos. We discuss the role of museums in a changing demographic.

Those whom KQED’s Forum engaged included:

• Elizabeth Merritt, director of the Center for the Future of Museums
• Gregory Rodriguez, op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times and founder and executive director of Zocalo Public Square (see Allyson Lazar’s recent westmuse post “Sit Up and Take Note”)
• Jim DeMersman, president of the California Association of Museums (check out their gorgeous, new site http://calmuseums.org/) and director of the Amador-Livermore Valley Historical Society
• Lori Fogarty, executive director of the Oakland Museum of California

To listen now click here.

These are scary times, friends.  The Claremont Museum of Art is closing. “Two and a half years after bursting into life in a historic, former fruit packing plant, the Claremont Museum of Art is on death’s door,” writes Suzanne Muchnic on the LA Times blog Culture Monster.

In Fresno, CA an “..exhibitor pulled 65 etchings by Marc Chagall over the weekend fearing the Metropolitan Museum is about to shut for good...[being]  more afraid that he’d be unable to retrieve the art if the faltering museum padlocks its doors.”

On the other hand:

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs completed its run at the Dallas Museum of Art as the most popular exhibition in the Museum’s history, drawing in 664,000 ticketholders since its October 2008 opening. Additionally, the Museum reached a historic high in attendance, welcoming for the first time more than one million visitors to date in the 2009 fiscal year.  The King Tut exhibition, which was accompanied by more than 500 special programs, brought in thousands of first-time visitors from throughout the region and nearly 110,000 students to experience the Museum and its encyclopedic collections.

And with King Tut’s present reign at the de Young in San Fransisco, the museum is now reported to be one of the few museums in the country that is able to remain in-the-black based on admissions income, a phenomenal even unheard-of accomplishment for anyone who has tracked a museum’s bottom line.

One of our nation’s finest museum leaders Ron Chew had some thoughts posted this week for the Center for the Future of Museums blog:

I’ve been thinking about what I learned in China, and the little exchange with the tour guide and the driver. Sad to say, they were right. The most memorable and engaging places were not the museums – the air-conditioned enclosures with objects protected behind glass and neat little labels – but the living spaces: restored temples, rustic gardens, village courtyards, public squares, orphanages, and outdoor and indoor markets. These well-trafficked spaces – where daily life is lived and lots of things just sort of happen – were the places where I learned the most and found the greatest inspiration.

What do we do as museum professionals, when industry thought leaders like Ron Chew fundamentally question what museums contribute to a tourist’s understanding of another culture?  Having been to China recently, I do not really agree with Chew’s assessment of museums there.

The Forbidden City may be one of the world’s largest and finest museums.  As Chew concedes “In Beijing, the Forbidden Palace is called a museum.”  Then he questions it after his visit, “Was all of that a museum?”

Terra Cotta Warrior Museum, Xi'an, China -- talk about inspiring awe and wonder.

But what greater re-purposed, repossessed, once-limited access stately collection has been so transformative?  Isn’t that one of the fundamental definitions of a type of  museum à la the Louvre?  And isn’t the Eastern reverence for the object something to which museums should aspire?

In fact, I was quite struck by how much the word “museum” was adopted in China, perhaps or, um, of course to attract tourism.  But is that bad for our industry?  Our cultures?  Our globe-spanning societies?  One of the world’s great mind-boggling experiences is to visit the Qin Shi Huang Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum in Xian.

And even the traditional “air-conditioned enclosure” model-type museum in Xian — the Shanxi History Museum — as desolate, large and new-though-musty as it was…was a really important time-space experience for me and my wife in our understanding and appreciation of our shared experience in China, our shared humanity.

Now, I might imagine Ron’s piece for the Center for the Future of Museums was mainly anecdotal.  He might generally agree with me in more direct dialogue.  I also find it interesting that Chew may have been so successful in his life’s work to help the museum field to fathom better the transcendent power of museums.  I see the term “museum” as a meaningful catchall that invites and inspires.  He may still find the word limiting, or more something to excel beyond.

Where are we?  Is a retrenchment necessary?  Are we diluted by audience-focused missions?  Or not diverse and relevant enough?!

As part of a dialogue on Museums 3.0 called Museum as Soup Kitchen Elaine Heumann Gurian asks for feedback as she posits, “It is clear to me that museums could be much more helpful and timely by changing hours, job retraining, health care information and all manner of social service.”

And one of America’s great chroniclers of this nation’s history of museum’s Marjorie Schwarzer responds in a comment that captures an inspired and spontaneous spirit:

HI Elaine, I am in the middle of writing an article for Museum News on how museums responded in the 1930s (before the WPA) and have spent two days digging through archives from 1929 – 1934. The results are fascinating! As expected, museums were slow to react in the 1930s, since no one really knew what was going on or how deep the impact would be. We have the gift of history, archives and insight to help guide us and that’s a lot! But here are some things that they did do that are noteworthy: a) they looked at new technologies (in this case, it was radio broadcasts!); b) they re-focussed their collecting on American-made items; c) there was a huge effort to document and archive; c) they began to advocate for employee benefits (in those days, that meant pensions for retiring folks); d) they began to develop and evaluate games (!!); e) there was an enormous push toward educational activities and adult education — including free re-training for “unemployeed persons”. And this was all before the WPA was enacted and occured organically.

To read Scharwzer’s fascinating, above-referenced article Bringing it to the People/Depression in its published state at the AAM archive on line click here.

As we explore these questions collectively and continue to face international financial and political disruptions, 2010 promises to be a big year for museums.

For one thing, all eyes are and will be on the Oakland Museum of California:

In May 2010, the Museum will welcome back visitors and introduce the reconfigured History and Art Galleries. The new galleries will include digital and interactive features to encourage visitors to experience California’s many stories and voices, and add their own. Much of the signage and exhibit copy will be in Spanish and Chinese, as well as English. Californians can expect to see their history and culture represented throughout the Museum.

There’s lost of upside here, people.  Despite the bad news, we’ re hanging strong in fact.  In the KQED Forum discussion Elizabeth Merrit says,  “One of the great things about America is that anyone can start a museum, and often does…”  Thanks, Dan Spock, for pointing out to me that The Big House, The Allman Brothers Band Museum finally just opened in Macon, GA.

Cultural Transcendence at the Wing Luke

The bottom line is that museums can make a difference.  Ron Chew taught us with his brain seeds, his Wing Luke Asian Museum, an industry standard bearer for community-driven, identity-based institutions.

And it is this very, present exploration being led by those within the field that proves the ability and perhaps the need for museums to continue to innovate in meaningful ways.

Join the conversation!  Give your feedback here.  And be a part of WMA in Portland 2010 for #wmaportland75.  Session proposals are being accepted now on-line.

If you would like to participate by submitting a session proposal, please first read the guidelines here; then download the submission form,; fill it out, and email it to the Program Committee co-Chairs, Jacqueline Cabrera and Merritt Price at wmaportland2010@gmail.com by January 15, 2010.

OR

If you prefer to submit your session via an online form, please CLICK HERE!

A Local Event: Cultural Connection’s “Feast of Ideas”

by Katherine Whitney

For their annual “Feast of Ideas” session, December 9, 2009, the Bay Area’s Cultural Connections experimented with a new format. Traditionally the December meeting is more social than other programs, focusing on gathering and exchanging information from many participants rather than a single speaker or topic. This was the case this year as well.

The broad theme was Technology and Inspiration in the museum world and there were five speakers. The format was the fast-paced “PechaKucha,” which allows each presenter just 20 seconds per slide, and a maximum of 20 slides each. This was a big experiment – neither the participants nor Cultural Connections had ever done this before, and the audience was the great beneficiary of their bravery. Though there are some kinks to be worked out, I think this is a good model for future programs.

Follow Sorel Denholtz on Twitter

The five speakers, all doing creative and innovative work with internet technology, included: Sorel Denholtz, Social Media Marketing, California Academy of Sciences; Perian Sully, Collection Information Manager and Web Programs Strategist, Judah L. Magnes Museum; Jordan Klineman, President, Virtual Gallerie; James G. Leventhal, Director of Development and Marketing, Judah L. Magnes Museum and Mandy Smith, who presented Antenna Audio’s Create Your Own Audio Tour Contest.

Speaking rapidly as she fired off her slides, Sorrel Denholtz gave us a quick rundown on the rapidly evolving world of social media, and described how the California Academy of Sciences is modifying their web site to become more interactive with, first their members, and eventually the general public. Their web site has evolved from a brochure about the institution to something much more engaging.

For starters, the Academy currently invites visitors to post photos of their visit on Flickr in an effort to foster community beyond the museum visit.  Then there’s Live on Line, Scientists’ Spotlight, where members can ask questions of Academy scientists. To prevent the scientist from being overwhelmed by a huge numbers of questions, members vote to rank the questions, and only the top-ranked questions are submitted. The scientist then responds on-line, extending a dialog about science beyond the four walls of the institution. Members also get to share their suggestions about future exhibits at the Academy in an on-line discussion which, according to Sorrel, results in conversations that are both lively and profound.

In her general remarks, Sorrel touted the importance of Facebook Connect, now a year old. This service lets users log in to third-party sites with their Facebook credentials and bring their social identity with them. (In the meantime museum professional can join the very active Western Museums Association (WMA) Facebook page to keep up with what regional professionals are doing.)

Find Mandy on LinkedIn

Mandy Smith presented Antenna’s “Create your own Audio Tour” contest in which 13 different museums submitted audio that they created in house, with no professional assistance.  The presentation included snippets of each museum’s self-produced audio, and highlighted the winner: Harbor History Museum in Gig Harbor, Washington. Their prize included 15 brand new XP-classic™ MP3 players Headsets, a 15-unit charging rack, a 12-month license for Antenna Audio’s XP-classic Updater™ software, access to the Omnimusic Library with 1-year license and a 1-year warranty on equipment. This is an annual event that Antenna publicizes on its web site, as well as on Twitter. Bits of the winning audio can be heard on Antenna’s web site as well.

Perian Sully has the awesome title of “Web Mistress” at the Magnes Museum. She has taken up the challenge of “creating a sense of wonder” around the museum’s collections through social networking. Perian began by introducing us to several different institutions that are successfully engaging visitors and would-be visitors around the world in conversations about museum collections. Art Babble is a video sharing site that, according to its website “…is intended to showcase video art content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives.” The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley highlights one object per day through a Twitter feed.  The object is thematically tied to the day it’s featured. For example, on December 11th the object was a survey of El Rancho del Rinconada in Santa Clara County, filed with the state of California on December 11, 1860.

Follow Perian on Twitter

At the Magnes, Perian has, among other things, posted digitized versions of vintage Rosh Hashanah postcards from the Magnes collection. People can comment and converse about the cards, and also send digitized versions of the postcards to their friends and family.

Jordan Klineman demonstrated his proprietary Virtual Gallerie software that allows museums to create virtual, 3-D exhibits.  This software can be used as a design tool before the construction and installation of an actual exhibit. It can also be used by museum goers to visit an exhibit that is no longer extant (an “artchive.”) The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is currently experimenting with Virtual Gallerie. Museum visitors can check out a PDA, at no charge, before visiting the collections. While browsing through the galleries they use the PDA to call up information about different artworks, and/or bookmark works of art they like, saving them to a customized account created automatically when they check out the PDA. Then when they get home, they can log on to lacma.org and enter their own three-dimensional virtual gallery, already stocked with the artworks they’ve selected.

Find Jordan on LinkedIn

James G. Leventhal presentation was about the “poetry of process” or “the beauty of bureaucracy,” which touched on technology as a constant innovation cycle. Even if a person manages to get technology into the work cycle of an organization, the work involved in pushing that innovation through the system is never over. And, once that innovation has been adopted by the institution, it’s no longer innovative. Due to the nature of technology, something new is already emerging.

Follow James on Twitter

The highlight of James’ presentation was in fact how he dealt with a failure of technology: some of the graphics in his slides refused to load, so he stood in front of the glare of the slide projector and made huge windmill circles with his arms, demonstrating with great dynamism the innovation cycle. As soon as you think you’re finished, it’s time to start over again.

What was refreshing about the PechaKucha presentation format was that the speakers had to be brief and focused. The slides were for the most part visually interesting and engaging. And the things left unsaid became fodder for the question/answer session that followed. Prompted by specific questions from the audience, speakers elaborated in more detail on a particular point, like how to demystify technologically-phobic staff of the importance of Web 2.0 while simultaneously convincing them that it’s not a 40-hour per week job.

It would be great to see more of this PechaKucha format, with an emphasis on creating time and space for conversation among presenters and audience members. PechaKucha can serve up rich fodder for social networking in real time and space, conversations which no doubt will continue in the virtual world.

A holiday message from Aldona Jonaitis

Here in Fairbanks the day is at its shortest, the sun rising at 10:57am and setting at 2:39 pm.  Outside it’s -17.6 degrees.   When it’s this cold there’s no wind, so the snow just stays where it fell, and there are several inches of snow decorating the trees.  Cold, snow, short days – one might think this is a depressing time of year.  But it is absolutely not.

The low sun filters through the atmosphere in some way so the skies are iridescent  blue.  The horses stand outside, happy and content in their shaggy coats.  The cold creates an otherworldly stillness rich with the essence of winter.  I happily sit inside my warm house, surrounded by dogs and count my blessings.

I myself have had a very good year.  I retired from my job of 15 years at the University of Alaska Museum of the North and am enjoying being busy with many tasks of my choice, including president of the board of WMA.

WMA has had a difficult year.  The national recession has taken its toll on not for profits, and income from our membership and conference attendance was substantially less than in previous years.  As a result, the board had to make some very hard decisions, including laying off the dedicated and hardworking staff and agreeing to run WMA by volunteers.  One could be depressed by this unfortunate turn of events — but not us!

The board, and many other WMA members, have been contributing time and effort to keep our organization going.  This is something to be very grateful for.  And, interestingly, this situation has offered us all a valuable opportunity to reinvigorate WMA with new ideas for how we serve our community, how we communicate with our membership, how we organize our conferences.  This opportunity is also something to be grateful for.

And there’s something else.  As museum professionals, we do only good.  We educate.  We preserve and protect our world heritage.  We create new knowledge.  We provide safe environments.  We offer intelligent amusements.  During these difficult times, we offer an optimistic perspective on the world.  And that is something major to be grateful for.

I wish you a very happy holiday.

Aldona

LA Times Article on Attendance Should Make Us All Sit up and Take Note

by Allyson Lazar (with hat tip to Ted Greenberg for pointing out the LA Times article)

The new "Survey of Public Participation in the Arts" was released on Thursday by the NEA.

According to a newly released NEA study, museum attendance is down. This may not seem news-worthy–we are in the middle of a recession for heaven’s sake! But this December 14 article by Gregory Rodriguez from the LA Times indicates that the study reveals a deeper and more problematic trend: museum attendance is down because museums aren’t keeping up with the changing demographics of the American public.

The NEA findings corroborate the findings in a report published by AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums, which found that “only one in 10 ‘core museum visitors’ today is non-Anglo” despite the fact that “nonwhites are projected to make up roughly half of the national population by mid-century.” That means that unless museums start becoming more relevant to people of color, more and more museums will be shutting their doors.

The LA Times article specifically identifies the underserved educated, middle-class Latino demographic as the potential saviors of the museum world. But don’t take my word for it; read the article. Read the NEA study (pdf). Read the CFM study. And then act.