How it Works

Catamaran Reception Area

by Valerie Huaco

The caller was so enthusiastic her voice bounced right out at me. Guess what! She wanted us to know that she had found a cheap hotel room to stay in during the annual meeting of WMA. Wasn’t that great? Did we want to tell the membership?

So here’s how it works. WMA starts looking at where to hold the annual meeting two, three, even four years in advance. Once a proposal has come in from museum folk interested in hosting our community at thrilling sites and institutions, Elida packs her bag (carry on only for this gal) and goes to visit the city in question. She tours five to ten hotels (and keeps them straight in her head!) to assess meeting spaces, accommodations, transportation, walkability, and always price. She haggles, she asks, she looks under the bedspread, all in a quest to provide the perfect combination of affordability, comfort, and meeting space. You see, access to the meeting space for the general session, exhibit hall, and every break out room, is a function of how many beds we promise to fill at a hotel. So if you stay at a different hotel, and we fail to meet the minimum number of beds filled, WMA may have to pay a fine. Did I say fine? I meant ransom – it’s a number pushing six figures.

In other words, it’s a package deal: please stay at the conference hotel, join in the conviviality and convenience, and help us to secure the shared space we rely on for excellent presentations and networking. Be sure the hotel knows you’re there with WMA, and if you end up staying for fewer nights than planned, let reception know asap so another museum-head can claim the space.

Yeah, we did want to tell the membership.

Sustain, Sustaining, Sustainable, Sustainability…Sustenance

by Rosalind Bedell, Program Co-Chair
Judging from recent comments it seems that while many of you may love social networking and find it useful (and who am I to disagree – I’m already excited about the eateries in San Diego), that nothing quite replaces the face to face experience of a conference. I’m sure you have taken a glimpse at the preliminary program for the WMA conference in October – see www.westmuse.org/san diego preliminary program.pdf – but I wanted to draw your attention to some aspects of the conference that the program committee hoped would make it a must-attend event.
This year the theme is sustainability, a word that appeared as a noun or adjective no fewer than 34 times in the session proposals the committee reviewed. But this is not just sustainable in terms of being green (although this is covered too) but in all other ways affecting museums in this difficult economic climate: sustaining exhibitions, sustaining programs, sustaining audiences, membership and staff. Benefits from the recession are hard to find but slim pickings and skinny budgets can stretch minds and produce creative ideas that do not surface in more abundant times. Exciting and innovative ideas can be found in sessions, such as the New and Notable session, in the sessions relating to collaboration between museums crossing the boundaries between their specialties or from the grantees of the Innovation Fund. Hear about the opportunities that a major capital campaign may bring or about a regional cooperative response to disasters, or the race in the Gulf to build the biggest and best museum in the world.
The conference planners hope, more than ever, to send you home with practical help and advice so that with reduced staff or hours you can still put solutions into effect: help with foundation funding, with negotiating small grants, with IMLS, with understanding your board, with the basics of evaluation or insurance claims, with your staff’s texting habit, with website creation and online tools, and some tried and true education programs and projects so that you are not reinventing the wheel.
New this year is the TechLab where you can find out how to blog better or FaceBook faster as well the answers to a host of other computer-related questions afflicting those of us who are less tech-savvy. Another new feature is the Resource Clinics, where experts will provide answers to questions on your resume, the challenge of being a new director, evaluation, creative education or grant writing.
Finally of course – where this article began – there is the face to face contact, the networking. Enjoy an affinity lunch with a fellow curator, educator, registrar or director, the free lunch in the exhibit hall on day one or the afternoon in Balboa Park seeing how the museums in this museum-rich city are coping with present stresses and strains.
The Program Committee spent many hours reading the proposals submitted for the conference, and met together for 3 ½ days over two meetings. Proposals were examined, sometimes tweaked and mostly approved for the conference. Ideas flew around the table as this dedicated and enthusiastic group worked to make the conference as accessible and relevant as possible, well aware that it would be difficult for many to attend this year. We hope we can entice you to come and to persuade your director or department head of the value of attending. WMA has always had a reputation for being a good conference. We hope by giving you tools to take back with you to use in lean times and some new ideas based on sustaining our museums and our profession that we can induce you to come. Think of all the hours you spend on the web or on a social network site, take a few of those hours, put them in a block to attend the conference, and meet some of the professionals you most admire for what they are doing and the faces behind the blogs. And come up with as many alternatives as you can for the word sustainable and let us know – on the blog or, better still, at the conference!

New and Notable

by Valerie Huaco

Back in November when the WMA program committee convened in San Diego to review session proposals, we took some time to discuss what ideas had been knocking around in our collective heads. What’s on the tip of our museological tongue, as it were. Many good sessions were born of that conversation, including On Board with Innovation, Weathering the Storm: Foundations Respond to the Financial Crisis, Strategic Plans: Friend or Foe, the Tech Lab, Leave No Child Inside, the Resource Clinics, and the general session on museums in Quatar.

Merritt Price, Design Manager at the J. Paul Getty Museum, brought forward the idea of a “New and Notable” session to capture some of that same energy, live, at the annual meeting.
Merritt’s idea was enthusiastically embraced by the program committee, as we were all searching for ways to take the buzzing human energy we were experiencing and bring it to the meeting.

Intern Lisa Chanoff, who most recently worked with the Contemporary Jewish Museum, has joined us to spread the word and solicit New and Notable submissions. We’ve had a stirring of interest, but there is room for more. I’m including the call for entries below. What’s going on in your microcosm of the museum world? Share!

CALL FOR ENTRIES

Let us know what’s “new and notable” at your institution and we will
present it at a new session at A Rising Tide: Sustainable Practices,
Green & Beyond, the upcoming annual meeting of the Western Museums
Association, October 24-30, 2009, in San Diego.

The New and Notable session will showcase the best of the west’s work
and feature newly built projects that are permanent in scope or programs

and projects that are unique. Projects submitted must have been
completed between September 2007 and September 2009. A What to Watch For

segment will feature up and coming projects scheduled for completion by
September 2010.

To submit an entry for the New and Notable session please send:

* A 75 word description of the project or program including the relevant dates of completion or in the case of a unique program, when it was instituted and what makes it unique. Include something you (or your institution) learned from it, and what you might change next time.
* Up to three 1 MB images
* Project contact person and contact information
* Send the above to wmanewandnotable@gmail.com

Submission deadline: July 31, 2009

We will also be highlighting work in development in a Poster Session in
which presenters can showcase ideas that are in the percolator on 19″ x
24″ posters, and be in attendance to discuss their ideas and solicit
input from the WMA community. The Poster Session is intended to showcase

the work of students and/or staff-led or institutional research
including the results of grant-funded projects and in-house initiatives.

Posters for chosen projects will include up to three images, a 250-word
description, timeline, and contacts.

To submit an entry for the Poster Session please send in:
* A 75 word description of the work in development
* Project contact person and contact information
* Send the above to wmapostersession@gmail.com

Submission deadline: July 31, 2009

For more information go to westmuse.org, call the WMA office, 510-665-0700, or email Lisa Chanoff .

Executive Director’s Message

Elida Zelaya, Executive Director

This is a whole new world. Well, maybe not so new to many of you, but new to me, me who loves factoids and the random but has been called….(*gasp*) a luddite.

I can honestly say that I am not a luddite, in fact I love machines and technology since they make my job easier or me more efficient! But I am a twitter virgin, a very recent FB user, and only in the last week, Linked In. I will admit that I tend to want to grasp the physical, hear an actual voice, even write a letter…on paper…with a pen.

Luckily I have a job that allows me the best of both worlds – communication via technology most of the year, and then an intense period of in-person connection with hundreds of you at the WMA annual meeting. The reality is that what WMA has to offer is access our members’ experiences, so that we can grow as a professionals, and inclusion in our network. That’s our ultimate product, and the quarterly newsletter and annual meeting have been the traditional vehicles.

But here WMA is, LinkedIn, on FB, and with a blog. I think these “new” means of communication will evolve  and supplement the traditional vehicles. WMA will give and get an even more inclusive feeling by participating this virtual world and sharing/bonding/inspiring each other between personal meets. In my head, and eventually as formal goals for WMA, I want to utilize these modes of communication for depth: increasing WMA’s commitment to and role as a gathering place for those who already are members; but also, WMA must prepare for breadth: reaching out to and offering a place to those who are not yet members.

We all are better human beings and do our jobs better when we have someone we trust to vent to, to share with, to support us. I think that all of us will find that we crave more, consistent communication with our friends, family, and colleagues as the stresses that our nation faces wax, wane, and, whether directly or indirectly, touch us. So why not join me and be a part of the WMA network? I bet you have a lot to offer.