On Sunday, October 25 WMA held a pre-conference workshop at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts called “Getting Comfortable with Visitor Comfort.” The goal of the workshop was to help participants and the museum assess how the museum’s experience met visitors’ comfort needs, and therefore was an experience they might want to repeat. The facilitators (in alpha order) were Paul Gabriel, Vivian Haga, Beth Katz, Steve Tokar, and myself. We were extremely fortunate to have Kenshi Westover with us, an amazing videographer and editor, as well as Joaquin Ortiz from the museum staff. During the workshop they shot a total of 6 hours of video, which Kenshi is editing down into segments.
This first segment is about entrances and exits. The workshop participants were each given cards with roles to play, and sent out into the museum with very little priming to see how the museum experience worked for them in this role. Roles varied from temporary physical conditions, like pregnancy, to learning differences like dyslexia.
In the video, you’ll see the participants identified by name and then the role they were playing.
Rachael Faust is a JFKU museum studies graduate student. Previous to her academic studies, Rachael worked at the University Art Gallery at UCSD and at the Portland Art Museum. Since moving to the Bay Area, she has volunteered at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and has been an intern at SFMOMA and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.
By Rachael Faust
After completing my first year at John F. Kennedy University, I spent the summer coping with the fact that I would soon be faced with the daunting task of undertaking a thesis project. Summer came and went, and at the end, I found myself without a revelation of what this dynamic topic would be.
As fall quarter quickly approached and as people began to inquire about my amazingly innovative thesis topic, I quickly devised plan B: crashing the 2009 Western Museums Association annual conference in San Diego where I hoped to find a veritable assortment of fresh ideas and topics just waiting for further exploration. Plan B turned out to be far more effective than plan A (waiting for a revelation). I encourage my fellow grads who are still on plan A to stop waiting and quickly sign up for a museum conference.
Of all the conferences I could attend, I chose WMA because of the interesting and diverse session topics and the manageable size and length of the conference (the student discount price was also rather alluring). A preconference workshop titled, “Navigating New Media In Collections without Going Adrift,” caught my attention because my current studies focus on collections management and I have become particularly interested in the care and preservation of time-based media works.
San Diego. Image courtesy of Lydia Johnson.
The presenters for this session included registrars from MOMA and LACMA as well as LA MOCA’s media exhibition technician and an LA based freelance media specialist. I hoped that the information they presented in this session as well as the questions raised by the museum professionals in attendance would point to areas that needed further investigation (read: my fingers were crossed in hopes that they had an extraordinary thesis topic for me).
The preconference workshop not only gave me a handful of possible areas to research that could lead to relevant thesis topics, but also gave me an opportunity to test out a few of my own ideas.
Is it possible for museums to share or loan exhibition media equipment to one another?
How are museum staff being trained to handle, install, preserve, and repair media works and their related equipment?
What happens when artists don’t want to migrate their media-based artwork to newer formats? The work will eventually die. Should museums collect works with such short life spans? Do museums continue to store the remains of the dead artwork?
I was able to ask these questions and others to a captive, knowledgeable audience that I may not have had access to otherwise; the dialogue I enjoyed with museum professionals at WMA could not have been easily facilitated on my own.
In the proceeding days at the conference, I ran into several of the speakers, and they all went out of their way to stop me and say, “hey, I was thinking about your questions and….” Everyone I introduced myself to at the conference was excited that I was a student and was eager to learn about my potential thesis work.
The WMA conference exposed me to new ideas, expanded ideas I had already been tinkering with, and provided access to museum professionals from a diverse range of museums. I left the conference with a direction for my thesis work and at least a dozen business cards of museum people who said they would be more than happy for me to contact them in the future.
Slide from Porter's Presentation ot the Museum Computer Network Conference Attendees in Portland 2009
Describe the purpose, size, and topical scope of the conference.
Describe the attendees, making an attempt to capture their occupations, roles, ages, experience level, interests, and the extent to which they engage with each other.
What were some of the highlights of the conference for you? Best sessions? Best conversations? Most interesting person you met? Feel free to describe the top sessions in as much detail as you’d like.
What were some of the takeaways from the conference? Did you resolve to act on something you heard there? Did you share information about the conference with colleagues (either inside or outside of your institution)?
What would you change about the conference, if you could? (Keep this positive. One or two ideas only: we don’t want to alienate conference organizers from other meetings!)
Was there a conference backchannel? Can you describe it? Did you participate in it?
Would you attend again? How frequently?
What was the cost of the conference (and of travel/lodging). Would you consider the conference good value for money?
First, I want to thank everyone involved for making the annual WMA Conference in San Diego such a successful event. Special thanks go to Elida Zelaya and Valerie Huaco who worked tirelessly to welcome our arrival in San Diego. I also want to thank the Program Committee and the Host Committee, both of whom corralled the collective wit and experience of colleagues and volunteers to present an excellent series of sessions, workshops and social events – many of which concentrated on issues of sustainability – a topic that is on everyone’s mind. Finally, I would like to thank the vendors and sponsors who supported the Conference, including our lead sponsor, the Barona Cultural Center and Museum.
WMA San Diego 2009
As you may have heard at the Conference, the Western Museum Association is undergoing a restructuring process to ensure that our 74 year old organization continues to thrive. Despite careful monitoring of the budget by the Board of Directors, WMA revenue is far below target, an unfortunate result of the strain felt by all not-for-profits during the current recession.
The goals of the restructure are to create a business model that cuts overhead costs and thus streamlines administrative activities. The new model includes eliminating the positions of Executive Director and Publications and Media Manager, closing the physical office located in Berkeley, CA, and investing in digital communications vs. printed materials, among other administrative cost reductions.
In the next few weeks, the Executive Committee and Task Force will create various business models that will consider 1.) maintaining the organization at a base level 2.) estimating costs and overhead associated with the 2010 Annual Meeting in Portland and 3.)possibly suspending the 2010 Annual Conference in Portland to invest resources in the 2011 Annual Meeting in Hawaii. Each of these business models will take the best interests of the membership as our first priority.
We will also investigate innovative ways to keep the membership involved and networking throughout the next three years. We have discussed developing a series of regional events, sessions, webinars and partnerships with like professional organizations in an effort to serve you better. We welcome your ideas as we explore more ways to network throughout the region.
Each of our institutions have been faced with making difficult decisions in the last year and no decision is harder than that which involves talented and devoted employees. Please join me in thanking Elida Zelaya and Valerie Huaco for their hard work and dedication in serving the WMA. On behalf of the Board and membership, I would like to thank each of them for their valued professional service and their heartfelt commitment to the organization.
We will continue to keep our members up to date on the progress of the objectives mentioned here. Together with the Board, I am committed to the health and well being of this spectacular organization. I am gratified that so many members and friends have already stepped forward to volunteer their help and I look forward to many more doing so. Together we will thrive and celebrate happily the 75th anniversary of WMA in 2010!
I welcome your comments and invite you to contact me with any questions, concerns or ideas you would like to share. My direct e-mail address and phone number are aldona@jonaitis.net and (907) 978-1903.
Margaret Kadoyama's thirty years in the museum profession embrace extensive experience in audience development, community involvement and education strategic planning.
I was fortunate enough to attend the recent WMA conference in San Diego. The conference provided at least one significant outcome for me — the discovery of a new report on engaging diverse audiences from the Japanese American National Museum, published in August 2009.
I attended a session on programming for Latino audiences. The session, Museum Mission and Audience: Tips from Collaborations with Latino Communities, was moderated by Elizabeth Morin from Youth Arts and Education for the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
The presenters were Lisa Sasaki from the Japanese American National Museum, Lorraine Yglesias from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and David J. de la Torre from La Plaza de Cultura y Artes. The session provided many great tools and tips for engaging Latino audiences, from David de la Torre’s articulate and compelling list of strategic issues (focus on mission, diversification of board and staff, marginalization, and cultural insensitivity, among others) to Lorraine Yglesias’s focus on marketing.
Lorraine shared some great resources, including the tip to subscribe to email reports from www.mediapost.com, which provides current information on marketing for different audience segments, including Latino audiences.
Lisa Sasaki shared tips from the JANM’s Boyle Heights project, and included information on museum attendance before, during and after the project. Lisa also shared information about a white paper that JANM recently published called The Cultural Museum 2.0: Engaging Diverse Audiences in America. It is available to download at http://www.janm.org/projects/innovation/.
The white paper is the result of a three year project, funded by The James Irvine Foundation, in which JANM was able to holistically reassess itself and its relationship with its audiences. I read through it and found it articulate and very timely, focusing on the issues that culturally specific museums are grappling with right now.
The section on essential questions was particularly significant. During the course of the project, the Museum began looking closely at the interests, wants and needs of its potential audiences. According to the report (pages 12-13), the Museum addressed questions such as:
To what extent is the visitor experience influenced by cultural or ethnic self-identification?
What is the relevance of the Museum to younger, multi-ethnic audiences?
How can the Museum develop programming to engage and sustain these audiences?
How can the Museum engage new audiences while sustaining and satisfying its current constituency?
What impact does engaging these audiences have on the ability for the Museum to sustain itself in the future?
These essential questions mirror concerns voiced by many museums, and the report goes on to include the results of the project’s research and recommendations to address these issues. It is timely and relevant. I teach the JFKU Museums and Communities course, and this will definitely be required reading for the spring M&C class!
WMA Board Members convene near the end of the conference
Last week roughly 400 museum professionals from the Western Region and beyond* gathered in beautiful San Diego for the annual WMA conference. Buzz in the hallways indicated that the sessions were some of the strongest, most relevant, useful and enjoyable yet!
But what about the folks who weren’t there? How can they benefit from the conversations and sharing that took place? Fear not! We’ve got a lot of different ways to make sure everyone can get all caught up!
First off, there are the blog posts here at the WestMuse blog. And pretty soon the latest issue of the WestMuse newsletter will be published, focusing on the conference.
But there are other places to see what happened, too:
And hey, if you have photo sets you want to share or conference discussions that are happening someplace else online, please go ahead and post them in the comments so that more people can join in!
* Not only did we have museum people from the East Coast and the Mountain-Plains, we even had one special guest who came in all the way from Australia!
Some of the tools that may be used by a contract registrar: cotton gloves, camera, notebook, pencils, flashlight and tape measure.
These days with so many layoffs, there are a lot of people running around calling themselves freelancers, consultants or contract registrars. But is getting laid off enough of a reason to “hang your shingle” out there and go independent? How do you know if you’re really ready to cut it in the world of museum consulting and contract work?
The “Survival Strategies for Consultants” led by museum collections specialist Ted Greenberg answered just those questions and more! The panel consisted of Mo Shannon, the former registrar at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA who has now been independent and caring for the collections of private collectors for 15 years; Alice Parman, an interpretive planner from Oregon who has worked in the past both in museums and exhibit development/design firms; and Gail Anderson, who went independent as a management and strategic planning consultant after 25 years in the field.
Though they each have markedly different backgrounds and areas of expertise, each one of these panelists is doing well right now, despite the downturn in the economy. Perhaps that’s because each one of them made the conscious decision to go independent, rather than being forced into that position, and each one has taken the time to be strategic in their approach to working on their own. They all seem to love the flexibility that freelancing affords, but they caution that you have to know yourself and if being your own boss is right for you: working, managing yourself, looking ahead to new clients and projects, tracking your time (often in 15-minute increments) and tracking receipts. You have to be aware of and prepared for the additional costs associated with freelancing: health care, insurance, a higher tax rate, office expenses and marketing.
Marketing is critical–both informally through word of mouth and building connections with vendors as well as museums, and formally, primarily through websites these days. It’s also important to very carefully and strategically determine your particular skill set and area of specialization and your geographic focus–are you willing to travel? if so, how far?
Naturally a good portion of the discussion was devoted to the ever-important topic of how to set billing rates and fees, and although this is critical, I found the overall discussion even more useful. What I took away from the session was that, done right, independent consulting can be a great way to serve the museum field in a way that is both personally and financially rewarding, but you really have to examine yourself first to determine if it is the right step and if so, you must be strategic about how you approach your business.
Bright and early last Wednesday morning I sat in on a session on Director/Board Relations at the annual WMA conference, moderated by Jim McCreight, President of the Museum Trustee Association. His panelists were Mo King, Immediate Past Chair of the Mingei International Museum in San Diego and Derrick Cartwright, formerly the Director of the San Diego Museum of Art and now the Director of the Seattle Art Museum.
As a relatively new member of the WMA board, I thought it would do me some good to listen to some pros talk about leadership, the role of the board, building a strong board and how to maintain healthy board/director relations–and I was right! I learned a lot in this session, so I thought I’d share some of the helpful nuggets of wisdom I gathered from the session.
Two-way trust, transparency and support are key to board/director relations. Mutual respect is necessary.
The board must:
understand their fiscal responsibility
preserve the mission
set policy
be committed to the mission, strategic planning and fundraising
The director must:
communicate effectively with the board, and in a timely fashion, particularly if there are problems
be able to deal with constructive criticism
handle small problems quickly before they mushroom
“If the relationship between the Executive Director and the Chair fails, you’re sunk.” — audience member
“If they are getting the job done, you don’t have to like them.” — Jim on differing styles
Tips for a strong board:
Strategically identify board prospects–and identify them early on.
The board should evaluate itself according to its Board Contract.
Commitment to the mission is crucial–fundraising alone is not enough.
Well-run, well-organized board retreats are good for keeping a board energized.
Have orientation meetings for new board members with the Executive Director, the Chair and the Immediate Past Chair (and possibly the Development Director).
Make sure new board members know what is expected of them in terms of both money and time.
by Allyson Lazar (disclosure: I moderated this session)
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Technology seems to be a key buzz word in the museum world these days. Many people are still a little tech-shy, but that changes day by day. But while people may feel less afraid or daunted by the idea of online technologies, they still aren’t always quite sure what to do with them. The session on free, shared, online tools at last week’s WMA conference introduced some of the ways that Internet technologies can help with everyday projects in museums such as digitizing collections and curating and developing exhibitions and sharing information with the public.
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Lynn Bethke of the brand new Museum of Culture and Environment at Central Washington University opened the session with a brief overview of the types and range of tools that would be discussed and then demonstrated how several of these free, shared, online tools help her in her daily quest to digitize her collection. Some of the software she uses includes: Picasa and the GIMP for photo editing; IrfanView for batch photo processing and Kompozer for web page editing. Her presentation can be viewed here.
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Next Sharon Leon, Director of Public Projects for the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University spoke about one of CHNM’s projects, Omeka. Omeka at its most basic is a web publishing platform–like a blog–for museum collections that can be used as a research tool. However, that is not really doing Omeka justice. Omeka allows museums to create detailed, rich pages about collections objects, including text, photographs and videos, that can be used to develop online exhibitions. And because Omeka adheres to strict metadata standards, searching for information and keeping the information portable are simple tasks. Sharon’s presentation can be viewed here.
Bob Ketner, Virtual Community Manager for the Tech Virtual, is also working on developing
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exhibitions–only while he does the developing in a virtual space, ultimately the exhibitions are created in a physical space. The Tech Virtual is a “collaborative online design platform for developing museum content”–a virtual testing ground for exhibition development and evaluation. The Tech Virtual makes use of Second Life–where only a person’s imagination limits what can be designed and built–as a virtual space for building potential new exhibits. Bob’s presentation can be viewed here and in addition he also has a list of resources available here.
Along with describing the various tools they use, the three panelists also addressed such questions as, “What does free really mean?” All of the software that they discussed is free to download, free to use. Space for hosting information and maintenance or customization of databases, software, websites, etc is not free–but it can still be cheap. And just in case words like “free” or “cost-effective” aren’t enough to get your board on board with these technologies, the panelists also pointed out that these tools allow for both evaluation and data collection–both key to the metrics that are so important to funders these days.
Although it wasn’t mentioned much directly in any of the presentations, online social networking was also very present in the session. Sharon was “tweeting” the session on Twitter using the tag #wma09 for easy searching. In one particularly great moment, James Leventhal in the audience asked about a creative commons plugin for Omeka and Sharon responded by tweeting that suggestion to the Omeka development team who were in their afternoon meeting. Talk about instant gratification!
Both Bob and Sharon mentioned that their projects are currently looking for volunteers as well; the Tech Virtual is looking for museums who are interested in making use of this virtual workshop for developing content and Omeka is looking for volunteer museums for a new hosting program that is going into Beta–that is, in addition to simply offering the software, CHNM is now offering to host museum websites that make use of the Omeka software. Anyone reading this post who is interested in either of these programs, please visit Bob and Sharon’s websites and contact them!
Never fear, there will be more blogs posted about specific sessions coming to WestMuse, but I wanted to take a moment to point everyone in the direction of a fantastic set of conference photos, courtesy of Lydia Johnson and to share a few of the places and moments that have made this conference so great for me. Thank you to everyone who organized a session, a pre-conference workshop, a lunch, an event, or who facilitated discussions and presented ideas and of course to everyone who came and made this conference so rich and successful.
A post-WWII display at the San Diego Air and Space Museum. SDAM is where we volunteered for CSI: Registrars and where a closing reception was held for conference organizers. They have the most amazing shop in the basement where volunteers build real planes!
A koala naps at the San Diego Zoo. Douglas G. Myers, CEO of the Zoo, graciously offered free admission to the Zoo and the Wild Animal Park for early arrivals to the conference, along with a discount at the shops!
A display of art books at the Atheneum in La Jolla. Set in a beautiful historic library, the Atheneum is an inspiring home to art and music collections that also hosts live music events.
The Santa Fe railroad passes a small country fair at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum. Hidden away in a basement in Balboa Park, the SDMRM offers 27,000 square feet of railroading fun--making it the largest accredited model railroad museum in the country!
The flight deck of the USS Midway. Docents donning leather jackets indicating over 2000 volunteer hours served guided WMAers through the longest-serving aircraft carrier in the Navy fleet, including up here to the flight deck. President and CEO "Mac" McLaughlin gave a rousing welcome and extended a shop discount, free simulator rides and gifts of signed coffee table books to the attendees.
San Diego made a stunning backdrop for the conference. Thanks to the Host Committee and the VP for Programs for providing us with such an amazing and inspiring setting!
James G. Leventhal
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