Positioning Your Museum as a Critical Community Asset - (American Association for State and Local History) (Paperback)

About the Book

In this how-to guide, practitioners at cultural heritage venues share their experiences in building sustainable relationships with their geographic and demographic communities. The volume focuses on the practicalities of starting and sustaining educational, advocational, digit...

Book Synopsis

In this how-to guide, practitioners at cultural heritage venues share their experiences in building sustainable relationships with their geographic and demographic communities. The volume focuses on the practicalities of starting and sustaining educational, advocational, digital and co-creative activities and programs. The thematic essays and case studies discuss strategies and actions museums can employ to build relationships with their communities, while serving as a community asset and resource. Case studies include candid discussions of successes, challenges, and lessons learned with an emphasis on small-to medium-sized institutions with limited staff and budgets.

Review Quotes

Happily, this volume is not yet one more call for museums to engage with the communities they serve -as its editors note, that would be nothing new. Rather, the book is a "how-to" guide, illustrated with case studies drawn from a wide variety of contexts, and including a digital resource guide (linked to ancillary online content) compiled by the book's contributors. This volume demonstrates how reciprocal, mutually empowered community engagement is a profoundly co-creative process which benefits both communities and the museums which serve them.

Positioning Your Museum as a Critical Community Asset: A Practical Guide is a major contribution to studies about community engagement and participatory strategies in museums. Encompassing examples from more than two dozen contributors, the book is a valuable manual of tested and inexpensive "bottom-up" or "co-creation" approaches. This is a must-read not just for museum professionals but also for everyone in the critical museum studies field.

About the Author

Robert Connolly is active in the museum field as an independent consultant and President of the Advocates for the Poverty Point World Heritage Site. He has over 25 years of experience in museums and community engagement most recently as an Associate Professor in the Museum Studies program at the University of Memphis and the Director of the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa. His PhD is from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996.

Elizabeth A. Bollwerk is currently an Archaeological Analyst for the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS, www.daacs.org) at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation based at Monticello. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2012.