Collections

Ben Garcia, Head of Interpretation at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.


By Maraya Cornell
What's it like to work in a museum that's closed for renovation? "It's a real privilege and luxury," says Ben Garcia, Head of Interpretation at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley, California. "It's so rare to have time to really think about your practice and be intentional...
By Sharon Sekhon
The LA History Archive – the Studio for Southern California History's online portfolio.


The Studio for Southern California History (Studio) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to critically chronicling and sharing the region's social history in order to foster sense of place. The Studio achieves its mission through participatory programming like our internship program with...
By Melissa Bowling
The Society of American Archivists (SAA) Museum Archives Section Working Group has been developing an online tool for the museum archives community to aid in the sharing of resources across institutions. Currently, the Working Group is gathering examples of forms, policies, and procedures to populate this online resource. You can view the resources that were gathered last year...
Nomenclature 3.0 for Museum Cataloging is a structured and controlled list of object terms organized in a hierarchical classification system. It provides a way to index and catalog collections of human-made artifacts based on their function. A museum standard for over 30 years, the third edition of Nomenclature, produced in 2010, includes over 5,000 new object terms. More importantly, the lexicon...
By James G. Leventhal
One of the author's favorite records.


Many years ago Stephanie Weaver of Experienceology encouraged the Western Museums Association to start exploring the use of Ted-like talks to enliven the Annual Meeting and to provide better year-round content on the then recently launched blog site westmuse and other outlets. Well, Stephanie, your wait is over!...soon.
At the fall...
Session
An Update on the Connecting to Collections Initiative in the Western States
Moderator
Connie Bodner, Ph.D., Senior Program Officer, Office of Museum Services, IMLS
Presenters
Kara West, Assistant Director for Field Services, Balboa Art Conservation Center
Keni Sturgeon, Curator & Museum Director, Willamette Heritage Center
Eric Taylor, Heritage Lead, 4Culture
Description
Since its...
By: Andrea Godinez
Do you consider yourself a scientist? Or see the ways that research affects your daily life? Sometimes, for those of us who are not working in a lab or the field, science can seem exclusive and disconnected from our lives.
That’s why I have devoted my career to telling stories of science and research in ways that are hopefully accessible to our audiences – including those who...
By: Renee Montgomery
Scenario:  Your museum is securing a loan critical to its upcoming exhibition. The lender returns the loan contract.  His declared insurance value is high, but the loan is vital to the exhibition and it’s ticklish to question this lender.  The contract is countersigned with everyone hoping the loan will simply come and go without incident so the value never becomes an issue...
By: Katie Williams
The Northwest African American Museum, Main Entrance just after opening in 2008. Photo by Jennifer Richard.


The Northwest African American Museum (NAAM) is not a collecting institution at this time. This fact has made describing our collections policy to the public tricky, because, isn’t that what museums do? They mainly collect objects and care for them in perpetuity, right...
Joining in on the collections access conversation is Rebecca Andrews, Ethnology Collections Manager at the Burke Museum in Seattle.
This past week I exchanged emails with Rebecca about some of the fascinating ways the Burke Museum partners with indigenous communities around the world to provide access to collection objects for ceremonial purposes.
According to Rebecca the Burke lends objects for...

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