Sunday, October 8, 2023

Learning Format: Conversation

This roundtable discussion will foster dialogue related to art museums with affiliated outdoor spaces (landscape settings, sculpture gardens, or parks). Focused breakout discussions will consider how to ensure that outdoor space use promotes deeper connections with visitors, staffing, interpretation, and programming practices, the potential for revenue, and how museums can acknowledge the histories of the land on which our outdoor spaces sit, including centering Indigenous peoples.

Learning Format: Passive Learning

School field trips are among the most effective ways of connecting young students with museums and historic sites in their community. With the longstanding nature of these programs, many institutions are finding them ripe for reexamination. What new resources can be utilized and what changes in approach? Three varied local institutions will discuss the successes and pitfalls that they’ve experienced as they have reinvented their field trip programs to meet the needs of students today.

Learning Format: Active Learning

Museum Stores are uniquely positioned to raise the institution's profile and are critical to the overall financial and educational health of the institution. They enhance visitor experience through store design, engaged/informed staff, marketing, and product selection. Hear how museum stores, together with their institutions, have worked to create memories that reverberate beyond museum walls and how the Museum Store Association’s Museum Store Sunday brings together museums across the country in support of their institutions.

Learning Format: Active Learning

5 Museum industry themed challenges
4 Teams
3 Hosts
2 Much Fun!
1 Winner
Join a team and join the fun. This whirlwind competition will pit museum professionals against each other in a range of interesting and interactive games. 

Learning Format: Passive Learning

Learning Format: Active Learning

If the thought of advocating every day sounds exhausting, this session will help you approach it from a different angle. At its core, successful advocacy is simply articulating throughout the year why your museum adds value to your community. We will share resources and tools available from state museum associations to help museums of any size advocate for themselves and the field as a whole. All of us have a part in advocating for museums.

Learning Format: Active Learning

Creating meaningful experiences through exhibition and visual display is one of our major goals for our communities, but what happens in between that? How do we maintain a safe and enjoyable experience for our guests, docents, and volunteers? This session will address the health and safety considerations of staff who work tirelessly behind the scenes and the front lines. Participants will learn to identify safety issues including hazards of common substances used in art handling.

Learning Format: Conversation

Every collecting organization has an artifact that provokes the question, “what do we do with this?” or “how should we do this?” From STEAM collections to history or art collections, this session will explore the different ways to care for collection oddities. WMA and the Registrars Committee-Western Region (RCWR) team up to present case studies on specific artifacts, lessons learned, and strategies for caring for the unusual artifacts in your collection. 

Learning Format: Conversation

Learning Format: Conversation

Are you a collections manager or registrar that has said, “WTF?” more times than you can count? Join us for a moderated conversation between yourselves and a panel of people like you who have seen it all and want to share their wisdom. Here’s our chance to be honest about things that have gone wrong, share stories that sound too weird to be true, and support each other as we work to make things right.