Using AI on a 500-Year-Old Page Changes Where Curatorial Expertise Begins

Objects to be sold in an auction house include a box filled with framed prints.

I bought the box for $30.

It was a brown cardboard box at a local auction filled with framed prints and miscellaneous ephemera. The sort of lot you bid on partly out of curiosity and partly because, if you’re lucky, you might discover something interesting. I did—it was a framed page from a 500-year-old German book.

As a historian, I enjoy reading. But more than that, I love books as objects. Their design, typography, and material presence give me tremendous joy. I got the bug in college in a federal work-study position in the rare books and special collections department of the library, where I learned how much evidence a single page can hold: paper quality, typeface, layout, illustration style, and wear patterns can all reveal a story before you even understand the words.

This page immediately caught my attention.

The typeface was Gothic, clearly German, probably around 1500. But the illustrations were strange. Instead of familiar late-medieval imagery (saints, cities, plants, kings) one woodcut showed a man lying in bed while another pressed a knife to his neck. Another showed a dining table with people seated around a severed head on a platter. Huh?

It was unmistakably early printed material, but not religious, political, or medical.

In other words: a cool mystery.

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Reimagining the Historic House Museum coming to Nashville in July

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*Ken Turino introducing the Reimagining House Museum workshop at Bayou Bend, Houston, 2025.*

In July, Ken Turino and I will be leading the one-day Reimagining the Historic House Museum workshop on Friday, July 10, 2026, at Belle Meade Historic Site & Winery in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s designed specifically for people working at house museums and historic sites who are wrestling with familiar questions: How do we refresh our programs? Attract new audiences? And build a more sustainable future without losing what makes our site special? Registration is $225 for AASLH members and $350 for nonmembers.

The day combines current social and economic research with practical tools drawn from nonprofit management and business strategy. Participants conduct a holistic assessment of public programs, explore examples of sites that are successfully reinventing themselves, and take part in a facilitated brainstorming session that puts new ideas into practice using a real house museum as a case study.

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The Question Most Students Overlook About Museum Internships

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A collage of images showing students in museums.

Most students search for internships by looking for a museum.
Instead they should be looking for a mentor.

In the Museum Studies Program at George Washington University, I advise about 40 students every year, which includes a required internship. Students are excited to get into the field, so they want to obtain their internship as quickly as possible. However, in the process, they often overlook the most important aspect.

An internship doesn’t train you — a supervisor does. And in today’s museum workforce, those are no longer automatically the same thing. Many organizations, especially small historical societies and local museums, operate with very lean staffing and competing demands. A capable staff member may be handling exhibits, collections, programs, and fundraising at the same time. That doesn’t make them unprofessional. But it may mean they lack the time, structure, or disciplinary depth to train a graduate-level emerging professional.

You can have a legitimate museum and still receive a volunteer experience instead of a professional one. The difference is supervision.

Reframe the Goal

The internship is not just a graduation requirement. It is your first professional apprenticeship—a chance to build competencies and networks, not just accumulate hours. Focus on what you need to learn and how it supports your career goals. Think of it as work experience with training wheels. Consider how this step leads to the next one.

The Supervisor Test

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Public Writing as Interpretation: Advice from the Editor of Public Humanities

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One of the most important roles museums play is sharing scholarship with the public—and it’s also one of the hardest. We are often asked to interpret complex events that unfolded over decades and involved many people, and in the process we rely on shorthand that makes sense to other scholars but not always to our visitors. Words like contextualize, agency, material culture, or periodization can quickly create distance rather than connection. Too often, we respond by simply “simplifying” academic work, when what we really need is something more ambitious: a distinct, rigorous form of interpretation designed specifically for public audiences.

In “How to Do Public Writing,” Jeffrey R. Wilson—director of the Harvard Law School Writing Center—offers a timely corrective: public writing is not scholarship “lite,” but a different craft altogether, one that requires clarity, narrative discipline, and deep respect for audience. Wilson is also the editor-in-chief of the new open-access journal Public Humanities, published by Cambridge University Press, and is currently developing a special museum issue—making his insights especially relevant for those of us working in museums and historic sites.

Wilson defines public writing as scholarship for people outside the academy—what he memorably calls “the folks we grew up with.” His premise is simple but urgent: as humanities education has declined and public trust in expertise has eroded, the responsibility for interpretation has shifted. Museums, libraries, and cultural organizations are now among the primary places where people learn how to make meaning from history, culture, and evidence. In this sense, public writing and museum interpretation are performing the same civic function.

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From Sites to Stories: Using ESRI StoryMaps to Interpret Women’s History in Washington, DC

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Digital tools do not automatically produce meaningful interpretation. What they can do—when used with discipline—is force clarity about audience, theme, and purpose. This is why I have begun using ESRI ArcGIS StoryMaps as a core interpretive platform in my graduate course CMST6307: Interpretation of Historic Sites at George Washington University.

This fall, students were commissioned—within a realistic professional scenario—to create StoryMaps interpreting the history of women in Washington, DC. Each project connected five or six historic sites through a coherent theme, tailored to a specific public audience. The results demonstrate how StoryMaps can function not as digital scrapbooks, but as public-facing interpretive products grounded in professional standards.

I’m incredibly proud of what they accomplished, but this isn’t a showcase of student work for its own sake. It’s a case study in how digital storytelling platforms can support the interpretation of historic sites and house museums.

A flowchart of the interpretive planning process used in my course and at Engaging Places, which starts with audience, content, and design. — *Interpretive framework used in my interpretation course (and with my clients).*

A Professional Product, Not a Classroom Exercise

The assignment was framed as a hypothetical consulting project for the White House Historical Association. Students were told: “The StoryMap should connect 5–6 historic sites through a coherent theme, tailored to a specific audience. It should demonstrate professional standards in historical research, interpretive writing, and digital design.”

From the beginning, the emphasis was not on technology, but on interpretation. Each student had to demonstrate the integration of three core elements: audience, content, and design.

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How Emerging Museum Professionals View Community Engagement in Museums

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*Learning about the vision and resources of the GW Museum.*

End-of-semester reflections often confirm what instructors suspect but rarely see so clearly. Read together, the reflections from my course CMST 6703: Museums and Community Engagement at George Washington University offer a useful window into how emerging museum professionals are learning to connect the theory of community engagement with its day-to-day practice. For museum leaders and practitioners, the themes echo many of the field’s ongoing debates about values, capacity, and impact.

One of the strongest patterns was a shift in how students understand community engagement. Early in the semester, many approached engagement as something measurable through attendance, participation counts, or one-off programs. By the end, their reflections show a more nuanced understanding: engagement as a relational practice grounded in mission, trust, reciprocity, and long-term stewardship. This mirrors core engagement theory, which emphasizes relationships over transactions and positions engagement as an ongoing organizational practice rather than a discrete activity.

Students also demonstrated increasing comfort applying theoretical frameworks to real institutional contexts. They reflected on analyzing museums through mission, governance, resources, and capacity—recognizing that engagement strategies cannot be separated from how an organization actually functions. The shared GW Museum case study, while initially frustrating, became a practical laboratory for testing theory against reality. Students noted that working within a single, constrained case forced them to confront tradeoffs, power dynamics, and feasibility—key elements often glossed over in more idealized engagement models.

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EngagingPlaces.net at 15: What the Numbers Say

In 2026, EngagingPlaces.net marks its 15th anniversary. What began in 2011 as a modest professional blog has grown into a widely used resource for history museum and historic site professionals working at the intersection of interpretation, engagement, sustainability, and leadership.

The numbers tell part of the story. In 2011, the site received 1,108 visitors—mostly colleagues and friends in the field. In 2025, EngagingPlaces.net recorded more than 37,000 page views from 22,000 individual visitors, a level of readership that reflects both the scale and the consistency of interest in applied museum practice.

Most readers are based in the United States, with international readership extending—at a distance—to the United Kingdom, Canada, and India. Within the U.S., the largest audiences come from Virginia, California, Texas, and New York, states with dense concentrations of museums, historic sites, and cultural organizations navigating rapid change.

What Readers Come Here For

The most-read posts over time reveal a consistent pattern: practitioners are looking for clear frameworks, practical language, and decision-ready thinking.

Among the most visited pages on the site are:

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From Standards to Spectrums: Why Museum Practice Is Better Understood as a Matrix

One of the things I keep returning to in my teaching and consulting is how much museum work actually lives along a spectrum—not in binary terms of success or failure, right or wrong, compliant or noncompliant.

This is one of the persistent challenges of working with professional standards. Standards are essential. They articulate shared values, define public trust, and help the field hold itself accountable. But by their nature, standards can imply an all-or-nothing logic: either you are doing the thing or you are not. And if you are not, that’s a problem.

Museum management, of course, is far more complex.

Museums and historic sites operate with widely varying levels of capacity, expertise, staffing, governance maturity, and external pressure. Boards change. Funding fluctuates. Crises intervene. Even within a single organization, some areas of work may be highly developed while others lag behind—not because of neglect or incompetence, but because of constrained resources and competing priorities.

Over time, I’ve become interested in how we might better describe and normalize that reality for the field—without lowering expectations or abandoning standards altogether.

Why a Matrix (Not a Scorecard)

In different contexts, I’ve heard similar tools described as rubrics, spectrums, continuums, or maturity models. In my own work, I’ve settled on calling this a matrix, for a very specific reason: it allows us to look across multiple areas of practice at once.

Once you do that, patterns start to emerge.

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When Oversight Becomes Bullying: Lessons from the Smithsonian

In December 2025, the White House sent a letter to the Smithsonian Institution requesting extensive documentation related to exhibitions, educational materials, internal processes, and collections. The request followed an earlier directive tied to an executive order and was framed as part of federal oversight.

In principle, this kind of oversight is not only appropriate—it is necessary. The President and senior staff have a responsibility to ensure that federally-funded institutions are operating effectively and that public resources are protected from waste, fraud, or abuse. Museums, like any other organizations that receive public funds or tax exemptions, should expect scrutiny and be prepared to demonstrate sound management and professional standards.

What concerns me is not the idea of oversight, but the scale, scope, and apparent purpose of this particular request. From a museum management and governance perspective, much of what is being asked for would require significant staff time to assemble, while providing little information that would actually inform decisions about efficiency, risk, misuse of funds, or as they phrased it, “Americanism.”

*Excerpt from August 12, 2025 letter from White House to Smithsonian.*

As someone who has worked with museum boards, executive directors, and city councils for more than three decades, I see troubling patterns here—patterns I have seen before, much closer to home.

First, I’ll share my open letter to Vince Haley, Director of the Domestic Policy Council, and Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, then I’ll relate this to museums and historic sites.

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What Emerging Museum Managers Are Learning—and Why It Matters to the Field

*Discussing current management issues in museums.*

Graduate students recently finishing an introductory course in museum management with me at George Washington University offered useful insights to the field. Their end-of-semester reflections reveal where emerging professionals are gaining traction, where they’re still uncertain, and what this means for museums and nonprofits navigating an increasingly complex landscape.

What’s clicking

A clear shift is underway in how new professionals understand museums. Rather than seeing them as a set of departments or activities, students are beginning to read museums as systems: mission, governance, finances, staffing, and programs working together—or, sometimes, at cross-purposes. Core documents like budgets, Form 990s, strategic plans, and bylaws are no longer viewed as bureaucratic paperwork, but as evidence of priorities, capacity, and risk.

Equally important, many students are learning that management is less about finding the “right” answer and more about making defensible decisions with imperfect information. That realization—often uncomfortable—is a sign of professional formation. They are also becoming more fluent in professional communication: writing memos for decision-makers, structuring findings, and using standards as tools rather than checklists.

Where the strain shows

The productive strain is familiar to anyone who has worked in museums. Students struggled most when ideals collided with constraints—especially around finances, staffing, and governance. They felt the tension between mission-driven aspirations and organizational realities. That’s not a weakness; it’s the work.

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