Author Archives: Max van Balgooy

About Max van Balgooy

President of Engaging Places LLC, a design and strategy firm that connects people to historic places.

Video: “Every Student Succeeds Act” Overview

In this 3:38 video, Education Week’s Alyson Klein provides an overview of the changes brought by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaces No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in the 2017-18 school year. Responsibilities for performance, curriculum, and testing shift from the federal government to the states. For museums and historic sites, that means that your local school district may be adopting new standards of learning, which could prompt you to revise your school programs. States are required to adopt “challenging” academic standards, which could be Common Core but it isn’t required. For more details, take a look at Education Week’s written summary or the analysis in The Atlantic.

Looking for Exhibit Ideas? Check Out These Online Files

Looking for an idea for an upcoming exhibit? Need some alternatives for an interactive activity? Want to know if anyone else has installed an outdoor exhibit at a bus station? You’ll want to explore “Exhibit Files,” a free online collection of exhibition records and reviews for exhibit designers and interpretive planners. The Association of Science-Technology Centers launched this website in 2007 with funding from the National Science Foundation, but despite those affiliations, you’ll find plenty of files related to history, including a case study of Lewis & Clark (the national Bicentennial exhibition); a review of Terror House in Budapest by Daniel Spock of the Minnesota Historical Society; and a case study of a low-tech document-based interactive exhibit at the Missouri State Archives. Because most exhibit techniques can be used with any subject, you can adapt many ideas for your specific needs. The files can be searched by title, date, tag, or topic (such as history or architecture). And if you have an exhibit experience to share or you’re looking to solve a problem, you can join for free and become one of the nearly 3,000 members.

Webinar: The Five Forces Affecting House Museums

This Friday, April 8, I’ll be discussing the five forces facing historic house museums in a free webinar hosted by the Wisconsin Historical Society. It’s based on simple and incredibly useful framework developed by Michael Porter at the Harvard Business School more than 30 years ago but little known outside the corporate business world. I’ll not only examine how the five forces are affecting history museums and historic sites on a national level, but how we can harness those five forces to improve and enhance tours, events, and other public programs. The webinar starts at 10:30 am Central/11:30 am Eastern for about an hour with time for questions and discussion. Registration is free and available online but limited to 100 people (and you don’t have to be from Wisconsin!).

It’s part of series of local history webinars offered every spring for staff and volunteers at local historical societies, historic preservation organizations, and museums. In April and May they are offering nine different webinars, including an introduction to PastPerfect 5 with Sarah Kapellusch, the basics of collections care with Craig Deller, and a fresh look at walking tours with Anthony Rubano. Hats off to the Wisconsin Historical Society for providing this service to museums and historic sites not just in their state, but the rest of the country.

Curated Nutrition Bars Interpret Collections and Earn Income

Curated nutrition bars are turning out to be an effective way to interpret collections and earn income for museums and historic sites across the country. First introduced by the Friends of Gettysburg National Battlefield for the July 2015 re-enactment, the “Blue & Gray Battle Bar” drew inspiration from the historic Civil War battle. “We knew the kinds of foods soldiers were eating so it was just a matter of coming up with a combination that tasted good and was good for you,” said curator John Rupp, “Hard tack, peas, and coffee had to be in there, of course, but we had to work with food scientists to figure out how to include salt pork. Quinoa wasn’t my idea, but someone said we had to include it for marketing purposes.” Fortunately, the curators were also able to have some fun and included minie balls, which also resolves a major deaccessioning challenge because of the thousands that fill their collection.

Other museums and historic sites heard about the success of this venture, especially after it was featured in the fall issue of Museum Business. Currently under development are:

Big Met Bar: It’s so big, you’ll be full before you’re even halfway through.
Smithsonian Behring Bar: a sprinkling of stars from a spangled banner, dinosaurs, pandas, air, space, and some wonder. So many flavors you can’t tell what you’re eating.
Colonial Williamsburg’s Christiana Campbell Bar: crab, salet, and corn pudding dipped in heritage chocolate (with zombies!). It’ll be about 4 inches high and equally thick.

If you know of a museum or historic site that’s developing a Curated bar, please share it in the comments below!

Video: Online Event Sales and Promotion via EventBrite

In this 8:55 video, Steve Dotto at DottoTech explains Eventbrite, a tool that allows you to setup, manage, and promote an event online. Eventbrite can handle paid or free events, allows for discounts, and can accept donations, plus it can create ads for email, Facebook, an event page, or a countdown widget for your website. Eventbrite is free but collects a service fee for each ticket sold for paid events (2.5% + 99¢ per ticket; for nonprofits it is 2.0% + 99¢ per ticket; if the event is free, there’s no charge!). Fees can be passed on to the customer or can be absorbed into the ticket price (a $10 ticket for a museum would incur $1.49 in service fees). You can use PayPal to process payments or use Eventbrite’s payment processing service for 3% of the ticket price.

If your museum or historic site has experience working with Eventbrite, please share what’s worked or not in the comments below.

Interpreting Race: Challenges and Solutions from NCPH

Last year when I was preparing Interpreting African American History and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites, it seemed that the obvious had been overlooked: race. Although we all advocated for the integration of African American history in interpretation in part to overcome racism, I wondered if instead we are inadvertently promoting the idea that races exist and we simply need to find ways to get along, just like dogs and cats in our homes. We never questioned or uncovered the assumptions about race that visitors may carry with them into museums and historic sites. Our bigger concern was that African American history was sufficiently significant to merit preservation and integration into the interpretation.

We know that races do not exist and it was a theory developed by scientists in the 18th and 19th century as a way to explain human differences. Race has long been disproven, but certainly race and racism continues, probably in the minds of many of our visitors. So if more of our visitors could understand that race is socially constructed and artificial, it may go a long way towards Continue reading →

Webinar: How can Historic Sites Make History More Relevant?

On Monday, March 21 at 3:00 pm Eastern/12 pm Pacific, Tim Grove and I will be discussing the History Relevance Campaign during AASLH’s monthly Historic House Call. For the past few years, a dozen people from various history organizations have studied the challenges and opportunities for changing the common attitude that history is nice, but not essential. We won’t have overnight solutions and there’s lots of work to do, but we’ll share what we’ve learned, discuss how it impacts historic house museums, and provide a tool that organizations have found very helpful. The webinar is free but preregistration is required.

If you’re not familiar with the Historic House Call, they are webinars offered through out the year by the Historic House Museum Community of the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH). Upcoming webinars include religion and historic house interpretation and using futures thinking to navigate ongoing change, and a recording of an earlier webinar, “creating engaging and memorable tours” is available. They also have a very active listserv on Yahoo Groups, a growing blog called “Views from the Porch,” and free resources, such as the Technical Leaflet, “How Sustainable is Your Historic House Museum?“

Can the Folger Library Figure Out Its Schizophrenic Photo Policy?

Photo booth at the exhibit that prohibits photography at the Folger Library.

The Folger Library in Washington, DC is one of my favorite places because it’s about books and Elizabethan England, two things that fascinate me. As an historian, books are not an unusual passion but as an American historian, I’m interested in the Elizabethan period because of the comparisons to our Colonial era. So every time the Folger mounts an exhibit in their gallery, I go no matter the topic and want to document what I’ve seen and learned through photos (and share them with you!). And yet, while copyright protects none of the material on exhibit, the guards frequently stop me from taking photos and one time I even had to prove I deleted the images from my camera. The latest exhibit on Shakespeare was photo-prohibited because it was on loan, but again, none of the materials were protected by copyright (all pre-dated 1700). Ironically, at the entrance to the exhibit is a special booth where visitors were asked to share videos or photos of themselves talking about Shakespeare on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Huh? To thine own selfie be true, as long as it doesn’t include any actual historic objects on exhibit.

That’s such a contrast to other museums in DC which encourage photography. The “Wonder” exhibit at the Renwick Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, is filled with contemporary art, which is typically tied up in a particularly rabid form of copyright protection, encourages photography with signs mounted in nearly every gallery. Somehow they’ve figured out how to allow photography by the public without jeopardizing their collections, reputation, or loan agreements.

Museums and libraries have to figure out how to embrace photography.* While overall attendance has dropped for the past thirty years, interest in photography has grown by leaps in bounds.** Indeed, it’s the only cultural or artistic activity that’s growing in the US and by prohibiting it unconditionally, museums and libraries are only further distancing themselves from the rest of America.

*The Rauschenberg Foundation recently developed a radical but thoughtful photography policy, which is described in the New York Times.

**National Endowment for the Arts, “Survey of Public Participation in the Arts,” 2012.

Interactive Station Using a Tablet and Stanchion

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The equipment for interactive displays is becoming increasingly easier, thanks to powerful computer tablets that can show documents, images, and videos. There’s no need to mount a monitor to the wall with a fat cable snaking to a computer unit tucked into a cabinet. I recently saw a nice example of an interactive tablet system at the George Washington University Museum in Washington, DC. The tablet (such as an Apple iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab) is mounted on a stanchion with a special head from the Exhibit Stanchions Group. That’s it. None of the tablet’s ports are blocked so it can be charged or updated even when it’s held in place. The tablet is securely fastened and the stanchion is heavy enough to withstand a casual bump, but if you need to remove the stanchion for an event or use it elsewhere, it can be easily picked up (yes, a thief could steal the whole thing but if they’re walking out the door with a stanchion, you’ve got bigger problems).