Author Archives: Max van Balgooy

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About Max van Balgooy

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

AASLH Conference Offering Lots for Historic Sites

Preliminary program for the 2012 AASLH Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City.

The program for the annual meeting (aka conference) of the American Association for State and Local History just arrived in my mailbox.  Flipping through its pages, there are more than 70 educational sessions, many that focus specifically on historic sites and house museums including:

  • Twilight at Conner Prairie: The Creation, Betrayal, and Rescue of a Museum
  • Too Important to Fail: Historic House Museums Meet Communities’ Needs
  • Business Models and Earned Income for Historic Houses
  • Visitors to Religious Sites: The Whos and Whys
  • Historic Places as Museums: Crossroads of Expectations
  • Re-imagining Historic Sites: Three Roads to the Same Destination
  • Paranormal Policies (if your site hasn’t been contacted by paranormal researchers in pursuit of ghosts, your time will come)

In addition, most of the other sessions are helpful, depending on your needs and interests.  There are sessions on fixing poorly functioning Continue reading →

Amelia Wong Joins Museum Studies Faculty at GWU

Amelia Wong, currently the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s senior social media strategist, will be joining the fulltime faculty of the Museum Studies Program at George Washington University this fall as an assistant professor. Amelia holds a BA from UCLA in history and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. Amelia’s scholarship focuses on how museums, especially those concerned with democratization, can engage critically with technology for their goals. Her dissertation, “Museums, Social Media, and the Fog of Community,” reflects her research interests and
is the first book-length project about social media in American museums.

At the Holocaust Museum, the Twitter community has grown from 2000 to over 100,000 people under her direction. Amelia also developed and produced an ongoing Web series, “Curators’ Corner,” which gives the public, donors and others an inside look at the
museum’s collections via short multimedia presentations narrated by museum staff. During her first year at the museum, Amelia proposed, Continue reading →

Comments on IMLS Revised Grant Guidelines Due Today

A crew from Alabama repairing downed power lines in Maryland near my office.

Electrical power was out in my part of the world for a couple days earlier this week due to the fierce thunderstorm that struck the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic on Friday.  Some parts are still without power and although I haven’t conducted a survey to see how the nearby historic sites fared, I have heard that one historic house museum in Virginia is facing about $30,000 of clean-up costs due to fallen trees and branches.

But power and Internet have been restored to my office, just in time to submit my comments to IMLS on their revised guidelines to their grant program.  Comments are due today to comments@imls.gov.  Here’s what I submitted:

Please accept these comments for the public record regarding the draft guidelines for the FY 2013 Museums for America and National Leadership Grants for Museums programs of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

I appreciate the federal Continue reading →

AASLH Council Meets in Maine

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This past Saturday, the Council (aka board) of the American Association for State and Local History met in Maine for one of their three regular meetings each year.  It’s been a tough few months due to the discovery of embezzlement and fraud within the organization, so this meeting had been preceded by nearly a dozen additional meetings of the Council and several committees by conference call to deal with various aspects related to the situation, potential threats to the organization, and improvements to our current financial management by reviewing and revising various policies, procedures, and practices.  This meeting adopted revised financial policies and procedures; adopted revised codes of ethics for board, staff, and organization; adopted a revised conflict of interest policy for board and staff; and discussed how the by-laws may need to revise the finance and audit committee responsibilities as well reconsider how Council members are elected to ensure we have sufficient people on board with financial skills.  We also began working more strategically, looking longterm to identify priorities so we can preserve those programs that matter most to members and most effectively fulfill the mission.  History News and the annual meeting/conference rose to the top as expected, but Continue reading →

Detour Ahead for National Trust’s Main Street Program?

Preservationists in Frederick, Maryland, which received a Great American Main Street Award in 2011.

In a move that will surprise many who work in historic preservation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has decided to move its Main Street program to a separate non-profit subsidiary and three of its senior staff members–Doug Loescher, Lauren Adkins, and Andrea Dono–have decided to leave the organization.  Main Street was created more than thirty years ago to help revitalize historic downtowns and commercial districts and its work was so highly regarded that the National Trust presented its own Honor Award to its founders–Mary Means, Scott Gerloff, Tom Moriarity, and Clark Schoettle–in 2004.  In a  email message on June 18, Executive Vice President David Brown wrote:

As most of you are aware, since the launch of the Preservation10X framework last September, we have been engaged in a focused and inclusive process to assess the current status of the National Trust Main Street program and the Main Street Center, in order to arrive at the best path forward for Main Street. Thank you for the excellent input many of you have provided during this process.

Main Street is one of the most valued programs of the National Trust. It has achieved unprecedented stature nationwide as a highly successful preservation-based economic development program and enjoys great popularity among a wide constituent base. In many ways it has far surpassed Continue reading →

Slave for a Day? I’m Not Sure This is a Good Idea

Footsteps of the Enslaved, a new program at Hampton

Hampton, a National Historic Site operated by the National Park Service, recently announced a “Slave for a Day” program which will allow visitors, to, “Experience agricultural labor that enslaved people may have performed at Hampton. Work in the fields with actual hoes and scythes. Carry buckets of water with a yoke on your shoulders.” After a chorus of howls went up on the Internet, the title was changed to the much more tame, “Walk a Mile, a Minute in the Footsteps of the Enslaved on the Hampton Plantation” but the program content remained the same. I certainly want to encourage the ranger who developed the program to continue to pursue her passion for African American history, but I’m not sure these activities, as described, get visitors to fully understand what life was like for enslaved people.  Antebellum farming is about hard work; Continue reading →

Changes at Google+ Creates Opportunities for Museums and Sites

Okay, everyone knows about Google but Google+ and Google Places is still a mystery for many people.  It may become a bit simpler because the rumor is that Google Places is slowly being replaced by Google+ Local.  Or did that just complicate things?  Let’s start over.

Google search results for “historic sites in philadelphia”

Google has launched new search results that include the usual title, web link, and brief description, but now adds the address, phone number, shows the location on a map, a link to reviews, and a Zagat ranking on a scale of 1 to 30.  In the example to the left, you’ll see the search results for “historic sites in Philadelphia” and that the Eastern State Penitentiary (the third item) received a Zagat rating of 25 (it really is an amazing place) and has 81 Google reviews (wow! their visitors have opinions).  This new form of listing doesn’t occur for every city, just those that seem to have enough places to warrant them (right now, this list appears for Denver but not San Francisco).  Local information is being integrated across Google (including the Zagat ratings, which was acquired by Google last year), so you’ll find Continue reading →

IMLS’ Revised Grant Guidelines Need Revision

In May, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)–the national agency devoted to museums and libraries–released a new set of proposed guidelines that would significantly revise their grant programs for museums (and that includes historic sites, historical societies, house museums, and preservation organizations).  Initially, these changes were proposed to go into effect without comment from the field, but fortunately enough museums spoke up that director Susan Hildreth changed her mind and announced she would welcome comments–but the comment period ends on Friday, July 6, 2012.

According to IMLS, the guidelines affect the Museums for America and National Leadership Grants for Museums programs, however, the impact is much larger because these programs are proposed to consume two other grant programs: Conservation Project Support and 21st Century Museum Professionals.  Claudia French, deputy director for museums, proposed the changes so that the grant programs would align better with the IMLS strategic plan and make it easier for grantees and IMLS staff.

Here are the major changes that caught my eye:

1.  One deadline to rule them all:  January 15.  Currently, the deadlines for Continue reading →

Google Launches World Wonders Project

Independence Hall in Google World Wonders. To protect the statue’s identity, his face has been blurred!

Google recently launched its World Wonders Project, an edited compilation of world heritage sites using its Street View technology to “bring to life the wonders of the modern and ancient world.”  If you’re not already familiar with Street View, it allows you to navigate Google Maps through 360-degree images so you can look left, right, up, and down.  At present, they’ve assembled 132 sites from 18 countries, including Stonehenge, Pompeii, Versailles, and Himeji Castle. Sites are organized by location and theme, and each site features a large navigable photo with a map and a slide-out window of information, video, and photographs.  The World Wonders Project also includes education packages for primary and secondary levels that are linked to specific “wonders,” such as “liberty and the US declaration of independence” for Independence Hall.  These are large zipped files, so I didn’t investigate them.

It’s exciting that Google is working with Unesco and the World Monuments Fund to bring  attention to this amazing places, but there’s some work to do.  First of all, Continue reading →

Experiential Courses Offer Opportunity to Explore Places

Map of City Semester field projects in New York City.

If you hear the words, “experiential, expeditionary, or hands-on learning,”  “adventure education,” or “outdoor education director” in your school district, it may be an opportunity to present your museum or historic site as a valuable resource.  For decades, schools have focused on formal educational process emphasizing lectures and textbooks, but that seems to be changing according to Jenny Anderson in her New York Times article, “For Bronx Private School, All the City’s a Classroom in an Experiential Course.”  She describes the City Semester: The Bronx Experience, new educational venture by the private Ethical Cultural Fieldson School.  It’s a semester-long program that, “integrates history, English, science, ethics, language, civic leadership and the arts around the study of New York City- through the lens of the Bronx. Like other semester programs, City Semester offers a chance to step outside your everyday routine, have an adventure, challenge your assumptions and grow in new ways.” Each week the class combines classwork with at least one day in the city visiting businesses and historic sites (such as Woodlawn Cemetery and the Louis Armstrong House), Continue reading →