Category Archives: Books and articles

Challenges and Opportunities Facing Historic Sites and House Museums

This fall I’ll be teaching the historic site and house museum interpretation class in the Museum Studies Program at George Washington University.  Department Chair Kym Rice graciously offered me this opportunity earlier this summer and I couldn’t resist.  I’ve been impressed by the caliber of GW students and I count many of their graduates among my friends and colleagues.  Today is the first class and participating are fifteen graduate students, mostly in museum studies with a handful from history and anthropology.  We will  have some fun discussions!

During the next few months, I’ll share my experiences with you and I thought I’d start by laying out the initial readings for the course, which focus on the opportunities and challenges in interpreting historic sites.  It was hard to pick and choose among Continue reading →

VSA: Why Teachers Visit Historic Sites

The April 2012 (15:1) issue of Visitor Studies, the semi-annual journal of the Visitor Studies Association, just arrived and it includes, “Motivating Participation in National Park Service Curriculum-Based Education Programs” by Marc Stern, Elizabeth Wright, and Robert Powell.  It’s a rare examination of the reasons why teachers visit (or don’t visit) historic sites.  For anyone that provides school programs, its findings provide some useful guidelines.

The study attempts to “understand why teachers at schools within the immediate vicinity of Great Smoky Mountains National Park attend, or don’t attend, the park’s curriculum-based programs.”  To discover the perceived benefits and disadvantages of participation, they conducted a preliminary focus group with teachers and then surveyed 400 teachers in fourteen schools and interviewed school administrators.  Although this study’s focus was on a national park’s programs for a middle and high school audience, there are some surprising findings that may cause you to question your assumptions even if you’re an historic site focusing on the elementary grade levels.  Here’s a quick summary:

  1. Administrators are most concerned about Continue reading →

HBR: To Engage Your Visitors, Keep it Simple

"To Keep Your Customers, Keep it Simple" by Patrick Spenner and Karen Freeman (Harvard Business Review, May 2012)

The May 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review arrived a little early to my mailbox, but I couldn’t stop from sharing a great article on engaging customers in business world that can easily be translated to engaging visitors and building support for historic sites and museums.  In “To Keep Your Customers, Keep It Simple,” Patrick Spenner and Karen Freeman note the paradox of today’s promotional techniques:

Companies have ramped up their messaging, expecting that the more interaction and information they provide, the better the chances of holding on to these increasingly distracted and disloyal customers.  But for many consumers, the rising volume of marketing messages isn’t empowering–it’s overwhelming.  Rather than pulling customers into the fold, marketers are pushing them away with relentless and ill-conceived efforts to engage.

This conclusion is based on multiple surveys of more than 7,000 consumers which were then compared to interviews with 200 marketing executives representing 125 brands.  Their pointed out that what consumers what and what companies think consumers want didn’t correspond to each other, or in biz speak, it’s a Continue reading →

Renting an Academic Research Article Now Possible

Conducting scholarly research has become much easier thanks to DeepDyve, a company that makes “authoritative information more affordable and accessible to users who are unaffiliated with a college or university and therefore lack easy and affordable access to scholarly sources of information.”  They’re a Netflix for academic journals.

If you’re like me, access to journals is nearly impossible unless you have access to something like JStor–an incredibly expensive option for occasional use (although JStor may soon be improving access for individuals).  DeepDyve allows you to search for articles in one place and if you find what you’re seeking, provides two options:  rent or purchase.  Renting gives you read-only access (no printing or downloading allowed) for a low cost.  If you want to print or save it, you can purchase a pdf copy.   If you want to investigate it, they’ve made it easier by providing a 14-day free trial.

Among the journals they currently list that might be of interest to those working with historic places are: Continue reading →

Preservation Books Takes a Sabbatical

Preservation Books, the publisher and distributor of books, reports, and studies on the management, preservation, and interpretation of historic sites has closed and is sending its inventory to Amazon.com.  Here’s the notice on their web site:

It’s a brave new world in publishing and Preservation Books will not be left behind. In order to bring exceptional preservation tools and information to our members, Preservation Books is going on sabbatical and will spend the next six months researching new technologies, testing potential platforms, and re-evaluating how and what we publish.

But what does that mean? We are no longer selling books on www.preservationbooks.org. However, our best sellers and most recent titles (see the full list below) are available through Amazon.com.

Books published by the National Main Street Center will now be sold by them.  We’re not sure when this notice was posted so we don’t know when the six months will conclude.  We understand there are more shoppers at Amazon.com so that’s a better place to distribute books but we’ll be sorry if the National Trust decides to end the publishing business–it is one of the nation’s leading publishers of books on historic preservation, putting out such popular titles as Housekeeping for Historic Homes and House Museums, The Economics of Historic Preservation, Feasibility Assessment Manual for Reusing Historic Buildings, and Takings Law in Plain English.

Will iBooks Textbooks Extend the Reach of Historic Sites?

iBook textbook on an iPad. Image courtesy of Apple, Inc.

Today at the historic Guggenheim Museum in New York, Apple announced an expansion of their iBooks app to include textbooks for their iPads.  Students will no longer have to lug around heavy books, content will be always be current, and it will cost less.  As Apple describes it:

A Multi-Touch textbook on iPad is a gorgeous, full-screen experience full of interactive diagrams, photos, and videos. No longer limited to static pictures to illustrate the text, now students can dive into an image with interactive captions, rotate a 3D object, or have the answer spring to life in a chapter review. They can flip through a book by simply sliding a finger along the bottom of the screen. Highlighting text, taking notes, searching for content, and finding definitions in the glossary are just as easy. And with all their books on a single iPad, students will have no problem carrying them wherever they go.

They’ve already partnered with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, and McGraw Hill to produce textbooks on math and science.  With the big publishers in play, what’s in it for historic sites and history organizations? A lot. Continue reading →

What do You do with Collections in a 21st Century House Museum?

Museums and the Disposals Debate, 2011

One of the findings of the 2007 Kykuit Conference was that “undefined collecting coupled with a lack of professional standards and inconsistent practices regarding deaccessioning are an impediment to change and sustainability” and recommended that “selected sites should develop a pilot process to streamline deaccessioning and share their results with the field.”

Some of this work may have just been accomplished with the publication of Museums and the Disposal Debate, an anthology of essays edited by Peter Davies.  At a hefty 600 pages, it includes two dozen contributions from museums from around the English-speaking world but for those working at historic house museums, you’ll be most interested in “Too Much of a Good Thing: Lessons from Deaccessioning at National Trust Historic Sites” by Terri Anderson, the John and Neville Bryan Director of Museum Collections at the National Trust for Historic Preservation (she moderated the standing-room only session on deaccessioning for AAM a couple years ago).  I read an early version of her essay and it’s the best I’ve seen written on the particular challenges facing deaccessioning at historic sites, which are distinctly different from other museums.

The talk of becoming “21st century museums” is often coded language for Continue reading →

Want Buy-In? Build Trust

John Kotter is a prolific author of books about “change” in organizations.  Getting people, organizations, and communities to move in new directions or to end old habits is difficult, but he’s developed lots of practical strategies and outlined a step-by-step process to succeed based on his studies of dozens of companies.  Fundamental is a relationship of trust among the participants (e.g., managers and employees, city council and residents, historic sites and neighbors), which is a result of transparency and openness, and a willingness to listen and discuss tough issues.  It sounds obvious but I’ve seen national organizations create an atmosphere of suspicion, hostility, and fear simply because they hold too many closed door meetings, only communicate bland or stale news when the environment is clearly unsettled, and won’t answer simple questions about what’s happening.  The result is change has to be forced (and enforced and reinforced) and buy-in, participation, and support is low.  It’s the worst way to implement change, except for war.

If you’re dealing with change at your historic site or house museum (either leading or experiencing it), John Kotter introduces this idea in, “Levering Trust to Achieve Buy-In,”  a short video at Forbes posted last week.  If you want to explore his ideas further, I’ve found his books Leading Change (a classic) and Buy-In:  Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down (really a handbook, great for advocacy and fundraising) to be helpful.

Is an Organizational Hybrid for Non-Profits and For-Profits on the Horizon?

In my work with historic sites, financially sustainability is one of the major challenges, and many are seeking advice from business leaders to increase their earned income.  It’s often an awkward situation because business owners don’t share the same values for preservation and history, and non-profits are uncomfortable with the risks associated with entrepreneurship.  Much time is spent explaining and defending various practices, and making decisions is incredibly slow.  But there may be an answer.  This month’s issue of the Harvard Business Review predicts that the growing desire to meld non-profit mission and for-profit entrepreneurship will create a new form of organizational structure:  the for-benefit enterprise.

For-benefits are a new class of organization.  Like non-profits, they can pursue a wide range of social missions.  Like for-profits, they can generate a broad range of products and services that improve quality of life for consumers, create jobs, and contribute to the economy.  Combining social and commercial ends is not new–think of hospitals, universities, arts organizations, Goodwill.  But the for-benefit model does much more than that.  It redefines fiduciary duty, governance, ownership, and stakeholder relationships in fundamental ways.

Author Heerad Sabeti calls this a fourth sector of the economy, distinct from government, non-profits, and commercial businesses, with the following characteristics: Continue reading →