The American Precision Museum is housed in the 1846 Robbins & Lawrence Armory, a National Historic Landmark, where in the mid to late 19th century, a group of inventors and machinists perfected the tools and techniques of precision manufacturing. Our project will create a new, long-term exhibition and related programs that explore the themes of innovation and work, and the influence of precision manufacturing on the course of American history. Highly skilled workers produced new machinery that helped drive rapid industrialization, the emergence of the United States as a world power, and the development of the consumer culture. The project will take place over three years from May 2011 to April 2014 and the new exhibition, titled Shaping America: Machines and Machinists at Work, will open in May 2014.
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits: Injury, Death, and Healing in Civil War Philadelphia will transcend the basic facts of war, offering visitors an intimate view of the experiences of real people augmented by anatomical specimens, instruments, manuscripts, images, and printed texts. The exhibit and web-based educational materials will explore two major themes: how the war forced soldiers, healers, and family members to manage injury, recovery, and death in dramatically new ways; and how the lasting effects of the devastating conflict forever changed soldiers’ relationships with their own bodies and minds. In a city with strong historical connections to Civil War medical history, the College’s unique institutional history and unparalleled Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library collections ensure that the exhibit will offer a new view of the conflict, firmly grounded in the medical humanities, to a large, diverse audience.
"In the past several years, New England Aquarium (NEAq) renewed all exhibits, built new additions, and made substantive efforts to restructure its interpretation strategies to transform the visitor experience. With support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant #MA-06-12-0143-12, the Aquarium embarked on A New Strategy for Visitor Engagement: Interpreting our Mission for a Changing World. From fall 2012 through summer 2014, NEAq developed, implemented, and evaluated a comprehensive approach to increasing the capacity of front-line staff and interpreters to engage with
Overview of Clever Together/Juntos somos ingeniosos and Evaluation: As part of the National Science Foundation funded "Sustainability: Promoting Sustainable Decision Making in Informal Education" project, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) and its partners developed a bilingual (Spanish/English) exhibition. The goal of this and other project deliverables was to promote sustainable decision making by building skills that allow participants to weigh their choices and choose more sustainable practices. Clever Together/Juntos somos ingeniosos is a permanent, bilingual exhibition at
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Oregon Museum of Science and IndustryRenee B. Curtis
Although studies in a variety of settings suggest that participant reactions to the research context can threaten the validity and generalizability of study findings, there have been almost no investigations of participant reactivity in museums. In this experimental study, the authors compared the behaviors and learning outcomes of visitors at two versions of an interactive mathematics exhibit who had either been actively recruited by a data collector or passively recruited using posted signage. They assessed the amount of time visitors spent at the exhibit, the number of mathematical exhibit
The four New England museums of the Environmental Exhibit Lab (EEC) set out in the Fall of 2011 to create a replicable model of collaborative professional development for small museums. At small institutions, impending deadlines, budget and staffing limitations, and professional isolation all too often get in the way of true innovation. The goal of Exhibit Lab was to help staff who, though conversant with current museum theory, sometimes struggle to apply that theory to their daily work, or to disseminate these ideas through an institution. Exhibit Lab relied on a carefully crafted mix of meetings, workshops and staff exchanges, a combination of outside experts and peer-to-peer mentoring, to foster a community of practitioners, engaged in collaborative learning-by-doing. In short, the participants created a "virtual department" in which we came to rely as quickly on our peers in a partner museum as quickly as we would to a co-worker down the hall had we worked in a larger museum. The Exhibit Lab project focused on the work of the Exhibit and Program/Education staffs, but we feel that the project model holds lessons for other museum departments, and for museums outside the Children's and Science museum sphere.
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Worcester Natural History Society dba EcoTariumBetsy LoringAlexander GoldowskySuzanne OlsonChris SullivanPhelan FretzJulie SilvermanNeil GordonDenise LeBlancJoseph P. Cox
The four New England museums of the Environmental Exhibit Lab (EEC) set out in the Fall of 2011 to create a replicable model of collaborative professional development for small museums. The project, Exhibit Lab (sometimes called “EEC 2”), was funded by a 3-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services [2011 21st Century Museum Professionals Program; IMLS Log Number: MP-00-11-0049-11]. At small institutions, impending deadlines, budget and staffing limitations, and professional isolation all too often get in the way of true innovation. The goal of Exhibit Lab was to help staff
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Betsy LoringAlexander GoldowskyDenise LeBlancJulie SilvermanLucia StancioffChris Sullivan