Download or read book Science Museums in Transition written by Carin Berkowitz and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Outstanding Academic Title 2017, Choice Magazine The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it—an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public—was still very much in formation during this dynamic period. Science Museums in Transition provides a nuanced, comparative study of the diverse places and spaces in which science was displayed at a time when science and spectacle were still deeply intertwined; when leading naturalists, curators, and popular showmen were debating both how to display their knowledge and how and whether they should profit from scientific work; and when ideals of nationalism, class politics, and democracy were permeating the museum’s walls. Contributors examine a constellation of people, spaces, display practices, experiences, and politics that worked not only to define the museum, but to shape public science and scientific knowledge. Taken together, the chapters in this volume span the Atlantic, exploring private and public museums, short and long-term exhibitions, and museums built for entertainment, education, and research, and in turn raise a host of important questions, about expertise, and about who speaks for nature and for history.
Download or read book Science Museums in Transition written by Hooley McLaughlin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-23 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science Museums in Transition: Unheard Voices considers how museums can adapt their exhibits, programs, and organizational structures to the diversity of ideas, people, and cultures that speak to modern science. This collection contains individual expressions by museum insiders addressing a range of particular perspectives – Native American, African American, Latinx, Islamic, Israeli, Danish, white North American. These reflections provide guidance to the museum community as to how their institutions can become more thoughtful, more welcoming to diverse audiences, and more cognizant of the ways that different people incorporate science into their daily lives. As a whole, the book emphasizes the need for museums to engage in dialogue with their visitors – not merely to present them with information – and to offer the opportunities to share experiences, exchange perspectives, and thereby advance science learning through a dynamic and collective process. Science Museums in Transition is intended to further discussion on how museums address the political and social ramifications of science and, as such, should be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of museum studies, science, anthropology, education and history. It should also be essential reading for museum professionals around the globe.
Download or read book Museums in Transition written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Museum in Transition written by Hilde S. Hein and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past thirty years, museums of all kinds have tried to become more responsive to the interests of a diverse public. With exhibitions becoming people-centered, idea-oriented, and contextualized, the boundaries between museums and the “real” world are eroding. Setting the transition from object-centered to story-centered exhibitions in a philosophical framework, Hilde S. Hein contends that glorifying the museum experience at the expense of objects deflects the museum's educative, ethical, and aesthetic roles. Referring to institutions ranging from art museums to theme parks, she shows how deployment has replaced amassing as a goal and discusses how museums now actively shape and create values.
Download or read book Science Museums in Transition written by Carin Berkowitz and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2017-07-19 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it—an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public—was still very much in formation during this dynamic period. Science Museums in Transition provides a nuanced, comparative study of the diverse places and spaces in which science was displayed at a time when science and spectacle were still deeply intertwined; when leading naturalists, curators, and popular showmen were debating both how to display their knowledge and how and whether they should profit from scientific work; and when ideals of nationalism, class politics, and democracy were permeating the museum's walls. Contributors examine a constellation of people, spaces, display practices, experiences, and politics that worked not only to define the museum, but to shape public science and scientific knowledge. Taken together, the chapters in this volume span the Atlantic, exploring private and public museums, short and long-term exhibitions, and museums built for entertainment, education, and research, and in turn raise a host of important questions, about expertise, and about who speaks for nature and for history.
Download or read book Creating Connections written by David Chittenden and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2004 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science museums are in the business of making science accessible to the public--a public constantly bombarded with new information and research results. How the public understands this information will affect what they expect and take away from a museum's exhibits and programs. Creating Connections looks at the public understanding of research (PUR) and how it affects what science museums do. What are the opportunities and critical issues in PUR? What strategies are working and what are some pitfalls? What can be learned from the media's experiences with PUR? Creating Connections will be an invaluable resource for science museum professionals who want to guide their institutions and their visitors toward a new understanding of and appreciation for current research.
Download or read book Museums and the Public Understanding of Science written by John Durant and published by NMSI Trading Ltd. This book was released on 1992 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume are organised thematically. The first essay sets the scene by reviewing the present position and future potential of science museums as educational and cultural resources. The next section is devoted to the role of museum exhibitions and analyses how exhibitions deal with complex material. The third section is concerned with museum programmes and reports on the strengths and weaknesses of different museum programmes, ranging from gallery drama to the Boston Museum's innovative experiment with Science-by-mail.
Download or read book Making Museums Matter written by Stephen Weil and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2012-01-11 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume of 29 essays, Weil's overarching concern is that museums be able to “earn their keep”—that they make themselves matter—in an environment of potentially shrinking resources. Also included in this collection are reflections on the special qualities of art museums, an investigation into the relationship of current copyright law to the visual arts, a detailed consideration of how the museums and legal system of the United States have coped with the problem of Nazi-era art, and a series of delightfully provocative training exercises for those anticipating entry into the museum field.
Download or read book Museums and the public understanding of science written by John Durant and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Do Museums Still Need Objects written by Steven Conn and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this broadly conceived study Steven Conn examines the development of American museums across the twentieth century with a historian's attention and a critic's eye. He focuses on an array of museum types and asks illuminating questions about the relationship between museums and American cultural life.
Download or read book Life on Display written by Karen A. Rader and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rich with archival detail and compelling characters, Life on Display uses the history of biological exhibitions to analyze museums’ shifting roles in twentieth-century American science and society. Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain chronicle profound changes in these exhibitions—and the institutions that housed them—between 1910 and 1990, ultimately offering new perspectives on the history of museums, science, and science education. Rader and Cain explain why science and natural history museums began to welcome new audiences between the 1900s and the 1920s and chronicle the turmoil that resulted from the introduction of new kinds of biological displays. They describe how these displays of life changed dramatically once again in the 1930s and 1940s, as museums negotiated changing, often conflicting interests of scientists, educators, and visitors. The authors then reveal how museum staffs, facing intense public and scientific scrutiny, experimented with wildly different definitions of life science and life science education from the 1950s through the 1980s. The book concludes with a discussion of the influence that corporate sponsorship and blockbuster economics wielded over science and natural history museums in the century’s last decades. A vivid, entertaining study of the ways science and natural history museums shaped and were shaped by understandings of science and public education in the twentieth-century United States, Life on Display will appeal to historians, sociologists, and ethnographers of American science and culture, as well as museum practitioners and general readers.
Download or read book Science for the Nation written by P. Morris and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging study of a great national institution. Essays explore the changing roles of museums and the perceived public role of a museum of science and technology. Illuminates the ways in which we think about the collecting and display of objects and the often difficult relations between the state, business and industry, and museum funding.
Download or read book Idea Colliders written by Michael John Gorman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative call for the transformation of science museums into “idea colliders” that spark creative collaborations and connections. Today's science museums descend from the Kunst-und Wunderkammern of the Renaissance—collectors' private cabinets of curiosities—through the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 to today's “interactive” exhibits promising educational fun. In this book, Michael John Gorman issues a provocative call for the transformation of science museums and science centers from institutions dedicated to the transmission of cultural capital to dynamic “idea colliders” that spark creative collaborations and connections. This new kind of science museum would not stage structured tableaux of science facts but would draw scientists into conversation with artists, designers, policymakers, and the public. Rather than insulating visitors from each other with apps and audio guides, the science museum would consider each visitor a resource, bringing questions, ideas, and experiences from a unique perspective. Gorman, founder of the trailblazing Science Gallery, describes three scenarios for science museums of the future—the Megamuseum Mall, “the Cirque de Soleil of the science museum world”; the Cloud Chamber, a local space for conversations and co-creation; and the invisible museum, digital device-driven informal science learning. He discusses hybrids that experiment with science and art and science galleries that engage with current research, encouraging connection, participation and surprise. Finally, he identifies ten key shifts in the evolution of science museums, including those from large to small, from interactive to participatory, from enclosed to porous, and from subject-specific to cross-disciplinary.
Download or read book The Lost Species written by Christopher Kemp and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We hear routinely about dinosaurs unearthed in the Gobi Desert, about new marsupials found in the forests of Madagascar, about darling deep sea squid in the polar regions. These discoveries tend to be accompanied by wondrous feats of adventuring scientists. But just as one can experience the world in a backyard, or farther reaches of the world with a good book and a comfy armchair, scientists themselves know that the natural history museums of the world contain some of the best terrain for discovering new species. In recent years scientists have found in museum drawers and cabinets a new rove beetle collected by Darwin, a tiny lungless salamander thinner than a matchstick, a monkey from the Brazilian rainforest, and a 40 million year old beardog. The Lost Species shares the thrill of spelunking in museum basements, digging in museum trays, and breathing new life in taxidermied beings--a in a days' adventure for the scientists in this book. These discoveries help tell the story of life, and the priceless collections of natural history museums.
Download or read book Useful Objects written by Reed Gochberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Useful Objects' examines the cultural history of nineteenth-century American museums through the eyes of writers, visitors, and collectors. Throughout this period, museums gradually transformed from encyclopedic cabinets to more specialized public institutions. These changes prompted wider debates about how museums determine what objects to select, preserve, and display-and who gets to decide. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials and accounts in fiction, guidebooks, and periodicals, this text shows how the challenges facing nineteenth-century museums continue to resonate in debates about their role in American culture today.
Download or read book Science Museums Without Walls written by International Council of Museums and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Libraries Archives and Museums in Transition written by Casper Hvenegaard Rasmussen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this anthology, top scholars researching libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) issues in Scandinavia explore pressing issues for contemporary LAMs. In recent decades, relations between libraries, archives, and museums have changed rapidly: collections have been digitized; books, documents, and objects have been mixed in new ways; and LAMs have picked up new tasks in response to external changes. Libraries now host makerspaces and literary workshops, archives fight climate change and support indigenous people, and museums are used as instruments for economic growth and urban planning. At first glance, the described changes may appear as a divergent development, where the LAMs are growing apart. However, this book demonstrates that the present transformation of LAMs is primarily a convergent development. Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Transition will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners seeking to get on top of the LAM literature or the particularities of Scandinavian LAMs.
