I came across the fantastic Some Rules for Students and Teachers, by Sister Corita Kent. With a little modification, I think they’re quite perfect for museum work, too: Find a place (or story or visitors) you trust and then try trusting it for a while. General duties of a museum visitor: Pull everything out of a…
Freiburg’s Colombischlössle Archaeological Museum (or “The Colombi” for those of us who still can’t manage umlauts) has an amazing collection of artifacts from Freiburg’s history, from the Stone Age through the Romans and up to the Middle Ages. But there are two things at the museum that recently caught my eye. The first is the…
I’m not always the biggest fan of dioramas. For me, most have always been a little too dark, a little too static, and just never sparked my imagination the way they do for so many others. I appreciate dioramas. I value the role they play in museums, and I am in awe of the skill…
How do you share your museum’s data? Charts? Lists? Memos? Newsletters? Why don’t you turn all that delightful data into an infographic and… Organize your information in logical and attention-grabbing ways Simplify how you define and describe yourself Embrace color! Share the results of a survey in a new way Market an upcoming event or…
I can’t praise creating beautiful, emotive, unexpected, and fun text without referencing one of my favorite exhibits of all time: the Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s Jellies: Living Art. The exhibit’s now closed, but was it ever something amazing. Showcasing jelly species against paintings, sculptures, and scientific illustrations, the exhibit displayed jellies as pieces of art and wrote about art…
Phylogenetic trees. I love you almost as much as dichotomous keys…almost. Like most charts and graphs, phyogenetic trees aren’t big interpretive hits in museums. The fault isn’t that the information is boring – evolution is about as amazing and awe-inspiring as it gets (for this bio-nerd, anyway). The problem is that the information is too interesting.…
Museums Askew 