Theme 1: Visitors
On the relation of museum to its communities of users.
- Visitor diversity in the inclusive museum
- Defining museum stakeholders and measuring participation
- The politics of heritage: national, regional, ethnic, diasporic and first nation identities
- Multilingualism: accessibility for small languages and cultures
- Gender and sexual orientation in the museum
- Disability access in the museum
- Competing cultures: high, folk, popular, techno-scientific
- Public trust: re-establishing the bases of ‘authority’
- Defining the ‘education’ and ‘communications’ roles of museums
- Pedagogy as presentation or dialogue: how the museum relates to its visitors
- The ubiquitous museum: towards the anywhere anytime learning resource
- Competing pleasures: museums against or with ‘entertainment’ and ‘edutainment’
- Cross connections: with schools, with universities
- Sponsorship and philanthropy: logics and logistics
- The economics of admissions
- Memberships: changing roles and demographics
- Voluntarism and professionalism: calibrating the mix
- Government stakeholders (local, state, national, transnational): museums in politics and navigating government funding and policies
Keywords: Museums, Visitors, Stakeholders, Diversity, Culture, Nation, Region, Ethnicity, Diaspora, First Nations, Multilingualism, Gender, Sexual Orientation, Disability, Education, Communications, Media, Admissions, Sponsorship, Membership, Volunteers, Government
Theme 2: Collections
On the practices and processes of collecting and curating.
- The changing work of the curator
- Exhibition didactics: the dynamics of visitor learning
- The idea of ‘heritage’: changing conceptions of what counts
- Authenticity, decontextualization and recontextualization of objects-on-show
- Custodianship and community assets: meanings and purposes for the museum
- Representing social and cultural intangible heritage
- The ‘ethnographic’ and the ‘anthropological’: framing first peoples and other ‘traditions’
- Technologies in the museum
- Arts in the museum
- Environment in the museum
- The process of acquisition: competing demands and limited resources
- Conservation, preservation: negotiating changing priorities
- Artifacts: what are the objects of the museum?
- Places for amateurism: barefoot repositories and the self-made museum
Keywords: Museums, Curators, Exhibitions, Custodianship, Heritage, Authenticity, Technology, Arts, Environment, Acquisition, Conservation
Theme 3: Representations
On museums as repositories and communicators of culture and knowledge.
- Museums as knowledge makers
- Museums as cultural creators
- Architectonics: designing buildings and information architectures
- Research and investigation in the museum
- Measuring knowledge ‘outputs’
- Intellectual property: commons versus commercialism?
- Knowledge management paradigms and practices
- ‘Neutrality’, ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity’; or ‘narrative’ and ‘politics’? The knowledge rhetorics of the museum
- Knowledge frames: modern and postmodern museums
- Cross connections: with libraries, with galleries, with educational institutions, with arts centers
- The digitization of everything: from collection objects to media representations
- The virtual museum
- Online discoverability and public access
- Museums in and for the knowledge society: preserving heritage ‘born digital’
- New literacies: changing the balance of creative agency in the era of the Internet and new media
- Addressing the digital divide
- Digital disability access
- Cataloguing, metadata, discovery and access
- Internet standards, semantic publishing and the semantic web
Keywords: Museums, Knowledge, Culture, Architecture, Research, Intellectual Property, Digitization, Virtual Museums, Digital Divide, Cataloguing, Discovery, Internet
Presentations at the conference, as well as the journals and books created in this knowledge community, are grouped around the themes listed here. Submissions are welcomed that cross more than one thematic area. Keywords are only indicative - please add your own keywords as you think necessary. The range of ideas listed in each thematic grouping and associated keywords is continually reviewed and revised by the participants in this knowledge community. Please suggest additions and changes.