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Long regarded as one the leading texts in museology, "Introduction to Museum Work" in now thoroughly revised and updated. While citing recent changes in the museum world, the third edition of Burcaw's classic work retains its useful philosophical orientation and convenient summary format. All the basics of museology are here-the central issues are discussed and definitions are given for all the terms museum workers need to know. Every chapter includes practical exercises making Burcaw's book ideal for the classroom or for novice museum workers. Accepted by the Documentation Center of the International Conference of Museums as exemplary of museum training, "Introduction to Museum Work" is used as a basic text in museum studies all over the world. ... Read more

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Introduction to Museum Work
I ordered this book on line through Amazon.com and as of now have not received the book.Your help in expediting the delivery of this book to me would be appreciated.

Museums 101
This is a text book on museum science. It covers all phases of designing, building, financing and operating a museum from the very basics. I have used it extensively to develop policies and procedures for the MinnesotaTransportation Museum as we grow from a trolley ride to a major museumsite. Everyone in the museum/history center/science center business shouldread this and see that other members of the trustees and employees haveread this as well.Most valuable is the discussion of the responsibilitiesof the board of trustees, executive director, curator and other employees.Though the book is small, it gives you a good foundtation to build upon forany phase of museum work. ... Read more

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An interesting perspective on Victorian science
I have found one of the most interesting dimensions of Victorian intellectual history (of which there are many) is the development and distribution of new scientific information.After all, this is the period when Darwin in 1859 unloaded his "Origin of Species."But there was much more going on than evolution, both before and after Darwin's bombshell.This essay collection looks at how science was disseminated during the 19th century. It discusses this process under several general topics.For example, under "Orality," there are essays on the important role of public lecturing (something much scarcer today) as a device for reaching the general public with new concepts, such as "phrenology."A second major method was, of course, through print, including handbooks published to assist museum visitors as they reviewed exhibits. A third device was "display," involving exhibits at private homes, the amazing spectacle of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, and of course the variety of museums throughout London. The co-editors are leading scholars in this field, as are the contributors. Each chapter has an excellent bibliography attached, and there are many helpful illustrations included. At 400 pages, this is a long book, but seldom does it drag and it opened up for me a number of concepts with which I had not previously had familiarity.An important addition to the available literature on this topic. ... Read more

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What goes into planning a successful exhibition, and how do we know one when we see it? This book gathers the thinking of leading exhibition professionals in a point-counterpoint format that grew out of an invitational conference at the Exploratorium. Featured are descriptions of "Twelve Noteworthy Science Exhibitions," including budgets and timelines, project goals, participants, and narratives of the exhibition development process. A CD augments these descriptions with color images and several video walkthroughs. The concluding section, "In the Vernacular," suggests strategies for keeping creativity alive while learning from past practice, using three novel formats—a "Creativity Killers" poster to hang by your desk, a "Muzine" full of irreverent ideas, and tear-out "Weed Seeds" cards with tips for encouraging innovation. Sponsored by the Exploratorium. ... Read more

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Acknowledged as the international standard text for basic security procedures in museums, now fully revised, enlarged and updated. ... Read more

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The architecture of British natural history museums reveals the complex definitions of nature in the 19th century. "Nature's Museums" allows the buildings themselves to act as a guide to the Victorians' understanding of the natural world.Amazon.com Review
Scientists in the medieval and early-modern eras faced manyobstacles to sharing their discoveries, among them the lack oforganized, comparative collections of specimens. Such assemblages werealmost exclusively in the hands of wealthy individuals, and scholarsof more modest means had to content themselves with "cabinets ofwonder," potpourris of natural curiosities whose message was often nomore profound than "behold, death is near."

One of the signal developments of the Victorian era, observes arthistorian Carla Yanni, was the building of great museums, accessibleto both scholars and the interested public, to house large collectionsof fossils, minerals, and other relics of the natural world. Some ofthese museums, such as London's Pantherion, offered astonishing andsometimes fictitious spectacles: in the Pantherion, for example,"stuffed animals were staged in frightening battles," while a greatartificial swamp filled with sculptures of dinosaurs ringed theSydenham Crystal Palace. Others, such as the incomparable NaturalHistory Museum of London, became clearinghouses for the exchange ofscientific ideas in the age of Darwin and Huxley. By the 1880s,science museums of all kinds had become popular destinations forfamily outings, and also the subject of considerable debate, with somescholars objecting to the supposed vulgarization of knowledge to whichspectacles inevitably led.

But, Yanni notes, in their many forms, these museums also became the"primary places of interaction between natural science and its diversepublics," allowing greater participation in learning and ultimatelyserving science well. Heavily illustrated with period engravings andarchitectural renderings, Yanni's book is a useful and entertainingcontribution to the history of science. --Gregory McNamee ... Read more

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Old curiosity shops
As a rule, when considering whether to buy an academic monograph, I check the endnotes for the introduction for the name of Foucault. If it's there, I don't buy.

I neglected to do this with "Nature's Museums." Foucault is here, but, for a change, architectural historian Carla Yanni and most of the authorities she cites find his categories of space don't fit Victorian natural history museums.

The news is, however, not all good. Yanni is a confessed postmodernist and believer in its theories of science. Basically, that science doesn't exist. That it is "socially constructed" and "gains legitimacy from its local associations."

This is not so, but if it were so, then, if we follow Yanni's examination of the development of four major (and several minor) natural history museums in Great Britain, then she would have hard time explaining why we are not all creationists still. Because creationists, principally Richard Owen, dominated the money-raising, concepts, iconography, choice of exhibits and public face of the museums.

This contradiction is not apparent to Yanni because she misunderstands the outcome of the creationism/evolution contest. She downplays the triumph of Darwinism (which had swept all before it within three years or so, despite what Thomas Kuhn may say about paradigm shifts) and overstates the coexistence of religion and science in Victorian Britain.

True, many, perhaps most, practicing biologists remained Christians and perhaps not merely nominal ones. But Christianity had changed. Darwin forced it to abandon perfectionism and to give up the doctrine of the fixity of species. Paley, cited often here, would not have recognized scientists of the late 19th century as Christians.

Well, so much for the confusions that underlie the analysis. Is there anything interesting left? Not much.

Yanni makes much of a supposed split between artifice and nature, or "God-created" and "man -created," which, according to her, started the century mixed together in collections but ended it each with its own structures, to which architects -- the focus of her interest -- contributed an intellectual framework. This sounds plausible until you compare it with evidence.

Museums, of course, became specialized, but there was and is no particular animus against mixing. The Bishop Museum, contemporaneous with the British Museum (Natural History), which bills itself as the greatest museum in the Pacific, happily combines ethnological, artistic and natural collections. Many state museums, as for example in Virginia and Iowa, do, too. A good example is the Falls of the Ohio museum operated by the state of Indiana at Jeffersonville. And the ultimate refutation -- in origin Victorian, too -- would be what is probably the most popular natural history exhibit in North America (if not the whole world), which combines natural history, art, technology and social history -- the glass flowers at the Agassiz Museum at Harvard University.

There's not much left, even for people who seek out natural history museums and take an interest in their curatorial history. (Which people do. The Peabody, on the opposite side of the wall from the glass flowers, has preserved a whole floor unchanged from the 19th century in order to demonstrate how display practices have changed.)

Science advances on a broad front, and, unlike architecture, it cannot go back. If Huxley rather than Owen had dominated the design of the British museums, which are almost all still in use today, their 21st century uses would not be much different. It may be incongruous that secularized scientists (and tourists) enter the Oxford University Museum through a portal guarded by an angel, but no more so than to see modern-day Christians who no longer believe in, say, the virgin birth, worshipping in churches layered with statues of Mary.

The text of "Nature's Museums" is not long, as the book is copiously illustrated. The illustrations are, however, too small to reveal much. The book might be of some interest to anyone visiting the museums today: the Hunterian, the Edinburgh, the Oxford or the British are examined in detail, with others, like the Dublin, alluded to.

The Hunterian, by the way, also confutes Yanni's theory of museumology. According to her, the explicit science museums did not develop from the "cabinets of wonder" but were novel Victorian establishments, arising from heterogeneous and haphazard collections that were dumped on the universities or nation.

The Hunterian, however, was a thoughtfully amassed collection that included both curiosities and deliberate "preparations," and it was explicitly pedagogical. It also was Georgian, not Victorian.

Furthermore, Yanni is wrong to suggest that the practice of dumping curiosities on the nation was a 19th century innovation. It's true that middle class collectors of the Renaissance, like Worm, kept their collections in their houses (where else?) for themselves, but in classical times, wealthy collectors did what Victorian scientists and patrons did: They put their most spectacular items on display in public buildings. In their case, temples. See my review of Adrienne Mayor's "The First Fossil Hunters."
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With the development of institutions displaying natural science, history, and artin the late 19th century camethe debates over the role of these museum in society. This anthology collects 52 of the most important writings on museum philosophy dating from this formative period, written by the many of the American and European founders of the field. Genoways and Andrei contextualize these pieces with a series of introductions showing how the museum field developed within the social environment of the era. For those interested in museum history and philosophy or cultural history, this is an essential resource. ... Read more

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Museum Inquiries
Anybody interested in art and colllectibles, ideology and ethnocentrism must
pursue museum inquiries. This is a must-have book. ... Read more

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In a companion to The Science Explorer, both chidren and parents can learn about a variety of objects while enjoying exciting experiments and discoveries inside and outside of the home. Original. 50,000 first printing." ... Read more

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Science Teacher Resource Material
This volume from the Exploratorium in San Francisco is a must resource for all Middle School and Junior High School science teachers.Don't requisition it -- just buy it -- before it's completely out of print and gone!js ... Read more

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The influence of digital media on the cultural heritage sector has been pervasive and profound. Today museums are reliant on new technology to manage their collections. They collect digital as well as material things. New media is embedded within their exhibition spaces. And their activity online is as important as their physical presence on site.

However, ‘digital heritage’ (as an area of practice and as a subject of study) does not exist in one single place. Its evidence base is complex, diverse and distributed, and its content is available through multiple channels, on varied media, in myriad locations, and different genres of writing.

It is this diaspora of material and practice that this Reader is intended to address. With over forty chapters (by some fifty authors and co-authors), from around the world, spanning over twenty years of museum practice and research, this volume acts as an aggregator drawing selectively from a notoriously distributed network of content. Divided into seven parts (on information, space, access, interpretation, objects, production and futures), the book presents a series of cross-sections through the body of digital heritage literature, each revealing how a different aspect of curatorship and museum provision has been informed, shaped or challenged by computing.

Museums in a Digital Age is a provocative and inspiring guide for any student or practitioner of digital heritage.

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A definitive guide to best practice in museums, at a time in which all museums require ever more innovative solutions to processes of interpreting the world's cultural and scientific heritage. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A solid read!
Handbook for Museums is an excellent source for both the inexperienced andthe veteran.The book covers a wide range of topics, from artifactconservation to ethics.I found the information contained to be of greathelp to my budding museum career.

The book is written simply andconcepts are easily grasped. As a bonus, each chapter includes a 'Questionsfrom the Field' section, in which FAQs about subjects relating to thechapter are answered.In short, Edson and Dean stick to facts and keep itsimple.

Due to large field of subjects covered, do not expect a technicaldissertation in each chapter.This may not bode well with some people,however I feel the information contained applies to all skill levels andpositions in the museum field.

'Handbook for Museums' is an excellentread; it's great for both classroom study or working reference.Definitelya 'Thumbs Up'! ... Read more

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"We live in a museum age," writes Steven Conn in Do Museums Still Need Objects? And indeed, at the turn of the twenty-first century, more people are visiting museums than ever before. There are now over 17,500 accredited museums in the United States, averaging approximately 865 million visits a year, more than two million visits a day. New museums have proliferated across the cultural landscape even as older ones have undergone transformational additions: from the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan in New York to the High in Atlanta and the Getty in Los Angeles. If the golden age of museum-building came a century ago, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Field Museum of Natural History, and others were created, then it is fair to say that in the last generation we have witnessed a second golden age.

By closely observing the cultural, intellectual, and political roles that museums play in contemporary society, while also delving deeply into their institutional histories, historian Steven Conn demonstrates that museums are no longer seen simply as houses for collections of objects. Conn ranges across a wide variety of museum types—from art and anthropology to science and commercial museums—asking questions about the relationship between museums and knowledge, about the connection between culture and politics, about the role of museums in representing non-Western societies, and about public institutions and the changing nature of their constituencies. Elegantly written and deeply researched, Do Museums Still Need Objects? is essential reading for historians, museum professionals, and those who love to visit museums.

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Each year the more than seven thousand museums in the United States attract more attendees than either movies or sports. Yet until recently, museums have escaped serious political analysis. The past decade, however, has witnessed a series of unusually acrimonious debates about the social, political, and moral implications of museum exhibitions as varied as the Enola Gay display at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum and the "Sensation" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

In this important volume, Timothy W. Luke explores the power that museums have to shape collective values and social understandings, and argues persuasively that museum exhibitions have a profound effect on the body politic. Through discussions of topics ranging from how the National Holocaust Museum and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles have interpreted the Holocaust to the ways in which the American Museum of Natural History, the Missouri Botanical Gardens, and Tucson's Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum have depicted the natural world, Luke exposes the processes through which museums challenge but more often affirm key cultural and social realities.

Timothy W. Luke is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. ... Read more

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A Companion to Museum Studies captures the multidisciplinary approaches to the study of the development, roles, and significance of museums in contemporary society. It is an indispensable reference for art historians, museum curators, and art and culture lovers.

• Collects first-rate original essays by leading figures from a range of disciplines and theoretical stances, including anthropology, art history, history, literature, sociology, cultural studies, and museum studies
• Examines the complexity of the museum from cultural, political, curatorial, historical and representational perspectives
• Covers traditional subjects, such as space, display, buildings, objects and collecting, and more contemporary challenges such as visiting, commerce, community and experimental exhibition forms

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Not a day goes by without media headlines trumpeting the discovery of new planets, discussing the pros and cons of cloning experiments or explaining our new-found ability to teleport atoms. As we switch on the television we see walking and talking robots, private jets that ferry travellers to the edge of space and space probes that rendezvous with asteroids. Science tells us that the first human to live for a thousand years has already been born. We are living in a science fictional world.

At a time when we are forced to explore the nature and limits of our own reality, FutureWorld will explain everything you need to know about how science fiction works, how it shapes the way we see and do things, and the way we dream of things to come. Focusing on four main themes - space, time, machine and monster - this book will separate fact from fiction, but also reveal what it is still possible to achieve in such areas as time travel and the discovery of alien life. Using examples from classic science fiction books and films, FutureWorld is a fun and exciting way to learn all sorts of fascinating facts about the world we live in today and the one that awaits us in the future. ... Read more

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Emerging technology in the field of telecommunications - the Internet, the World Wide Web and related applications - has begun to impact the way we receive and transmit information of all kinds. How will these new technologies affect museums' missions, operations, and even definitions, both now and in the near future? With chapters on online networks, digitization of collections, cultural intellectual property, public access, finance, management, and more, experts in the fields of museums and communications offer their analyses of the emerging information technology and the opportunities and challenges these changes present for museums. ... Read more

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Museum Informatics explores the sociotechnical issues that arise when people, information, and technology interact in museums. It is designed specifically to address the many challenges faced by museums, museum professionals, and museum visitors in the information society. It examines not only applications of new technologies in museums, but how advances in information science and technology have changed the very nature of museums, both what it is to work in one, and what it is to visit one.

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How, if it all, do museums shape the ways in which society understands difference?

In recent decades there has been growing international interest amongst practitioners, academics and policy makers in the role that museums might play in confronting prejudice and promoting human rights and cross-cultural understanding. Museums in many parts of the world are increasingly concerned to construct exhibitions which represent, in more equitable ways, the culturally pluralist societies within which they operate, accommodating and
engaging with differences on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, disability, sexuality and so on.
Despite the ubiquity of these trends, there is nevertheless limited understanding of the social effects, and attendant
political consequences, of these purposive representational strategies.

Richard Sandell combines interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives with in-depth empirical investigation to address a number of timely questions. How do audiences engage with and respond to exhibitions designed to contest, subvert and reconfigure prejudiced conceptions of social groups? To what extent can museums be understood to shape, not simply reflect, normative understandings of difference, acceptability and tolerance? What are the challenges for museums which attempt to engage audiences in debating morally charged and contested contemporary social issues and how might these be addressed? Sandell argues that museums frame, inform and enable the conversations which audiences and society more broadly have about difference and highlights the moral and political challenges, opportunities and responsibilities which accompany these constitutive qualities.

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Drawing from a wide range of experience, the authors propose the simple ideas which should underpin all professional museum training courses. Organized on a modular basis, Museum Basics provides a basic guide to `best practice' in every aspect of museum work, from museum organization, through collections management and conservation, to marketing and security. It is designed for training courses, to be supplemented by case studies, project work and group discussion. ... Read more

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Great resource!
Museum Basics is an amazing resource for anyone studying museology, conservation and preservation!Great perspective on european museology! ... Read more

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Celebrating the centenary of the world’s largest interactive science museum, this opulent volume offers a history of astonishing discoveries as it takes readers through the museum’s countless treasures.

Founded by German engineer Oskar von Miller in 1903, the Deutsches Museum in Munich was designed as a place of learning and entertainment. Today it continues to be a center of cutting-edge developments as it constantly modernizes to follow recent achievements in science and technology. With more than six hundred illustrations, this book shows the museum’s matchless collection, while documenting the building’s history and the collection’s dynamic evolution. Filled with information about the most exciting international discoveries in the fields of the physical and natural sciences, from acoustics to zeppelins, mining to hydraulics, this book is a visual delight for anyone interested in the history—and art—of science. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great overview of a great museum
The book is beautiful with lots of pictures to give the reader a real sense of the enormity of the museum.A great coffee table book to have and excellent conversation starter. Many people don't realize how big this museum is. This book covers alot of areas we didn't get to see when we were there. However, nothing is as good as actually being there. ... Read more