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Our Museum: Extraordinary Resources on How Museums and Galleries Become Participatory Places

Museum 2.0

They wanted to help museums and galleries across the UK make significant, sustained changes in the ways they engage community partners and visitors as participants in their work. The result, Our Museum , is an extraordinary funding program with a focus on community participation. didn't mince words. Here are my three top takeaways.

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Making Museum Tours Participatory: A Model from the Wing Luke Asian Museum

Museum 2.0

Last week, I visited the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle. I've long admired this museum for its all-encompassing commitment to community co-creation , and the visit was a kind of pilgrimage to their new site (opened in 2008). I'm always a bit nervous when I visit a museum I love from afar. What if it isn't what I expected?

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The Participatory Museum, Five Years Later

Museum 2.0

This week marks five years since the book The Participatory Museum was first released. Across the museum field, the questions about visitor participation have gone from "what?" I thought the pinnacle of participatory practice was an exhibit that could inspire collective visitor action without facilitation. and "why?"

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How Museum Hack Transforms Museum Tours: Interview with Dustin Growick

Museum 2.0

A new company in New York, Museum Hack , is reinventing the museum tour from the outside in. They give high-energy, interactive tours of the Metropolitan Museum and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The tours are pricey, personalized, NOT affiliated with the museums involved… and very, very popular.

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Great Participatory Processes are Open, Discoverable, and Unequal

Museum 2.0

He casts the whole idea of a great jazz jam in the context of the tragedy of the commons--like a poetry open mic, the jazz club is a community whose experience is fabulous or awful depending on the extent to the culture cultivates and enforces a healthy participatory process. This is an issue we are actively grappling with at our museum.

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Adventures in Evaluating Participatory Exhibits: An In-Depth Look at the Memory Jar Project

Museum 2.0

A man walks into a museum. Two years ago, we mounted one of our most successful participatory exhibits ever at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History: Memory Jars. Two years later, this project is still one of the most fondly remembered participatory experiences at the museum--by visitors and staff.

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New Approach, Historic Mission: Remaking a Factory Museum via Community Co-Production

Museum 2.0

But not enough people care about it anymore, and the museum is fading into disrepair. The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. Many people would look at the world''s oldest mechanized silk mill and say that the core content of the museum is silk. What do you do?

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