Ruminations on the latest issue of museum & society

This rolled in recently:

 

 

Hello, Subscribers to museum & society ,

 

The latest issue of museum & society is now available online at: www.le.ac.uk/ms/museumsociety.html.

 

contents

 

‘Journey without maps’: unsettling curatorship in cross-cultural contexts

Lisa Chandler

 

Translations: experiments in dialogic representation of cultural diversity in three museum sound installations

Mary Hutchison and Lea Collins

 

Objects, subjects, bits and bytes: learning from the digital collections of the National Museums

Siân Bayne, Jen Ross and Zoe Williamson

 

Review Article

 

Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod and Sheila Watson (eds),

Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and are Changed

Kylie Message

 

 

Best wishes,

 

Jim Roberts

Production Editor

museum & society

 

******************************
Jim Roberts Hon FMA
Webmaster
University of Leicester
School of Museum Studies

 

http://www.le.ac.uk/museumstudies

 

The third article is of interest to me. One point that I think wasn’t emphasized enough is that non-art museums can only put about 1%, in a best case scenario, of their collections on display. Therefore the online museum gives people an opportunity to access objects that no one else, including the curators, are using or paying attention to. In our scanning project, we have over 700,000 images created. Some of them are books, but the great majority are photographs that nobody had looked at since they were taken and the only record of them had been an index card in a nondescript building in Washington, DC. Someday soon, these will be available to anyone in the world who has Internet access. To me, that’s a big change in the status quo.