Professional Development

Museum of Chincoteague Island Seeks Exec. Director

/ Ricky Punzalan

The Museum of Chincoteague Island is currently seeking applicants for the position of Executive Director. Please see the position announcement and the attached position description:

Museum of Chincoteague Island

SEEKING EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

The Museum of Chicoteague Island invites applications for the position of Executive Director. The successful candidate will assume a leadership role in advancing the Museum’s mission to preserve and celebrate the island’s people, history and culture.

The Executive Director, under the oversight of the Board of Directors, is responsible for management of all Museum operations, supervision of volunteers, Museum store activities, event coordination, promotion and community outreach. The Executive Director has an active role in fund-raising, building an endowment, financial management and coordination of education programs with a special focus on the Museum’s Road Scholars programs. The Executive Director works closely with Board committees associated with collections, exhibits, promotion and maintenance.

An ideal candidate should have demonstrated excellent organization and communication skills, and proficiency with computer software. A good working knowledge of local and regional history and experience with grant-writing and grant management are desirable.

A bachelor’s degree is required; a master’s degree is preferred.

This is a full-time salaried position with a flexible work schedule. Salary range is $35k to $45k annually depending on qualifications.

A letter of interest and resume should be directed to Search Committee, Museum of Chincoteague Island, P.O. Box 352, Chincoteague Island, VA 23336 or emailed to museumofci@gmail.com no later than July 22 for best consideration. Email submissions are encouraged.

The Museum of Chincoteague Island is an equal opportunity employer.

Museum of Chincoteague Island – Job Description

SMA – Call for Proposals

/ Ricky Punzalan

33rd Annual Small Museum Association Conference
Call for Proposals
Sunday, February 19 – Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, College Park, MD
(New Location!)
Conference Theme: All Hands on Deck
Deadline for Proposals: July 1, 2016
www.smallmuseum.org

View the Call for Proposals
Deadline: July 1, 2016

This year, the Small Museum Association’s annual conference will offer sessions that address the theme “All Hands on Deck.” Speakers are encouraged to explore how professional staff, board members and volunteers can work together to make small museums thrive. 

Several different types of session proposals are sought:

  • 60-minute session — individual speaker, panel presentation, or roundtable discussion
  • 90-minute workshop — workshop, panel presentation, or roundtable discussion
  • 3-hour seminar— in-depth, experiential, hands-on learning (2 slots available on Sunday afternoon)
Learn more about the annual Small Museum Association Conference at www.smallmuseum.org.

Leaders in Museums

/ Ricky Punzalan

As we near the end of the Spring semester, many graduates, myself included, are finding new professional opportunities, or delving back into work after graduation. For  my last post as the Graduate Assistant for the Museum Scholarship Certificate, and on behalf of my peers, I want to take this moment to consider two questions:

1) what kind of leaders are we/do we want to be within the field of museum scholarship and material culture studies, and;

2) how has our academic focus on scholarship prepared us for the challenges of leadership? What skills in our academic and professional archive have prepared us to be museum directors, lab managers, collections management specialists, curators, education and outreach directors, and beyond?

Consider this article ~ Whitehair_HistoryNews2016 ~ written by Karen Whitehair in the Winter 2016 edition of History News titled “We Are All in this Together: Twenty-First-Century Museum Leadership” on the leadership crisis in museums. As part of a writing assignment for a course through the American Association for State and Local History, Whitehair critiques the “demigod”-like expectations placed on museum directors. She offers advice from a handful of museum leaders on how they became leaders and the characteristics they say others can learn as they’re thrust into management positions.

A helpful read for professionals at any career-level, some advice may be new and some may be good reminders for reassessing one’s own goals. Throughout the piece Whitehair takes note of the active initiative each leader took to learn more about managing people, communicating effectively, and inspiring others to act on your vision.

MSMC Committee Member, Mary Alexander is interviewed in Whitehair’s article and says she learned from leaders she found effective. She advises:

“To review your own talents…and select a few ‘weaknesses’ you’d like to overcome and find a teacher or mentor to help.”

Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, President/CEO of the Abbe Museum notes that she is “interested in being a leader of leaders. If I don’t develop leadership skills in others, then I end up only being a manager and no one is truly leading.”

Kristin Laise states that museums are businesses. Whether for profit or not, the leadership in a historic house museum will share the same qualities and practices of a small business leader. Finding effective ways to partner with others and grow the “business” of sharing history with the public is what Whitehair means by her title “We Are All in this Together.” Museums should figure out a business model that mutually benefits them and surrounding organizations with similar goals.

From a scholarship perspective, effective leadership means critically considering your museum’s role in the community, accessibility of your collections, the perspectives being communicated, and the relevance of your museum to larger societal discussions. Is your museum supporting or challenging the status quo? Leadership requires scholarship to make meaningful and relevant content, and scholarship  needs leadership to implement those ideas effectively.

Considering the first question of this post, I’d like to see myself and my peers from this Certificate program be leaders who embrace changing and alternative ways of managing museum spaces and material culture collections. I’d like us to be leaders who challenge our staff, volunteers, and visitors to question interpretations and functions of our material world. I think this conceptual challenge engages visitors with the material and can be an avenue for community discussion or promotion of newly imagined exhibits.

More importantly, leadership requires integrity to reflect on our own biases. To address my second question, this is what our academic achievements have taught us: to critically understand our theoretical and methodological roles in constructing historic, artistic, and cultural expressions of our past, present, and future. Not only should we continually learn from our “weaknesses” and failures, but discern our current strengths and abilities as leaders. As Anthropologists, American Historians, Librarians, and more, we have been trained for leadership. We ask big-picture questions that will drive the mission of an organization while considering how that vision is implemented at all scales. We have been trained in research methodology; in writing reports and grants; to lead and participate in groups; to be reflexive; and to communicate the importance of history, culture, archives, objects, and stories in daring ways.  No matter what direction we choose to take next, we are the solution to the leadership crisis.

~Sarah Janesko
Master of Applied Anthropology Candidate, Archaeology
Museum Scholarship and Material Culture Certificate

Curating the Curator: Perspectives from Dr. Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman

/ Ricky Punzalan

In our second post in the series “Curating the Curator: Perspectives from MSMC Committee” I introduce Dr. Barnet “Barney” Pavao-Zuckerman.

Barnet

Photo by Jannelle Weakly

Dr. Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman  is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland and is the Interim Director for the MSMC Certificate while Dr. Freidenberg is on sabbatical. She received her PhD from the University of Georgia in 2001, completing her dissertation research in the Georgia Museum of Natural History. Prior to arriving at UMD, she was Associate Curator of Zooarchaeology at the Arizona State Museum for over a decade, as well as Associate Professor and Associate Director of the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. She is an archaeologist and currently conducting research on the colonial-period experiences of Native Americans in southeastern and southwestern North America.

Having worked extensively in museums with an archaeology background, I asked her: What was your first experience working in a museum, and what was the most important thing you learned? She responded with several stories that wove together why scholarship is important to her work and the challenges and lessons she learned throughout her career.

these “stories” are the result of years of research

I have spent my entire career in museums—in fact, with my move to the University of Maryland last fall, this is the first time in 20 years that I have not worked primarily in a museum setting. My first museum work experience was in the early 1990s, while I was in high school and college. My summer job was as a tour guide at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village, which is in my home town of New Lebanon, NY. I have wonderful memories of my summers at Mount Lebanon—it is a truly remarkable place. Spend an hour wandering through the Village and you understand immediately why the Shakers chose Mount Lebanon as the place to build their most important community. I was an inexperienced teenager, and our small historical site museum operated on a shoe-string budget, but I learned that as long as I could tell a good story, I could send visitors away happy they had come, and with greater knowledge and appreciation for the place and the people who lived there. I quickly learned that these “stories” are the result of years of research by scholars, both within and outside of museums. I read as much as I could about the Shakers, and apprenticed myself to several of the more experienced tour guides, particularly one who was known for his engaging, and sometimes “salty” (and very un-Shaker), tours.

“you know, sometimes we just burned them down when the rats got too much”.

My graduate research, on the study of animal bones from archaeological sites (zooarchaeology), was carried out in the Georgia Museum of Natural History (GMNH), on the campus of the University of Georgia. I went from a mostly open-air historical site museum to a natural history museum, complete with snakes coiled in jars of alcohol. I learned a great deal during my six years at the GMNH. In a natural history museum, museum scholars from diverse disciplines work side-by-side, and my interactions with curators in the natural sciences had a huge impact on my career, including in promoting the role that zooarchaeological knowledge can play in modern wildlife conservation problems. It was also at the GMNH that I first interacted with a living descendent of an archaeological study community. This experience was just the first of many that serve as a constant reminder to consider and question the impact of archaeological research on descendent communities. As I showed our museum visitor the animal bone remains from his ancestral Muscogee-Creek village, I explained to him we had identified a lot of burned rodent bones inside the village’s homes. I told him I had read that in the 18th century, Creek houses were often burned during funeral rituals for heads of household. He looked at me, smiled, and said “you know, sometimes we just burned them down when the rats got too much”. I also learned that sometimes archaeologists privilege the stories they want to tell over the ones that actually make the most sense!

How to make a bunch of dead animals compete with gorgeous ceramics, baskets, and tapestries?

So, we need to be careful about the stories we tell, but to stay relevant in the 21st century, museums have to tell the important and compelling stories. As I grew into a scholar in my own right, I learned to approach the arcana of my own archaeological research to find the stories that reach broad audiences. From 2002 to 2015, I was a faculty curator at the Arizona State Museum (ASM), on the campus of the University of Arizona (with a joint appointment in the School of Anthropology). Behind-the-scenes tours and public lectures were an important part of my position. Museum tour groups would visit ASM’s world-class southwestern Native pottery collections, its state-of-the-art conservation lab, and the new basketry vault (the second of ASM’s Save America’s Treasures projects), and then walk into the zooarchaeology lab, full of old and broken animal bones. How to make a bunch of dead animals compete with gorgeous ceramics, baskets, and tapestries? The rather un-charismatic nature of old bones meant that I had to engage my audience through story, not stuff. After a couple of tries, I was able to engage our audiences with the story of how tiny fragments of animal bones from Native American sites in Alabama and Arizona tell us something about the origins of trans-oceanic trade and the mercantile economy in North America, as well as the role of Native American labor in the emergence of the global economy. Making these connections from the local to the global is, as I would say in my tours, why I love what I do.

I am also thrilled to be part of an institution with a thriving Museum Certificate program

As many of us know, museums face many challenges in the 21st century. Every museum I have worked in since I was a teenager has faced significant financial stress leading to reorganization, staff cuts, or programmatic shrinkage. Lately, the financial strain has been felt especially at state-funded museums, particularly in states that have chosen to balance budget shortfalls on the backs of educational institutions. While I was a curator at ASM, the 100-year old institution experienced unprecedented and crippling budget cuts. The last two years, in particular, were an extremely challenging time at the Museum, as the institution suffered heart-breaking staff losses due to state budget cuts. I miss the day-to-day life of a museum curator, but I am also thrilled to be part of an institution with a thriving Museum Certificate program in a state that invests in all aspects of higher education. I am realistic in my views on the future of museums and museum scholarship, but am committed to helping the students in our Certificate program gain the skills and knowledge that will allow them to thrive in a 21st century museum world.

~ Barney

Curating the Curator: Perspectives from Mary Alexander

/ Ricky Punzalan

For our first post in the series “Curating the Curator: Perspectives from MSMC Committee,” I introduce Mary Alexander.

Mary joined the MSMC committee last year and is currently instructing the Introduction to Museum Scholarship and Material Culture course. She has worked in and for Washington area history museums for the past four decades. She has been a museum educator, assistant director, leader of the Common Agenda for History Museums project for the American Association for State and Local History, and most recently administrator of the Museum Assistance Program of the Maryland Historical Trust.

I asked Mary, “What tools should every museum scholar take time to develop?” and she responded with the following insight:

A scene from “The Real Museum Directors of Kansas”

“The slide projector in the main exhibit hall kept needing adjustment so I had to open the back of the exhibit case and slip in to jimmy with jammed slides, replace bulbs and other mechanical fixes.  Because this happened so often I got to eavesdrop on visitors chatting in the gallery.  It was amazing what I learned simply by being a hidden observer.  All our highfalutin’ ideas about what visitors would notice from our impressive collections and our brilliant explanatory texts went right out the window.”

This scenario from an old friend of mine who ran a small museum in Kansas illustrates an important reality for museum professionals (curators, historians, researchers, registrars, educators)—watch out for the museum “bubble.” Visitors will surprise you with their perspectives, interests and ability to simply overlook what you consider so important.  In our Museum Scholarship and Material Culture Introductory class discussions we remind ourselves that we are not “regular” visitors and therefore we must always question our perspectives as potentially biased.

Be aware of your assumptions about visitors. Visit museums and take time to observe what others are doing and saying while they wander the galleries.  Note where visitors cluster and seem engaged; why are they stopping there?  Is it an object, a label, a bench to sit or an interactive?

Interpretation is complex and difficult to codify, but writing clearly is a central building block for both scholarship and its interpretive expressions. It’s easy to warn against jargon, but more important to focus on clear, concise descriptions that are readily understood. Exhibit design reports will quantify “appropriate” label length, but that’s not the solution, it is clarity. Working with others will improve your communication regardless of its form–labels, artifact layout, design decisions and programming–as it will inevitably challenge your assumptions and help you work towards clarity.

Your important tools are:

  1. Knowing your audience,
  2. Questioning your assumptions,
  3. Writing, re-writing, and writing again, and
  4. Working with others to gain clarity and provide understanding.

~Mary Alexander

Curating the Curators: Perspectives from MSMC Committee

/ Ricky Punzalan

TUNE IN FOR A NEW SERIES!

We’re starting a new blog post series called “Curating the Curators: Perspectives from MSMC Committee” in which  committee members of the certificate program give his/her view on museum scholarship and material culture (MSMC) topics.

We’re excited to feature our committee members’ voices on MSMC issues and read their stories not just as curators but as educators, researchers, and scholars of diverse subjects.  Take a seek peek of what’s to come: Committee Bios.

{Stay tuned for posts from our committee by subscribing to receive posts as they’re published each week (or so). Submit your email on the right side of this page, or “follow” us if you use wordpress.}

WHAT ABOUT THE COMMITTEE?

Beyond keeping the certificate program funded and functional, the Committee are integral to advising students on their practicum projects. Each student works closely with a committee member on the development and execution of their practicum proposals and final products. Committee members provide feedback to students on their proposals and are invaluable resources for navigating scholarship issues and local museum networks.

This series is geared toward emerging professionals and students who will work with the committee in various capacities. However, their thoughts and experiences are careful reflections we hope will reach colleagues in and beyond our network to continue conversations about how we use scholarship in our work everyday.

Join us in the coming weeks as we get to know the MSMC committee members!