Harold Skramstad, President Emeritus of Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, gave a keynote address at the New England Museum Association annual meeting Wednesday that for me (and many in the audience) was quite energizing. Essentially, museums can no longer see their mission as the traditional "collect, preserve, interpret," but instead need to be founded on the question "what value do we add to society? And to our community?"
For people like me who grew as staff at visitor-centered museums such as children's museums, this isn't a new message, but for the museum field as a whole (including the majority of collections-based museums), it is a paradigm shift. It is a new vision of museums along the lines of what Elaine Gurian has called "the essential museum," where the museum becomes integrated into the daily life of visitors.
I was especially energized by the mechanisms Skramstad described to achieve this: acknowledging the competence of visitors (what they bring to exhibits, including their stories), a return to storytelling and dialogue, becoming a place for celebration and inspiration. Given our work with visitors' stories in exhibits over the years, the message was totally in sync with my own experience.
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