In this study I explored the variety of educational opportunities available in museums. Next, I examined the museum education programs in the Portland, Oregon area and described what types of opportunities are available to teachers. Finally, I made suggestions for teachers on how to best access museum programs and for museum educators on how to best reach teachers. Interactions between schools and museums exist on a variety of levels. From limited interactions to collaborative programming, schools and museums have found ways to work together to accomplish their joint goal of education. Museums offer self-guided or guided tours, curriculum packets, teacher education programs, access to collections or informational programs related to special exhibits. Some museums and schools have developed deeper relationships in which each give and receive help carrying out their missions. I interviewed museum educators at nine museums in Portland and the surrounding areas. I asked questions regarding the types of programs available, especially focusing on programs suitable for school groups or those that might be helpful to teachers. The programs available in the Portland area vary by institution. Each museum, historic home or zoo offers unique programs on a variety of topics. While history predominates, science, math, social studies and art are readily available. Teachers should be able to supplement nearly any classroom topic. Teachers should take the time to get to know the educators in the institutions. Overall, the key for an individual teacher seeking museum education for students is to ask what is available. The programming at most institutions is flexible, especially when there are traveling or temporary exhibitions. Teachers should get onto mailing lists so they will be notified when special or new programs are available. Also, teachers need to keep in contact with the museum educators. Developing a personal relationship will prove invaluable for a teacher who is trying to fill a gap in a unit or supplement his or her curriculum. Museum educators will benefit from time spent analyzing where their current programs meet state guidelines or focusing planning on meeting specific state common curriculum goals (CCGs) when designing new programs. Schools are reorganizing their curriculum to meet state standards and museum personnel would be wise to do the same. / Graduation date: 2000

Authentic assessment of visitor learning in museum settings is a challenging endeavor. Evaluation literature includes very few studies that link adult visitors' behavior to their learning. Multiple data collection methods in a naturalistic environment hold great promise for increasing understanding of informal public education. In 1997, Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center (HMSC) in Newport, Oregon, opened a new visitor center. This unique science museum was designed with strong educational goals in mind. The first gallery, the Pattern Garden, was intended to provide a framework of understanding that visitors would build on during their journey through the museum. The three main exhibits in this gallery include a touch pool with live tidepool animals, a sound exhibit with listening stations, and a water wheel that demonstrates chaos theory. This study is a summative evaluation of these three exhibits and their educational effectiveness, both individually and as part of the overall gallery. Data on exhibit holding power and visitor behavior were collected for this evaluation. The touch pool and the sound station were videotaped, while field notes were used to document holding power at the water wheel. In addition, a wireless microphone was mounted at the touch pool to document discussion between visitors and docents. Visitors who spent a minimum of ten seconds at each of the three exhibits were interviewed as they prepared to leave the museum. The interviewer asked the visitor to recall the Pattern Garden exhibits, with special attention to things they learned and associations they made to their daily lives. Both holding power and learning proved to be the greatest at the touch pool. Further investigations are indicated to isolate whether it was the content of the exhibit, the presence of a docent, or other factors that made it particularly effective. The water wheel's holding power was nearly as high as that of the touch pool, but visitor learning scores were lower. Interview data indicated that the complex, difficult nature of the chaos concept was partly responsible for the low educational results. The sound station resulted in moderate holding power and moderate learning. Difficulties and successes in the research design indicate important factors to consider for future evaluation studies at informal science learning centers. / Graduation date: 1999

People are fascinated with death and disaster. One simply has to watch traffic slow to a crawl when passing a car accident to understand this. However, this fascination goes beyond the side of a highway and enters the realm of tourism. Today, numerous sites of death and disaster attract millions of visitors from all around the world: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Anne Frank's House, Graceland, Oklahoma City, Gettysburg, Vimy Ridge, the Somme, Arlington National Cemetery. The list grows each year as exhibited by the recent creation of an apartheid museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. Due to the increasing popularity of this tourism product, a small number of academics have begun studying the phenomenon. Leading the field are Lennon and Foley who labeled it Dark Tourism, Seaton who coined the term Thanatourism, and Rojek who developed the concept of Black Spots. However, despite ongoing study, there has been a paucity in understanding what actually motivates individuals to sites of dark tourism. Yet understanding motivation is imperative, particularly given the subject and sensitivity of these sites. Some are slowly decaying, and visitors play a large role in their preservation. Subsequently, without proper management, visitor influxes can further deteriorate sites or induce friction with the locals. Knowledge then, also provides administrators the necessary tools to properly manage the varying stakeholders. Although many feel an interest in death and disaster simply stems from morbidity, the range of factors involved extend from an interest in history and heritage to education to remembrance. To begin this study, a list of possible motivations was compiled. Then, to get a better comprehension of these motivations, visitors to the Holocaust Museum Houston were surveyed as a case study. As a commodified, synthetic site of death and atrocity, the museum fits the definitions of a dark tourism site as established by lead academics. Therefore, by asking visitors to the museum what motivated them to the site, the results will hopefully give some acumen into the wants and needs of certain stakeholders. Finally, this research sought to discover if motivation at the museum could shed light on motivation to other sites of dark tourism.

<p>The second half of the 1990's was marked by a significant reworking of memory and history in South Africa. WHilst the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was involved in its hearings on amnesty applications and gross human rights violations, new museums were emerging and older ones began reshaping their displays. This thesis interrogated the changing representations of history, culture, identity and heritage in one South African city, Port Elizabeth, which in 2005 was re-named the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipal area. This discussion examined, at times, the historical era prior to South Africa's democracy and the period after the first democratic elections of 27 April 1994.</p>

<p>&nbsp / <span style="font-size: 12pt / font-family: &quot / Times New Roman&quot / ,&quot / serif&quot / mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman' / mso-ansi-language: EN-US / mso-fareast-language: EN-US / mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">District Six was a community that was forcibly removed from the centre of Cape Town after its demarcation as a white group area in 1966. In 1989, the District Six Museum Foundation was established in order to form a project that worked with the memory of District Six. Out of these origins, the District Six Museum emerged and was officially opened in 1994 with the museum in the 1980s occurred at the same moment that the social history movement assumed prominence within a progressive South African historiography. With the success of <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic">Streets, the decision to &lsquo / dig deeper&rsquo / into the social history of District Six culminated in the opening of the exhibition, Digging Deeper, in a renovated museum space in 2000. Oral history practice, as means of bringing to light the hidden and erased histories of the area, was embraced by the museum as an empowering methodology which would facilitate memory work around District Six. In tracing the evolution of an oral history practice in the museum, this study aims to understand how the poetics involved in the practices of representation and display impacted on the oral histories that were displayed in Digging Deeper. It also considers how the engagement with the archaeological discipline, during the curation of the Horstley Street display as part of Streets, impacted on how oral histories were displayed in the museum.</span></span></p>

In the 1990s, the MLA sector – archives, libraries, museums – was defined as a comprehensive sector. One of the reasons for this was the belief that the digitizing of institutional collections and catalogues would provide a seamless access to the cultural heritage for the general public. No one would any longer need to know in which institution a certain object was kept; everything would be available on the Internet. The questions in this dissertation depart from the expectations in the late 1900s aimed at the available systems in the MLA sector for the management and storage of information and at knowledge maintained in such systems. My point of departure is the idea that access to collections in the MLA sector – real or digital – is made possible through the catalogues. It is in the catalogues that the sector orders data and preserves knowledge collected about the objects. My most important conclusions deal with the management and production of knowledge in the sector. The data systems generally used in the MLA sector lack the indulgence needed to accommodate inherent variability of information. Systems must be based on exact sorting, uniform terminology and classification without deviations in spelling or interpretation. Furthermore, international projects and systems presuppose distinct translations between national terminologies and international classification systems to work for information retrievals. This is not the case with the museum systems here investigated, in opposition to, primarily, the libraries. The museum systems are characterised as distinctive instead of following uniformity principles and national or international taxonomies. An important conclusion about knowledge processing and knowledge production in the MLA sector is that the value of compiling digitalised data from many museums is limited. It is not possible to realize the political goal other than at a superficial level. The conclusions in a comparison between the three professional groups are that in the beginning of the 21th century an extensive part of the antiquarians confirm a thought style, according to Ludwik Fleck, which has another direction than that of archivists and librarians. Throughout the 20th century or in the last decades of the 20th century the two latter groups professionalised their roles both through changes in education and through new professional requirements which led to positions and attitudes in their work other than what happened in the museum sector. Museums are mainly research institutions with members of staff who in many respects lack a focus on increased accessibility of collections. Challenges formulated for museums of cultural history by the cultural politics of the 1970s have not been answered with great flexibility. The investigation in this dissertation demonstrates that archives, libraries and museums in many respects continue to pursue activities according to a thought style which was formed during the first half of the 20th century. Their positions in society, their administrational practice and expectations from the general public constitute stabilising and preserving factors. The MLA sector is not as comprehensive as the policy makers want to believe.

Thesis (M.A.)--Texas State University--San Marcos, 2009. / Vita. Reproduction permission applies to print copy: Blanket permission granted per author to reproduce. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-83).

Thesis (M.A.)--Texas State University--San Marcos, 2009. / Vita. Reproduction permission applies to print copy: Blanket permission granted per author to reproduce. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-83).

A museum catalog is a legible, interpretable information system that acts as a rhetorical exposition of the museum’s collection and work. The unity of a collection is of course distinct from that represented in a catalog, and still further from the reader’s experience of it. But the information that comprises such an assemblage of individual records or representations, consistent metadata, support the ability to “read” collections as finite, enclosed, or complete. Here I perform a close reading of the elements and relationships that underpin the Walker Art Center’s online Permanent Collection catalog, an emergent publication funded by The Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalog Initiative (OSCI). I incorporate multiple layers of interpretation into my reading of the structure and contents of the museum website, drawing on concepts developed in information science and textual studies by Bonnie Mak and Johanna Drucker. My performance of reading of the new catalog helps me begin to address how collectively, online representation in virtual frames, contextualization within a website, searching, and browsing support divergent interpretations of a collection catalogue as a text. I conclude that to engage a catalog at a scholarly level, and to interpret and synthesize meaning of the catalog as a text, the museum must situate its self-representation spatially and temporally. / text

In 1929, Henry Ford opened Greenfield Village, his outdoor history museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Fourteen years earlier, Ford announced that written history was bunk. The museum was designed to reshape the historical project by celebrating farmers and inventors in lieu of military heroes and politicians. Included among the structures were Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park Laboratory, Noah Webster’s home, and Ford’s Quadricycle shop. Ford used architecture and material culture to connect American progress to self-made manhood, middle-class domesticity, and the inventive spirit. Despite signs that the struggling automotive industry is responsible for Michigan’s economic decline, the site is popular--since 1976 over one million visitors have attended each year. This project examines this phenomenon, which exemplifies how publics often fail to link past and present in the same way that scholars do. The Village’s largely unexplored archives documenting its internal history are mined, along with primary and secondary sources on the histories of public history and the Detroit metropolitan-area. Chapter one studies the site’s construction and audiences during Ford’s presidency arguing that the populist public images of Ford and Edison mediated encounters with the Village. Chapter two links the site to the racial politics of the Detroit metro-area, which marked the Village as an alternative public space for whites. Chapter three draws on visitor surveys, to show how patrons’ worldviews were shaped by the politics of populistconservativism. Chapter four explains how the appointment of an academic as president ensured the addition of progressive historical narratives, but the site’s location in Dearborn impeded efforts to draw a larger African American audience. In the mid-1990s, the fifth chapter contends, administrators successfully sought new patrons by blending progressive history and entertainment. This project argues that the Village is popular because it articulates both visitors’ longing for an imagined past, and desires for alternative futures. It also proposes that representations of the past are understood not only through a study of their internal histories, but by placing them in the broader contexts of the economy, politics, and social relationships of the geographic area in which they are located. / text