Bibliography: pages 78-84. / The aim of this project was to assess the image of museums in Cape Town society in the context of the changing needs of South African people. A questionnaire examining museum-visiting habits and perceptions of the role of museums was distributed to parents via nine schools in Cape Town. Each school represented a different socioeconomic package so that the sample included parents with varying educational status and incomes. Parents of school-going children were sampled because they may be predisposed towards museums as institutions that offer their children educational and recreational opportunities and, therefore, represent a best-case scenario. The majority of the sample had visited a museum. A relationship exists between museum-visiting and higher socioeconomic status. Museum- visiting, though, was not limited to people with a higher level of education. Parents who were actively involved in a broad range of leisure activities were most likely to have visited museums. Although socioeconomic status and participation in leisure activities are related, museum-visitors appear to have leisure-lifestyles and not level of education in common. The results showed a contradiction in parents' attitudes towards museums; the image of museums was good but the image of the museum experience was often bad. This was particularly the case for infrequent museum-visitors. This group also experienced a feeling that 'museums are for a different type of person', which may explain why they do not visit despite believing that museums are worthwhile institutions. Museums appear to be perceived as institutions that offer children opportunities for learning and recreation. This could be the reason why young adults or seniors do not participate in museum programmes. This survey also showed that museums were associated with research on and preservation of the past. Black parents, though, were least likely to make this association and it is possible that the emphasis of most museums on the post-colonial past of South Africa is one reason why Black South Africans do not visit museums. There does, though, exist a generally positive image of the role of museums. The emphasis placed on leisure-learning or semi-leisure by young and old people in the townships does indicate that museums could meet an important need for constructive leisure opportunities.

This dissertation traces the arc of Isabella Stewart Gardner's professional development through her photographic and archival practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Gardner's museum in Boston is well known, she destroyed evidence pertinent to her curatorial agenda. To recover these methods, this project surveys Gardner's involvement with photography through two of her earliest travel albums, all fifteen of her illustrated guest books, and five albums of the evolving galleries in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The process of photographic album making supported strategies of research, collection, installation, and preservation that Gardner would use as a patron and institutional leader. Gardner's albums illuminate her actions not only as a collector of travel photography by Antonio Beato, Francis Frith, Pascal Sebah, and others, but also as a snapshot photographer and a commissioner of professional architectural photography in Boston. Her multivalent photographic practices reveal the ways in which she used albums and photography to realize her professional ambitions. Collecting, creating, arranging, and displaying photographs were not sentimental pastimes for Gardner, but processes intrinsic to the formation of her identity as a cosmopolitan innovator and civic leader. The first chapter analyzes the handwritten narrative, watercolor paintings, and commercial photography of Egyptian antiquities in Gardner's 1874-1875 "Egypt Diary" to discover the earliest origins for her actions as a collector. The second chapter analyzes the photographic assemblages of Gothic architecture in Gardner's 1879 travel albums of England to show how that journey influenced her design of the galleries and garden at Fenway Court. The third chapter reads Gardner's guest books as socially networked photographic objects to demonstrate their role in cultivating institutional supporters and shaping the cultural mission of her museum. The fourth chapter establishes the importance of reproductive technologies in the assembling of Gardner's collection of art and the pivotal role of architectural photography in the preservation of her civic bequest. The case studies within this dissertation form a comprehensive examination of Gardner's photographic engagements and the importance of photography in the formation and preservation of her institutional legacy. / 2023-12-31T00:00:00Z

No description available.

No description available.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The nexus of presenting an authentic environment and engaging audiences has been at the core of debate around living history museums since their inception in the 1960s. Conner Prairie's transition from a folklife model to a learning theory and research-based organization is traced in this thesis.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the management policies of the Springville High School Museum of Art, and to arrive at an estimate of their effectiveness by means of a comparative analysis with fundamental elements of generally accepted good museum management.Materials from the booklet, So You Want a Good Museum by Carl E. Guthe, were used as basic criteria for making the comparison which included investigating the following factors: (1) goals and purposes, (2) collections, (3) organization, (4) administration, and (5) activities.A survey of literature, visits to museums, and interviews with museum administrators were made to gain a knowledge of museum management. Data were acquired from these authoritative sources; as well as by investigation of the Springville Museum's premises and records, local publications, and statements made by present and former administrators, members of the Board of Trustees of the Museum's Association, and other civic authorities.

No description available.

No description available.

The thesis examines how ethnography museums, in inventing and reinforcing the desire for modernity through their exhibiting clout, have been representing Self and the Other via the nexus that connects issues of identity, race, and difference. Based on research conducted using textual analysis and interviews to museum visitors, the thesis examines whether modern ethnography museums are moving past their colonial frameworks and managing to integrate the voices and experiences of the post-colonial Other through the lenses of heritage, history, and memory.

A dramatic wave of unionizing in the museum world over the past year has sparked new conversations about labor and collective organizing throughout the cultural sector. Yet while those at the forefront of these conversations hope to leverage this moment into a cohesive movement, cultural labor activism has manifested in different ways throughout the cultural sector. This thesis seeks to understand the specific role of public history within the recent movement, through interviews with staff members involved in organizing efforts at their museum/historic site and media coverage of both successful and failed union drives. The goal of this work is to bring together the many disparate threads of conversation surrounding cultural labor activism to highlight the specific ways that public historical work prevents social movements. This thesis will build upon an existing yet nascent scholarship on public historical labor to contextualize this moment in a way that will appeal to a broad cross section of cultural workers. This analysis also offers potential solutions to build on the momentum of this current cultural revolution, such as calling on professional organizations like the National Council of Public History to become a player in the fight for public history labor protections. / History