Museum Practice. Группа авторов

campaign, the collection catalog, the exhibition design, the funds development plan, the conservation lab, the public program, or the mission statement.

      This book is about all these kinds of museum practice – the visible and the hidden – or “what we as practitioners do” (Higgs 2010, 1). “Museum practice” refers to the broad range of professional work in museums, from the functions of management, collections, exhibitions, and programs to the varied activities that take place within these diverse and complex organizations, as well as indicating a recognizable sphere of work. Museum “practice” is also sometimes differentiated from museum theory – as is the case in the volumes that make up these International Handbooks of Museum Studies – drawing especial attention to what actually goes on in museum work. As do the other volumes, including Museum Theory, however, Museum Practice recognizes the inevitable – and productive – overlap between theory and practice.

      Gerard Corsane proposes that museum work can be thought of as a process of communication moving from resources at one end to public outputs at the other (Corsane 2005, 3, figure 1.1). This functional process model of museums has been employed in the organization of this book in four parts as follows.

       Part I: Priorities

In this first part we hear from contributors, most of them experienced professionals, who discuss how museums go about deciding what it is they are going to do through the “top” level of museum management, policy frameworks, and ethical guidelines. The chapters consider issues to do with setting the strategic direction of museums through mission, vision, leadership, and governance, changing ideas about ethics and what museums should do, debates about the measurement of performance, and shifts in legislation and policy guidelines. This section also contains a chapter on audience development, a critical dimension of museum work that increasingly shapes how institutions today set their priorities.

       Part II: Resources

      In Corsane’s process model of museum, gallery, and heritage work, “resources” refers broadly to the “stuff ” that professionals collect, use, and research, which they then subject to various processes of interpretation (Part III) before they are communicated to the public in the form of various outputs (Part IV). In this section, then, contributors discuss those objects, collections, and other materials that can be understood as the “resources” that museums contain, whether it is the objects at the heart of collecting institutions or the curators, collection managers, and other staff who acquire, research, care for, and manage them. Here readers will find several chapters on collections in one form or another: collections planning, collections care and management, collection development, and collections management systems, and a chapter reviewing recent shifts in conservation practice. This section also considers the financial resources that make all this work possible – museum economics – plus a chapter on critical issues to do with sponsorship, marketing, and branding.

       Part III: Processes

      In Part III, the focus is the internal “processes” of various kinds within museums that develop and deliver the resources discussed above into outputs or products delivered to the publics considered in the last part of the book. A group of chapters considers the development of exhibitions, trends in permanent and temporary museum exhibitions, and exhibition design and display. Two chapters survey developments in curatorial theory and practice, seen here as connected to but not limited by collections and exhibitions, in which curators acquire, select, arrange, research, present, and interpret things for people to look at. This section also considers repatriation and restitution, including of human remains, a process that is assuming increasing importance for museum practice, raising, as it does, questions about the very nature of museums, the ethics of collections and displays, and relationships with source communities.

       Part IV: Publics

In the last part of Museum Practice we come to the space in which the products, created by the contemporary museum at work, circulate in the public realm. Though the exhibitions considered in the previous section could also be seen as one of the most obvious of museum outputs, in “Publics” we look at a more diverse and diffuse range of topics – from visitor research and community, to interpretation, learning and public programs, and digital heritage – which explore how these are used, consumed, mediated, and responded to by the audiences that the museum addresses.

It should be clear from the outline above that this volume is structured as an anatomy of the contemporary museum in terms of its conventional organizational divisions and roles. When people learn how to work in a museum, they have to master knowledge and skills considered necessary according to current professional guidelines. This takes various forms, such as workplace-based training, university courses, International Council of Museums (ICOM) curricula, and manuals and books.¹ The professionalization of museum work has expanded considerably over the past two decades, and training programs for museum professionals are not only increasing in number but are also diversifying and adapting in response to a “changing museum landscape” (Livingstone and Davis 2013, 12–13). Professional museum bodies often talk of “best practice” as a clear set of rules of dos and don’ts: do wear gloves; don’t allow board members to make management decisions; don’t sell collections items; and so forth. Codes of ethics attempt to establish the essentials of “good” museum practice.²

An historical overview of professionalization in museums has been provided by Patrick Boylan (2006), who also gives an overview of the role played internationally by ICOM, and nationally by professional organizations: the Museums Association in the United Kingdom, the American Alliance of Museums in the United States, and their equivalents elsewhere.³ Any account of museum practice has to take into account the membership associations and professional bodies that are such an important part of the framework within which museums operate, as well as legislation, policies, and regulatory environment. We should, however, be wary of definitions, codes, and laws, useful as they are for raising standards and monitoring performance. As Simon Knell cautioned, these “artifacts of professionalism” can restrict practice, instead of advocating a “creative professionalism” that is more open to change (Knell 2013). Different professionals in different kinds of museums in different parts of the world do not always agree on what museum practice consists of, and might even see the setting of standards, processes of accreditation, and other bureaucratic guidelines as exclusive boundaries that may stifle responsiveness to change. There may be disagreement over specific aspects of museum work or even over basic principles, as well as over what universal best practice might be.

Rather than viewing museum practice simply as the best way of doing things in museums, then, this volume seeks to recognize the diversity of perspectives, to open up questions and to show a variety of ways in which they might be addressed. To introduce it, I provide some background to how museum practice has been dealt with in museum studies thus far and suggest how it might be better integrated into research on and in the museum. Then I consider the relationship between theory and practice and argue that together the university and museum sectors can collaborate in teaching, research, training, and practice. In the third section I review recent “practice theory” and assess its value for an integrated model of museum studies that is grounded in current museum practice, a model showcased in this volume. Lastly I briefly preview the contents of the four parts of the book – Priorities, Resources, Processes, Publics – which describes the contemporary museum at work.

       The place of practice within museum studies

      While there has been much useful academic research