In the Company of Our Peers

“Annual meetings remind us that we are professionals among others in a field that is often not quite understood and that is sometimes poorly defined, but one that is always interesting, and sometimes really quite thrilling. We might work alone but we have so much to discuss with each other—to learn from each other.”—Carol Kammen

Salt Lake City Skyline

The best thing I’ve discovered about the history and museum field is its openness in sharing ideas, processes, and mutual support. I have always loved the energy and enthusiasm we all share for our work. And there is no better place to get that recharge than the AASLH Annual Meeting. As Carol Kammen, one of our field’s best thinkers (and most wonderful people), reflected in this column from early in my History News editorial tenure, “I liked overhearing the chatter, listening to others discuss a small point or large one, of being among people who love doing local history. There is no substitute for being amidst one’s own people.”[1]  

This year the AASLH meeting is in Salt Lake City and our theme is Crossroads: Exploring Vibrant Connections Between People and Place. The first day of each meeting is our official Small Museums Day.



As founding chair of the AASLH Small Museums Committee, Toolkit editor Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko initially proposed this idea. Her co-editor, Stacy Klingler, has carried on the tradition. This year’s program is packed with sessions that are relevant to institutions of all sizes—and we all know how much we can all learn from small museums!

The collegial attitude of our profession is true in spades within the small museum community. Representatives bring wisdom and expertise and every small museum session, luncheon, or affinity event I’ve attended has been packed. Whether they occur during or after the formal sessions, the resulting discussions always stimulate, inspire, and often spill out into the hallways.

Attending conferences like AASLH’s and the ones in your own state and region are an essential way for you to share your own experiences as well as learn from that of others. The bottom line is that no person is an island and you should never feel that you work in isolation. There is a large community of small museum professionals (paid and unpaid) that is ready and willing to lend a hand, offer a suggestion, or just listen. And more than that, you will learn the myriad ways history professionals are accomplishing the tasks and suggestions shared in the six volumes of the Small Museum Toolkit.

BUT WAIT…there’s more. We understand that often the cost of attending a conference each year can be prohibitive. For the past four years, AASLH has been offering an online conference in conjunction with our in-person meeting. We have put this program together with the small museum community in mind. For $55 ($95 for a group), AASLH members can participate in six live, interactive conference sessions, hear our Friday plenary and Awards Banquet speakers, and download podcasts of some of the other sessions.

Professional development is extremely important to our field is it not? As Carol noted, “Participating in our professional organization helps us to know what is happening, helps keep us on our toes. It is our adult education.”

And these days, programs such as the AASLH Annual Meeting and online webinars are available at the touch of a button. I hope you will join us either in person in Salt Lake City or online from the comfort of your own desktop.

Whether or not you attend the AASLH meeting onsite or online, I hope that you know there is an army of people out there ready and willing to help you fuel your professional development fire. And I hope that you are seeking and making opportunities to connect with your fellow local history and small museum soldiers.

A “history geek” since elementary school, Bob Beatty is Vice President of Programs for the American Association for State and Local History, a national history organization based in Nashville, Tennessee. Through his work at AASLH, Bob leads a variety of national committees serving the American historical community.  From 1999-2007, Bob worked as Curator of Education at the Orange County Regional History Center a $35 million history museum in Orlando, Florida.  Bob authored the preface to the Small Museum Toolkit.

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[1] I count among one of my greatest blessings getting to edit Carol’s columns each quarter!

Why are small museums great places to work?

When we’re knee deep in projects and tasks, we sometimes forget why small museum work is incredibly fulfilling and exciting.  Small Museum Toolkit co-editor, Stacy Klingler, and I developed this quick list to remind you why the work matters and possibly clarify why you feel fulfilled even when you’re more tired than you’ve ever imagined. 

Small museums provide you with:

·         The opportunity to be a leader.

Not everyone can be at the top and if you’ve wanted to spread your leadership wings and see how they fit, tackling the leadership of a small museum is a great place to start.  You may be surrounded by volunteers and board members helping to lift the heavy loads so you can afford to try out your leadership style.  This is especially a great leadership opportunity for younger professionals and folks new to the field. 

·         A variety of work.

No day is alike in a small museum.  And, rarely is there a dull moment.  If you bore easily or are prone to multi-tasking (and maybe a little hyperactivity!), small museum work can keep you energized.  Plus, you can get your hands dirty in a variety of ways – collections care, fundraising, construction projects, volunteer management and more – making you a museum generalist.  You’ll be supremely qualified to move into your next job because you’ve “seen it all!”

·         The opportunity to develop new expertise.

Have you wanted to learn more about trade and hand tools?  Membership programs?  Textile storage? The immigration story of your hometown?  The possibilities are endless and if there’s a question you’ve always wanted answered, you can spend time becoming an expert and have space to exercise your curiosity.  You can always use what you’ve found to develop an exhibit, improve the collections storage environment, or raise funds for your organization. 

·         A flexible work environment.

While being available for public visitation hours may be critical to operations, you can make a case for structuring the hours so that you can get important work done and take a vacation when needed.  With enough volunteer power, there is the potential to have flexible workdays and with a limited budget, you can explore flexible benefits if a comprehensive benefit plan is not available.  But, you need to advocate for this which will make you a stronger manager and employee.

·         A visible and tangible impact in the community.

Where else can you lead a group of school kids through a program and then at a PTO meeting the next night, you meet the mom of one of the kids?  Likely her child has not stopped talking about what she learned and how much fun she had.  You have immediate proof that your work made a difference in a child’s life.  Your impact is especially felt when wherever you go - you meet people who know who you are and what your organization has accomplished.  Your fingerprints will be on practically every project and you will feel proud.  Just don’t go to the grocery store wearing your pajamas.

Are there other reasons?  Please share with us and we’ll add your thought to our Small Museum Leadership conference sessions that we’re presenting around the country. 

Working in museums for nearly 20 years, Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko has been a museum director since 2001. Cinnamon became CEO of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine in 2009. Before that, she was the director of the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where she led the organization to the National Medal for Museum Service in 2008. She is co-editor of the recently released Small Museum Toolkit from AltaMira Press.

State Museum Association Conferences – For Connections and Conversations, Too!

Departing a bit from the standard Small Museum Toolkit blog format, this post includes personal reflections from one of the Toolkit co-editors, Stacy Klingler, on the importance of attending state museum association meetings.

September is state museum association month. Well, at least for me it is, as I'll be presenting at both Indiana and Illinois state museum association conferences. But it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a month to celebrate the good work that state museum associations do and to remind you to take part in your state museum association's activities.

Most state museum associations have an annual conference. I went to my first Association of Indiana Museums conference in 2003, about a year after I started working in the field. I remember distinctly the session on collections care on a shoestring, which featured aluminum foil as an inexpensive barrier layer, and a presentation by a foundation director on what makes an outstanding grant proposal. These sessions opened my eyes to the practical solutions and real life perspective on museum theory that I was just digging into. They also opened my eyes to how many really smart people were working in small museums around my state and what I could learn from them.

I'd like to say that I did a good job of making connections at this conference – getting business cards from speakers and other attendees and having interesting conversations about theory and practice – but I didn't.  I was shy and I didn't know anyone, so I kept to myself and took good notes. While I learned a lot, I missed out on the most valuable part of attending an in-person conference or workshop – networking.

Museum associations offer all sorts of services – training, newsletters, advocacy, salary surveys, preservation supplies discounts, technical assistance, site visits, and more – but the most important service they offer is access to your nearby peers. These colleagues will almost always share what has worked and what hasn't, they'll show you their storage areas (good and bad), they'll talk with you on the phone about how to manage a problematic board member, and they'll be just as enthralled with a new way to hang labels or a deal on unbleached muslin as you are.

So, even though I hope to see you in the sessions I'll be presenting in on visitor studies and jumpstarting your small museum, I'll be happier to see you swapping business cards and stories during the breaks and events.

Stacy Klingler currently serves local history organizations as the Assistant Director of Local History Services at the Indiana Historical Society. She began her career in museums as the assistant director of two small museums, before becoming director of the Putnam County Museum in Greencastle, Ind. She chairs the AASLH's Small Museums Committee (2008-2012) and attended the Seminar for Historical Administration in 2006. While she lives in the history field, her passion is encouraging a love of learning in any environment.

Know your Audience, and Yourself

Before embarking on creating an interpretive plan, or as part of the process, it is important to build in audience evaluation. This allows the museum to gain a greater understanding of the sort of themes that interest current visitors and that might potentially interest others.

This can take various forms.  Survey current visitors to assess what aspects of the museum speak to them.  Organizations like AAM and AASLH have audience evaluation programs to help museums, or you can construct your own with the help of a local firm.  Although these programs elicit responses from those who already visit or have an interest in your museum, they can give you a great deal of valuable information as you plan.

Analyzing potential audiences is also worthwhile.  If you do not have much participation from your community, conduct focus groups with local leaders, or one on one interviews asking them what sorts of connection they envision with your museum.  Consider whether some sort of recurring activity or club might suit your mission or interpretation and could meet regularly at and become affiliated with your museum.  Build partnerships with other organizations when possible as this holds the potential to broaden your reach and deepen your impact.

If you have a website (and every museum should), you should utilize this as a way of gathering data.  This might include social networking sites and other vehicles that link your museum with the connected community of cyberspace. Although this chapter does not focus on technology, it is in the best interest of every museum to utilize technology to gather, convey and share information.  

You should not only rely on feedback from audiences about what they want to see your museum talk about and do, but ask them to participate more fully in your process. Familiarize them with your site and what is special about it.  Involve them in your decision-making. Solicit their advice. Better yet, act on and incorporate their ideas.  No one likes it better than when they have a good idea and someone actually makes it a reality.   Although this can be challenging and produce unexpected results it is also a particularly vibrant way to give your museum and its message meaning.

Having said all this, museums must be wary of overextending.  Although organizations in this day and age need to be much more responsive to a public with wide-ranging interests, small museums must play to their strengths.  If you are a small science museum, collecting and interpreting works by local artists may never be on your agenda. A suggestion like this, however, might be just the sort of prompt you need to develop a program or exhibition that links these local artists with scientific themes.  It could be an innovative collaboration in the making.   Then again, it might not.  But, whatever your choice your decision-making process will be better informed knowing who you are talking to and what they want to hear.

Stephen G. Hague is currently the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain Ernest Cook Trust Research Student at Linacre College, University of Oxford, England. His research interests center on architecture, material culture, and social history in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. Previously he worked as executive director of Stenton, a historic house museum in Phila- delphia administered by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He holds a master’s in history from the University of Virginia and a bachelor’s from Binghamton University.


Laura C. Keim is curator of Stenton and Wyck, two house museums located in historic Germantown, as well as a lecturer in historic interiors at Philadelphia University. A graduate of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, she holds a preservation degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s in art history from Smith College. She has published widely on early American material culture and coauthored Stenton’s interpretive plan.