The Toolkit Talks at AASLH in Birmingham

Will you be attending the AASLH annual conference in Birmingham next week?

Meet with five contributors to the Small Museum Toolkit at The Toolkit Talks: Sharing Resources for Small Museums on Thursday, Sept. 19, 4 to 5:15 p.m., chaired by Janice Klein.

After a brief overview of the series, each contributor will share tips or next steps in 5 minute presentations: 

• Collections Management with Pat Miller
• Developing Exhibits with Janice Klein
• Museum Legal Issues with Allyn Lord
• Project Management with Rebecca Martin
• Visitor Studies with Stacy Klingler

After these quick presentations, you'll be able to choose a roundtable discussion lead by a presenters about one of the topics for 25 minutes. Then you can change areas during for the final 25 minutes of the session and interact with a different presenter and group of colleagues.

Through the discussions with the Toolkit contributors and your colleagues, we intend for you to travel home with practical information and further develop your personal  network and resource base.

We hope to see you there!

Budgets and Funding Interpretive Planning

Let's face it:  planning is an area where small museums are apt to skimp on the budget.  There is always something seemingly more important to be done with vital and scarce resources. All museums worry about money, and in an era of tightened belts smaller museums may worry more than others.  

This does not diminish the importance of interpretive planning.  Rather, it forces us to be creative with how we do it.  

Before setting out on this process, compile a budget. This should factor in money that will likely be spent (and there will be some of this) but perhaps even more importantly be clear about the time and energy that will be expended.  Remember to include costs of your staff and volunteers; good planning and training will take their time as well as money, and this should be quantified in some way.  

For budgets the following may apply to your list of possible expenditures:
-Staff
-Consultants
-Travel
-Meals/Subsistence
-Telecommunications (telephone, website, blogs)
-Marketing/Publicity
-Related programming (i.e. pilot programs)
-Printing
-Supplies and Materials
-Administrative overhead 

As with all things the range of costs are variable. Interpretive planning projects, especially when well-conceived, are compelling and can attract outside funding. If grants or other funding are available that is great, but the process does not need to be costly. More elaborate processes can cost tens of thousands.  With creativity they can be done for far less, and excellent projects can be undertaken for a few hundred dollars.

For many small museums, an expenditure of time and energy on the part of a committed group of volunteers may be easier than spending cash. Find ways to recruit volunteers: perhaps local teachers or an art historian from a local college.  Secure donations for printing.  Few organizations are as imaginative in this regard as small museums.   

If you are committed to this process and willing to be creative to see it through, then the budget can be scaled accordingly. A community concert done on a shoestring budget can be just as rewarding and enjoyable as a big-city symphony orchestra. 

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.

Developing Interpretive Plans

Thoughtful planning is essential in the creation of effective interpretation.  Once your organization has accepted root and branch that interpretation is your primary focus, you are ready to move on to planning what that interpretation will be. Having done the hard background work to position your institution to interpret its collection, it is time to decide on the best ways to do that. 

A good interpretive plan offers key concepts and a structure that is designed to spin a web of connections for the visitor between what they are seeing in the museum and their own experiences and lives.  Strong connections strongly will capture the visitor’s imagination on a deep level.  Although we cannot in every instance do this explicitly, the more connections that visitors can make to the story of your museum, the more often they will want to visit and become engaged.

Interpretive Planning is a process that takes time.  First, all in the organization must be on board knowing that the plan will ultimately generate new ideas and approaches.  It can be helpful to emphasize that the plan may only codify messages that are already part of the museum’s current offerings. 

While an Interpretive Plan can be a wholesale change in how a museum approaches itself, it does not have to be.  If you do not want to lose existing stakeholders while you consider strategies for building relationships with new ones, it is helpful to think of the plan as one that will include existing messages or aspects of your interpretation you already do well.

All interpretation must rest on bedrock of good scholarship, so do involve scholars and other experts early and often.  Engage actively with scholarship, reading new material in your field regularly.  When developing interpretive planning documents, staff and volunteers should conduct their own research and build their own knowledge foundations.

At the same time, remember that you have an obligation to convey scholarship to a wide public.  Academic research should support what you do, but do not let it take over.  Although the post-modern discourse related to the “liminal space of the dining room table’s social topography” (as one scholar opaquely commented in a planning session) may sound impressive and contain some really good nuggets of academic research, you need to play the translator. 

This does not mean “dumbing down.”  Just the opposite.  You want to challenge your audience, engaging fully with difficult topics and complex ideas.  As discussed in the chapter on “Interpreting Difficult Issues,” topics related to race, ethnicity, war, violence, immigration, enslavement and class all belong in museums.  Complicated issues or problems can have great resonance for visitors.  These topics are made more tangible and meaningful when you can rely on solid, up-to-date research in crafting your interpretation. 

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.

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. 

Committing to Good Interpretation

A major shift in accepted interpretive practice has taken place over the last decade or so.  Museums have increasingly moved from being collections-centered to audience-centered. Although museums have a great responsibility for buildings and collections, what we do with those objects matters a great deal. Or, to put it another way, we must provide a forum that allows people to experience and engage with museums in a way that is comfortable for them.

Nothing connects with people better than a story they can relate to.  Committing to offer good interpretation is the first major step in doing this effectively.  Interpretation thus needs to be the primary focus stated by the museum. This seems to be intuitive – of course we want to tell people about all the great stuff we have. But too often this focus has not been central for all museums.

The goal of good interpretation is to see that your interpretive focus is reflected in every aspect of your museum operations. The idea of reaching various audiences needs to underpin every facet of a museum’s operations. 

This can be done formally through a policy document or strategic plan that clearly states the importance of interpretation, a Board-approved Interpretive Plan that guides the staff in developing content, and in training staff and volunteers to understand the critical importance of this part of the museum’s work. It can be done informally by instituting and insisting upon an organizational culture that values high-quality interpretation and places extraordinary emphasis on accurate, open communication and interaction.

Each member of the board, staff and volunteer corps needs to be aware of and committed to the overall goal of interpreting your museum.  What is more, this approach can no longer only be restricted to tour guides. A highly-trained guide delivering extensive information in a structured, highly-controlled format the norm is only one way to interpret your museum. 

The commitment to interpretation and public education should be made clear in policy documents, training materials, and in daily operations. There should also be periodic reviews of interpretive goals; at least every five years but more frequently as needed.

A tour begins long before your visitors enter the first gallery or period room.  As fewer visitors experience museums and historic sites through the mechanism of the guided tour, the definition of interpretation has been stretched, as has the sense of who is responsible for it. Visitor experiences will be improved dramatically if commitment to interpretation runs through the entire organization.

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.