nature and because things don’t always happen according to initial timetables, editorial work like this often has to be fitted into what might otherwise be leisure time or time allocated for other things. Luckily, both of our Mikes (Mike Beaney and Mike Leahy) were sympathetic, not least as both have deeply occupying work of their own; and we thank them for being there for us when we needed them.
Lastly, we would like to thank each other. We have each benefited from the other’s complementary expertise and networks, from the confidence of having that insightful second opinion, and from the sharing of the load. Having somebody else with whom to experience the frustrations and joys, the tribulations and amusements, has made it so much more fun. Not only has this helped to keep us relatively sane, but it has also made The International Handbooks of Museum Studies so much better than they would otherwise have been.
Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy,
August 2014 and July 2019
INTRODUCTION
Grounding Museum Studies: Introducing Practice
Conal McCarthy
Practice, broadly speaking, is what we do, and more specifically what we as practitioners do in particular practice communities and how others engage with this practice.
Higgs 2010, 1
When a collection manager documents an object, a curator writes a label, an educator leads a tour group, a director attends a board meeting, or a visitor walks through an exhibition – these are the forms of museum practice with which the public are familiar. But there are other kinds of museum practice hidden from view, taking place at different levels of the institution: for example, the policy framework, the marketing 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
