Museum Studies Commons^™

A Tribal Special Library And Archives Project: Establishing The Malki Museum Special Library And Archives, Andrea Geyer

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Malki Museum Tribal Special Library and Archives project is an on-site repository created in order to provide access to information regarding tribal culture and heritage to local tribal members and researchers. The project filled the need for a space dedicated to material related to the history of local Southern California Native American tribes and information regarding the topics of Archaeology, Anthropology and History. The collection includes: books, manuscripts, documents, audio/visual media, and photographs. Bringing together multimedia sources, the Special Tribal Library allows for the preservation and accessibility of these items through cataloging and digitizing the collection. This method ...

Organizational Improvement Plan: Establishing A Plan For A Rural Museum To Actively Engage Its Community Youth, Jason Pankratz

The Organizational Improvement Plan at Western University

Rural museums play active roles within their communities. They provide opportunities for community members to volunteer and engage as patrons. The museum within this Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) is the hub of culture and tourism for a small town in Ontario. It has a solid volunteer base made up of town citizens. These individuals participate because they have an innate interest in the culture and heritage of the town. A weakness to the volunteer base is that there is no active policy or practice to involve youth as volunteers or in leadership roles. This OIP suggests that the museum partner ...

Human Rights And Cultural Heritage: Protecting Museum Professionals During Armed Conflict, Jennifer Lee Reilly

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The purpose of this thesis is to address the issue of protecting museum professionals in areas of armed conflict. Recent conflicts have increased public awareness of cultural heritage sites in danger. Organizations such as UNESCO condemned the destruction of Palmyra and the desecration of the Mosul Museum. Despite the public outrage, there is little consideration given to professionals who work at these institutions and who care for the collections. Examining the historical accounts of museum professionals in conflict zones provides the context to the suggestions made in this text. Possible solutions and methods proposed throughout the text include the expansion ...

The University Museum In Times Of Fiscal Uncertainty: Fisk University And The Alfred Stieglitz Collection Of Modern Art, Jessica Pochesci

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This study of the travails of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Modern Art at Fisk University reveals the unique issues facing college and university museums and galleries, as they balance their responsibility to their donors, the public and their parent institution. In this thesis, I will argue that Fisk University made choices that directly violated generally accepted museum ethics, while simultaneously finding creative solutions to its parent institution’s financial stability and honor charitable intentions. I will examine the legal process of breaching donor restrictions, dissect the role and position of the university museum, and analyze the precedent the Fisk ...

Multi-Sensory Museum Experiences: Balancing Objects’ Preservation And Visitors’ Learning, Anna Baccaglini

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In the late twentieth century, museums moved from a near exclusive focus on researching, collecting and preserving objects to an increased interest in visitors’ experiences and learning. Consequently, today’s museums are re-focused on facilitating engaging connections between visitors and collections. Nonetheless, many current-day museum visitors are dissatisfied with their primarily visual experiences. In order to enhance visitors’ intellectual, emotional and physical connections with objects, this paper argues museums should introduce new ways of visitor interaction with objects through narrative and multi-sensory experiences. By combining discursive and immersive exhibition models, museums can create narratives that emotionally and intellectually involve visitors ...

Public Art And Patronage: A Collective Study Of Four Of Buffalo, New York's Early Monuments, 1882-1907, Drew C. Boyle

Museum Studies Theses

The goal of this paper is to investigate the motivations of the patrons behind four of Buffalo, New York’s early monuments. These are the Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1882), the Lincoln, The Emancipator Monument (1902), the Red Jacket Monument (1890), and the McKinley Monument (1907). Each section contains historical context regarding the time period, critical events that influenced the monument, comparisons to similar monuments in the United States, and the narratives of the monument’s dedication and ceremonies. When grouped together, the historical context provided for each monument essentially plays into the motivations behind why each monument was erected ...

Acknowledging The Colonial Past: Display Methods Of Ethnographic Objects, Sarah Kraft

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Today, the word ‘colonialism’ brings to mind a dark page in Western history. In the nineteenth century, it was justified as a civilizing mission of the West, aimed at bringing culture, religion, and prosperity to the ‘primitive’ people of non-Western countries.

Many Western colonizers took objects from colonized peoples, bringing them back, first as curiosities, then as objects of study and wonder to be displayed in ethnographic museums. Ethnographic museums today exist in a post-colonial world, where people recognize that taking these objects in many cases was wrong and, in some cases, criminal. This raises the question of whether museums ...

Built Ford Tough: Masculinity, Gerald Ford's Presidential Museum, And The Macho Presidential Style, Dustin Jones

Major Papers

In Cold War America, spanning roughly from 1945-1991, masculinity was in crisis. The rise of Communism and the Soviet Union had led to a fear of spies, infiltrators, and defectors known most commonly as the Red Scare. Americans were encouraged to be hyper vigilant in sussing out deviant behaviour. Alongside this scare came the Lavender Scare. It was suggested that homosexuals were deviant peoples and were therefore more susceptible to being turned Communist than their heterosexual counterparts. This led to a crisis of masculinity where even the smallest suggestion of femininity could lead to accusations of potential compromise, an effect ...

Tolerance As A Way To Remember, Natalie Figueroa

Voces Novae

This project examines the topic of Holocaust memorialization with a specific focus on the Simon Wiesenthal Center and their Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance. It posits that the mission and design of the museum were shaped by two major factors, first, the values of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal for whom the Center was named, and second, racial and ethnic tensions within the City of Los Angeles during the late 1980s and early 1990s, which culminated in the Los Angeles riots in 1992 following the acquittal of four white police officers in the 1991 beating of Rodney King. The museum opened ...

Enhancing Your Intelligence Agency Information Resource Iq: Pt. 2: The Central Intelligence Agency, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Provides an overview of information resources produced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) including popular reference works like World Factbook and Chiefs of State and Cabinet Leaders of Foreign Governments. Additional content describes the CIA's origins and development, descriptions of current organizational components, information about it's directors, and the text of historical National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) and the President's Daily Brief covering topics as varied as North Korea, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and NIE's on Soviet ballistic missile forces and numerous other topics. Features artifacts from the CIA Museum.

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Rescuing Records: Safeguarding Vital Museum Records, Brianna Losardo

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Every activity undertaken by museums relies in some way on records and information. As technology becomes more and more integrated into museum operations, these records are increasingly being created, used, and stored in electronic format. The rapid proliferation of electronic records has left many institutions unprepared to safeguard electronic records that are vital to their operations from disaster, both natural and man-made. In addition, a historical focus on collection records has siloed records management concerns into registration and collections management departments, an approach that no longer suffices in today’s museum. In this thesis, I argue that museums should empower ...

The Story Of The Ink And Paint Department, Emma Thielk

Honors Theses AY 17/18

The Ink and Paint department at the Walt Disney Studios, for a while, was a department completely staffed by women, but this department faded away with the introduction of technology at the studio. There has been a revival in knowing about the Ink and Paint department in recent years and the purpose of this paper is to figure out who owns the revival story because of the biases that surround this department. To understand the complexity of this department and therefore revival, this study was completed in three parts – how the department was viewed in the past (to know how ...

James Connolly's Bloodstained Vest: Mediating Death And Violence In Commemorative Exhibitions, Siobhán Doyle

Articles

The actions surrounding the display of images and artefacts in museums – collection, conservation, research and exhibition – are bound up with how the past is presented and remembered. These conditions and decisions relating to exhibitions are largely invisible to viewers who are confronted with the apparent completeness of an exhibition display. By conducting a historical and visual analysis of the bloodstained vest of political leader James Connolly, this article uncovers how this artefact has become a relic of historical violence due to the way in which particular aspects of its configuration, form and trajectory have been manipulated in order to elicit ...

Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work Of Charlotte Moorman, Saisha Grayson

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When classically trained cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) moved to New York City in 1957, she swiftly positioned herself at the intersection of experimental music, performance, video, and the visual arts. She interpreted works by composers like John Cage, collaborated with artists such as Nam June Paik, and founded and organized the New York Avant Garde Festival from 1963 to 1980. This dissertation argues that Moorman’s career sheds new light on what it meant to be an artist in this post-medium-specific moment and proposes that Moorman’s deterritorialization of authorship exerts pressure on traditional art histories. The generative dynamics of ...

Edith M. Richardson: Woman Of Mystery And Her Subjects, Adam J. Barnes

Museum Studies Projects

This paper and corresponding exhibit fulfill the final requirement for a M.A. in Museum Studies. They are both titled Edith M. Richardson: Woman of Mystery and Her Subjects because the people involved, including the donors of the collection, did not know or could not find anything about Richardson. In this paper I will write about my search for Richardson and her subjects as well as implementing the exhibit.

The Myth Of Southern Atonement: Constructed Forgiveness In Public Spaces, Elizabeth Ashley Clayborn

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of public space in Arkansas and examines the ways in which the myth of Southern Atonement is constructed within those spaces. Three formal elements characterize Southern Atonement: absolution from the past, distinctiveness in constructed authenticity, and hope for a post-racial future. The analysis develops over three case studies which I argue contribute to the construction, engagement, and actualization of this cultural myth. The first chapter looks at Fort Smith, Arkansas, and The Unexpected art project as a source of identity construction and place attachment. Then I examine The Billgrimage, or the monuments and museums ...

Formal Learning In An Informal Setting: The Cognitive And Affective Impacts Of Visiting A Science Center During A School Field Trip, Charlie Belin

Theses and Dissertations

With the pressures of budget cuts, many schools--particularly schools serving low-income students--are eliminating school field trips to museums, zoos, and other cultural institutions despite their widely reported utility. First, through a systematic review of the literature, I examine the findings from 17 international studies on the benefits of visiting an informal science education institution during a K-12 school field trip. Almost all pre-post studies reported a positive change in both cognitive and affective outcomes after visiting an ISEI. However, studies that also included a control group to compare students who visited the ISEI with students who had yet to visit ...

Lumumba’S Iconography As Interstice Between Art And History, Matthias De Groof

Artl@s Bulletin

How does Congolese art and artistic representations of Lumumba “mediate past, present and future”? How do they relate to historical narratives and to the dialogues within the Global South? This contribution proposes Lumumba’s iconography as a case in point of the interstice between art and history. It positions the image of Lumumba as mediating between past, present and future for both the Congo and the Global South more broadly.

Making Do With What You've Got: Improving Your Collections Storage Now, Adam Stephen Guy Smith, Heather Hoagland

Library Services Faculty and Staff Publications

Don’t wait until that inventory grant money comes through, get started improving your collection storage today using things you have right now or can get without breaking the bank or begging the board! Come ready to share your ideas as well as learn from your presenters and colleagues in this informal discussion-style session. Attendees will leave the session with easily implemented and inexpensive ideas for storing, displaying, and rehousing objects of all shapes, sizes and materials.