Museum Studies Commons^™

Deaccession Decision-Making During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Multi-Site Case Study Of Art Museums In The United States, Shannon Hahn

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

At the beginning of the pandemic, museums were forced to close, resulting in significant losses in earned revenue. To address budgetary shortfalls across the museum field, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) temporarily relaxed their deaccessioning guidelines to allow museums to sell works of art from their collections and use proceeds to support the direct care of collections. This project utilized a qualitative multi-site case study and textual analysis to examine deaccession decisions of four art museums in the United States that deaccessioned works of art during the pandemic. Textual data was collected from online newspaper articles, press releases, …

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.

While …

Safeguarding For The Future: Managing Born-Digital Collections In Museums, Kimberly Kruse

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Over the past few decades, advancements in technology have changed society entirely. Every bit of information about world news, popular culture, and art is just a tap of a touchscreen away. So many aspects of the contemporary world have become digitized so that it was only a matter of time before museums would have to face the issue of born-digital media in their collections. From videos to web-based art, museums have to tackle how to save this new form of cultural heritage. Museums have to do so now before it gets lost forever. The challenge of born-digital objects lies in …

Deaccessioning In Small Museums: A Historical View And Lessons From The Past, Kristin Lapos

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Deaccessioning is a frequent topic of conversation in even small and mid-sized museums in the twenty-first century. With collections costs soaring, budgets dwindling, and space ever more limited, museums must deaccession to survive and prosper. However, deaccessioning and disposal have become hugely controversial, both among museum professionals and with the general public in the past few decades. Scholars like Stephen Weil and Marie Malaro argue that deaccessioning and disposal were non-issues prior to the 1970s. Is this true? If so, how did museum professionals handle deaccessioning and disposal of objects from their collections before this time?

This thesis explores the …