Apologies for cross promoting - please share with members and colleagues

We are pleased to offer the following 3-day immersion session on MAKING MUSEUMS MATTER for professionals in museums and related organizations. 

MAKING MUSEUMS MATTER 
March 7 to 9, 2002 with Stephen E. Weil 
Offered by the Cultural Resource Management Program, University of Victoria
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In his 1917 essay The New Museum, pioneer North American museologist, John Cotton Dana wrote that the first and obvious purpose of every museum must be to add to the "happiness, wisdom and comfort" of the community it served.

Although museums have made great strides in their ability to survive in an increasingly complex and competitive environment, it would be the height of folly to confuse institutional survival with institutional success. Survival is only a pre-condition. No less than in Dana's time, success today must still be measured by what museums can contribute to the "happiness, wisdom and comfort" of the communities they serve.

This gathering of museum leaders challenges you, first, to identify, perhaps even to rethink, the range of basic ways in which museums might potentially contribute to the "happiness, wisdom and comfort" of their communities and, second, to explore the particular ways in which your own institution might fit into that range.  Stephen E. Weil, one of museum community's pre-eminent thinkers, provides the framework for a facilitated three-day discussion in which you work with other directors, trustees, and colleagues who shape change in museums, to:

*       seek consensus on the attributes of a "good society" and how museums in general might be uniquely capable of contributing toward the development of those attributes
*       against that background, think through the unique and defining purposes of your own museum and how those purposes might best be articulated to your community 
*       clarify the relationship of museum means (resources and operations) with ends (desired outcomes) and recognize the danger that means may sometimes become ends in themselves
*       identify the internal/external obstacles that may interfere with your own museum's ability to achieve desired outcomes and consider various strategies that might be employed to overcome such obstacles 
*       analyze your own museum as a form of "social enterprise"
*       develop measures of intermediate and ultimate institutional success  

Facilitator: Stephen Weil is the emeritus senior scholar with the Center for Education and Museum Studies at the Smithsonian Institution. His background in law, his experience as Deputy Director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and his extensive involvement as a consultant to a range of professional agencies and activities provide a foundation for his reflections on the changing nature of museums in contemporary society. He is the author of A Cabinet of Curiosities: Inquiries into Museums and Their Prospects, Rethinking the Museum, and Beauty and the Beasts: On Museums, Art, the Law, and the Market, as well as numerous journal articles and conference presentations. 

Dates: March 7 to 9, 2002
Please register by: February 15

Fee: $340 (Canadian funds, non-credit)

For more information, please contact:

Lisa Mort-Putland, Program Coordinator
Cultural Resource Management Program 
Continuing Studies, University of Victoria 
PO Box 3030 STN CSC  Victoria BC Canada V8W 3N6 
Tel: 250 721-8462  Fax: 250 721-8774 
Email: [log in to unmask]
Visit our Web site! http://www.uvcs.uvic.ca/crmp
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