Jennifer Fair asked about interpretation of historic houses with conflicting restoration, interpretive stories, and furnishing plans. Jennifer, The questions you have asked should be addressed in several planning components: research reports, an interpretive plan, and a furnishing plan. The purpose of these planning documents are to 1.) document the history of the house, 2.) develop interpretive strategies to tell the stories at stations within the home, and 3.) create a material culture environment that supports the stories you have identified as most important and intend to interpret. It sounds to me like these pieces may not yet be in place. Historic houses are interpreted in a myriad of different ways, depending on the restoration and interpretation strategies that organizations have selected. For instance, some houses interpret change over time, preserving all changes and trying to illustrate and interpret the entire history of the house. Others select a particular time period that they decide is most significant for that structure and restore the house to the way it looked in that period, attempting to furnish it to the period and interpret the lives of the people who lived in it during the selected period. When you begin to mix restoration dates, furnishing plans, and interpretive plans in ways that conflict and do not contribute to a coherent story, your visitors will become confused and unable to understand your story. I think the first option I noted above (change over the entire house's history) is also difficult for most organizations to pull off, because visitors have trouble abstracting the entire history of a house and understanding stories that are not supported by the material culture of the house. So my advice is select an interpretive story that corresponds to the structure's (carefully selected) restoration date and support it with an appropriate furnishing plan. Tom Woods Thomas A. Woods, Ph.D. President, Making Sense of Place, Inc. 1521 Grandview Ave. Oconomowoc, WI 53066-3422 [log in to unmask] 262-569-1698 Fax: same as phone ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).