Description

Theme 2 - Collections

On the practices and processes of collecting and curating.

• The changing work of the curator
• Exhibition didactics: the dynamics of visitor learning
• The idea of ‘heritage’: changing conceptions of what counts
• Authenticity, decontextualization and recontextualization of objects-on-show
• Custodianship and community assets: meanings and purposes for the museum
• Representing social and cultural intangible heritage
• The ‘ethnographic’ and the ‘anthropological’: framing first peoples and other ‘traditions’
• Technologies in the museum
• Arts in the museum
• Environment in the museum
• The process of acquisition: competing demands and limited resources
• Conservation, preservation: negotiating changing priorities
• Artifacts: what are the objects of the museum?
• Places for amateurism: barefoot repositories and the self-made museum

Theme 3 - Representations

On museums as repositories and communicators of culture and knowledge.

• Museums as knowledge makers
• Museums as cultural creators
• Architectonics: designing buildings and information architectures
• Research and investigation in the museum
• Measuring knowledge ‘outputs’
• Intellectual property: commons versus commercialism?
• Knowledge management paradigms and practices
• ‘Neutrality’, ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity’; or ‘narrative’ and ‘politics’? The knowledge rhetorics of the museum
• Knowledge frames: modern and postmodern museums
• Cross connections: with libraries, with galleries, with educational institutions, with arts centers
• The digitization of everything: from collection objects to media representations
• The virtual museum
• Online discoverability and public access
• Museums in and for the knowledge society: preserving heritage ‘born digital’
• New literacies: changing the balance of creative agency in the era of the Internet and new media
• Addressing the digital divide
• Digital disability access
• Cataloguing, metadata, discovery and access
• Internet standards, semantic publishing and the semantic web