Salute To Small Museums

Small museums need champions. In this book, we make a case for small museums and share what the broader museum field can learn from the small museum leadership. Because a few tools have been invaluable to small museum leaders and are referred to throughout the book series, we highlight the MAP and CAP assessment process, accreditation, and provide an overview of the StEPs program that inspired this book series in this first book.

A Practical Guide to Fundraising for Small Museums: Maximizing the Marketing-Development Connection turns the traditional development program on its ears, as it starts with the needs of donors rather than the needs of the organization. Just like marketing for other goods and services, museums must begin with aligning their products with their audiences. Then they can develop fund strategies that keep their audiences in mind. While the book covers traditional strategies (such as membership and events), it approaches them from a new point of view and provides tips and sample ideas all along the way for small and mid-sized museums to implement a successful development plan. Complete with sample forms, this book is a must-have for every museum development professional, volunteer, and student who wants to succeed.

The definitive guide to the most interesting, amusing, and surprising collections in America. With listings that leave no source unexplored, this clever directory is the first in-depth popular guide to more than 1,000 small museums. Its listing of archives ranging from the utterly informal to the most diligently organized, labeled, and catalogued, from displays of celebrity shoes to the work of visionary artists, provides a picture of the American landscape that is rich in quirky details. In Little Museums, you will find the listings that tourist literature does not provide, including the Barbie Hall of Fame in Palo Alto, California, the Dog Mushing Museum in Fairbanks, Alaska; the Museum of Ordinary People in Hurtsboro, Alabama; the 24Hour Church of Elvis in Portland, Arizona; and the last freak show left in America--at Coney Island's Sideshows by the Seashore. A virtual museums listing means you don't even have to leave home to visit a little museum, and a category index makes finding museums devoted to your favorite subjects even easier. Little Museums is for anyone who hates to miss a unique opportunity along the byways and urban centers of America.

This brief manual is designed specifically for people running the thousands of small museums and historic sites across the U.S. and Canada. These smaller institutions tend to lack funding and professional staff, so this book is meant to help the busy administrators perform their job of fundraising better and more efficiently.

Along the superhighways and backwoods roads of America -- in cities and one-horse towns -- hundreds of little museums are ripe for discovery. This guide unlocks the doors to the most unusual, historical, educational, obscure, and downright bizarre collections in all 50 states. This book is complete with websites, exact directions, and invaluable tips on when to go and what to know. Perfect for anyone who thinks they've been there, done that, this marvelous book highlights all the offbeat, unsung, and unhyped wonders of America, such as the Museum of Bad Art; Bowling Hall of Fame; Jell-O Museum; Titan Missile Museum; Dog Mushing Museum; 14-Hour Church of Elvis; Conspiracy Museum; Muscle Car Ranch; Mini-Cake Museum, and over a thousand more!

In this exuberant celebration of the world's museums, great and small, revered writers like Ann Patchett, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, and more tell us about their favorite museums, including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, the Mus'e Rodin in Paris, and the Prado in Madrid. These essays, collected from the pages of The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine, reveal the special hold that some museums have over us all. Acclaimed novelist William Boyd visits the Leopold Museum in Vienna -- a shrine to his favorite artist, Egon Schiele, whom Boyd first discovered on a postcard as a University student. In front of her favorite Rodins, Allison Pearson recalls a traumatic episode she suffered at the hands of a schoolteacher following a trip to the Mus'e in Paris. Neil Gaiman admires the fantastic world depicted in British outsider artist Richard Dadd's "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke," a tiny painting that also decorated the foldout cover of a Queen album, housed in the Victorian room of Tate Britain's Pre-Raphaelite collection. Ann Patchett fondly revisits Harvard University's Museum of Natural History -- which she discovered at 19, while in the throes of summer romance with a biology student named Jack. Treasure Palaces is a treasure trove of wonders, a tribute to the diversity and power of the museums, the safe-keepers of our world's most extraordinary artifacts, and an intimate look into the deeply personal reveries we fall into when before great art.

"As a small museum staff person, you are responsible for a lot, including areas outside of your expertise or training. You need a quick reference that makes the process of becoming a sustainable, valued institution less overwhelming. The Small Museum Toolkit is a collection of six books that serves as a launching point for small museum staff to pursue best practices and meet museum standards. These brief volumes address governance, financial management, human resources, audience relations, interpretation, and stewardship for small museums and historic sites." --Amazon.