The new Small Museums Special Interest Group held its inaugural meeting earlier this month during MCN’s annual conference in Minneapolis. Small museums that adopt technologies such as digitization of collections and even automated collections management are severely challenged by budget restraints and limited collections staff members who are already multi-tasking as it is. Maintaining data standards in these kinds of situations is always problematic. A further difficulty is that often technical solutions which are available for museums have been written or created with only larger institutions in mind. Twelve staff from small museums and cooperative museum projects from across North America attended the meeting and shared both their concerns and some of their own solutions to these challenges.
The principal point agreed upon by those who took part is that the Small Museums SIG should be a means for small museums, archives and libraries to share information and success stories. It was proposed that the SIG section of the MCN website be a place where links useful to staff in small museum and case studies of small institutions could be posted. It was also suggested that the theme of a Small Museums SIG sponsored session at the 2005 conference could be cooperative projects involving consortiums of small, sometimes micro, museums.
Even if you are not currently working in a small museum or archives, I would like to encourage any of you who know of any links, web articles, case studies or grants which would be of particular interest to the members of the Small Museums SIG to post them to the MCN listserv.
Thanks,
David Farrell – Chair, Small Museums SIG
David Farrell, Collections Assistant
Peel Heritage Complex
9 Wellington Street East
Brampton, ON L6W 1Y1
Canada
(905) 791-4055 ext. 3628
(905) 451-4931 fax
http://www.peelregion.ca/heritage/
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