AAMD have some pretty specific guidelines around deaccessioning. You can do it as long as the money you get from it is used as investment for your collection. You cannot use it to pay off your utility bills or offset the bath you took on that highly-publicized travelling exhibit that flopped like a Disney summer blockbuster. In the same way that Disney doesn’t ask its movie-going public what kind of movie it wants, neither do museums, although that may be about to change.
Monthly Archives: December 2013
Downloading is the New Membership
This is what museums look like in the physical world: unique and obvious.
Museums and their collections have personality, unique to the institution and like personalities, they can be friendly and engaging or bi-polar and schizophrenic – but interesting and engaging all the same. That’s what makes visiting a museum an experience, like visiting a friend or relative, your crazy uncle, your quirky aunt or your very grand grandmother.
Memory Outsourcing
Excluding the outsourcing of software application development and Helpdesks to India over the past few years, there have been some very significant technology outsourcing innovations in the course of human history. One of the earliest was tools, particularly the arrow head, eliminating the need to be up close and personal when killing your food.
You can imagine the scene: Cavemen Woz in his cave startup, knapping and polishing his flint. Caveman Job with real turtle bones around his neck, would be like, “this is going to change the way you kill animals”, and everyone would be like “nooo”, and then Caveman Job would say “one more thing” and he’d bring out a bow and attach the flint to a stick and kill a deer 200 yards away, and everybody would be like, “oooh”, and then there’d be a cavestarter round of bartering to fund production of arrowheads, bows and arrows and everybody would get one. And then Caveman Gor would be like “I invented this bow and arrow” and Caveman Ted would be like “the bow and arrow is a series of intertwined vines”… (Okay, enough of this…)
Recovering Museum Technologist 