Fifth monthly Consultants’ Corner TweetChat

Posted on March 3, 2013 by adina

Welcome to the month of March. Depending on where you live, spring may still be a few weeks away, but it’s a great time for a consultants’ TweetChat. Tomorrow, Monday, March 4, at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (please note the new time!) will mark our fifth monthly NCPH Consultants TweetChat. This month, the topic is collaboration. Do you collaborate regularly with other consultants? If not, why not?

To participate in this and future TweetChats, you will need to sign up for a Twitter account by going to www.twitter.com. When it’s time for the chat, go to http://tweetchat.com/ and enter #phconchat as the chat hashtag.

Let us know if you have any questions in advance of the chat, and we hope to see you there on Monday!

~ The Consultants’ Corner Editorial Team (@NCPHconsultants)

Will digital crowdfunding work for your next project?

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Noah Goodling

Nikola Tesla’s lab building at Wardenclyffe, 1904

In August, 2012, an extraordinary thing happened: a small museum, dubbed the Friends of Science East (FSE, now the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe), which was being run out of two unused classrooms in a local high school on Long Island, began an online fundraising campaign which raised over $1 million in just over a week. The money was to be used to buy a local historical site, a laboratory utilized by the 19th century inventor Nikola Tesla called Wardenclyffe; the museum planned to repair the site and convert it into a science and technology museum to honor Tesla’s legacy. The story quickly went viral on the Internet, as journalists and bloggers asked the same set of questions: How did a small, virtually unknown museum manage to marshal such incredible resources so quickly? And what implications does this success carry for fundraising for public historians? Continue reading →

What employers seek in public history graduates (Part 3): Skill sets beyond collections management

Posted on February 18, 2013 by William Bomar

This is the third post in a series to discuss the genesis of the idea for the “What Employers Seek in Public History Graduates” session at the 2013 National Council on Public History meeting in Ottawa. Session panelists will continue to share their thoughts on the topic in entries in the coming weeks.

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Before the rapid proliferation of museum studies and public history programs began in the 1960s and 1970s, almost all museum professionals held degrees in traditional academic disciplines related to the content areas of their museums. People who worked in historic sites and history museums usually had degrees in history. Typically, museum-specific skills and knowledge in areas such as collections care, exhibit development, and interpretation were learned “on-the-job.” In today’s economic climate, fewer museums and heritage sites can afford to hire entry-level professionals who must be trained on-the-job to do the work of public history. Of course, it is still important to be well-educated in history, but today’s employers seek more.

I recently completed a national study for my doctoral dissertation on this very topic. I surveyed 38 leading practitioners from lists of board members of the American Association for State and Local History and the American Alliance of Museums from the last ten years. The very detailed survey took 65 competencies with definitions, divided into five major areas, and asked museum leaders to rate the level of mastery of each item that they believe is needed for entry-level museum professionals. Continue reading →

What employers seek in public history graduates (Part 2): Professional development ideas for public historians: An online discussion in preparation for NCPH 2013

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Scott Stroh

This is the second post in a series to discuss the genesis of the idea for the “What Employers Seek in Public History Graduates” session at the 2013 National Council on Public History meeting in Ottawa. Session panelists will continue share their thoughts on the topic in entries in the coming weeks.

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I believe a cultural organization’s greatest value rests with its ability to change the world, and that cultural organizations must seek to provide experiences that:

Inspire, challenge, and question;
Nurture, inform, and educate;
Offer dialogue, discourse, and debate;
Provide opportunities for reflection and action; and,
Offer enrichment through authentic interaction with people, place, and heritage.

Building on these values, I believe that professional development experiences must transcend disciplines, careers, and subject matter. The focus must move beyond collections, programs, and exhibits. We can and should nurture a commitment to these things, but with a re-purposed fundamental intent; to use these skills as a vehicle for a larger purpose. Continue reading →

Hustling historians: selling your trade

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Jennifer Stevens

Create a hero. Use suspense. Set scenes. That was the advice offered by renowned food politics author Michael Pollan to a room of professional historians who struggle to sell their books to a wide audience and still rely on a model of doing history created at the profession’s birth more than 100 years ago. They were gathered to watch the plenary session, entitled “The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age,” at the American Historical Association’s 127^th meeting, which met in New Orleans from 3–6 January. Another panelist, Richmond University President Ed Ayers, mused that historians missed the pre-modern movement, the modern movement, as well as the post-modern movement, implying that we might miss the digital movement, too, if we’re not careful. Case in point: American Historical Association President Bill Cronon (University of Wisconsin) noted that no other discipline still publishes (and reveres) books as history does. Yet this remains the only way to obtain tenure at most research universities. The overarching question of the session became: How does—and should—the practice of history change in light of the vastly different technology and platforms of expression that exist today? Continue reading →

When opportunity knocks

Posted on January 14, 2013 by jdichtl

Turn to the sixth page of the 2013 Program of the American Historical Association and you will spot a genial turn of phrase: “the malleable PhD.” It refers to the idea—already engrained in the practice of public history—that graduate training need not limit one to a tenure-track teaching career. A history degree, as NCPH members have shown for decades, readies one for a broad variety of jobs, from investment banker to foundation officer, from marketing consultant to park ranger. Eight sessions were listed for this thread within the 2013 AHA conference. At nearly the same time, the AHA and the Organization of American Historians have begun promoting their involvement in the “Versatile PhD” program. It’s a service to which associations and more than forty universities subscribe so that their student members have access to online “high quality non-academic career materials” and advice about turning their skills and interests to a wide range of jobs.

These are welcome developments. Taking a holistic view, as historians fill a spectrum of jobs and the historical discipline expands its influence, all historians will benefit. Continue reading →

Social entrepreneurship in the public history classroom

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Nicole King

Students in the Mapping Baybrook class, taken at the Polish Home Hall

During the fall 2012 semester, I taught the third iteration of my undergraduate research seminar “Preserving Places, Making Spaces in Baltimore” for the Department of American Studies at UMBC. The class is designed to expose students to historical documentation skills as well as business practices that can be used in the non-profit world.

A 2008 Faculty Innovation Grant from the Kauffman Foundation continues to function as the seed money for the course, but students must use the money in an entrepreneurial way that produces revenue for a local non-profit partner. Students must plan and execute the class project and a final event to debut our research at a community space. Continue reading →

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