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Creating Exhibits That Engage: A Manual for Museums and Historical Organizations
Winner of the 2018 Ontario Museum Association Award of Excellence
Winner of the 2019 Canadian Museum Association Award of Outstanding Achievement in the Research - Cultural Heritage Category
Creating Exhibits that A Manual for Museums and Historical Organizations is a concise, useful guide to developing effective and memorable museum exhibits. The book is full of information, guidelines, tips, and concrete examples drawn from the author’s years of experience as a curator and exhibit developer in the United States and Canada. Is this your first exhibit project? You will find step-by-step instructions, useful advice and plenty of examples. Are you a small museum or local historical society looking to improve your exhibits?
This book will take you through how to define your audience, develop a big idea, write the text, manage the budget, design the graphics, arrange the gallery, select artifacts, and fabricate, install and evaluate the exhibit. Are you a museum studies student wanting to learn about the theory and practice of exhibit development? This book combines both and includes references to works by noted authors in the field. Written in a clear and accessible style, Creating Exhibits that Engage offers checklists of key points at the end of each chapter, a glossary of specialized terms, and photographs, drawings and charts illustrating key concepts and techniques.
Winner of the 2019 Canadian Museum Association Award of Outstanding Achievement in the Research - Cultural Heritage Category
Creating Exhibits that A Manual for Museums and Historical Organizations is a concise, useful guide to developing effective and memorable museum exhibits. The book is full of information, guidelines, tips, and concrete examples drawn from the author’s years of experience as a curator and exhibit developer in the United States and Canada. Is this your first exhibit project? You will find step-by-step instructions, useful advice and plenty of examples. Are you a small museum or local historical society looking to improve your exhibits?
This book will take you through how to define your audience, develop a big idea, write the text, manage the budget, design the graphics, arrange the gallery, select artifacts, and fabricate, install and evaluate the exhibit. Are you a museum studies student wanting to learn about the theory and practice of exhibit development? This book combines both and includes references to works by noted authors in the field. Written in a clear and accessible style, Creating Exhibits that Engage offers checklists of key points at the end of each chapter, a glossary of specialized terms, and photographs, drawings and charts illustrating key concepts and techniques.
- GenresMuseums
216 pages, Hardcover
Published March 8, 2018
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30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 1, 2019
Definitely gave me a whole lot to think about while planning the design of the exhibit! I really appreciated the clear writing, aided by illustrative examples. I'm sure I will refer to this book (the notes I took) again and again in the future! I also aim to read more museum books soon (although I certainly will for classes soon enough!).
August 21, 2021
Umm...
This book is described as a "nuts-and-bolts guide to how to do [exhibits] step by step." It's meant, as Graham Black says in the Foreword, to help build the skills base of staff and volunteers at small and medium-sized museums and give them "the confidence to experiment and innovate" (xv). Author John Summers says this will give you "a method and a process you can follow that will greatly increase the likelihood that you will be able to create [a good exhibit]" (xix), and that "If you want to know what is involved in making exhibits, this book will show you the scope of a typical project. If you need to create an exhibit, the steps outlined here will lead you through from beginning to end. Even if you are just hiring contract professionals to create some or all of an exhibit, the information in this book will help you to understand their perspective on the project and lead to a more effective working relationship (xx)."
Given all the summary information about how this would empower small museums' staff and lead them from beginning to end of an exhibit, I just didn't get it. The chapter titles and subheadings (Audience, The Exhibit Development Process, The Big Idea, The Brief and Request for Proposals, Text, etc.) sound like this would be a great resource, but I still felt like this was just skimming the surface. This felt like it was general guidelines and not like we're actually going anywhere big or specific. If you go with the statement above that talks about "the steps outlined here," then I guess it succeeds: this is just an outline of steps, which may give you a general map of how to create an exhibit, but doesn't give a lot of tips or advice on how to make it good. All of the other reviews of this book (which, granted, I couldn't find many of) think this is a great book, so maybe I'm just so uncreative and un-exhibit-minded that this book didn't touch me. There were some helpful parts, though, so this wasn't all a waste: a few accessibility guidelines, installation/viewing height guidelines, font samples, tools you need to build your own exhibit furniture (which is way beyond anything I'll ever do), and other tips, plus the Exhibit Briefs section was great; I just didn't see it as the same wonderful resource other reviewers did. I may refer back to it at some point, but I'll definitely look for other books about creating exhibits.
This book is described as a "nuts-and-bolts guide to how to do [exhibits] step by step." It's meant, as Graham Black says in the Foreword, to help build the skills base of staff and volunteers at small and medium-sized museums and give them "the confidence to experiment and innovate" (xv). Author John Summers says this will give you "a method and a process you can follow that will greatly increase the likelihood that you will be able to create [a good exhibit]" (xix), and that "If you want to know what is involved in making exhibits, this book will show you the scope of a typical project. If you need to create an exhibit, the steps outlined here will lead you through from beginning to end. Even if you are just hiring contract professionals to create some or all of an exhibit, the information in this book will help you to understand their perspective on the project and lead to a more effective working relationship (xx)."
Given all the summary information about how this would empower small museums' staff and lead them from beginning to end of an exhibit, I just didn't get it. The chapter titles and subheadings (Audience, The Exhibit Development Process, The Big Idea, The Brief and Request for Proposals, Text, etc.) sound like this would be a great resource, but I still felt like this was just skimming the surface. This felt like it was general guidelines and not like we're actually going anywhere big or specific. If you go with the statement above that talks about "the steps outlined here," then I guess it succeeds: this is just an outline of steps, which may give you a general map of how to create an exhibit, but doesn't give a lot of tips or advice on how to make it good. All of the other reviews of this book (which, granted, I couldn't find many of) think this is a great book, so maybe I'm just so uncreative and un-exhibit-minded that this book didn't touch me. There were some helpful parts, though, so this wasn't all a waste: a few accessibility guidelines, installation/viewing height guidelines, font samples, tools you need to build your own exhibit furniture (which is way beyond anything I'll ever do), and other tips, plus the Exhibit Briefs section was great; I just didn't see it as the same wonderful resource other reviewers did. I may refer back to it at some point, but I'll definitely look for other books about creating exhibits.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews