Advancing Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion

This issue marks the sixty-third year of Curator: The Museum Journal publishing museum theory in English. Our archive contains a rich set of resources that can track the evolution of our field. As stewards of this resource, the editorial team continues to work on improving the value of these resources. Over the past three years, we have worked to expand the diversity and representation on our editorial board, and to rethink policy. With this issue, we are pleased to announce the start of three major initiatives that we hope will do more to grow the diversity, equity, inclusion, and representation of the museum enterprise in our journal. I outline those announcements below, followed by a note on a few policy changes, and a heart-felt thank you to all the volunteers who make this journal possible. The first is the culmination of two years’ work. At the recommendation of our editorial board, we quietly started publishing abstracts in the first language of the first author to ensure our publications were searchable and available in that scholar’s home language. That experiment has played out well, with a number of contributors choosing to submit either an abstract or the full text in their primary language. Last year, we expanded our translations experiment by making a commitment to a much deeper acknowledgement that the day-to-day language used by a researcher should be part of the official record of their research. With this issue, we are launching Curator Translations, a commitment to publishing a supplemental version of the text in the first language of the first author or as many languages as our authors wish to submit alongside the final version of their paper. In making translations a goal of this journal, we have also committed to the opening our archives to translators from around the world. Today, any scholar from around the world can request access to a historical paper for translation, or can submit their own translation of a paper they already have access to through our online portal. We are committed to peer-review of those translations and publishing authoritative translations of any paper from our archives in any language. This is not a small effort, but something we believe is worth investing in. With this issue, we’re pleased to welcome Prof. Yongying Dong of Xidian University as our Associate Editor who will be leading the Curator: Translations program. Under Professor Dong’s direction, a team of peer-reviewers worked with Zhao Xingyu on the translation of Falk (2006) An identity-centered approach to understanding museum learning. Working with this first full translation tested our strategy. It led us to develop new submission guidelines and processes to best serve the work (Figure 1). Today, Zhao Xingyu’s translation has been added to the supplemental materials for the original manuscript and is now searchable online as Chinese text. Following the experiments that led to adding Mr. Zhao’s translation to our archives, we invited a second author to submit a translation of her final accepted paper to test our process. In this issue, for the first time, we publish Lee’s (2020) Curriculum Based Interactive Art Exhibition Design and Family’s Learning Experiences: A Case Study of the Children’s Art Museum in Taipei, as an official version of the text in English with a simultaneous supplemental translation of the text in Chinese. Both the original accepted paper and the supplemental text were peer-reviewed by independent teams, and the translation considered an authoritative text. The peer-review process also helped us to think through the logic of our translations policy since there are regional differences in scholarly writing between Taipei and the Peoples Republic of China. We have now updated our website and welcome translations submissions through our journal portal. We now welcome museum scholars and students from around the world to consider translating articles from our archives as part of our journal publishing program. Importantly, we are now open to publishing translations of an original non-English paper in our journal if the translating author has the permission of the original publisher and that publisher conveys the right to publish an English translation to Wiley. Our second announcement is an investment in the next generation of museum scholarly writing. Thanks to a grant from the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (award #MG-50-18-0044-18), additional matching support from our publisher, and some of the funders of our editorial office, we are now able to offer our first Curator: The Museum Journal/Knology Writing Scholars Workshop for emerging or mid-career museum professionals in the USA. The Workshop’s goal is to (1) Engage emerging professionals in scholarly literature and dialogue around museums and personal identity, and (2) Publish original work in scholarly journals about personal identity in museums. They will also be working with our archives to produce virtual issues that explore different themes and topics to help others discover long-buried papers that can be made relevant for practitioners today. In fall of 2019, we recruited the first 12 scholars who will work with us in 2020 to advance their work as museum writers and thinkers. Third, we’re pleased to welcome our new Associate Editor leading the Research Practice Forum, Professor Laura-Edythe Coleman. In her editorial “The Necessity of Research Practice” (Coleman, 2020), she outlines her vision for the section. We are excited about the vision that Dr. Coleman brings to this work, which you’ll see in her editorial immediately following these comments. In addition to our three major announcements we have a great many people to thank for their work over this past year. In the past twelve months, thanks to a lot of support from our editorial board, we’ve seen contributions nearly tripled in volume. As part of the growing interest in publishing work that can make a difference, our publishers at Wiley have removed the page limits that we hold on any issue, allowing us to publish as many papers as we feel are useful to the field and meet the expectations of our peer-reviewers. With this growing volume of contributions for us to consider, first and foremost, I want to thank the editorial “staff” of this journal. Our Associate Editors and I volunteer our time to help make this journal what it is. Each of our Associate editors has a full-time job, but then dedicate their weekends and evenings to our journal. They search extensively for qualified peer-reviewers, they develop thoughtful responses to guide authors to improve their work, and they dedicate their time to developing special issues that give life to new ideas in our journal. In 2019, we welcomed two guest editors, Kathleen Wiens from Canada, and Eric deVisscher from the UK to produce the special issue on Sonic museum experiences (Volume 62.3). As I look back on 2019, that issue was a landmark contribution that effectively quadrupled the content related to sound in our archives. Reviewing papers for quality and merit is the altruistic work of volunteers who ensure we are growing the museum scholarly enterprise. I want to thank all of these volunteer reviewers that help authors improve their work. The papers in issue are a wonderful representation of the international efforts to advance museum practice. Our cover image was selected to illustrate Graham and Blair’s paper on the Ulster Museum’s efforts to interpret the 1968 peace movement during Ireland’s troubles. We also publish a selection of papers illustrating the breadth of practice, from deep history (Hecht), value practice (Robbins), participatory art experience (Hoffding) and skeletal preparation (Pahl). I draw particular attention to another paper that demonstrates the degree to which volunteerism helps authors create transformative publications. Assistant to the Minister of Antiquities for Museum Exhibition Affairs, Dr. Nevine Nizar Zakaria. Zakaria’s (2020) Barriers to Social Inclusion with the Egyptian Museums: New Approaches Toward Inclusion, advances a social change strategy that she believes place museums in a leadership position in her country. Thanks to the collegial support of Dr. Christine Reich at the Museum of Science in Boston, Dr. Zakaria has produced a seminal accessibility model for public museums as a catalyst for national policy. Dr. Zakaria’s paper demonstrates that museum policy can be used to advance a shift toward universal access across the government sector and in the public mind. As Dr. Coleman puts it in her editorial, our practice itself is where change starts. I want to thank Dr. Reich, who first worked as a blind peer-reviewer based on her expertise in universal design. After our first review, Dr. Reich agreed to set aside the confidentiality of blind review, and stepped forward as a supporter to help reconcile the Western literature on universal access with the Egyptian legal frameworks Dr. Zakaria was analyzing. The result led to yet another round of blind peer-review with new reviewers, but the final work is now an example of how peer-review can strengthen the value of a contribution to our international dialogue. I close by thanking all of our contributors and reviewers for their effort. I’m pleased to see how dedicated everyone is to increasing the diversity of voices that shape our field, working to advance our understanding of equity and access and to ensure that inclusion is a hallmark of excellence in museum practice. John Fraser, Editor (johnf@knology.org). John Fraser is President & CEO of Knology Ltd., a social science research institute based in the USA, and the 2019–2020 Past President of the Society for Environmental, Population, & Conservation Psychology, Division 34 of the American Psychological Association.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.