Useful Museums

The museum enterprise continues to find new paths to advance understanding of the world around us. This issue assembles perspectives that exemplify the diversity of the global museum field. One of our two Forum pieces exhort museums to fully engage in climate change advocacy. The other by Ostman, Zirulnik and McCullough Cosgrove explore the challenge of negotiating science and religion, cultural rights and patrimony, and overcoming patriarchal structures. While these are social issues at the heart of the contemporary view on the usefulness of museums to their communities, the most unexpected paper to arrive for this issue studies the foundational materials that result from the urge to collect. That study on the curatorial value of a taxonomic collection of insects helped us as an editorial team see a theme that connected all the papers in this issue. Maciá, Foieri and Marino de Remes Lenicov conducted an ambitious study to estimate the research value of their biological collections. It meant rummaging through drawers, reading specimen labels, assessing collection notes, and quite literally questioning the value of each artifact. Their work harks back to the heyday of gathering during a period when curatorial power was often associated with how many or how different things were. In our current era, technology has taken us into a new, more parsimonious practice that doesn't necessarily kill things to learn about their contribution to evolutionary biology. They demonstrate that those initial impulses to gather examples are valuable assets that can indeed be useful resources as new technologies emerge – if we fully understand the provenance of each artifact and the overall quality of the collection to represent nature. The collections and records held by museums around the world remain an unexcavated treasure of hand written notes that can now be made available on behalf of our entire museum enterprise when those records become part of a shared database. We saw an inkling of this movement in our Special Issue 61.1 on Ivory in a valuable paper by Castronovo and La Ferla (2018) that illustrated how a shared database was tracking elephant ivory in European public collections and religious institutions. Today, we see that these collections can be both assessible at the institutional level, and can be made accessible as a public asset for study as part of a global collection for academic study. They demonstrate that holding collections for as-yet-to-ask questions is a public trust shared across the entire museum field. We also publish a pair of papers that illustrate the transformative potential of museums as places for engaged debate about aboriginal rights and patrimony in our current era. The first of these papers by Minner reflects on historical reconstruction and occupation of the museum space in the remains of world fair sites. The second, by Kieffer and Romenak, covers the strategies used to crowd-source content for an exhibition documenting an active conflict between the people of North Dakota and the US government's attempts to claim land for an oil pipeline. Both address the issue of the meaning of land versus real estate, the stories of ancestry, and the rights of a people. In both papers, the authors negotiate authenticity and meaning of contemporary culture in the context of historical wrongs. They offer insight into hot debates and concerns that challenge society. And lastly, we are pleased to present three papers that now document active work to overcome the traditional museum's patriarchal approach to learning. One of those papers is the third in a series of papers on young women's learning in museums, Dancstep (née Dancu) and Garcia-Luis capping two prior studies published in this journal and offering a full circle look at implementing research in practice. The second paper, by Harrington, Tatzgern, Langer and Wenzel, also presents research that builds on generations of study on the role of augmented in exhibition settings. And the third in this set by Barnes and MacPherson illustrate that museums have now embraced as practice what was called a new museology of cultural engagement over a decade ago. Together, this pair of papers demonstrates that research is not novel, but rather, a long trajectory of refining skills and techniques to directly address inclusive community engagement. These papers show that there is no longer a new museology, but rather, a museological practice that continues to advance through experimentation, testing, and eventually evaluation to assess improvement. These papers demonstrate a level of maturity in the museum research field, offering direct and measurable outcomes that evidence a concerted long-term effort to create a more inclusive museum. Reflecting on this enterprise, I note that our journal seeks to truly reflect that each museum helps our field become richer. Contributions from each museum are now finding ways to be part of a global public trust. In response to this global dialogue, in the past two issues, we have welcomed a new cohort of professionals to our editorial board, representing the current dialogue in Canada, China, Ghana, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. Given the active practice and our tradition of sharing, we will continue to work toward a more international board to reflect the diversity of our readership. I also feel it important to revisit the value of our peer-review process. It is extremely rare to receive a manuscript that is not returned to the author with critical questions and possible counter-arguments drawn from the literature. It is thanks to the unfailing eagle eyes of our reviewers that we are able to guide authors to a central question that represents the latest thinking in the field. Their advice helps to improve each paper we accept. In closing, I extend my personal thanks to all the authors I have worked with over the past two and a half years since I accepted this role. The back and forth with authors is, in itself, a reward for the many volunteer hours spent reviewing and editing the papers you see here. We are thrilled that our archives from 62 years of publishing this journal increasingly represent the broad and multifaceted history of our field. John Fraser, Editor (jfraser@newknowledge.org). John Fraser is President & CEO of New Knowledge Organization Ltd. and 2018–2019 President of the Society for Environmental, Population, & Conservation Psychology, Division 34 of the American Psychological Association.

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