On Wednesday, November 9, Susan Rowley, director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and Bridget Callahan, coordinator of the Luce Foundation Center Program at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., will lead an online panel discussion on open and visible storage in museums. The panel, Museum Collections: Considering Access & Transparency through Visible Storage, is hosted by the U-M Museum Studies Program. Noon to 1:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
In recent years, museums have increasingly turned to "open storage" techniques to display parts of their collection which would otherwise not be on public view. The foundations for this decades-long trend are found in the impulse to democratize museums with "visible" storage being touted as one way to make collections more accessible to their communities.
In this conversation on open and visible storage in museums, we will be guided by Susan Rowley and Bridget Callahan in an exploration of the history of "visible" collections storage and how technology and new considerations of democratized access have changed the design and use of museum holdings. Ethics, equity, standards of care, and programming will also be addressed.
If you would like to request an ASL interpreter for this presentation, please email ummsp@umich.edu by November 1. Registration is required: click here to register.
