Another year is upon us. We hope it has gotten off to a good start for you. At Museum Study we are busy getting ready for another year of online courses and webinars. There is a full schedule already available for our 2024 courses on the course schedule page on our website beginning with Keeping Historic Houses & Museums Clean led by Gretchen Anderson and Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections led by Angela Kipp in February.

The book Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections came out in 2016 and Angela Kipp is working on completing the 2^nd edition, which is scheduled to be available in December 2024. In December 2023 we hosted a talk with Angela about the upcoming 2^nd edition. In this event Angela presented the plans for the new edition, solicited feedback, and held a discussion about unmanaged collections. If you would like to watch the talk you can see it on our YouTube Channel, where we put all our webinars. https://youtu.be/-qKLzT3bhfI

Our first free webinar of 2024 will be presented by Shannyn Palmer a community-engaged practitioner, researcher, and writer living and working on the Ancestral lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples in the place now known as Canberra, Australia, and instructor of our Foundations of Community Engagement: Building relationships for meaningful connection and collaboration course. The topic will be Guiding Principles: The Foundation of a Meaningful Community Engagement Practice.

Terms such as ‘community engagement’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-creation’ are becoming increasingly common in cultural institutions and yet, the way in which they are used is often ill-defined and inconsistent. This works to dilute their meaning and can lead to tokenistic claims of collaboration that perpetuate the idea that community engagement is a box-ticking exercise, or something that can be tacked onto a project when it suits.

Thoughtful consideration of the core values and principles that underpin and guide relationship building and collaboration is critical to the development of a meaningful community-engaged practice. In this webinar we will explore the central role of guiding principles, not just as words, but as actions that embody core values and provide a roadmap for implementing an ethical, empowering, and meaningful community engagement practice.

This free webinar will be on Tuesday February 6 at 10 pm Continental Europe, 9 pm U.K., 4 pm Eastern North America, 3 pm Central, 2 pm Mountain, 1 pm Pacific, Noon Alaska, 11 am Hawaii, Wednesday February 7 10 am New Zealand, 8 am Australian Eastern. Email Webinar@MuseumStudy.com if you would like to register for this discussion.

Later this year Tara Young (Writing K-12 Lesson Plans for Museums) and Hillary Hanel Rose (Creating Virtual Learning Opportunities in Museums) will give a joint webinar related to their education courses and watch for another webinar from John Simmons on Collection Management Policies. Speaking of John Simmons, the 3rd edition of Things Great and Small: Collections Management Policies will be out in April 2024.

Other new editions expected this year include: in February the third edition of Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach used in our How to Tell Stories and Create Effective Exhibition Panels course and in August the second edition of Recruiting and Managing Volunteers in Museums: A Handbook for Volunteer Management used in our Managing Museum Volunteers course.