Active Collections: How to Create a Leaner Collection for Greater Impact

An AASLH Webinar

Looking to explore options of what it means to steward leaner, more sustainable collections with greater impact? Join Elee Wood, Rainey Tisdale, and Trevor Jones for a lively interactive discussion of ideas and action items on innovative and possibly unconventional ideas for collections stewardship and management. Topics will include new approaches to collections development, cataloging, policy, deaccessioning.  Participants will gain practical strategies and tools to shape your collection for greater impact.

Learn more and register.

About the Speakers:

Trevor Jones is Director and CEO of the Nebraska State Historical Society. He believes that museum collections have the power to tell amazing stories, and has helped museums of all sizes rethink how artifact collections support their mission. Trevor holds BA degrees in history and German from Grinnell College, an MA degree in history and Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute.

Rainey Tisdale is an independent curator who leads for change on field-wide issues including place-based interpretation, collections stewardship, creative practice, and museums & well-being. She has held curatorial positions at the AFL-CIO’s museum, the US Senate’s Office of Senate Curator, and the Bostonian Society; she was a Fulbright Scholar in Helsinki, Finland and a community fellow at Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities; and taught in the Museum Studies Program at Tufts University. She is an international expert on city museums and a co-founder of the Active Collections Project. With Linda Norris, she co-authored Creativity in Museum Practice.

Elee Wood is professor of museum studies, and public scholar of museums, families, and learning in the Museum Studies Program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), and Associate Dean of Student Affairs in the School of Liberal Arts. Wood’s research includes the study of visitor-object experiences in museums, object-based learning, critical museum pedagogy, and evaluation capacity building. She is co-author of The Objects of Experience: Transforming Visitor-Object Encounters in Museums with Kiersten F. Latham (Routledge, 2014) and joined the Active Collections Project in 2014.