Search

In this article, we assess the state of museum studies, with special attention to programs in the United States. After briefly reviewing the historical trajectory of museum studies, we define this field of study and determine that it should more accurately be called museology. To investigate the most critical issues in current museological pedagogy, we then address museology's current status and, finally, its future through select critical issues in the field: museological thinking, the meaning of "museum professional," museology as an academic discipline, and museological curricula.

As makerspaces and hackerspaces pop up in libraries and museums, one little lab sits in the middle of an Information School, but it is not a maker-space, a gallery, or a museum. The MuseLab, at the Kent State School of Information, is something else, something new--or perhaps something familiar, but situated in a different context, making it less easy to define. The MuseLab is a laboratory for museum studies, where museality--the characteristic of something that in one reality documents another reality--is at the heart of all our activities. Created around design thinking principles and propositions of emergence and openness, the MuseLab is truly a space for experimentation, practice, and breaking rules in the interest of learning, innovating, and discovery. As more and more higher education courses go online, face-to-face creative group activities are becoming scarce. The story of the lab's genesis and development may be of interest for other LIS schools, programs, teachers, and information practitioners.

This paper is an attempt to support and promote education programs that cover the entire cultural heritage landscape (libraries, archives, museums) as an integrated, larger meta-discipline. By taking a larger picture approach, professionals who do the work of memory institutions can be more effective in their work, in the promotion of that profession, and increase public value of all related institutions and their purposes. Through the description of the integrated museum studies specialization at Kent State University School of Library and Information Science, this paper aims to provide one example of how this can work, first by describing the role of Library and Information Science (LIS) as a meta-discipline, next by discussing the changing landscape of cultural heritage professional education, and finally by describing in detail the new Kent State integrated museum studies specialization. The infusion of museum studies with LIS is discussed as a part of a larger movement toward integration of training information professionals in the entire cultural heritage sector.

In this paper, I describe an interactive thought experiment and workshop that I conducted at a recent European LAM conference. In this experiment, I asked participants to imagine that we are at the very cusp of creating the next-generation curriculum for a libraries, archives, museum (LAM) program, and that we have a blank slate. I offered a way to think about determining this curriculum, a way to think about it at the level of designing, by starting fresh, erasing, as best we could, the idiosyncratic aspects of each field in order to determine the shared foundational core. Central to this process were systems thinking, complexity thinking, and the notion of the integrated curriculum. This paper outlines the reasoning behind this process and provides a glimpse at the actual steps. I position current LAM curriculum in the context of convergence trends, or more accurately, re-convergence trends, and ask what exactly is converging. Next I outline a framework derived from a systems-thinking-oriented approach to creating curriculum, suggesting that this approach is helpful in describing and defining the state of LAM in Library and Information Science (LIS) from the perspective of each department creating an integrated curriculum. Finally, I provide a brief overview of the process I used to conduct a workshop around the notion of starting over, or from a blank slate.

Though the road is uphill for scholarship, teaching beyond text is well within reach for departments, programs and individual instructors. In this special issue of Education for Information, authors are asked to explore the possibilities beyond text-based teaching in information studies education, building on a previous special issue on innovative pedagogies (volume 32, issue 1). With the papers in this issue, a return to learning and teaching is seen with many of those tried-and-true methods--storytelling, drawing, exhibition, kinesthetics and community. This special issue opens with two short works describing teaching practice. In "Storytelling," McDowell discusses storytelling as a form of pedagogy. In particular, she details her MLIS course on Storytelling, which she has developed over the past 11 years. In "Writing without Words," Stoerger illustrates how her information technology students created infographics to express scholarly research and learning. Their work process involved analyzing and synthesizing complex information about a given topic in order to create a unique digital artifact, which could then be used as a portfolio piece. The issue continues with two full papers that present two different approaches to using a draw-and-write technique to teach conceptual and theoretical topics. In the next paper, "Holistic Competency Development and the Significance of Learning Domains in Audiovisual Archiving Education," Gracy discusses audiovisual archiving education and the as-yet missed opportunity for psychomotor teaching and learning in that domain. This collection of papers serves as an inspiring entrée to non-text-based instruction in the field.

The article explores focus and formalize understanding of how literature information relates to contemplation, postulating a set of contemplative aims for information. Topics discussed include information also contributes to other aspects of human consciousness; information studies continue to solve societal problems and reveal more healthful ways of being, appealing only to epistemic aims; and development of the concept of social epistemology for knowledge management.

Every discipline has an existing canon – seen in textbooks, scholarly journals, conference proceedings, etc. – that explicitly outlines existing practice and thought. Recognizing the inadequacy of these canons, the current paper outlines an approach to classroom instruction that helps students move beyond these texts as they create and discover noncanonical knowledge. This noncanonical approach focuses on turning classrooms into Communities of Practice (CoP). There is myriad literature on the utility of such groups for knowledge creation and learning in organizations, yet this paper is unique in introducing it to classroom instruction. By turning classrooms into an adapted CoP, instructors are situated to move beyond the texts or canons of their disciplines. This occurs as they a) invite unique student contributions to create ideas and knowledge that go beyond existing texts, b) develop trust and community among students that goes beyond simple icebreakers and standard group work, and c) engage consistently in action that recognizes the practical utility of what is learned. This is essential to any discipline, yet it has a special place in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) which – long a discipline of the text – is itself moving outside of this as it focuses on knowledge creation [1]. In addition to its theoretical foundation, the paper provides practical steps instructors can take to turn their classrooms into CoPs that move beyond the existing text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audiovisual archiving education programs prepare individuals to care for film, video, and digital media collections found in cultural heritage institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums. These programs combine traditional graduate education with significant experiential components to train students for work with moving images and sound material in archival and museum settings. Audiovisual archivist training requires a three-pronged approach that combines competencies drawn from the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning domains, blending conceptual, historical, and theoretical knowledge and soft skills such as communication and project management with training in hand and other sensory skills. Audiovisual education programs tend to be less explicit about requirements in expert handling and repair work (often referred to in the conservation profession as “hand skills”), sensory skills, and soft skills, however. While cognitive competencies are often stated directly through program documents such as course descriptions and syllabi, psychomotor and affective competencies tend to not be directly stated or are deprioritized in favor of development of cognitive competencies. This perceived gap establishes the need for making affective and psychomotor educational objectives more explicit in program curricula and requirements. In particular, learning objectives in the psychomotor domain have been neglected, which is problematic for a field that requires professionals to possess significant manual dexterity and sensory skills. This paper also makes the case for the design of a field-wide competency framework that accurately reflects the roles of the three learning domains and makes them equally essential for professional preparation in the audiovisual archiving profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Storytelling, as a practice and process, is a longstanding tool and non-textual pedagogy in the field of library and information science. Storytelling is also the topic of a graduate course taught for the past eleven years by the author as a tool for all forms of professional communication. This article explores the non-textual (and selected textual) pedagogies involved in teaching storytelling as an interactive communication practice. This pedagogical approach defines storytelling as involving a dynamic triangle of telling, listening, and story, drawing on both folklore and storytelling performance scholarship. Three themes weave throughout the syllabus: ethics, applications, and technologies. Storytelling brings the teller and audience into a reciprocal process of listening and telling, from which a fresh story of professional meaning and purpose can emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates a dynamic, collaborative, and dialogic strategy for guiding students (and experienced researcher teams) through rudimentary forms of visual analysis using draw-and-write datasets. The approach identifies five sequential stages of the visual analysis process and further delineates twenty activities therein. Akin to the instructional “calls” spoken during square dancing, a leader with a script verbally prompts participants through a series of observational and analytical exercises and poses discussion questions along the way. The interactive experience unfolds stepwise and engenders in participants a feeling of intimacy with the images; introduces an array of analytical lenses; gives rise to discoveries about the concept being studied visually; kindles esprit de corps; and is fun. To encourage the adoption of this approach – called (i)Square Dancing – a blueprint for a student-geared, draw-and-write study and the leader’s script are provided for educators and scholars alike to borrow and customize to their own courses, research questions, and disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an experiment of using a hybrid pedagogical approach to tackle the challenge of teaching “Information and Communication theories” to students enrolled in Master of Communication and Digital Content at the School of Communication and Journalism of Aix Marseille University in France. The hybrid pedagogical approach combines the classical textual/verbal approach with an arts informed pedagogy, augmented by creative writing and storytelling activities. The fact that the arts-informed approach was not used in isolation but in combination with the traditional textual/verbal approach and creative writing and storytelling activities offered students a wide choice of learning modalities through which they could express themselves. Our preliminary findings suggest that using a hybrid pedagogical approach rather than one single pedagogical approach improved students’ understanding of the abstract concepts implied by the communication theories discussed during the lectures. Students illustrated their understanding of these theories by recasting them in various real life or plausible situations during the creative writing activity which we call “Communication Stories” or cStories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the large number of students, instructors teaching high enrollment courses often rely on traditional assignments such as scantron exams and research papers. While these types of assignments are functional and satisfy a purpose, they are typically not meaningful or pleasurable for students. In an introductory information technology course, the final paper was redesigned to focus on visuals rather than on written words. The redesigned visual learning experience – a digital infographic – gave students the opportunity to rely primarily on images rather than text to communicate their message about an emerging technology to an external audience. Throughout this creation process, where students had to analyze and synthesize complex information, they gained new understanding about their topic as they were thinking and making. Further, this experience had personal significance to the students – one that gave them a sense of pride and accomplishment. The students also recognized that their unique digital artifact had a life beyond the classroom, and they wanted to share their creation with others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to invite further consideration of how people experience documents. By offering a model from Reader Response theory – Louise Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory of Reading – as well as examples from research on numinous experiences with museum objects, the author hopes to open further avenues of information behavior studies about people and documents. The goal is to incorporate more aspects of lived experience and the aesthetic into practice with and research of documents. Design/methodology/approach – Theoretical scope includes Louise Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory of Reading, John Dewey's concepts of transaction and experience and lived experience concepts/methods derived from phenomenology. Findings – Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory explicates the continuum of reader response, from the efferent to the aesthetic, stating that the act of “reading” (experience) involves a transaction between the reader (person) and the text (document). Each transaction is a unique experience in which the reader and text continuously act and are acted upon by each other. This theory of reading translates well into the realm of investigating the lived experience of documents and in that context, a concrete example and suggested strategies for future study are provided. Originality/value – This paper provides a holistic approach to understanding lived experience with documents and introduces the concept of person-document transaction. It inserts the wider notion of document into a more specific theory of reading, expanding its use beyond the borders of text, print and literature. By providing an example of real document experiences and applying Rosenblatt's continuum, the value of this paper is in opening new avenues for information behavior inquiries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to understand the meaning of museum objects from an information perspective. Links are made from Buckland's conceptual information framework as a semiotic to museum object as "document" and finally to user experience of these museum "documents". The aim is to provide a new lens through which museum studies researchers can understand museum objects and for LIS researchers to accept museum objects as another form of document to be studied. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual and comparative analysis of Buckland's information typology as a semiotic. Outcome of analysis forms a model of understanding the museum object as a "document" that is accessed by users on a continuum of experience. Findings – Michael Buckland's information typology is insightful and useful for a broad understanding of what all heritage institutions have in common: the physical object. Buckland helps us see the museum as an information system, the museum object as a document, and the multidimensional use of the concept information and its semiotic ramifications. Originality/value – Buckland's typology is important to an understanding of the museum system and museum object in both LIS and museum studies. The concept of "document" opens up a broader perspective, which creates, rather than limits understandings of the human relationship with information. This expanded concept of "document" as sign/semiotic helps us understand user experience in ways not previously explored in the convergence of museums and information studies, from the practical to the theoretical. In this inclusive sense, Buckland's concept of document is a unifying theoretical concept for museums, libraries, and archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the second installment in a two-part series on the physicality of archival material in the context of the digital age. The first part reviewed key lessons in the history of new technologies that have affected archival practice. Part two will explore a holistic understanding of paper-based knowledge transmission in the context of the digital access movement. The intent is to provide a more expansive context to the shift from a physically, place-based activity to one of ubiquitous access to secondary materials. The investigation emphasizes two notions: archives as thing and archives as experience. Issues of authenticity, evidence, and sensory engagement are seen as potential knowledge elements of original material. Furthermore, physical archives are considered in their environmental context, through physical processes in the embodied act of using, and through their meaning to the user. The purpose of this article is to highlight the tacit, assumed and taken-for-granted aspects of using original archival material to better understand the conversion from physical to digital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to understand the meaning of museum objects from an information perspective. Links are made from Buckland's conceptual information framework as a semiotic to museum object as „document“ and finally to user experience of these museum „documents“ The aim is to provide a new lens through which museum studies researchers can understand museum objects and for LIS researchers to accept museum objects as another form of document to be studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]