Checklist of Small Museum Friendly Sessions at AASLH

We all eagerly await next year’s Small Museum Association Conference scheduled for February 17 – 19 in Ocean City. The SMA conference committee is hard at work planning sessions for the upcoming event titled, Superheroes: The Extraordinary Power of Small Museums. We are eager to hear your “Super” strategies for board development, fundraising, community engagement, or collections care. If you have an idea for a conference session, please submit a proposal by visiting http://www.smallmuseum.org/conference.html

While we wait for the SMA conference, I wanted to let you all know about some of the exciting sessions for small museums at the AASLH Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City (October 3-6). 

One session, Small Museums, Big Impact!, will feature representatives from three small museums who will share their successful experiences in developing exhibitions focused on members of their local community. These exhibits serve as role models of how a small museum can play a significant role in recognizing the achievement of local residents in, or their connections to, the wider world.

The AASLH Small Museum Committee has created a checklist (attached) including this and other small museum friendly sessions. Please pass it along to your co-workers and colleagues. 

For more information on this conference you can download the preliminary program at http://www.aaslh.org/documents/PrelimProgramforWebsite.pdf

Thanks to AASLH and to the conference committee, board members, and members of SMA for their continued commitment to excellence in small museums.

John Pentangelo

Small Museum Association

AASLH Small Museums Committee

Call for Proposals for SMA 2012 now Available!

The Small Museum Association (SMA) is planning its 28th Annual Conference, which will be held in Ocean City, Maryland, February 19 - 21, 2012. The most important part of that planning is assembling speakers for the 40+ concurrent program sessions that will be presented during the conference. Through this Call for Proposals we invite you to share your knowledge, experience and lessons learned with hundreds of colleagues who – like you – are committed to small museums everywhere. The deadline for submitting all proposals is September 1, 2011.

As the only conference in the country dedicated specifically to small museums, the Annual Conference draws museum professionals from the Mid-Atlantic region and from across the country as our membership and attendee base continues to expand. The conference goal is to support and nurture the small museum community through a mix of invited speakers, contributed presentations, workshops and engaging discussion. The conference provides a unique and comfortable learning environment for individuals and institutions with diverse experiences to meet and learn from each other, to share their expertise, build capacity and increase professionalism. Conference sessions typically provide practical, relevant discussions and examples for small museums and institutions with limited budgets and staff. This year, the Small Museum Conference will offer sessions that address the conference theme, Adapt and Reuse: Fresh Ideas and New Approaches.

We invite proposals based on institutional experience or original research. Proposal topics should explore how organizations can adapt and reuse ideas, strategies, or even materials to create successful programs and healthy institutions, no matter how small. This should be a central theme to any presentation, whether it addresses fundraising, education, curatorial issues, museum boards or volunteers. Sessions should also indicate the level of the information that will be provided, and whether it is most appropriate for a beginner who is new to museums, someone with intermediate experience, or an expert in the field.

Possible session topics include: · Mining your Board - How to take advantage of skills you didn’t know they had · New ways to sell your project - writing winning grant applications · Using every day materials to create amazing exhibits · Turn your volunteers into social media ambassadors · How to be green on a shoestring budget · More with Less - Coping with reduced resources · Which Hat Today? - How to grow your museum with a staff of one.


Proposals should be submitted using the form here, and sent to one of the SMA Speaker Coordinators no later than September 1, 2011.

 SMA's mission is to develop and maintain a peer network among people who work for small museums, giving them opportunities to learn, share knowledge and support one another, so that they, in turn, can better serve their institutions, communities and profession.