By Emma Gencarelli Every summer, Lyndhurst—National Trust Historic Site in Tarrytown, New York—hosts a handful of Preservation interns from different academic programs, locations, and backgrounds. This year I was fortunate to be one of them. The interns’ projects vary from year to year. The...
Valuable advice for homeowners and house museum operators on cleaning and caring for historic buildings and their contents. #HistoricSites #collectionsmanagement #housemuseums
Housekeeping.pdf
The National Trust for Historic Preservation and its Collections. The National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States (hereafter the National Trust), chartered by an Act of Congress, October 26, 1949, is a private nonprofit organization empowered to acquire “sites, ...
nthpcollectionspolicy-140625142801-phpapp01.pdf
Historic house museums and historic sites throughout the United States provide public benefit in uniqueand varied ways. They preserve significant buildings, landscapes and objects for the future; educate the public about the history of the United States; commemorate historic events and...
nthpcollectionspolicypositionpaper-140626103046-phpapp01.pdf
For museums and historic sites that maintain collections, a key phrase of the American Alliance of Museum’s (AAM) Code of Ethics—“direct care”—has been without a definition for almost 25 years. The phrase is important: AAM’s code only permits proceeds from the de-accessioning and disposition of...
Historic sites are cool these days. Not because they are a place to get out the summer's heat, but because cool stuff is happening--community gardens, gatherings for student activists, performance art, surprising exhibits, and creative workshops to name just a few. And it turns out there are an...
FJ_SUMMER_14_F.pdf
By Laura Quinn Cooper-Molera, Monterey, California. | Credit: National Trust for Historic Preservation From the earliest discussions of shared use at Cooper-Molera, it was understood that the collection of...
Inside the studio at Chesterwood. | Credit: National Trust for Historic Preservation `What do thumbtacks, Napoleon’s death mask, a slave brand, and a Thomas Affleck sofa all have in common? They are all accessioned objects in the National Trust’s museum collections. These four...
Most historic sites and house museums currently follow museum collections standards that do not generally acknowledge that their buildings and grounds often represent the most important and tangible “objects” in their “collection.” In this context, institutions struggle with balancing their...
By Sheila A. Brennan Limited funding for museums often means that objects languish in storage facilities. (photo of Unley Museum, Australia | Credit: Flickr user, Community History SA, February 17, 2011) ...