Museum Ethics: Forecasting, Round Three!
The third round of the Delphi Forecasting Exercise, a joint project of the Center for the Future of Museums and the Institute of Museum Ethics, is beginning this week and you are welcome to join in.
In Rounds One and Two, we identified six issues to focus upon and in this round, we hope to learn more about how you think these issues will affect museum business in coming years. Will they be more or less important? Do the standards that we have currently established adequately describe the challenges that the issues might present?
The six issues identified include:
- Accessibility: providing access to collections and institutions; economic accessibility; balancing accessibility to collections with preservation responsibilities; economic accessibility; balancing accessibility with preservation
- Conflicts of Interest: development and fundraising, governance, personal collecting
- Control of content: curatorial independence and scholarship by staff and academic experts versus community curation; public participation in content creation (e.g., crowdsourcing, participatory design); censorship
- Collecting and deaccessioning: including the use of funds resulting from deaccessioning, retention of material the museum does not use or make accessible, choice of what to collect
- Diversity: diversity of representation in governance, staff and audience; affirmative action in recruiting staff and board members
- Transparency & accountability: governance, operations, finance
Background information on this round of the exercise is available on the website of the Center for the Future of Museums (http://futureofmuseums.blogspot.com/2011/11/ethics-forecast-round-3-future-of.html) or you can go directly to the survey (http://aam.checkboxonline.com/ethics3.aspx).
