Avoid pointless artifact dumping or meaningless trivia. Answer the question: Why is this object, person, or event historically significant?

For instance, photographs should be identified as to date taken, photographer, persons and activities in the image, and source or collection in which the image can be found

As Rudyard Kipling said, if history were taught in the form of stories it would never be forgotten.

As a practical matter, museums can’t possibly take in every old item, so historians will have to review and evaluate each item to determine whether it should be discarded or taken in by the museum.  It is extremely helpful if owners can provide complete documentation or descriptive information about items.

When it comes to artifacts such as old photographs, audio recordings, film, and documents, one of the biggest misconceptions is that everything old is in the “public domain” and therefore does not have a copyright owner. In other words, it is free to copy, manipulate, and use by anyone.

For other items, it’s important to note manufacturer name and location, date, material, description of usage, and name of donor.

Perhaps social media’s most powerful feature is that it is interactive, giving the community an opportunity to share information and opinions with local historians

In most situations, formal writing and speaking standards should apply whenever local historians are communicating with the public, fellow historians, and professionals on behalf of their museums

Statement on the use of funds from deaccessioning

Specifies how to protect, evacuate, and recover collections in the event of a disaster

Includes preparedness and response plans for all relevant emergencies and threats (natural, mechanical, biological, and human)

States why the museum exists and who benefits as a result of its efforts

Be a docent:  Be an ambassador for the museum and provide tours and presentations during our many events throughout the year.

Their work should educate, entertain, and inspire us to value and appreciate not only historical artifacts but also the people, events, and socio-cultural, political, and economic processes that shape history

are getting harder to buy, according to a Senate report published Wednesday.

This made it more difficult for us to win

The lag in compassionate release is particularly alarming because prisons are teeming with aging inmates who suffer from cancer, diabetes, and other conditions, academic researchers said.

The commission was delayed for more than three years because Congress did not confirm Trump's nominees and President Joe Biden's appointees were not confirmed until August.

But data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission shows judges rejected more than 80% of compassionate release requests filed from October 2019 through September 2022.

A federal compassionate release law allows imprisoned people to be freed early for "extraordinary and compelling reasons," like terminal illness or old age.

drug charges

15-year sentence for a drug conviction when he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer last year.

"It doesn't make us any safer because in many ways it diminishes the trust and respect that could occur between law enforcement and the community."

The message that I'm hearing from officers in the field is that they are very discouraged

Now those officers complain they are the ones being handcuffed as the Biden administration tries to limit the agency's focus to what it considers serious threats to public safety and recent border crossers.

The focus should always be on clear & immediate safety threats. Not others who are not threats."

deportations in the summer of 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement mobilized to deliver.

Everyday visuals can work as a road back to the best thatart museums can offer through objects thatare not yet in museum collections

. But to many contemporary art educators, the permission to usethe humble objects and visual encountersin our homes, magazines, streetscapes,and shops has been liberating. The world ofimages available to art educators, alreadyenormous and pre-selected by generationsof curators and critics, is now even larger.

This step might also, assome students have suggested, encompass non-art, objects that fall outside theusual definition of art and thus help us todistinguish between the excellent and theordinary.

Oberhardt posits a four-cell, twoby-two, matrix that describes the life cycleof art images, starting with the art imageitself (which she calls Frame 1), movingto the meanings attached to the art imagewhen it enters the interpretive context of themuseum gallery (Frame 2), and graduallybeing appropriated into reproductions ofvarious kinds (postcards, posters, T-shirts,now internet images) that become availableto people outside the museum in a kind of"museum without walls", as Malraux (1967)described it decades ago and which Oberhardt calls Frame 3. To these reproductionsin Frame 3, I would add the deliberate reuse of art as described above, since bothways of using the image transform it forpublic consumption. Thus, in this formulation, museum reproductions move out intothe world and essentially become part ofthe visual culture available to consumers invirtually any location

artful and compellingstill-life compositions. A recent example ofa "vanitas? arrangement was installed in ajewelry store window, with a chain of diamonds artfully draped over a rock behindwhich loomed a skull adorned with autumnleaves?a Halloween motif, and as suchalso a vanitas reminder of the fleetingnessof earthly pleasures

Museums participatein this side of the dialogue by enshriningfamiliar objects into their collections: Tupperware and the ScrewPull corkscrew canbe seen at the Museum of Modern Art inNew York. We see the deliberate dialoguebetween art and visual culture, therefore,in various ways, in the clear re-uses of artfor objects of commerce and everyday use,as well as in artists' celebrations of the ordinary and museums' celebration of everyday objects on view under glass.

The viewer, then, iscentral to any definitions of art and visualculture and is the variable that can eitherkeep the two points separat

Without a clear concept ofvisual culture as a source both of visualexperience and of the artifacts themselvesfrom many times and cultures, art museumsbecome repositories of objects unrelated tothe lives of today's visitors. L

scontinuum is developed here from an existingmodel of the life cycle of museum objects todescribe the changing roles of objects as theychange settings and as viewers change theirrelationships to them. T