This free course was developed by the entire Museum Study team to help cultural institutions through the current crisis by highlighting important resources we have found. We welcome your input to continue to grow and improve this course. Please use the Help us improve this free course forum to make suggestions about resources you think would be useful to this free course and suggestions you have about what to include or not include.

As you are strategizing how to shut down your facility consider also what you can do to serve your community in other ways. The Baltimore Museum of Industry in partnership with a local health provider is transforming a parking lot into a coronavirus testing site.

This course is an evolving tool to aide cultural institutions in ways to respond to large scale crisis that affects the ability to operate normally.

Join instructor Tara Young beginning September 2, 2024 for the four week course Managing Museum Volunteers.

Join instructor Helen Wong Smith beginning November 4, 2024 for the four week course Cultural Competency.

Everyone believes they work well with cultures unlike their own and are aware of the benefits of intercultural or Cultural Competency (CC) practice. How you define and incorporate cultural competency in your museum requires the ability to function with awareness, knowledge, and interpersonal skill when engaging people of different backgrounds, assumptions, beliefs, values, and behaviors.

In this workshop you’ll be challenged to examine personal perceptions that might surprise you and strategies that will increase your ability to practice inclusion to your stakeholders including staff, donors, visitors, and communities.

This workshop provides the skills to employ cultural competency and the stages individuals and organizations can implement to improve relations with internal and external communities.

Join instructor Shannyn Palmer beginning March 4, 2024 for the four week course Foundations of Community Engagement.

The role of museums is evolving in a rapidly changing world. A global reckoning with the legacies of colonialism and collecting has raised questions about what it means to be a museum in the 21^st Century. Museums are increasingly expected to be responsive to their audiences and actively develop the roles that they play within society, which requires a re-imagining of museum practice and accelerated efforts to develop new ways of working.

The challenge and opportunities of museums today is to connect effectively and meaningfully with the communities they serve to tell stories, explore issues, and deliver powerful experiences that reflect the diverse and entangled nature of our past and present.

And yet, while terms like ‘community engagement’ and ‘collaboration’ feature prominently in contemporary cultural institutions, their use is often inconsistent. This works to dilute their meaning and can lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion that perpetuate the notion that community engagement is something that can be tacked on to a project.

Join us February 3, 2025 for the four week course Creating Exhibitions through the Collective: Insight into Community Co-Curation.

Want to create an exhibit that utilizes your community?

If so, Creating Exhibitions through the Collective is for you. This class will be focused on community co-curation. We will investigate how community involvement during all stages of the exhibit development process can lead to more interpretation that is credible, community empowerment, and advocacy. Tips and strategies will be provided to build sustainable frameworks for this type of engagement.

Join us for the four week course Creating Successful Traveling Exhibitions beginning May 5, 2025.

Ever wanted to know how to develop a traveling exhibition?

If so, Creating Successful Traveling Exhibitions is for you. This class will be focused on providing you with the nuts and bolts on how to develop and tour traveling exhibitions. We will be delving into all stages of the traveling exhibit development process and tips and strategies will be provided to build sustainable frameworks for these types of exhibitions.

Join us for the four week course Creating Successful Traveling Exhibitions beginning October 7, 2024.

Join us beginning May 6, 2024 for the four week course Writing K-12 Lesson Plans for Museums.

This course is designed to teach museum educators how to develop and write formal lesson plans for K-12 programming.

Join Instructor Tara Young for this 4 week online professional development course.

Each week’s lecture, chat, and assignment will be iterative, and students will end the course with a finished lesson plan that they can put into use at their museums.

Join us for the four week course Creating Successful Traveling Exhibitions beginning March 4, 2024.

Ever wanted to know how to develop a traveling exhibition?

If so, Creating Successful Traveling Exhibitions is for you. This class will be focused on providing you with the nuts and bolts on how to develop and tour traveling exhibitions. We will be delving into all stages of the traveling exhibit development process and tips and strategies will be provided to build sustainable frameworks for these types of exhibitions.

Join us beginning October 7, 2024 for the four week course Creating Virtual Learning Opportunities in Museums.

This course builds upon your prior knowledge of creating museum education programs by introducing techniques for creating virtual learning opportunities.

Participants will create at least 3 different virtual museum education programs. Participants will learn to use technology tools and build skills to help them develop additional virtual learning opportunities.

Join Instructor Hillary Hanel Rose for this 4 week online professional development course.

Join us June 3, 2024 for the four week course Creating Exhibitions through the Collective: Insight into Community Co-Curation.

Want to create an exhibit that utilizes your community?

If so, Creating Exhibitions through the Collective is for you. This class will be focused on community co-curation. We will investigate how community involvement during all stages of the exhibit development process can lead to more interpretation that is credible, community empowerment, and advocacy. Tips and strategies will be provided to build sustainable frameworks for this type of engagement.

Housekeeping in the museum or historic house is a vital activity. Dust building up on an object is not only unsightly, it will also cause damage. An unkempt museum or historic house is not appealing to the visitor nor is it healthy for the staff and collection. Yet cleaning collections can be risky as well.

This course will provide the participants with a foundation as to how to clean objects and facilities safely. We will explore a variety of subjects, including health and safety for the staff and the objects, cleaning methods for a large variety of collection types common in cultural institutions and the importance of documenting what you do. Join us for this four week course. Join us for Keeping Keeping Historic Houses & Museums Clean beginning February 3, 2025.

Housekeeping in the museum or historic house is a vital activity. Dust building up on an object is not only unsightly, it will also cause damage. An unkempt museum or historic house is not appealing to the visitor nor is it healthy for the staff and collection. Yet cleaning collections can be risky as well.

This course will provide the participants with a foundation as to how to clean objects and facilities safely. We will explore a variety of subjects, including health and safety for the staff and the objects, cleaning methods for a large variety of collection types common in cultural institutions and the importance of documenting what you do. Join us for this four week course. Join us for Keeping Keeping Historic Houses & Museums Clean beginning February 4, 2024.

Join us beginning February 3, 2025 for the 4 week course Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections.The process of securing the collection and making it accessible needs the mindset of a collections manager as well as the one of a project manager. This course helps you to get a grip on your unmanaged collection by developing a plan to tackle it, defining achievable goals by creating logical exits and finding ways to keep the project going even if you are limited in time, staff and money. The course textbook, Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections, will be supplemented by a variety of readings and assignments.

Join us beginning September 2, 2024 us for the four week course Moving Museum Collections. 

Moving Museum Collections provides a how-to for planning and managing a collection move to avoid the many pitfalls associated with a move project. The course will help you clarify your project, develop a work plan, prepare a communication scheme, define proposals for vendors, organize staffing and establish packing protocols.

Join us beginning August 5, 2024 for the 4 week course Laws & Collections Management.

This course provides an accessible introduction to the basic legal aspects of managing museum collections by presenting an overview of the legal organization of museums and the scope and significance of key US and international laws and regulations that affect collecting and managing museum collections. The course textbook (A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections) is supplemented by a changing variety of pertinent readings and class discussions.

Join us beginning July 1, 2024 for the 4 week course Policies for Managing Collections. In this course we will critically examine the purposes and functions of collections management policies, including how collections are defined, acquired, managed, used, maintained, and deaccessioned. The course textbook,Things Great and Small: Collections Management Policies, will be supplemented by a variety of readings and assignments.

Join us beginning June 3, 2024 for the 4 week course Assessing Risks to Cultural Property 1. Assessing risks to cultural property, including but not limited to Museum, Library, and Archive collections, is becoming a fundamental ability for collection care professionals. This introductory course provides a firm foundation on which to build an understanding of risk-based approaches to cultural property protection. Ideas associated with the terms hazard, risk, deterioration, damage, and loss are clarified. Risks are defined as departures from the goal of shepherding a collection forward in time without it suffering damage or loss. We will explore the importance of comprehensiveness and of clear definitions of risks. Tools are provided and practiced to ensure comprehensive sets of well defined risks can be developed based on agents of change and types of risk.

Participants will develop a useful set of defined type 1 (rare and potentially catastrophic) specific risks relevant to their institution. The potential impact of those risks will be ranked according to estimates of likelihood and impact. This will provide focus in the development of emergency preparedness plans and resources. It will also provide a platform for more effective communication among functional groups within your institution including collection management, registration, conservation, facilities management, security, finance, and possibly others.

Join us beginning October 7, 2024 for the 4 week course Assessing Risks to Cultural Property 2.

Assessing risks to cultural property, including but not limited to Museum, Library, and Archive collections, is becoming a fundamental ability for collection care professionals. This course builds on the foundation established in Assessing Risk to Cultural Property 1. We will explore challenges to quantifying risks and strategies for estimating rates of, and expected impacts of, sporadic incidents (type 2 risks) employing examples based on participant situations. Means of determining or estimating rates of progressive changes (type 3 risks) are provided and practised. Finally, methods for presenting comprehensive, (semi-) quantitative risk profiles are demonstrated and employed by participants.

Participants will appreciate the impact of human thinking heuristics and biases on judgments and how these impact our understanding of risks. An Excel workbook for organizing and documenting a risk assessment will be provided. Using this workbook and working individually and in groups, participants will determine or estimate examples of both type 2 type 3 risks impacting their own collections.

Virtual workshop in managing fluid preserved collections for the curation team at the National Herbarium of Victoria.