2025 Past Courses

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.

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 March 3, 2025.

Join instructor Helen Wong Smith beginning January 6, 2025 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 us beginning August 4, 2025 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 June 30, 2025 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, Third Edition, will be supplemented by a variety of readings and assignments.

Join us beginning June 2, 2025 for the 4 week course Repatriation Beyond NAGPRA.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) has come a long way in the last three decades, but museums still have a lot of work to do, and repatriation does not begin and end with the mandates laid out in NAGPRA regulations. If this work is to be effective and adhere to the spirit of the law, museum practitioners will need to go above and beyond (what? NAGPRA?) with relationship building, restitution, and authentic storytelling.

This four-week course uses case studies, literature, media, and discussion to delve into the possibilities, complications, and practice of repatriation beyond NAGPRA.

Join instructor Tara Young beginning September 8, 2025 for the four week course Managing Museum Volunteers.

Join us beginning August 4, 2025 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 October 6, 2025.

Join us beginning September 8, 2025 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 May 5, 2025 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 September 8, 2025 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.