Small Museum Association Annual Conference Recap

This week I attended the Small Museum Association’s 30^th annual conference in Ocean City, Maryland.  As a smaller group connected with the American Alliance of Museums, the SMA champions the cause of small museums and historic houses. Their mission is "to develop and maintain a peer network among people who work for small museums, giving them opportunities to learn, share knowledge, and support one another so that they in turn, can better serve their institutions, communities, and profession."  I was excited to be able to present at this conference, learn what my colleagues in the small museum world were doing, and make some new connections.  

Getting to Ocean City turned out to be a much bigger challenge than I expected it to be.  While conferences go to places in the ‘off season’ to get better rates on hotels, apparently ‘off season’ in Ocean City means getting anywhere- including a major conference hotel- is next to impossible.  To make a long and painful story short, let’s give the hotel its due and say they were beyond useless, and it was more complicated than the internet made it sound (although I suppose most things are). I left Ocotillo at 2:30 am PST, left San Diego at 6:30 am, landed in Baltimore with no weather trouble (to my amazement), and one 3-hour shuttle bus ride and 20 minute cab ride later, finally made it to my hotel by about 10 pm EST. Even now I refuse to calculate how many hours travel time that was. 

The conference was a day and a half and I’m proud to say I made it to a session in each of the time slots. There was a very interesting keynote talk on one museum’s experience with kids in summer programs and what they did and did not like about different exhibits that I’m still thinking about.  How to you compare different experiences and the lessons they learn to your institution? When they discovered kids didn’t like technology in their exhibits and we are building an exhibit with lots of technology? Some areas have kids completely immersed in technology, others (like mine) do not. I've always been a big advocate of hands on aspects to museums in addition to technology, and definitely have ideas and thoughts to bring back to the table when I get back to the IVDM and our exhibit development.  I also got some good tips on building a Wikipedia site for the museum, felt better after hearing most people have similar experiences with volunteers and I was even able to give suggestions to others, listened to a talk about education programs and may have gotten a few ideas for our upcoming field trips, and had an overall good experience.

I connected with several lovely ladies- including the only other person to attend the conference from west of the Mississippi. We had several similar experiences and were a little disappointed to find that the SMA is much more mid-atlantic focused than we felt it should be (they do claim on their website to serve "small museums in the mid-Atlantic region and beyond"). I’d like to see it really expand beyond the mid-Atlantic, especially since AAM always points people in small museums to SMA, no matter where they are geographically.  SMA is an all volunteer organization, and it is always easier to work in your own area, but maybe we can do some brainstorming on how to expand their reach.  It’s still much to soon after the conference for me to decide if I want to try and encourage change in this organization or not, and how I would do that.

The conference had a little less than 250 attendees, much smaller than the Society of American Archivist conferences I’ve been to in the past.  I liked this smaller approach- many people knew each other already but were always happy to draw in a new person, everyone was very relaxed and open, friendly, and made me feel right at home.  There was nothing overwhelming about the event, but it encouraged you to exchange ideas and grow as a person and an institution in a very friendly manner. I definitely hope I get to return next year, and maybe have another chance to present.

SMA Conference Presentation: On the Road Again: Adapting Traveling Exhibits to fit your Small Museum

1850 newspaper ad found through the LoC's Chronicling America site

The main reason I attended the Small Museum Association conference was to give a presentation on travelling exhibits and to share the IVDM’s experience turning Gold Fever! into a successful and fun exhibit.  While I have attended conferences, I had never given a talk at a conference before.  My time slot was the last slot on the last day and I admit I was convinced most people would head out early and skip the last talks altogether, let alone show up to hear me.

20 people were interested enough to attend my session and it ended up being pretty awesome.  They not only listened, they took notes, asked questions, and we had a really great talk afterwards about ideas everyone could implement.  I refused to make the classic mistake of having a PowerPoint presentation that was all words, or that I read from.  Instead, my slides were almost entirely pictures from our exhibit, highlighting different features as I talked about them.  Many people commented on how cool the exhibit looked, and congratulated the museum on a job well done- which I still really take pride in even though the exhibit itself has come down.  It reminded me how much I enjoyed building the supplemental exhibits, and challenged me to make our next travelling exhibit even better.  Taking a minute to blow my own horn I also got a lot of positive feedback on the presentation itself, how I gave it, how informative it and helpful it was.  Several people said this should have been one of the sessions SMA filmed (as soon as I heard they were filming sessions I checked to make sure mine wasn’t one of them.  Newbie nerves can only take so much at a time!) A few people asked for my card so they could email me with questions as they worked on exhibits of their own. 

It was a hugely positive experience for me to hear so many encouraging things from professionals who have been in the field much longer than I have, and to hear them say that both the museum and I are headed for great things.  In a way, I think this was the first time I felt like I was also a “professional” not a student, and these were my colleagues.  That I now have experiences and ideas that make me worth listening to on certain subjects blows my mind a little.  I hope I can hone in on something I’m equally passionate about for next year (and, more importantly, might have a fresh perspective on).  I’ve now set a challenge for myself both in building exhibits and in giving presentations.

Warning for my non archival friends: the next few blogs will probably end up focusing on the conference from a more professional point of view. This may bore you, but if you decide to read them, I'll try to make them worth your while.