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.