The Montana Museum of Art and Culture offers the only Advanced Certificate in Museum Studies in Montana and the Inland Northwest, featuring graduate-level coursework and practical training in the burgeoning field of museums and galleries.
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Through readings, assignments, and hands-on experiences, students will learn best practices in object handling, maintenance, and care, building archival housing, and organizing collections in the museum.
This course is part of the Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program.
This course has two goals: firstly to introduce students to the history, preparation, curation, and scientific use of natural history collections; and second is to familiarize them with the basic structure and management of data associated with museum collections. The course will be leaning on vertebrate zoological collections as examples for both goals, as they involve complex physical and data curation. However, the core concepts are transferrable to different types of collections, with different practices and purposes, across disciplines.
Museums obtain new acquisitions through donations, gifts, or bequests. Accessioning is the process of transitioning artwork into a Museum's Permanent Collection.
Students will learn the workflow of Accessioning, including presenting to Collections Committees, inventory and legal documentation, transporting, photographing, and cataloguing. This is essential for each piece of artwork to ensure its proper record and storage in the Permanent Collection.
Museums are among the most dynamic cultural hubs of the modern world; their evolution in the western world has been the topic of much scholarship and historical analysis since at least the 16th century. The course is an intensive seminar in which the class discusses the development of museums in the west as well as the ideological implications for their function in contemporary society. It is primarily based on lectures, reading and discussion, and a supervised research project.
Graduate students enrolled in the Museum Studies Certificate program will take this course to polish and present their year-long practical Field Projects to the core faculty.
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