Small Tech, Big Impact: Twenty-First Century Educational Collaborations to Preserve and Share Rural Museum Collections

ABSTRACT

Thoughtful and intentional collaborations among small, community-curated museums, colleges, and schools have the potential to create transformative learning opportunities for all partners while also improving access to, and preservation of, museum collections. In this article, we describe the Digital Scholarship in Museum Partnerships (DSMP) project, a project designed to establish authentic, technology-enhanced educational experiences that forge synergistic relationships between college students, area museums and public school educators. We focus on the first of a series of collaborations between DSMP and the rural, volunteer-led museums in Kent County, Maryland. Through intentional collaboration, and on a next-to-nothing budget, project members digitized more than 4,000 objects, collected oral histories, created two middle-school unit plans, and built a virtual reality (VR) tour with more than 70 interactive buttons. Here, we describe the collaborative and planning processes, as well as the strengths and challenges of collaborations of this kind, in order to provide a road map for other museums and educators interested in doing similar work.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural museums
• virtual reality
• digitization
• community
• collaboration
• school/museum partnership

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the following individuals for their contributions to the DSMP project: Dr. Courtney E. Rydel, Carter Miller, Bill Poore, Candi Sorge, Ginny Story, Helen Sanders, Jackie Luike, Larry Crew, Anita Williams, John Schratweiser, Jana Carter and Bernadette Bowman.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 IMLS 2018.

2 Hartman and Hines-Bergmeier, “Building Connections.”

3 Villeneuve and Martin-Hamon, “At the Heart of it.”

4 Kingsley, “The Practicum Course Model.”

5 Clarke-Vivier and Bard, “Museum/University Ecology.”

6 Addario and Langer, “A University-Museum Partnership.”

7 Gaylord-Opalewski and O’Leary, “Defining Interactive Virtual Learning.”

8 Frisch, A Shared Authority, xxii; Hutchison, “Shared Authority,” 145.

9 Hutchison, “Shared Authority.”

10 Fouseki and Smith, “Community Consultation in the Museum”; Silverman, “Introduction.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Clarke-Vivier

Sara Clarke-Vivier, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Education at Washington College. Her work focuses on learning at the intersections of school and out-of-school spaces, including museums and cultural heritage sites. Sara and her students served as lead program evaluators and curriculum designers for the first partnership in the Digital Scholarships in Museum Partnerships (DSMP) project. She is Educational Director of the Crooked Tree Museum and Cultural Heritage Center in Belize, which served as a second partner site for DSMP.

Raven Bishop

Raven Bishop, N.B.C.T., is an Instructional Technologist in Washington College’s Library and Academic Technology department. Raven explores augmented & virtual reality in instruction and oversees the new Virtual/Augmented Reality Digital Imaging Studio [VARDIS] at Miller Library. She is a National Board Certified Educator with over 15 years of experience in project-based curriculum and instructional design. Her strong background in graphic design and multimedia production in addition to experience with curriculum and assessment design allow her to fulfill her role as a dynamic project manager and community liaison for the Digital Scholarship in Museum Partnerships (DSMP) project.

Julie Markin

Julie Markin, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and the Chair of Anthropology at Washington College. She examines political and economic inequality in the Pre-Columbian United States. Her experience working in archaeological and historical museums instilled a desire to more deliberately rely on those whose stories are being presented to define and develop the story that is told. Julie and her Museum Studies students comprised the digitization and oral history teams at the Betterton Museum. Over the course of one semester, they digitized over 4000 images and recorded more than 3 h of oral history.