Museums 101

Looking for an A-Z, one-stop, comprehensive book on museums? Wish you were able to have one of the world's leading museum consultants spend a couple of days with you, talking you through how to start a museum, how museums work, how to set up an exhibit, and more? If so, Museums 101 is the answer to your wishes.

In one short volume, Mark Walhimer covers:
. Essential Background, such as what is a museum, a quick history of museums, and 10 steps to starting a museum
. Operational Basics, such as branding, marketing, strategic planning, governance, accessibility, and day-to-day operations
. What goes on behind the scenes in a museum, ranging from finances to fundraising to art handling, exhibit management, and research
. The Visitor Experience, planning a museum, designing exhibits for visitors, programming, and exhibit evaluation.

Features that even the most experienced museum professionals will find useful include a community outreach checklist, a fundraising checklist, a questionnaire for people considering starting a new museum, and an exhaustive, well-organized list of online resources for museum operations. The book's contents were overseen by a six-member international advisory board.

Valuable appendixes you'll use every day include a museum toolbox full of useful forms, checklists, and worksheets, and a glossary of essential museum-related terms. In addition to the printed book, Museums 101 also features a companion website exclusively for readers of the book. The website- museums101.com-features:

. links to essential online resources in the museum world,
. downloadable sample documents,
. a glossary,
. a bibliography of sources for further reading, and
. photographs of more than 75 museums of all types.


Museums 101 Advisory Board
. Jim DeMersman, Executive Director, Museum on Main, Pleasanton, California,
United States of America
. David L. Godfrey, C.P.A., Allison & Godfrey, Certified Public Accountants,
Norwalk, Connecticut, United States of America
. Van A. Romans, President, Fort Worth Museum of Science and History,
Fort Worth, Texas, and Board of Trustees, American Alliance of Museums,
United States of America
. Sergey Solovyev, Ph.D., Department of Greek & Roman Antiquities, The
State Hermitage Museum, Russia
. Alison Spence, Exhibitions and Loans Registrar, National Museum of Australia,
Canberra ACT, Australia
. Audrey Vermette, Director of Programs and Public Affairs, Canadian Museums
Association, Ontario, Canada

Mark Walhimer is a managing partner of the museum consultancy Museum Planning, LLC, and an industrial design professor.

He is the founder of Museum Courses, an online platform for museum courses, and has taught at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, and at Tecnológico de Monterrey and Universidad Iberoamericana, both in Mexico City.

Prior to starting his company, Walhimer held positions at Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, California; the Children's Museum of Indianapolis; the Tech Museum in San Jose, California; and Liberty Science Center. He has also been Chief Operating Officer of a museum exhibition design and fabrication firm. He is the author of Museums 101 and Designing Museum Experiences.

Walhimer has been a three-time juror for the United States Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, an American Alliance of Museums Museum Assessment Program peer reviewer, and an Institute of Museum and Library Services peer reviewer. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Specialist grant.