Themes

The preliminary program includes papers relating to the following themes:

Collections for communities: Using collections to tell the stories of all our communities. Includes use of collections to strengthen indigenous communities.
Collections for cultural diplomacy: The role of collections in international and local diplomacy (including touring exhibitions, repatriation and restitution issues).
Collections and commerce: Leveraging collections to create revenue streams and support (e.g. sponsorship, friends groups, retail, catering, commercial marketing, intellectual property).
Collections in peril: War, terrorism, financial crisis, natural disasters
Interpreting and showcasing collections (through exhibition design, building architecture, new technologies).
Communicating collections: Understanding, researching and evaluating exhibitions, programs, audiences and non-attenders; new approaches to marketing and communications, including new media.
A national strategy for Australia’s museums?
Collections for creativity: Using collections to drive creativity, for life-long learning, for healthy communities, to open minds.
Using collections to preserve languages, intangible heritage and the ephemeral.
Using collections for research: Includes ongoing and new roles for natural history collections; taxonomic research; new or unexpected research topics and methods.
Fellow travellers: Organisations collecting outside the museum (e.g. Universities, hospitals, performing arts centres, corporations).
City museums: The living metropolis.
A position of trust: The evolving roles of trustees, governors and boards
Don’t forget the present: Contemporary collecting.
Collections and education (including the use of collections to support the national curriculum; collections and the digital education revolution; best museum education practice; museums in a box and other creative strategies for education collections).
Conservation and significance.
Public programs, theatre and performance.
Museums and environmental sustainability.
Keeping up, or leading from the front? New technologies.

Abstracts can be submitted in one of the following modes of presentations:

oral presentation
poster presentation
workshop

Information regarding Call for Abstracts can be downloaded here.