Читать книгу Museum Practice - Группа авторов - Страница 15

As general editors of The International Handbooks in Museum Studies, we – Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy – are delighted that Museum Practice is now appearing in paperback, as a self-standing volume. So too are the other volumes, which is testament to the strength of these volumes individually, as well as collectively, and to the importance of the issues that they each address. Museum Practice clearly concerns a fundamental area of museum studies – without such practice, there would be no museums. Nevertheless, there has not yet developed an established consensus on precisely what might be covered under the label ‘museum practice’, and, in particular, more extensive and theorised accounts and analyses of practice – going beyond ‘how to’ guides – are still far from numerous. One reason for this is the relative recency of museum studies as a field. A second reason is that museum studies draws on a wide range of disciplines, each themselves renewing their toolkits in various ways, resulting in new impulses for thinking about museum practice – so challenging the formation of a fixed canon. In addition, and perhaps of most significance, is the fact of changing museum practice in response to wider challenges and opportunities, be they in relation to issues of funding, communities or new media possibilities, to name but a few. This results in the need to think afresh about practice – to take a critical perspective on how things are done, as well as to take inspiration from the most intriguing and promising instances of practice in order to develop new modes of working.

In light of the considerable change underway, the editor of Museum Practice, Conal McCarthy, in consultation with us as general editors, faced a task of how to achieve a volume that would cover topics that have become central to consideration of museum practice, while also being sure to include as much as possible of the new directions and ideas that have been emerging in recent years. That this was achieved so well is evident from the resulting volume. The range of topics included and the ways in which they are tackled, provide a sound and also cutting- edge coverage of museum practice.