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Conal McCarthy

Practice, broadly speaking, is what we do, and more specifically what we as practitioners do in particular practice communities and how others engage with this practice.

Higgs 2010, 1

When a collection manager documents an object, a curator writes a label, an educator leads a tour group, a director attends a board meeting, or a visitor walks through an exhibition – these are the forms of museum practice with which the public are familiar. But there are other kinds of museum practice hidden from view, taking place at different levels of the institution: for example, the policy framework, the marketing campaign, the collection catalog, the exhibition design, the funds development plan, the conservation lab, the public program, or the mission statement.

This book is about all these kinds of museum practice – the visible and the hidden – or “what we as practitioners do” (Higgs 2010, 1). “Museum practice” refers to the broad range of professional work in museums, from the functions of management, collections, exhibitions, and programs to the varied activities that take place within these diverse and complex organizations, as well as indicating a recognizable sphere of work. Museum “practice” is also sometimes differentiated from museum theory – as is the case in the volumes that make up these International Handbooks of Museum Studies – drawing especial attention to what actually goes on in museum work. As do the other volumes, including Museum Theory, however, Museum Practice recognizes the inevitable – and productive – overlap between theory and practice.

Gerard Corsane proposes that museum work can be thought of as a process of communication moving from resources at one end to public outputs at the other (Corsane 2005, 3, figure 1.1). This functional process model of museums has been employed in the organization of this book in four parts as follows.