Creating Exhibits That Engage: A Manual for Museums and Historical Organizations

John Summers

Mar 2018 · Rowman & Littlefield

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Winner of the 2018 Ontario Museum Association Award of Excellence

Winner of the 2019 Canadian Museum Association Award of Outstanding Achievement in the Research - Cultural Heritage Category


Creating Exhibits that Engage: A Manual for Museums and Historical Organizations is a concise, useful guide to developing effective and memorable museum exhibits. The book is full of information, guidelines, tips, and concrete examples drawn from the author’s years of experience as a curator and exhibit developer in the United States and Canada. Is this your first exhibit project? You will find step-by-step instructions, useful advice and plenty of examples. Are you a small museum or local historical society looking to improve your exhibits?

This book will take you through how to define your audience, develop a big idea, write the text, manage the budget, design the graphics, arrange the gallery, select artifacts, and fabricate, install and evaluate the exhibit. Are you a museum studies student wanting to learn about the theory and practice of exhibit development? This book combines both and includes references to works by noted authors in the field. Written in a clear and accessible style, Creating Exhibits that Engage offers checklists of key points at the end of each chapter, a glossary of specialized terms, and photographs, drawings and charts illustrating key concepts and techniques.

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John Summers is manager of Heritage Services and Curator for the Regional Municipality of Halton in Ontario, Canada, where he leads, develops, designs and fabricates exhibit projects. He has taught students about museology, material culture, museums and technology, and exhibition design and planning for the Ontario Museum Association, the Fleming College Museum Management and Curatorship Program, the University of Victoria’s Cultural Resource Management Program and the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, where he is an adjunct lecturer of Museum Studies. He is course director for Exhibit Planning & Design in the Ontario Museum Association’s Certificate in Museum Studies program. His experience spans more than three decades of work at cultural institutions in Canada and the United States.