Mining the Museum: A How to Guide

Are you trying to create a better world? Museums can help, if you know to ask. America’s 34,000 museums are repositories of memories, stories, connections and a burgeoning portfolio of digital resources (as well as over 4.8 billion objects). Museum staff—including designers, educators, researchers, scholars and IT experts—are dedicated to fostering creativity, sharing knowledge and helping their communities. But the stereotype of museums as “dusty warehouses” means these assets go largely overlooked and underused. This session is a guide to how social entrepreneurs and community organizations can tap into the physical, digital and human assets of museums to fuel and amplify their own work.