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In a companion book to the new PBS series starring Lily Tomlin, readers learn about sound and how it is made as Ms. Frizzle's class spends the night in a sounds museum that turns out to be haunted.TV tie-in. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Magic School Bus--Sound
This is a great book to use when you are teaching students about sound.I read it to my third graders during the standardized unit on "sound."They loved the way the author combined entertainment with information. After I read the book to the children, I put it in the classroom library.Even my lower level readers were eager to check the book out and read it for themselves.

Kids who love noise will love this book
This title is a good choice for introducing children to Ms. Frizzle and her class of diverse personalities. Kids learn from this book that we hear sound when objects vibrate and that sound is dampened when vibration is hindered. Eventually the class dons magic glasses that allow them to see soundwaves. The students notice that higher sounds have waves that are close together whereas lower sounds have waves spread much further apart. The concepts aren't difficult to grasp and the plot is entertaining.

This book became an instant favorite of my daughter when she was two and a half years old. It still interests both my son and daughter now that they are five and a half and three and a half respectively. They love reading the noises in the spooky forest where the bus grinds to a halt outside the museum and they never tire of hearing sounds emanating from the audible books inside the museum.

The straightforward science and noisy read make this a great introductory title. Once children are familiar with Ms. Frizzle hook them with other Magic School Bus books where the morphing antics of the bus play a more central role. An animation of MSB in the Huanted Museum is also available.
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The development of interactive displays has transformed the traditional museum world in the last decade. Thrust into intense competition for the public's time and money with all branches of the leisure industry, museums must operate with marketing savvy. Visitors are no longer satisfied by simply gazing at worthy displays in glass cases; they expect to have hands-on experience of the objects and be actively involved with the exhibits as a form of entertainment.Tim Caulton investigates how to create and operate the effective exhibitions which achieve their educational objectives through hands-on access while encouraging a broader visitor base. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

To the point, great reference and basic introduction
Tim Caulton has prepared an excellent reference book for anyone involved in Science Centers and Children's Museums. He manages to contextualize all the relevant factors: history, education, exhibit development, marketing, finance, human resources, operations, special events and activities. I have used this book to a great extent. It has helped me plan and manage a mayor children's museum. His style is straightforward and synthetic. The book has a lot of useful information. It addresses the main educational theories and particular museum cases to illustrate the problems, risks and most effective procedures to run a kind of museum that is not like the rest. A must for anyone that operates interactive museums. Not many books on the subject. This one is a keeper. ... Read more

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Drawing from a wide range of experience, the authors propose the simple ideas which should underpin all professional museum training courses. Organized on a modular basis, Museum Basics provides a basic guide to `best practice' in every aspect of museum work, from museum organization, through collections management and conservation, to marketing and security. It is designed for training courses, to be supplemented by case studies, project work and group discussion. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great resource!
Museum Basics is an amazing resource for anyone studying museology, conservation and preservation!Great perspective on european museology! ... Read more

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The Politics of Display brings together studies of contemporary and historical museum shows and challenges the notion that these exhibitions are politically exempt. For example, what does it mean when the Enola Gay, the aircraft which dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima, is displayed?

The contributors to this volume chart the changing relationship between displays and their audience and analyzes the consequent shift in styles of representation towards interactive and multimedia displays. Examples are taken from exhibitions of science, technology and industry, anthropology, geology, natural history and medicine. Contributors include Steven W. Allison-Bunnell, Ken Arnold, Tony Bennett, Thomas F. Gieryn, Penelope Harvey, Sharon Macdonald and Tracy Lang Teslow. ... Read more

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From its inception in the early nineteenth century, the museum has been more than a mere historical object; it has manufactured an image of history. The museum believes in history, yet it behaves as though history could be summarized and completed. This twofold process explains the paradoxical character of museums. They have been accused of being both too heavy with historical dust and too historically spotless, excessively historicizing artworks while cutting them off from the historical life in which artworks are born. Thus the museum seems contradictory because it lectures about the historical nature of its objects while denying the same objects the living historical connection about which it purports to educate. The contradictory character of museums leads the author to a philosophical reflection on history, one that reconsiders the concept of culture and the historical value of art in light of the philosophers, artists, and writers who are captivated by the museum. Together, their voices prompt a reevaluation of the concepts of historical consciousness, artistic identity, and the culture of objects in the modern period. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Congratulations
To be honest: several times I felt envy reading this book. Maleuvre analysis the beginning of a museum-culture in the 18th and 19thcentury and does this with an extraordinary knowledge of philosophy, art and literature, especially French literature. His question of departure is: In what social context surges the museum and what impact has its birth to the relation between subject and object, the artwork. That is what a museum does: Create a distance between the individual and the sculpture. From the first to the last page the book is written on a high philosophical level, combining literature (Balzac, Proust) with philosophy (Hegel, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and others). I was reading it line by line, a pleasure that I did not have in the last months. Congratulations to the author for this brilliant opening to a very interesting field of (hopefully) other studies in the future.

a text aboutmuseums in the 19th c.
this book is centred on the 19th century. it explains the logic behind museums during this century drawing comparisons with the domestic interior and the work of Balzac. So its contents refers in its majority to the culture, at large, of the 19th century and how this transformed the institution of the museum during this time. Therefore it is not a text exclusively on museums but in the cultural dynamics that shaped it during that period of time. ... Read more

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Experience the thrill of flying some of the world's most important airplanes and spacecraft. Best Of The National Air And Space Museum provides unprecedented access to the most popular museum in the world.

The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum hosts more than 9 million visitors a year, and the newly opened Dulles Center –three football fields long and ten stories high – is a phenomenon in its own right: in the first week it was opened, some 250,000 people came through the doors.

Best Of The National Air And Space Museum features the best of both museums, from the Challenger space shuttle and the Wright flyer to the Spirit of St. Louis and the stealth bomber. Bob Van der Linden, curator of aeronautics, has selected the most historically important, popular, and just plain impressive aircraft and spacecraft from the collections of both museums to be captured in the book's beautiful full color layouts. Each layout includes intriguing facts of the item's design, use, mission, specifications, and dimensions. It's like your own guided tour!

Customer Reviews (3)

Great Guide to the National Air & Space Museum
I recently visited the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum. It was the first time I'd been there since they moved into their current facility in the mid-1970's. It was breathtaking. The best way to describe the effect of walking in the main entrance is to envision the bedroom of a boy who hangs model airplanes from the ceiling. Only at the NASM, the "models" hanging from the ceiling are full-size. I was a model-building boy in the 1950's, and my favorites were planes I'd built from kits. Unfortunately, the museum was undergoing some of its regular updating and a few of my favorite planes weren't on view, such as the F89 Super Saber. Fortunately, that plane and most (if not all) the permanent collection are profiled in the Best of the National Air and Space Museum. If at all possible, visit the museum. If you can't get there, buy the book. Actually, buy the book in either case. You won't be disappointed.

Nat'l Air & Space Museum review
Great photograghs with well written copy. This book makes me want to go to this museum and see first hand the items displayed. Highly recommend!!!

Great photo essay, history of aviation and space
i'm an engineer- worked rocket motors, and various satellite programs.this book was recommended by associate after visiting the museum at Langley.The pics are super, with short descriptions, and moderate on the tech.It's an amazing pulse of this wild history, and mostly is from America's lineage.St. Louis, Mercury, Atlas, and up to current Shuttle.There's also the SST, and unique turn of the century early birds.A fine read to be shared with a youngster (my son 10, digs it), or for the historyor engineering buff.amazon has it cheaper than at the museum. ... Read more

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Handbook for museums that wish to mount theatre productions. ... Read more

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Museums, modern concepts of culture, and ideas about difference arose together and are inextricably entwined. Relationships of difference--notably, of gender, ethnicity, nationality, and race--have become equally important concerns of scholarship in humanities and contemporary museum practice.

Museums and Difference offers the perspectives of scholars and museum professionals in tandem, using the concept of difference to reexamine how museums construct themselves, their collections, and their publics. Essays explore a wide range of examples from around the world and from the 19th century to the present, including case studies of special exhibitions as well as broad surveys of institutions in Europe, the United States, and Japan.

[D]emonstrates both the centrality and rapidly changing significance of difference in museum practice and poses a number of critical questions for future scholarship, such as, for example, whether or not aesthetic distinctions can ever be employed in museums in a manner that does not privilege the identity of one or another social group. --David O'Brien, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ... Read more

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Get practical tools to successfully develop collaborative online learning projects!

Virtual museums provide an opportunity to spark learning through online access to multi-sensory information, and collaboration between sources is needed to efficiently and effectively catalog and present material. Collaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls presents respected authorities exploring the world of virtual collections, from the identification and selection of objects to be included to providing online access using common terminology. Future possibilities and problems are fully detailed, taking into consideration the need for fixed metadata, descriptive standards, and negotiated compromise. Solutions to difficult issues are provided to allow successful development of collaborative virtual museum projects of all types.

A virtual museum can provide users with direct, easy access to information, photographs, drawings, sound files, and video clips. However, discipline-based differences in terminology between collections are as much a challenge as integrating detailed locally-developed vocabularies with more general descriptors. Collaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls shows how to best achieve consistent information access by providing studies of successful collaborative museum projects which resulted in the creation of catalogs of material from a number of separate collections. The book helps you to understand the challenges of dealing with an unknown online user community as well as the opportunities for presenting information to the virtual museum visitor that differs from that information available during an on-site visit. Four case studies are presented in depth and highlight practical strategies on the development of collaborative common language for future projects. Extensive references provide opportunity for further research while tables clearly illustrate data.

Collaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls thoroughly explores:

cataloging and the digital collection at the Experience Music Project

the collaborative cataloging efforts using Dublin Core to unite local heritage organizations

the compromises and negotiations necessary to build a common catalog for multiple collaborating organizations

the challenges of creating contextual information that places objects in relationship to their creators and the circumstances of their use

the partnership between museums with Native American collections and tribally controlled schools

the types of images indexed by museum practitioners

indexing procedures and systems

identifying potentially sensitive information for inclusion or exclusion in online collection databasesCollaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls is cutting-edge information for museum archivists, librarians, collection curators, and anyone involved in creating catalogs or providing online access to existing museum collection information. ... Read more

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For some time now, museums have been recognized as important institutions of western cultural and social life. The idea of the museum as a ritual site is fairly new and has been applied to the art museums in Europe and the United States so far. This volume expands it by exploring a range of contemporary museums in Europe and Africa. The case studies examine the different ways in which various actors involved in cultural production dramatize and ritualize such sites. It turns out that not only museum specialists, but visitors themselves are engaged in complex performances and experiences that make use of museums in often unexpected ways. ... Read more

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Stephen E. Weil has long been considered one of the museumcommunity's most insightful (and frequently wittiest) commentators.In this volume of twenty-nine recent essays, his overarching concernis that museums be able to "earn their keep"-that they make themselvesmatter-in an environment of pontentially shrinking resources. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

great book for museum studies
Book was in great condition, as seller promised. It arrived promptly after I ordered. Book is used a lot in museum studies courses.

An outstanding selection of informed and informative essays
Written by Stephen E. Weil experienced and witty commentator on the museum community who is currently the Scholar Emeritus in the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Education and Museum Studies, Making Museums Matter is an outstanding selection of informed and informative essays about the difference that museums make, their role in preserving and showcasing history and art to the public, cost-related problems plaguing museums today, and a great deal more. Making Museums Matter is enthusiastically recommended as a most thoughtful and authoritative treatise on these notable and noble institutions. ... Read more

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Each year the more than seven thousand museums in the United States attract more attendees than either movies or sports. Yet until recently, museums have escaped serious political analysis. The past decade, however, has witnessed a series of unusually acrimonious debates about the social, political, and moral implications of museum exhibitions as varied as the Enola Gay display at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum and the "Sensation" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

In this important volume, Timothy W. Luke explores the power that museums have to shape collective values and social understandings, and argues persuasively that museum exhibitions have a profound effect on the body politic. Through discussions of topics ranging from how the National Holocaust Museum and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles have interpreted the Holocaust to the ways in which the American Museum of Natural History, the Missouri Botanical Gardens, and Tucson's Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum have depicted the natural world, Luke exposes the processes through which museums challenge but more often affirm key cultural and social realities.

Timothy W. Luke is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. ... Read more

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Evolution in the Museum explores the ways diverse natural history museum audiences imagine their evolutionary heritage. In particular, the book considers how the meanings constructed by audiences of museum exhibitions are a product of dynamic interplay between museum iconography and powerful images museum visitors bring with them to the museum. In doing so, the book illustrates how the preconceived images held by museum audiences about anthropology, Africa, and the museum itself strongly impact the human origins exhibition experience.

Although museological theory has come increasingly to recognize that museum audiences ‘make meaning’ in exhibitions, or make their own complex interpretations of museum exhibitions, few scholars have explicitly asked how. Evolution in the Museum, however, provides a rare window into visitor perceptions at four world-class museums—the Natural History Museum and Horniman Museum in London, the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Through rigorous and novel mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) covering nearly 500 museum visitors, this innovative study shows that audiences of human origins exhibitions interpret evolution exhibitions through a profoundly complex convergence of personal, political, intellectual, emotional and cultural interpretive strategies.

This book also reveals that natural history museum visitors often respond to museum exhibitions similarly because they use common cultural tools picked up from globalized popular media circulating outside of the museum. One tool of particular interest is the notion that human evolution has proceeded linearly from a bestial African prehistory to a civilized European present. Despite critical growths in anthropological science and museum displays, the outdated Victorian progress motif lingers persistently in popular media and the popular imagination. Evolution in the Museum sheds light on our relationship with natural history museums and will be crucial to those people interested in understanding the connection between the visitor, the museum and media culture outside of the museum context.

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Acknowledged as the international standard text for basic security procedures in museums, now fully revised, enlarged and updated. ... Read more

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Table of Contents
* Stargazing
* Circling the earth
* People in space
* Going to the moon
* Probing space
* Space plane
* Life in space
* Space stations
* Glossary
* Index
* ... Read more

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From huge jumbo jets to speedy fighter planes, there's so much to learn about planes in this fantastic touch-and-feel book! Packed with bright illustrations, amazing touch-and-feel textures and simple facts, this book is the perfect introduction to the world of planes for the youngest readers. ... Read more