Skip to main content

The New Center

I was recently invited to sit on a panel for the African American Museum and Library of Oakland (AAMLO) to help them work through some "identity" issues as the Museum/Library is due to reopen later this year.

It seems like there is some infighting amongst AAMLO staff and volunteers. And, within my recent experience, that seems quite typical of most all non-profit organizations, especially community-based NFPs.

In hearing the conversation around some of their dilemmas about whether they are a museum or a library or an archive, I kept thinking of this great article I had read in a cafe in Boston when I was at the AAM national conference last year about a new library in London.

I will expand on this further, but for now I had to find the article, so I could share it with those who had invited me to participate in the panel.

Right now, I have too much on my plate to be any more a-part than having attended their first meeting two weeks ago. I will pass this along to them, then pick up this trail on this blog down the road...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Go to A Conference Anyways?

@lidja @lyndakelly61 @futureofmuseums @creativemerc @museum_flavor pLz look http://tinyurl.com/qxlja4 &here http://bit.ly/q1mhV assoc./conf. grpthink @RichardMcCoy @DanielCull very import.

A Year-end Letter Update from James and Family

Dear Friends and Family, On the brink of the new year on December 31, 2019 we stood at the foot of Kehinde Wiley's brand new monumental equestrian sculpture in downtown Richmond at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. There were a bunch of families gathered around taking pictures together. Emblematic of this entire year and entitled “ Rumors of War ,” the monument depicts an unarmed Black man in heroic pose atop a horse. The man’s sneakers are in the stirrups, looking back over their shoulder like Napoleon as they ride forward up a ridge . It was a strange harbinger of the year that was, and how it’s going. Kamala Harris will be named our vice president in a few weeks. In between, the apocalyptic has been commonplace; I mean, what a year. Emil started high school this fall. Graduation this past spring from Mark Day School was likely the year’s highlight. Karen is still at Mark Day. This fall they've been doing hybrid learning. It’s the first time Karen and Emil have not been goi...

Facebookedness First Finale (part I): Naked in High School

Right around Yom Kippur this year, I did something on-line that felt really good. I was “social networking.” Over the past several months social networking sites like Facebook have overtaken porn sites in popularity, according to Reuters and an article last week in the UK Guardian . The article has been posted a lot on Facebook profiles and received a lot of diggs at DIGG.com . Everybody’s doing it, or at least “three in four US online adults,” according to a recent report by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. And that’s what is so amazing. The massive proliferation of Facebook and LinkedIn has brought it closer to the white pages than any earlier iteration of America On-line or other “services.” I been doing things on-line for years, right? But something was different this time. What did I do on Facebook? I atoned. I made recompense. And I reconnected with a group of old high school friends through Facebook about a stretch of time when we all defined ourselves together for a...