Exhibit Lab: Developing a Community of Practitioners

The four New England museums of the Environmental Exhibit Lab (EEC) set out in the Fall of 2011 to create a replicable model of collaborative professional development for small museums. At small institutions, impending deadlines, budget and staffing limitations, and professional isolation all too often get in the way of true innovation. The goal of Exhibit Lab was to help staff who, though conversant with current museum theory, sometimes struggle to apply that theory to their daily work, or to disseminate these ideas through an institution. Exhibit Lab relied on a carefully crafted mix of meetings, workshops and staff exchanges, a combination of outside experts and peer-to-peer mentoring, to foster a community of practitioners, engaged in collaborative learning-by-doing. In short, the participants created a "virtual department" in which we came to rely as quickly on our peers in a partner museum as quickly as we would to a co-worker down the hall had we worked in a larger museum. The Exhibit Lab project focused on the work of the Exhibit and Program/Education staffs, but we feel that the project model holds lessons for other museum departments, and for museums outside the Children's and Science museum sphere.