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

This book is described as a "nuts-and-bolts guide to how to do [exhibits] step by step." It's meant, as Graham Black says in the Foreword, to help build the skills base of staff and volunteers at small and medium-sized museums and give them "the confidence to experiment and innovate" (xv). Author John Summers says this will give you "a method and a process you can follow that will greatly increase the likelihood that you will be able to create [a good exhibit]" (xix), and that 

If you want to know what is involved in making exhibits, this book will show you the scope of a typical project. If you need to create an exhibit, the steps outlined here will lead you through from beginning to end. Even if you are just hiring contract professionals to create some or all of an exhibit, the information in this book will help you to understand their perspective on the project and lead to a more effective working relationship. (xx)

 

Creating Exhibits That Engage: A Manual for Museums and Historical Organizations, 2018 by John Summers, 190 pages

The upsides:

• A "nuts-and-bolts guide to how to [create exhibits] step by step that is suited to the resources typically available in small- to medium-sized institutions" (xix)
• Each chapter has what Summers calls a "checklist" at the end, basically a summary or a TL;DR.
• I really liked the section on how to create an Exhibit Brief
  

The downsides:

• I felt like this was a very broad and brief overview of exhibits (The Big Idea, layout, fabrication, etc.).
  

Overall: 

Given all the summary information about how this would empower small museums' staff and lead them from beginning to end of an exhibit, I just didn't get it. The chapter titles and subheadings (Audience, The Exhibit Development Process, The Big Idea, The Brief and Request for Proposals, Text, etc.) sound like this would be a great resource, but I still felt like this was just skimming the surface. This felt like it was general guidelines and not like we're actually going anywhere big or specific. If you go with the statement above that talks about "the steps outlined here," then I guess it succeeds: this is just an outline of steps, which may give you a general map of how to create an exhibit, but doesn't give a lot of tips or advice on how to make it good. All of the other reviews of this book (which, granted, I couldn't find many of) think this is a great book, so maybe I'm just so uncreative and un-exhibit-minded that this book didn't touch me. There were some helpful parts, though, so this wasn't all a waste: a few accessibility guidelines, installation/viewing height guidelines, font samples, tools you need to build your own exhibit furniture (which is way beyond anything I'll ever do), and other tips, plus the Exhibit Briefs section was great; I just didn't see it as the same wonderful resource other reviewers did. I may refer back to it at some point, but I'll definitely look for other books about creating exhibits.