EDITORS’ PREFACE TO MUSEUM PRACTICE AND THE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOKS IN MUSEUM STUDIES

       Museum Practice

      As general editors of The International Handbooks in Museum Studies, we – Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy – are delighted that Museum Practice is now appearing in paperback, as a self-standing volume. So too are the other volumes, which is testament to the strength of these volumes individually, as well as collectively, and to the importance of the issues that they each address. Museum Practice clearly concerns a fundamental area of museum studies – without such practice, there would be no museums. Nevertheless, there has not yet developed an established consensus on precisely what might be covered under the label ‘museum practice’, and, in particular, more extensive and theorised accounts and analyses of practice – going beyond ‘how to’ guides – are still far from numerous. One reason for this is the relative recency of museum studies as a field. A second reason is that museum studies draws on a wide range of disciplines, each themselves renewing their toolkits in various ways, resulting in new impulses for thinking about museum practice – so challenging the formation of a fixed canon. In addition, and perhaps of most significance, is the fact of changing museum practice in response to wider challenges and opportunities, be they in relation to issues of funding, communities or new media possibilities, to name but a few. This results in the need to think afresh about practice – to take a critical perspective on how things are done, as well as to take inspiration from the most intriguing and promising instances of practice in order to develop new modes of working.

      In light of the considerable change underway, the editor of Museum Practice, Conal McCarthy, in consultation with us as general editors, faced a task of how to achieve a volume that would cover topics that have become central to consideration of museum practice, while also being sure to include as much as possible of the new directions and ideas that have been emerging in recent years. That this was achieved so well is evident from the resulting volume. The range of topics included and the ways in which they are tackled, provide a sound and also cutting- edge coverage of museum practice.

       The International Handbooks in Museum Studies

Collectively, The International Handbooks in Museum Studies include over a hundred original, state-of-the-art chapters on museums and museum studies. As such, they are the most comprehensive review to date of the lively and expanding field of museum studies. Written by a wide range of scholars and practitioners – newer voices as well as those already widely esteemed – The International Handbooks provide not only extensive coverage of key topics and debates in the museum field, but also make a productive contribution to emerging debates and areas, as well as to suggest how museum studies – and museums – might develop in the future.

      The number of excellent contributors able and willing to write on museum topics is itself testimony to the state of the field, as was recognition by the publishers that the field warranted such a substantial work. Bringing together such a range and quantity of new writing about museums was accomplished through the deep knowledge, extensive networks, and sheer labour of the volume editors – Andrea Witcomb and Kylie Message, Museum Theory; Conal McCarthy, Museum Practice; Michelle Henning, Museum Media; and Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips, Museum Transformations. All enthusiastically took up the mandate to go out and recruit those they thought would be best able to write useful and timely essays on what they defined as the most important topics within their area of remit. Their brief was to look widely for potential contributors, including unfamiliar, as well as familiar, names. We – and they – were especially interested in perspectives from people whose voices have not always been heard within the international museum studies conversation thus far. This breadth is also a feature of the expanded and expanding field itself, as we explain further below.

       Diversification and democratization

The editors of the four volumes that constitute The International Handbooks are based in four different countries – Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada; and contributors have their institutional homes in over a dozen more. Yet these numbers alone do not fully convey the trend to diversification that we see in these volumes, and in museum studies more widely. “Internationalization” is a term that might be used but does not, we think, adequately characterize what is involved. Certainly, there is more traffic between nations of ideas about museums and about how to study them. Debates travel from one part of the globe to another, with museums and exhibitions in one location being used as models for emulation or avoidance in another. The massive expansion of professional training in museum studies that has taken place over the past three decades helps establish a shared discourse, not least as many students study away from their home countries or those in which they will later work. So too do texts in and about the field, certain key ones often being found on reading lists in numerous countries and