Think Clearly Blog

The single most important “KM sale” you can make is to your senior leaders. As mentioned in my previous post on this topic, if you get them on board, everything else will be much easier. If you can’t, you must keep trying until you do. To get their sponsorship and support, tell stories, make the business case, and sell the benefits. Please read on to learn about making the business case, drawn from my new book Proven Practices for Promoting Knowledge Management.

Whether you’re undertaking a grant-funded project or a project being done in-house, project management principles should be applied. Most museums and other historical organizations don’t have a project manager on staff, and the idea of project management can seem overwhelming.

In my country (Canada), mind mapping is in the curriculum from a very early age. This skill is a foundation for critical thinking and, indeed, project and report creation and development—as well as beginning the research, discovery and exploration process.

When digitizing collections, archivists should always take legal and ethical rights into consideration and proceed with caution when documenting culturally sensitive content—with sympathy as to the context of how the materials were collected, and consideration in the manner in which such content is presented.

The single most important “KM sale” you can make is to your senior leaders. If you get them on board, everything else will be much easier. If you can’t, you need to keep trying until you do. To get their sponsorship and support, tell stories, make the business case, and sell the benefits. Please read on to learn about effective storytelling, drawn from my new book Proven Practices for Promoting Knowledge Management.

With few exceptions museums rely on grant funding to supplement their annual budget. While it’s recommended a museum cultivate a stream of income that supports its yearly activities, most museums can only afford to keep the lights on and maintain a spartan staff.

I’ll bet you’ve done SWOT a lot. It’s a classic technique but one which benefits, I believe, from fish bone force field diagramming. It’s easy to do and, with good facilitation, mines the brains in the room quickly.

Selection practice in most archives is aimed at meeting the current needs of user communities. Criteria developed by archives to select items for digitization are based on evidential and aesthetic values, as well as informational, intrinsic, and artifactual values.

In my latest book, Proven Practices for Promoting a Knowledge Management Program, I share a number of keys to success (Chapter 12) for KM practitioners implementing knowledge management initiatives within the corporate world.

Image: University of Missouri’s Museum of Art and Archaeology

The University of Missouri’s Museum of Art and Archaeology exists to “advance…understanding of artistic and cultural heritage through research, collection and interpretation. [They] further their mission by preserving, enhancing and providing access to the collections for the benefit of present and future generations.” A museum staff of 12 (including part-time and student help) manage a collection of almost 16,000 objects, with a particularly strong antiquities collection.

In this third post in my series about interesting frameworks and tools for thinking about the value-add we can provide in our product and service design, I’ll outline three tools I use all the time—sometimes alone, and sometimes in collaboration with others.

Digital imaging captures all the information in photographic originals. Read on for some guidelines on making the best digitization choices, always with the ultimate usage of the images in mind.