Campus museums win award

After strenuous tests that last two to three years, the IU Art Museum and the Mathers Museum of World Cultures were recently honored with reaccreditation by the American Association of Museums.

The award, earned by only 776 museums of the 17,500 in the U.S. as of January 2009, has an intangible yet strong significance for Geoff Conrad, director of the Mathers Museum.

After almost 26 years at the museum, this is Conrad’s third and final accreditation. He plans to retire before the next.

“I think it’s a fairly time-consuming process, but on the whole, I’m glad we went through it again successfully,” Conrad said. “It’s nice for me and the staff to know that our peers out there in the museum world think we’re doing a good job. That kind of recognition is worth something.”

Given to museums around the country once every 10 years, the test has the museum provide paperwork detailing nearly every aspect of the facility and its practices. After a period of preparation, experts from the association show up for an on-site visit.
Heather Hales, assistant to the director at the IU Art Museum, was working through this for the first time.

“The amount of detail that it actually went down to, I would assume that certain things would have been in this booklet,” Hales said, “but they wanted everything. Everything. It was pretty amazing how much work everybody had to do, so many different departments.”

For Heidi Gealt, the director of the IU Art Museum, the museum’s more stringent requirement for an emergency preparedness plan is a welcome change to her second accreditation. The staff had to prove that they were ready for the most likely disasters – flooding and tornadoes.

“It was a very good thing, because it forced us to get this process off the ground,” Gealt said. “It’s not perfect yet, but we’re ahead of a lot of institutions on this campus in terms of documenting our emergency preparedness.”

A major change Conrad successfully worked for during this year’s accreditation was to expand the University’s focus on the museum’s collection.

“I was able to get some extra funding to support faculty and graduate student research on the collections,” Conrad said. “That’s something that I want to build on and carry forward and pass along to my successor, that the collections are being seen as valuable research resources by the University and not just resources for exhibition and teaching.”

The end result of all this stress and hard work is the benefit of being trusted and being confident in trusting others, Gealt said.

“We’re very leery about giving loans to non-accredited institutions. That’s one of the things we look for when we get loan requests,” Gealt said. “We ourselves get a rigorous review, and in turn we review others very rigorously when we decide to share something precious and irreplaceable.”