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North Carolina Museums Council |
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IMMEDIATE PAST-PRESIDENT’S REPORT
The North Carolina Museums Council: A Beehive of Volunteers!
2002-2005
From November 21, 2002 , to March 3, 2005 , I had the honor of serving as the North Carolina Museums Council’s twenty-second president. When I assumed this office at our annual meeting in High Point in 2002, I drafted a checklist of goals that I hoped to accomplish before the end of my term. Thanks to the ongoing involvement and support of my fellow board members and to NCMC’s statewide membership, we have pursued and accomplished all of those goals and more during this period. The number and scope of these accomplishments are especially impressive when considering the fact that after more than forty years NCMC remains an all-volunteer organization, one dedicated to serving not only the professional interests of our members, but also to promoting the programs and holdings of art, history, and science institutions across our state.
In compliance with NCMC’s operating guidelines, which call for the president to report formally to the Council, I will share or “bullet” here a few details about the services and projects that NCMC initiated, completed, or continued over the past twenty-seven months [my term as president was extended by three months due to the change of NCMC’s annual meetings from November to March]:
- We created FOCoS (an acronym for “Free On-site Consultation Service”). This new service seeks to assist small museums, galleries, historic sites, and developing science facilities that have extremely limited financial resources and whose supporters lack professional experience in conservation, exhibit design, collection management, or in public relations. NCMC specialists in these areas form two-person consultant teams who visit selected applicants and work with them to address a site’s most pressing needs and assist that site in setting developmental goals.
- As a partner with the Heritage and Cultural Tourism Partnership of North Carolina and the Yadkin Pee Dee Lakes Project, we established an administrative framework for dispersing over $230,000 in IMLS funding to help support and promote the statewide 1000/100 Project, an initiative that has set an ambitious goal of training 1000 citizens (representing all 100 counties) in heritage and cultural tourism.
- We established a Children’s Museums Section for NCMC, a fourth section that now joins our Art, History, and Science sections. This new section provides a network and forum for colleagues who work at facilities that specialize in providing programs substantially or exclusively for children. It is noteworthy that when NCMC held its first meeting in Charlotte in 1964, our organization had a Children’s Museums Section, so today we are really reactivating what had been in effect so long ago.
- We established on our board an ad-hoc committee on NC-ECHO to facilitate NCMC’s involvement in “ Exploring Cultural Heritage On-line” and to foster greater cooperation in the development of virtual exhibitions and the standardization of on-line collection data bases for accessing information on artifacts and natural history specimens preserved and exhibited in museums, science centers, and at historic sites.
- We formally celebrated NCMC’s 40th birthday in Raleigh on December 4, 2003, with all-day events and featured speakers at the North Carolina Museum of Art, North Carolina Museum of History, and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. This celebration established closer ties between NCMC and these state institutions and heightened public awareness of our organization’s history and its work in professional and community service.
- We completed and circulated a new (2004) edition of NCMC’s statewide directory of museums, historic sites, and science centers. While our on-line directory is easier to revise and update, NCMC remains committed to producing a limited number of hard-copy directories. These printed copies, which are sized to fit conveniently in the glove compartment of one’s car, were given to NCMC members, were presented to diploma recipients at the graduation ceremonies of the 1000/100 Project, and will be presented to each member of the General Assembly.
- We altered NCMC’s annual meeting’s schedule, making a smooth transition from November to March of each year. Accordingly, we convened in March 2004 in Durham/Chapel Hill and this past March in Salisbury . In part, this scheduling change was made so that NCMC can now periodically hold joint meetings with the Virginia Association of Museums (VAM) and the South Carolina Federation of Museums (SCFM), which also meet in March.
- We completed a comprehensive review and updating of NCMC’s operating guidelines and by-laws, revising the latter to conform with changes needed due to the shift in our annual-meeting schedule. Until the reworking of the guidelines, some board members worked with no written instructions or with very outdated descriptions relating to the duties of their office, committee, or section.
- We expanded NCMC’s on-line services and the circulation of the electronic version of our newsletter. We also improved the general administration of NCMC’s website by establishing formal work contracts for the webmaster and by centralizing publicity and communication between the board and the webmaster through the Public Relations chair.
- We requested and were awarded grants from the North Carolina Arts Council to support art-related NCMC programs and services. Beyond the educational benefits and financial support realized from these grants, the awards had the effects of extending NCMC own presence within our state’s art community and enhancing contacts and communication between our board and the Arts Council itself.
- We established annual scholarships to assist NCMC members who want to take part in the intensive, eight-day training program offered by the Jekyll Island Management Institute (JIMI) in Georgia . Sponsored by SEMC, the JIMI program is a “total immersion” experience that addresses a wide range of topics relating to the needs and common professional challenges inherent to developing and operating a museum, whatever its size.
Limited space and fatigue prevent me from recounting even more of NCMC’s accomplishments over the past twenty-seven months; nevertheless, I hope the preceding examples testify that our organization is, indeed, a veritable beehive of professional activity! In closing, I want to thank again the general Council and all my colleagues on NCMC’s board for making my term as president so interesting and productive. Our new president, Tamara Moore, will no doubt expand on and further improve our administrative structure and programming and will inspire and oversee new projects. I wish her all the very best as she begins her work as NCMC’s twenty-third chief executive. Actually, I should mention that I am not taking wing and buzzing away from the “hive” yet. Immediate past-presidents are expected to serve on the board for two years after their presidential terms, so I look forward to that additional service and to seeing everyone at NCMC’s annual meeting in Winston-Salem in March, 2006!
Neil Fulghum
Keeper
North Carolina Collection Gallery
Louis Round Wilson Library
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
March 8, 2005
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