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Part of Museum Trips: How to Plan a Visit to an Unusual Museum
Museum trips: finding a local guide for small collections
Plan museum trips to small collections: find local expertise through humanities councils and museum staff, then agree on the visit before meeting a guide.
What to take away
- A museum trip pays off when you keep the two or three rooms that match your subject and drop the room-by-room sweep of everything else.
- The person who can make a small collection legible is almost never a tour guide by profession: they are a retired teacher, a records clerk, a society secretary, or a curator with one day a week.
- Finding that person means asking the organizations that sit between the public and the collections, not a search engine.
- Every state and several territories have a humanities council that pays for local programming.
- Councils know who speaks publicly on a subject in their area, because they fund the talks.
- Museum staff will name a knowledgeable amateur if you ask them directly.
- The best local guides run programs, so look for the program rather than the person.
Ask for help with the collection
Keep the room that carries your subject and the person who can read it. A docent tour included with admission beats an extra hour of walking.
The National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin, offers a concrete single-subject example: its collection centers on mustard. If that subject is the reason for your visit, ask the museum whether staff can connect you with someone who can add context; a focused visit can start with the collection rather than a sweep of unrelated stops.
Two national programs can lower the cost. Museums for All, run by the Association of Children's Museums with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, admits SNAP and EBT cardholders for $3 or less at participating museums.
Blue Star Museums, run by the National Endowment for the Arts with Blue Star Families, is free for active-duty service members and their families from Memorial Day through Labor Day.
Keep the visit focused
- Drop the blockbuster if the same traveling show will reach a city within a few hours of home.
- Drop the audio guide where the labels are already detailed. Keep it where the labels are thin.
- Drop the last hour of the day. Many museums close individual galleries 15 to 30 minutes before the building shuts.
- Drop the second museum of the same day once you have been on your feet for three hours.
- Drop the stop you added only because it was nearby.
Start with the state humanities council
The fifty states each have a humanities council. So do the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. American Samoa has one, and the National Endowment for the Humanities notes this in an article about the many ways councils do public humanities work.
Some councils run speaker programs you can search. New Hampshire Humanities runs Humanities to Go, Oregon Humanities runs the Conversation Project, and Humanities Nebraska runs a Speakers Bureau.
The work looks recognizable from one council to another, the endowment notes. Each draws on the people, cultural heritage, institutions and interests of its own place.
That local grounding is what a visitor needs. A council staffer can usually tell you within a phone call who has spoken on your subject locally in the past two years.
How to reach the right one
The endowment publishes a full directory of state and jurisdictional humanities councils, with addresses, phone numbers, websites, named board chairs and executives, and a printable contact list. The directory is at neh.gov/about/state-humanities-councils.
Councils draw funding from the federal Office of Federal/State Partnership, private donations, foundations, corporations and, in some cases, state government. Their programming reflects local priorities rather than a national template.
How to reach the right council
- Find your state or jurisdictional council
- Write to the program officer
- Describe your subject in one sentence
- Say what dates you will be in the area
A short request works best. Suppose you want to see Shaker furniture in Mount Lebanon, New York. You might write: "I am visiting Mount Lebanon in June to see collections of Shaker furniture. Can you suggest someone who has spoken on that subject locally?" A request like this usually gets a name or a program suggestion within a day.
Other routes worth trying
- The museum itself.Ask who the institution turns to when a question falls outside its own expertise.
- The county records office or clerk.They deal with researchers daily and know which ones know things.
- The public library reference desk.Long institutional memory, and no gatekeeping.
- A local historical or genealogical society meeting.Attend one and the introductions happen by themselves.
- A university department.Faculty and graduate students often welcome an interested visitor.
What to agree before you meet
Say plainly whether you are offering to pay. Some refuse payment and accept a donation to their society. Others guide as a livelihood and need an agreed rate.
Agree before you meet
- Say plainly whether you are offering to pay
- Confirm the meeting point
- Confirm how long you expect to take
- Ask about access you could not get alone
- Ask what they would like in return
- Set out in writing what you want to see
- State how much walking you can manage
Before you meet, confirm three things in writing: the meeting point, how long you expect to take, and what you want to see. Ask what they would like in return, often a copy of your notes or photographs.
Agree the shape of the day as well as the price. A guide who assumes a two-hour walk and a visitor who planned a full day in a store room will both go home disappointed.
Fitting a guide into a wider plan is covered in how to plan a museum trip from start to finish. The cost of adding one belongs in the budget set out in museum trip costs across transport, stays and tickets.
