Resources

A watercolor painting of an art gallery interior featuring five framed artworks and a sculpture on a pedestal. The room has softly curved white walls and a high ceiling with decorative molding. Warm, focused lighting highlights each artwork, casting subtle shadows. The watercolor style blends soft blues, oranges, and yellows across the walls and floor, creating a dreamy, vibrant atmosphere. The artworks include portraits and still lifes in golden and wooden frames, and the sculpture appears to be a classical bust.

Mini Toolkits from Kaleidoscope Heritage Focus

Archive

Professional Help

Field Service Alliance – List by state. Each state has its own Field Service that offers operational support and programming for museums and historical organizations. (Remember, you are not limited to the help in your state.)
THC List of Consultants Working in Texas
Your Museum Career Coach with Alli Schell
Museum Store Accelerator by Melody Caban Consulting
POW! Interactive Museum Exhibit Design by Paul Orselli
Prycer Consulting with Melissa Prycer

Accessibility in Museums

The Neurodiverse Museum (UK) Best Practices Guide
Apps:
- Vision
  - Chromatic Vision Simulator – stimulates color blind vision (free)
  - Tengo Baja Vision – stimulates a variety of vision loss types and degrees, can combine types (free)
  - TapTapSee – how vision impaired hear objects described (free)
  - One Step Reader – designed for people with low vision, blindness, or other reading differences, like dyslexia, to convert text into speech or Braille (paid)
- Hearing
  - Hearing Loss Sounds Like – stimulates hearing loss
  - SoundPrint – Helps determine noise level
  - Ava Live Caption – how hard of hearing hear the world
- Nuerodiverse
  - SoundPrint – Helps to find quite areas
  - SymboTalk – for nonverbal communication
  - Avaz – for nonverbal communication
- Mobility
  - RollMobility
PlugIn or Extension
- Funkify (Google Chrome Extension) – stimulates a wide variety of disorders (paid)

Associations & Conferences

Alli Schell of Your Museum Career Coach keeps an updated list with dates and themes: Museum Conference Directory

Using AI

The American Historical Association has released “Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in History Education” outlines thoughtful ways to leverage AI to foster and support historical work, a critical conversation as our field navigates the opportunities and challenges of emerging technologies.

Starting a Museum?

Today’s economic and political climate is a complicated environment to start a new museum. We encourage you to work with community partners and previously established organizations in an effort to combine resources for success.

If you’d like help navigating this process, email: insight@kaleidoscopehf.com