Ford Bell, president of the American Association of Museums, responds to New AAM Standards Defend Collections-at-Risk in University Museums:
Many thanks for your piece about AAM’s new guidelines for museums with parent organizations. I think it is an important step, given the turmoil we have seen in recent years.
However, I want to stress that I had very little to do with these new guidelines. The credit goes to the fine AAM Accreditation Commission, including Julie Hart (AAM’s senior director of museum standards and excellence), and AAM’s director of external relations, Eileen Goldpsiel, and to our dedicated colleagues in the museum and art worlds, who worked extraordinarily hard on our joint task force.
These include the Association of Art Museum Directors (executive director Janet Landay) and the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (formerly ACUMG, whose president, David Alan Robertson, deserves enormous credit for getting this initiative under way); the College Art Association (executive director Linda Downs) and the American Association of Museum Curators (executive director Sally Block); University Museums and Collections—International Council of Museums; and the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. In addition, Max Marmor of the Kress Foundation has been enormously helpful in moving this initiative forward.
This whole effort has been a model of unprecedented collaboration and joint leadership, which is the most important story here. AAM is thrilled to have been able to work with so many dedicated and generous colleagues.