Small Museum Association Conference 2025

The US 250th is an opportunity to share history that tells everyone's story and to strengthen the history field. AASLH has developed key resources to help practitioners to both conceptually and concretely plan for this commemoration's transformative potential. Learn about the filed guide, programming idea, handbook, and how to effectively apply these tools to your site or organization.

Join us for late night Trivia! Create a team (1 to 8 persons per team), and come up with your team name!

Open to all!

Discover how museums, historic houses, and living history sites can leverage digital tools to promote access and engagement with their collections. This panel presentation will provide practical insights from the McFaddin-Ward House Museum on implementing virtual tour systems, managing digital projects, and integrating new platforms during extended closures.  Attendees will learn actionable strategies for using technology to enhance audience outreach and foster collaboration in their own institutions.

Learn how the Jonathan Hager House has spent the last 5 years developing a plan to update and renovate an outdated exhibit space for the modern era. Discover how this small municipal museum has dealt with challenges including lack of staff, funding, and resources to create a vision and purpose for a new visitor center.

Form 990. Your organization files one every year, but did you know that it can be a powerful informational tool? Jillian Decker and Conrad Deitrick will present a crash course in understanding nonprofit tax returns, both Form 990 and Form 990-PF. These returns become public, so it’s important to learn what you’re telling the world about your own organization, and all the juicy secrets you can find out about other organizations. We will provide a basic orientation to these highly informational returns, with specific emphasis on the information that is most useful to you—salary information, board composition, grant making history, size, and budget.

The arts invite audiences to engage with their subjects in a visceral, emotional way, and when artists use historical and scientific data as inspiration, they can create works that drive home deep truths about the past and inspire further engagement. For example, the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society has collaborated with artists to interpret history through poetry, performance, and forensic facial reconstructions, and the Delaplaine Arts Center developed an invitational exhibition in partnership with area visual artists and historic sites to commemorate the 275th anniversary of the founding of Frederick County, Maryland. Alongside some of the artists of the above partnerships, Elizabeth and Corey will provide examples of how the emotional understanding gained by providing a platform for shared meaning-making serves as a compliment to traditional interpretation and attracts new audiences and funding sources.