OMA 2024 Student Scholarship Blog - Mel Magin

The Ohio Museums Association is committed to connecting and empowering museum professionals at all stages of their career — including our student and emerging museum professionals!

For our 2024 OMA Annual Conference, OMA was very proud to offer students seeking careers in the museum field, scholarships to attend OMA 2024 in Sandusky.

We're continuing our 2024 Conference series with this week's post from Student Scholarship Winner, Mel Magin! Mel is a rising 4th-year undergrad student at The Ohio State University studying both History and Political Science. Mel was also previously a Historical Interpreter at the Ohio Village.

Did you miss our previous Conference Blog posts? Learn more about the Conference Blog series and read our previous entries here.

Where We Go From Here 

Hello, my name is Mel Magin, I am a rising 4th-year undergrad student at Ohio State University studying both History and Political Science and was previously a Historical Interpreter at Ohio Village for 3 long and rewarding seasons. I was fortunate enough to attend OMA’s annual conference held in Sandusky by way of the Ohio Museums Association Student Scholarship. This was the first conference I've attended not representing another organization, but rather myself as a young museum professional seeking greater opportunities within the field.

This year the topic of conversation was sustainability, specifically being able to adapt and accommodate in an ever-changing and at times volatile environment. The world has changed a lot since many of us began devoting our time and talents to preserving and teaching about the past. With the pandemic and the temporary closure of our institutions came a lot of discussion of just what would happen next. Would we open again, how can we reach people when we can't open our doors? Needless to say, we endured, and now that the dreaded 2020 has passed we face a new question: where do we go from here? Sustainability isn't just not polluting the environment and staving off a climate disaster, it's ensuring a future for our organizations and their missions even after we have moved on. The purpose of a Museum is to educate. Every artifact and plaque tells a story and it's our job as museum professionals to tell and preserve that story. During breakfast, I got to learn what stories people maintained and where they did so. Art museums, Historic House Museums, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; there were many ways to preserve a story. But was it the right story and was that story available for people?

While many of us certainly put in the effort to create and curate these experiences or work on the administrative end to run things smoothly; we cannot accomplish this goal if a portion of the public cannot utilize the materials we produce or enjoy the exhibits. It does not matter if a guest has a visual impairment, hearing impairment, uses a mobility device, has sensory needs, or has any other disability; they should be able to come to our institutions and utilize our resources to their fullest extent. Accessibility and inclusivity are not just buzzwords we like saying to sound good, they are the keystones of sustainability which was the theme of this year's conference. And this is really where that “where do we go from here” question came into play. What more could we as an industry be doing to ensure that our institutions are welcoming to everyone and that our work is available and usable by everyone? This was talked about extensively in almost every panel I attended along with many of the casual conversations occurring at the dinner table and breakfast.

I specifically remember attending “Audio and Deaf Cafes: Disability Centered Programs for All” presented by Megan Fitze, Elizabeth Sammons, and Mania’ Pathorski along with “Accessible Exhibitions: Collaborative Design for Blind/Low Vision Museum Goers” presented by Ellis Lane and Tom Babinszki and I remember listening to these presentations and reflecting on my own experience both as a museum educator wanting to create inclusive programming and a disabled person wanting to be included. I vividly remember during the second presentation, the presentation about accessible exhibitions, I sat in my chair with a little 3D-printed artifact in my hands. I looked down at it and thought back to those little buildings or statue replicas I would sometimes see in museum gift shops. I never really thought much about them before. I don’t think many people do. After all, how often do people truly ponder the items within the giftshops of the places they either work at or visit? But to a person with a visual impairment, they can make a world of difference since you provide a sensory experience that cannot be accomplished through just describing the object. I also remember having a conversation regarding accessible texts and audio at Museums and other similar institutions. For someone who might not need it having a braille translation of the text on a sign or an audio recording of said sign might not be the most important thing in the world. But for a person who does, having that there can mean a world of difference. Same with having ASL interpreters at in-person events, closed captions on videos, spaces that accommodate mobility devices, and sensory-friendly experiences. The importance of their inclusion isn't to generate revenue or to tick off a box on an arbitrary checklist, it's to allow a greater range of people to love and experience our work and what that work stands for. And since we as a field are opening ourselves up to diverse stories, the effort should be made to open up our actual sites and the resources we produce as well. After all; disability is the only minority you can become at any time and age.

I am very happy we are museum professionals are being more critical of not only what we are doing, but how we are doing it. After all, a little over 100 years ago not only did we regularly destroy artifacts on accident, I'm looking at you Victorians, and we also did not always tell the whole or correct story. We as museum professionals have the opportunity to do right by not only the people whose stories we tell but the people who come to see us and who come to work for us as volunteers or staff. After all, we have the ability to change lives and perceptions. I am happy to be a part of that. I am very happy I got to be a part of that with like-minded people who cared about this as much as I did. And I look forward to taking what I've learned and bringing it to whatever institution will have me next. Because if having little 3D-printed duplicates for people to feel or audio translations of signs or making sure our buildings are ADA compliant means another person out there gets to experience the lessons of history and gets to feel included within our lessons; it is a worthy thing to fight for. And OMA 2024 showed me other feel the same.