FHXB Museum: Final Week and if I were the Director...

Looking on my final week at FHXB Museum, everything seemed to go by so fast. I am surprisingly sad to be going away from this place though I look forward to travelling to Bremerhaven for my new internship. For a small and rather untraditional museum, I actually kept on being surprised about how complicated it would be to run a museum like this. Nevertheless, if I were to be the museum director there would be some things I would definitely would want to deal with first.

Having a clear working structure- At the museum, it was very apparent that the director was the boss. But beyond that everyone was on pretty much equal footing. While this was not always a problem, sometimes work does not get done because no one feels able to tell anyone to do something and thus people get too narrowly associated with their specific tasks to do anything else. I would definitely take a more direct approach to this issue; however, understanding that this museum’s history and association with the Green Party (which typically had a very consensual-egalitarian approach to politics), I can see why a hierarchical system may not be popular.

Finding a better system of involving the community- In complete understanding that giving to charities in Germany is much more difficult to do than in the US, I would want to figure out a better way for the museum to work with businesses. Since a lot of artifacts come from old businesses and their records, I wanted to showcase some of the businesses in the area and their history. It helps build pride in their contribution to the community and potentially gets them advertising. Additionally, we tend to hand out a lot of flyers to these businesses yet they very rarely seem to be interested in our events so building their interest in our events would be key in getting more support from the community.

ORGANIZATION- As someone who has visited numerous museums (many German ones as well), it gets to be a little onerous when things are repeated too many times or if artifacts are simply placed without context. Those are two of the main problems that occurred to me in the exhibit that I spent a month trying to understand. I would definitely find a way to at least organize the artifacts in a much better way and explain them so that they can be less boring for visitors.

Although there are plenty more ideas, these were the main ones. It has been a pleasure to work here and I wish I can come back to visit and see this museum. I know it has a lot of potential to grow and am very thankful for my experience. Farewell FHXB.