Academic Writing in Museums

Abstract

Museum staff strive to create environments rich in opportunity for visitors to explore their relationship with their heritage, culture, art, or science. Their unique expertise in communicating and creating educational spaces are critical to the field of informal learning. Museum staff possess wide-ranging capabilities across various forms of communication, but many organisations do not employ specialist research staff whose day-to-day work includes writing and publishing in academic journals. Consequently, the academic research that takes place in museums is conducted and published with museum staff, rather than by museum staff. As part of the European science communication project, QUEST, an academic writing group composed of museum staff was established with the goal of creating a handbook to encourage and aid museum professionals in extending their communication skills so that they may convey their work in academic writing and take ownership of how their field is portrayed in the published literature.