III. Planning exhibition workshops and continuing translation

After four full years of teaching, although my courses have been expanded to incorporate other related fields, such as Research Methods of Museology, Seminars of Local Museums, and more importantly, Exhibition Evaluation, still, nothing has changed in terms of governmental policy. As there were no further improvements that could be achieved among my colleagues personally, I trained my students to work in a ..team approach..for individual exhibitions. Therefore, I began to translate the second group of museum books, and they are: Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions, Before the Blue Print - Science Center Buildings, Questioning Assumptions: An Introduction to Front-End Studies in Museums, and Budgeting Exhibition. As these books focus on the process of planning and organizing a museum exhibition and educational programs, it became easier to see the results that I wished for. But still, I had to teach my students the practical methods of gathering evaluation materials from audience research, and this led to the translation of the third group: Practical Evaluation Guide - Tools for Museums and Other Informal Educational Settings and Try It! They were translated and used in class before they were published. Here, in addition, I would like to thank Prof. Jane Bedno of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Our graduate school had invited her as a visiting professor who could translate her experience in museum exhibition directly to my class for three times from 2002~2004. She also helped make a student exchange program possible between the two institutions, although the program did not succeed until after both of us retired. As said in the summary that Kenneth Hudson wrote in his book Museums of Influence, if a person's good idea cannot be accepted by the society, it would fail eventually even if a revolutionary approach is used to realize the idea. I did not make any revolutionary changes in my teaching career, but I know how to build the strengths to create changes in our society. It was at the Art Museum at Princeton University where I have worked for three years when I performed as a member of the museum field that I realized that American museums have won their autonomous status from Europe's civilization. This is a good example for other post-colonial countries in their cultural struggles.

After these American experiences and the assumption of my teaching of Exhibition Evaluation, I wrote a small book about How to Evaluate Educational Programs in Museums. This was an opportunity to distinguish Museum Accreditation from Exhibition Evaluation for my colleagues, and I tried to conclude that any kind of evaluation will lead the museum to improvement if it follows the small indications of the visitor's museum experiences. My main reason for publishing the book stems from the needs of our social backgrounds. Most of the Taiwanese are immigrants as with the Americans. Thousands of American museums have experienced problems due to the diversity of their visitors. It would be good for us to take our visitors into consideration. I taught courses to staff of small local museums, too. The achievement would not be very visible, as the governance of public museums is still silent. Therefore, theoretically, I should go on pushing my students into taking on practical projects in local museums: organize helpful teams to merge their exhibition projects, provide professional and technical information services, and evaluate their performance firstly. These books translated in Chinese are very helpful for my students and for the members of local museums to understand their problems. It was a silent victory in the campus at last, but it was also a sound one for the American model. Other good news is that my students have been following my footsteps, and translating, working in museums, organizing exhibitions, writing their theses about Taiwanese museums. They all have agreed that this American model works better than the one our museums are using. This new situation encourages me to advance this model into a system - ICR models, my latest translation - Guild-lines to Improve Museum Quality and Standard, and Museum Accreditation: A Quality Proof for Museums, which was published last year.