PA Museums will present our 2026 annual statewide museum conference  and  annual meeting in State College, PA on April 19 and 20, 2026. Our conference attendees will connect and learn as we join together for special events showcasing our member museums, educational sessions, and speakers. We will also celebrate the winners of our annual Special Achievement Awards and have many opportunities to meet colleagues. We look forward to seeing you there!

Speakers' registration fees are waived. Please email Rusty Baker, Executive Director, to receive your registration code.

PA Museums is committed to providing a safe, inclusive, and welcoming environment that is free of bias and intimidation. In keeping with federal laws, state laws, and non-profit best practices, PA Museums expressly prohibits any form of discrimination or harassment based on race, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, body size, marital status, changes in marital status, pregnancy, parenthood, status as a Vietnam-era or disabled veteran, or any other protected classification. By registering for our program, you are acknowledging PA Museums' Code of Conduct.

Lodging for attendees is on your own. PA Museums has reserved special rates on rooms for our 2026 conference attendees . You can make your reservations online. The cutoff date for our room deal is March 27.  

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM (subject to change)

Sunday, April 19th

Behind the Scenes Drop In, 3:00-4:30   p.m.
Earth and Mineral Science Museum of Penn State University

PA Museums Achievement Awards, 5:00-6:00 pm
Centre Furnace Mansion

Welcome Reception, Centre Furnace Mansion, 6:00-7:30 p.m.

Monday, April 20

Registration and Refreshments, 8:00-9:00 at the Wyndam, Ballroom B

Welcome, Rusty Baker, PA Museums, 9:00-9:30
Wyndam, Ballroom B

Concurrent Session, Ballroom A, 9:30-11:15 (with a break from 10:15 -10:30)

Handling for Digitization: Preservation Best Practices

Digitization is an important step in improving access to your collection, while simultaneously minimizing the frequency of handling that can potentially cause damage to collection items. But when is it safe to prepare fragile documents on your own, and when is it time to call an expert? This session is a hands-on workshop session to provide practical tips on safeguarding your collection before, during, and after the digitization process.

The interactive workshop will introduce concepts of practical, hands-on preparation of physical materials to ensure safe handling and high-quality capture. Topics include:
- Handling principles for fragile or oversized items
- Using supports, weights, wedges, and cradles during digitization
- Identifying and safely removing fasteners
- Gentle flattening approaches
- Light surface cleaning
- Recognizing basic condition issues and when to stop.

The group will have the opportunity to practice handling techniques with a study collection of various material types. Participants are highly encouraged to bring questions about preservation-related digitization challenges from their own collections.

Presenter: Kaitlyn Pettengill, Digital Archives Specialist, Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts

Concurrent Session, Ballroom C, 9:30-10:15

Slow Fundraising: A Calmer, More Effective Approach to Sustainable Development

In a world where fundraisers are constantly pushed to do more with less, burnout is real—and results can suffer. What if the key to better fundraising wasn’t working harder, but working smarter and slower?

Join fundraising master trainer Chad Barger, ACFRE, ACNP, for an insightful and empowering workshop inspired by Cal Newport’s book Slow Productivity. You’ll explore how fundraisers can embrace a calmer, more focused approach to development work that prioritizes impact over busyness. This session will introduce three transformative principles: do fewer things by focusing only on high-return fundraising activities, work at a natural pace that aligns with donor readiness and your organizational rhythm, and obsess over quality by elevating the strategy and execution behind every touchpoint.

Leave with practical tools to slow down, refocus, and achieve more by doing less—but better.

Break, Ballroom B 10:15-10:30

Concurrent Session, To Form a More Perfect Field Trip: Remaking School Programs, Ballroom C, 10:30-11:15

During the 2024-25 academic year, the National Constitution Center retired its existing Constitutional Ambassadors Program, which had been the only onsite school program offered since the museum reopened in August 2020. The Museum Experience team worked to launch a trio of new programs by spring 2025, each aimed at engaging students and educators on a variety of constitutional topics in a more accessible manner. This presentation will discuss what factors influenced the decision to retire old programs and the process by which new ones were created, as well as a look at the finished products.

Presenter, Brian Krisch has been a member of the National Constitution Center's Museum Experience department since 2009. In more than a decade and a half at the Center, he has developed and presented educational programs for a variety of diverse audiences. In his current role as Manager of Training and Program Development, he works with the Center's museum team to ensure staff members and volunteers are prepared to engage with students and guests of all ages to help them better understand the historic and modern significance of our nation's governing document.

Break, Ballroom B, 11:15-11:30

Concurrent Session
Mitigation Techniques for Operating Collections, Ballroom A 11:30-12:15

For museum staff charged with the care of operating collections the mission of preservation and education often causes conflict between operations and conservation. This difficulty occurs in all kinds of museums that maintain collections that are either made up of, or have a few, operating objects such as industrial equipment, vehicles, machinery, musical instruments, interactive artworks, technology, and more. The scope of what may be considered operating collections is wide and varied but the same problems echo across all subject matters. There is an intrinsic disagreement between the necessity of museums to preserve collections and the desire to educate on their true operational purpose, an inherently damaging function. This session will discuss why it is important that we continue to reproduce, represent, or continue operations and provide solutions for how this can be done. The bulk of the session will be spent exploring mitigation strategies which other museums have employed to balance these oppositional needs. These mitigation strategies will include but are not limited to, video documentation, audio guides, replicas, and replacement parts. These strategies are meant to assist museum staff in brainstorming potential solutions that fit their unique situation. There are many types of operating collections in a variety of museum settings, from industrial museums, to automotive museums, that all have unique circumstances and problems. This session is designed to equip staff with a toolkit of ideas and examples from other museums that they can then adapt and fit to their situation. The session presenter has extensive research experience with automotive museums and now works as the director of a musical machine museum and thus continues to grapple with this problem on the day to day. There is by no means a one-size-fits all solution to continuing to operate collections, however with knowledge sharing we can begin to help museums maintain their collections in operational condition and thereby preserve our rich mechanical heritage.

Presenter: Cassady Calder, Debence Antique Music World

Concurrent Session:

Strategies to Improve Team Focus, Communication, and Decision-Making, Ballroom C, 11:30-12:15

Many small and mid-sized museums face similar staffing realities: teams are small, everyone is wearing multiple hats, and no one has an HR department or consistent professional development resources. Staff members jump from object care to exhibit installation, from donor conversations to school field trip logistics, sometimes all within the same morning. This constant shifting of mental roles can make meetings unfocused, communication strained, and collaboration more difficult than it needs to be.

This hands-on session offers museum professionals practical, ready-to-use strategies for staff focus and team communication, including tools that can be implemented immediately, with little cost, in museums of any size or specialty.

While the presenter represents a STEM and hands-on museum, the strategies in this workshop are not STEM-specific. They directly address universal challenges:

• staff juggling many roles

• meetings that veer off track

• communication friction between colleagues

• lack of training tools for managing team dynamics

• difficulty making decisions efficiently

• mismatched working styles that create confusion or tension

No matter the museum’s content, staff will benefit from practical tools that help teams work more smoothly and communicate with more clarity.

Presenter: Michele Crowl, Discovery Space

Buffet Lunch, Ballroom B, 12:15-1:45 pm

Over lunchtime, PA Museums will convene a brief annual meeting followed by a panel discussion TBA.

Concurrent Session:
Low Cost Interactives: the nuts and bolts Amanda Walsh - Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Ballroom A, 2:00-3:00 

Join us for a discussion led by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s exhibitions team about prototyping and fabricating physical interactives.

This session will cover the process of creating interactives from concept through installation and maintenance. Using examples from our last two in-house exhibitions, The Stories We Keep: Conserving Objects from Ancient Egypt and The Stories We Keep: Bringing the World to Pittsburgh, we’ll discuss how we create low-fidelity mockups (think foam core, cardboard, and printer paper) to test with visitors, school groups, and donors. We'll share the evaluation materials that guide our process and how we’ve used prototypes to build visitor and donor interest in the exhibitions process. We will also share information about materials, hardware, maintenance, and budgets we’ve used. Our team will display a few of our own past prototypes for use and discussion. These examples will include flip panels, smell interactives, visitor talk backs, and more.

Participants are encouraged to try out our sample prototypes and then share their own experiences and questions in a group discussion.

We hope participants will be able to test and create interactives with a small internal team. We want to provide an opportunity for museum professionals to ask questions and share their own prototyping and interactive fabrication insights.

Presenter: Amanda Walsh, Carnegie Museum on Natural History

Concurrent Session: Young People’s Continental Congress: Inspiring Citizenship Through Partnership and Collaboration, Ballroom C, 2:00-3:00 p.m.

A National Historic Landmark, Carpenters' Hall was built in the early 1770s and hosted the First Continental Congress, one of the most significant events in the founding of our nation, in 1774. The Hall is located in Independence National Historical Park, though the building is privately owned and maintained by the nonprofit Carpenters' Company. Founded in 1724, The Carpenters’ Company is the nation's oldest continuously operating trade guild. Carpenters' Hall receives around 100,000 visitors annually, and donations enable site maintenance and free admission.

Knowing we had a special opportunity in 2024 to celebrate our 300th anniversary and the 250th anniversary of the First Continental Congress, in 2019 we began developing a series of events in partnership with our historic district. In total we held 15 unique events for our anniversary, which brought more visitation, donors, and awareness of both Carpenters’ Hall and The Carpenters’ Company. The most unique and deeply-partnership-driven of our 300th celebration events was the Young People’s Continental Congress. This project involved 20+ partners, from our 16 local YPCC Partner Consortium representing the historic district to a handful of core programming partners (like National History Day and Generation Citizen).

This session will demonstrate what successful long-term planning and partnerships can achieve across a specific geographic area and a specific historical moment. When you put dedicated, passionate experts in the room, magic happens. From museum directors, to development professionals, to marketing and educator staff, the YPCC planning and implementation introduced and engaged museum professionals in ways we had not worked prior.

Presenter: Michael Norris, The Carpenters' Company of the City and County of Philadelphia

Concurrent Session: Case Studies with Window to the Past: Unveiling Hidden Histories & Stories of Jefferson County and Viewing the Indigenous Landscape – A Case Study in Collaboration and Curation, Ballroom A, 3:00-4:00

The Jefferson County Historical Society received funding from PA Humanities New Wingspan grant in January of last year for our most recent 2-year project: Community Digital Storytelling. This project produced short videos for inclusion on our new JCHS You Tube channel dedicated to the history of Jefferson County. This production focuses on first-person interviews on a variety of topics inclusive of the county’s past, present and perceived future. Videos include historic locations, historic photographs and film footage, and relevant artifacts from our collections. These are the life stories of community residents – Stories to be shared by the people of Jefferson County – their livelihoods, their tragedies, their successes.

Staff from Lebanon Valley College's Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery will discuss Viewing the  Indigenous Landscape with a look at processes of research, collaboration, and curation behind a recent exhibition drawn from the permanent collection of the Suzanne H. Arnold Art Gallery and from loans provided by area institutions, local college alum, and friends/supporters of the Gallery. Viewing the Indigenous Landscape (Aug. 29 – Oct. 12, 2025) was an exciting opportunity for student involvement, from behind-the-scenes work in research, planning, writing, and designing by our Gallery interns, to class tours, campus events, and special programming offered during the exhibition’s run. Our experience speaks to the potential for creating dynamic learning experiences focused on important, topical issues in a way that engages both students and members of the surrounding community. These conversations are more impactful when they reflect people, places, and stories connected with our campus.

Presenters: Kat Lyons, Jefferson County History Center and Dr. Barbara McNulty, Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery, Lebanon Valley College

Augusta's STEAM Academy, Ballroom A, 3:00-4:00

This session will start by presenting our organization's newest program, Augusta's STEAM Academy. This is a classroom-in-residence style program that focuses on Augusta Demuth, Charles Demuth's mother, and her passion of cooking and gardening. The lecture portion of this session will highlight the curriculum and accompanying lesson plans, the response we've received from our community and partners, outcomes of our project, and our plan for the sustainability of this program. We will then have a workshop portion of the session where we will lead the attendees through one of the hands-on projects the students would be doing at our site. Attendees will be given a copy of some of Augusta's recipes, along with modeling clay and markers. Attendees will then need to infer what the completed recipe looks like based on the ingredients and instructions listed to then make a 3D version of that inference from the modeling clay and markers. Through this project, students will be able to compare and contrast a historical recipe versus a modern recipe and determine what the challenges might be to follow a historic recipe. While most people might see STEAM as an art science experiment, we are looking at the importance of inferring, compare and contrast, observations, forming hypotheses, and creative problem solving to test their theories.

Presenter: Abigail Dearden, Demuth Museum of Art