The AASLH Online Conference is a yearly component of our Annual Meeting where six of our most popular sessions are reworked for a virtual audience and broadcast from the conference to registered viewers across the nation. OLC sessions are exclusively available to registrants for six months after the conference and then become available for purchase in our online Resource Center. These sessions are a great way to stay connected with the conference even if you can’t be there in person, as well as to organize a mini-conference at your home institution to discuss important field-wide issues with colleagues.

Stay tuned to register for the 2019 Online Conference, live from Philadelphia!


Advocating for Collections Care: Both Internally and Externally

This session will explore routes for both external and internal advocacy with a focus on collections care, securing time and funding for preservation initiatives and conservation treatment, and will discuss opportunities for incorporating information about preservation into all institutional advocacy efforts.

Chair: Laura Hortz Stanton, Executive Director, Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, Philadelphia, PA


Discovering Truth and Unconscious Bias: Continuing the Conversation

How diverse and inclusive is the arts and humanities field in the area of employment, policies and procedures, and programs/activities? This webinar provides training and resources to ensure that diverse viewpoints representing race, ethnicity, culture, disabilities, and sexual identity are integrated and practiced.

Chair: Chris Taylor, Chief Inclusion Officer, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN


From Assumptions to Intolerance: Addressing Visitors’ Misconceptions about Religion

Interpreting religion can be challenging, especially when museum visitors arrive with misconceptions and biases. This webinar presents three case studies from institutions experienced in addressing religious questions based on misinformation. These case studies are also featured in Interpreting Religion at Museums and Historic Sites, part of the AASLH Interpreting History book series.

Chair: Karen Graham Wade, Community of Christ Historic Sites Foundation, Los Alamitos, CA


From the Ground Up: Creating and Building a Culture of Evaluation

How can you go from having no evaluation to creating a culture of evaluation? This webinar explores three internal evaluators and how their positions came to be, how they have built evaluation capacity in their museums, consequences of evaluating and not evaluating, and ways to start incorporating evaluation into your own work.

Chair: Sena Dawes, Evaluation and Audience Development, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, MO


A Tale of Two Cities: Building Museums That Are Community Centers, Not Monuments of the Past

Learn from small history museums in two cities that are both developing new museum buildings, both with new exhibition models. Participants will acquire ideas from the approaches these two museums with limited staff and operating budgets are taking to create thriving inclusive community centers that are not stereotypical historical societies.

Chair: Janice Klein, EightSixSix Consulting, Tempe, AZ


Getting Sexy at Historic Sites — This OLC session is available for free in our Resource Center.

From physical intimacy to courtship to sex work to changing sexual norms, incorporating the history of sexuality into museums and historic sites allows us to explore questions of societal power, create perspectives on modern sexual politics, and increase audiences. But how can organizations incorporate this topic in a way that is historically accurate and respectful, rather than simply prurient? Join the speakers in a conversation about how to do just that.

Chair: Susan Ferentinos, Bloomington, IN