ICMM Biennial Congress 2009
Annapolis, USA
28 September to 2 October 2009

The Congress dates will be September 28 (Monday) thru October 2 (Friday)  2009  - Please make a note in your diary now.

Our headquarters will be beautiful Annapolis, a colonial seaport, the capital of Maryland, a world yachting centre and home of the US Naval Academy.

We will offer a range of accommodation to fit every budget. We are aware not everyone has a generous budget for conferences.

We will include day trips to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Maryland as part of the conference program.

We will offer optional pre-conference day trips to Baltimore and Washington, and a post-conference trip excursion to Newport News, Norfolk, Williamsburg and Jamestown, Virginia. These will be for individuals to decide whether they can afford the time and the cost.

Detailed travel information will be available at a later stage. 
 
                        The programme is still in the early planning stages, and will be guided by a Programme Committee including Stephen Riley, Paula Johnson, Mary-Louise Williams, Hannah Hagmark-Cooper, Lars Ulrich Scholl and me, Stuart Parnes. 

We want to follow up on the theme that we explored in Malta – Reaching New Audiences – but we plan to focus this time on the messages that we are sending, not the media that we are using. How should our messages be changing in response to the changing world we all live in?  We recognize that the sea and the oceans play a fundamental role in all our lives, whether we live on the coast or not – how did most of the things get on the shelves of your local supermarket? Almost certainly by sea! But not everyone understands or appreciates just how important the sea and our maritime cultures have been and, more importantly, continue to be, in shaping all our lives. Maritime museums around the world all have an important part to play in getting this message across to our existing and, as we saw in Malta, in 2007, to new audiences.

                        We hope to present some of the new directions and new partnerships that have opened up for us. To quote Kevin Fewster, the new Director of the NMM, a past President of ICMM, and our recent host in Greenwich:  “High in our priorities is introducing the Museum’s contemporary relevance and appeal to new generations of visitors.  The next few years will define fresh ways for the Museum to play a role in the way people understand the past and see the future.”

                        For us on the Chesapeake Bay, this new understanding is closely linked to environmental awareness and the significant changes in the Bay’s environmental health, use and productivity. In other regions, linkages may be with new educational institutions, growing cultural institutions or newly-emerging technologies.  We hope to explore a wide range of new initiatives and new ways of thinking about the roles our museums will play in the future. 

YOU CAN HELP.  Now is the time to send in your ideas, thoughts and recommendations for the 2009 programme.  We received a few surveys following the Malta meeting and we have built those constructive comments into our planning, but we want to hear from more of you.  Have an idea for a great speaker?  Anxious to tell people more about a project you have just heard about?  Desperate for a workshop on a particular area of our work?

Now is your chance.  Send an e-mail to Stuart Parnes at sparnes@cbmm.org or to any member of the Programme Committee listed above.  We need to have the Congress plans finalized by November 2008, so PLEASE let us hear from you…

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