Fifth International Yearbook “Open air museums” 2016/17 is published and the title is very ambitious: The book of everything (you wanted to know about open air museums). This year’s edition broke all the records: 35 authors from 18 countries contributed to the Yearbook. It is very important that almost all experts from the Old Village took part answering to one of nine offered fields incorporating thus their thoughts about this vivid and dynamic museological domain. The North-American colleagues from USA and Canada played more significant role in the edition, but we can proudly state that the premieres came from Australia, Ghana, Iceland and neighboring Bulgaria. The Yearbook is not only ambitious in the terms of quantity: the mission was to collect the texts aimed for widest possible public, interestingly written, often in the form of blog that offer ideas and thoughts exchanges from/to all the parts of the world. Hard copy had its premiere on the Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne in the framework of the Cultural Base project during January 2017. E-edition will be available on the Old Village’s and web-site the Association of European open-air museums (AEOM - http://aeom.eu/en/?page_id=343, where the previous four publications could be downloaded for free) during the spring. Initiator and editor in chief of the “Book of everything…” is DrNikola Krstović while the editorial board secretary isM.SciJelenaToskić, both senior curators of the Old Village.
From the review of Srdjan Radović, PhD and research associate of Intitute of Ethnography of SASA: „Through their texts, museum employees told stories about their museums and about themselves in them; about their visions and reflections on what the open-air museums should be like; they presented general images of some institutions, but also microscopic examinations of some specific museum activities. This succession of textual forms and themes produced dynamic flow through the entire collection and provided vivid pictures of life and work in skansens (understood in the broadest sense of the word), so that the readers can experience a sort of museum journey from Siberia to Canada without having to set feet in the museums themselves. It is not easy to produce such an interesting book on a close professional topic (and often there is no effort to try to), but obviously, it is possible.”
