Museum Scholarship and Material Culture (MSMC) Certificate
The Museum Scholarship and Material Culture (MSMC) Certificate at the University of Maryland is a 4 course/12-credit hour certificate that augments graduate work in American Studies, Anthropology and Archaeology, Historic Preservation, History, Library and Information Studies, and other degree programs by educating future professionals, scholars, and activists to critically assess museums as political, cultural, and social institutions in order to create twenty-first-century museums that center the values of (social) justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (JEDIA). The MSMC Certificate provides students with practical skills that can enhance their job opportunities and equip them to become agents of change in museums, archives, and other cultural institutions. Students in many graduate programs can complete the certificate without taking any additional credit hours.
Whether you envision a career in museums, libraries, archives, academia, activism, or other cultural heritage organizations, the MSMC Certificate can help you prepare.
Recent News

“If you ask policymakers, ‘How big is the attack surface on a state or national level?’ they would say, ‘I don’t know,’” said UMD Associate Research Professor Charles Harry. His research team used open-source tools to find the answers. Illustration by iStock.
Maryland Today: UMD Researchers Calculate Cyberattack Risk for All 50 States
February 5, 2025 | John Tucker | Maryland TodayScholars Aggregate Threats to Thousands of County Governments to Draw Conclusions

This 1900 image of the Carlisle Indian School football team includes one of Assistant Professor Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner's ancestors. She said this and the photo of her great-great-great grandmother Joaquina Nahwilet (image at bottom) is a rare example of good photo metadata; improving the tools in archival research is a primary goal of the new Indigenous archives project she's co-leading. Photo by John N. Choate/Dickinson College Archives & Special Collections
Maryland Today: UMD Awarded $3.6M Mellon Foundation Grant to Advance Indigenous Archives
February 4, 2025 | Laurie Robinson & Jessica WeissProject co-led by INFO and ARHU will develop tools, standards, and reparative practices to restore indigenous histories