04.24.14 Kiersten F. Latham, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, School of Library & Information Science Kent State University Best in Heritage 2014: The Useful Heritage A Useful Framework: The Heritage Field as a Meta‐discipline “These disciplinary contextualisations have to be integrated, so that each subject forms a coherent whole,” (Hider et al, 2011, p 212). Introduction It is time to refresh the way we view the heritage field. When you click the “refresh” button on your computer’s web browser, it updates everything that is new since the last time you brought up the page but generally, keeps all the things that were familiar to you prior to that action. The heritage field—the public memory sector—is still in place, still holds its own history and unique and divergent origins from which it developed. But the heritage field of today—which includes (but is not limited to) libraries, archives and museums (LAM)—has witnessed an external world of changes and these shifts affect our field and how we train our workers. Why continue training the next generations of heritage professionals in the ways that were developed during a very different time (Rayward, 1996; Ribeiro, 2007)? If we hit the refresh button, perhaps we can take a different view—a more contextualized view— of how the field fits into the larger academic, professional and popular picture. In 2011, Kent State University in the U.S. opened a new specialization in museum studies within the master of library and information science (LIS). While this is not entirely unique in other parts of the world, it is a different tactic for training museum professionals than most programs in the U.S (see Kim, 2012). The intent of creating this specialization was to embed and integrate the thinking and training across information institutions such as libraries and museums (and as it turns out, archives as well). The courses filled fast and continue to stay full three years later—and our graduates are now starting to enter the job market. Students applying to the program understand the arrangement—their framework is LIS but their specific knowledge and skills are museum‐focused. This understanding, however, has not been as easy to elicit from those who do the training—academics and instructors in both museum studies programs and in other LIS programs across the country are often confused by the conflation of the two fields together into one program. This program was developed through a broader lens, a lens that sees the heritage field (that which includes LAM) as part of a meta‐discipline.