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1.
The ways that museums measure the success of their exhibitions reveal their attitudes and values. Are they striving to control visitors so that people will experience what the museum wants? Or are they working to support visitors, who seek to find their own path? The type of approach known as “outcome‐based evaluation” weighs in on the side of control. These outcomes are sometimes codified and limited to some half‐dozen or so “learning objectives” or “impact categories.” In essence, those who follow this approach are committed to creating exhibitions that will tell visitors what they must experience. Yet people come to museums to construct something new and personally meaningful (and perhaps unexpected or unpredictable) for themselves. They come for their own reasons, see the world through their own frameworks, and may resist (and even resent) attempts to shape their experience. How can museums design and evaluate exhibitions that seek to support visitors rather than control them? How can museum professionals cultivate “not knowing” as a motivation for improving what they do?  相似文献   

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Abstract This article reviews empirically oriented studies from the United States and Europe concerning visitor experiences in museum exhibitions in order to pinpoint similarities and differences among them. In the last 20 years, only a few scholars have tackled this research question in multifaceted empirical ways, although some of them have done so extensively. By comparing theoretical and methodical issues, as well as important results, we are able to outline several analytical building blocks that compose a complex framework of visitor expectations, experiences, and outcomes. Gathering credible data on experiences of visitors in exhibitions or museums, a method dating back to the tracking records of Robinson (1928) , is an ongoing challenge for the empirically inclined science of museum studies. Social scientists at universities and museums have been asking for 20 years: What are the findings regarding factors, structures, and consequences of exhibition experiences? Where are the blind spots? Which questions should be researched?  相似文献   

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The multisensory aspect of the museum, while neglected for many years, is undergoing a resurgence as museum workers have begun to push towards re‐establishing the senses as a major component of museum pedagogy. However, for many museums a major roadblock lies in the need to conserve rare objects, a need that prevents visitors from being able to interact with many objects in a meaningful way. This issue can be potentially overcome by the rapidly evolving field of 3D printing, which allows museum visitors to handle authentic replicas without damaging the originals. However, little is known about how museum visitors consider this approach, how they understand it and whether these surrogates are welcome within museums. A front‐end evaluation of this approach is presented, finding that visitors were enthusiastic about interacting with touchable 3D printed replicas, highlighting potential educational benefits among other considerations. Suggestions about the presentation of touchable 3D printed replicas are also discussed.  相似文献   

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The purposes of museums and those of their visitors often have little in common—despite the growing body of knowledge about museum learning and visitors' motivations. Based on concepts of experiential learning envisioned a century ago by the American educator and philosopher John Dewey, this paper explores bringing those purposes into closer alignment. A re‐evaluation of several factors—including criteria of experience, content organization, and the nature of inquiry—could lead to exhibitions more closely aligned with visitors' processes of self‐motivated activity and museums' goals for informal learning. One way is to shape exhibits and activity around problematical situations developed out of the exhibit experience itself and shaped by visitors' own purposes. By shifting focus from knowledge taxonomies to problem‐solving situations, museums could increase their exhibitions' potential for providing engaging educational experiences to visitors.  相似文献   

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In this paper, I suggest that museums have not explored their potential opportunities enough when dealing with their communities under stressful conditions. Each reader, however, should decide when what I am talking about is no longer appropriate for museums in general or your museum in particular. While some museums have moved more in the direction of serving their communities, I am struck by how little philosophical change has actually taken place in most museums after a year into this universal economic downturn. I argue that incorporating a broader palette of social services may make institutions more useful, but at some point these institutions might cease to be traditional museums. My question would be: “Should you care?” I do not suggest that all museums become full‐service community centers, though some might explore that option. Perhaps the question might become: How do we expand our services so that we make museums’ important physical assets of safe civic space and objects useful for tangible three‐dimensional learning into more relevant programs that reach all levels of community, and are rated by many more as essential to their needs and their aspirations for their children?  相似文献   

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Collaborative exhibitions built by aboriginal communities and museums often seek to reposition aboriginal peoples as the authors and experts of their cultures, and to assert their active and continued presence in the contemporary world. This article explores the impact of collaborative exhibitions on museum visitors' experiences and their potential to reshape the public's perception of aboriginal peoples. Interviews conducted with visitors to Nitsitapiisinni: Our Way of Life, a permanent exhibition created by Blackfoot Elders and museum staff at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, demonstrate that museum visitors rarely recognized the extent of the collaboration, and thus rarely equated Nitsitapiisinni with concepts of self‐representation or self‐determination. However, other messages were successfully communicated to museum visitors, namely the impact of colonialism, the efforts to revitalize Blackfoot culture, and the importance of Blackfoot spirituality. This study provides some interesting insights about public perceptions that will help promote deeper reflection on the issues surrounding collaboratively developed exhibitions and the first‐person authorship of First Nations cultures.  相似文献   

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This article explores the question of how transnational audiences experience anthropology exhibitions in particular, and the natural history museum overall. Of interest are the ways in which natural history museums reconcile anthropological notions of humanity's shared evolutionary history—in particular, African origins accounts—with visitors' complex cultural identities. Through case studies of British, American, and Kenyan museum audiences, this research probed the cultural preconceptions that museum visitors bring to the museum and use to interpret their evolutionary heritage. The research took special notice of audiences of African descent, and their experiences in origins exhibitions and the natural history museums that house them. The article aims to draw connections between natural history museums and the dynamic ways in which museum visitors make meaning. As museums play an increasing role in the transnational homogenization of cultures, human origins exhibitions are increasingly challenged to communicate an evolutionary prehistory that we collectively share, while validating the cultural histories that make us unique.  相似文献   

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Abstract In this article, the editors of the recent National Research Council report Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits discuss the report’s implications for museum professionals. The report is a synthesis of some 2,000 studies and evaluations of learning in non‐school settings such as museums. Here we focus on three specific topics discussed in the full report, which we see as particularly important for museum professionals. These are: a framework for developing and studying science learning experiences; cultural diversity as an integral resource for learning; and assessment of learning. Many museums include “learning” among their goals and many researchers concern themselves with how museums and other settings can be organized to support learning. Yet this wealth of research is rarely brought into focus and offered as guidance to the museum community.  相似文献   

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Abstract Our relationships with our audiences have proved parlous. But if history is destined to be contested, where should museums be in that contest and how do we get there? Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum has turned out to be a path not taken; Enola Gay was a cautionary tale. But we should have these fights in museums, where the national narrative is blocked out and staged, because of how museums teach us, opening hidden windows on cloaked realities. Museums can start by becoming clearer about what they think they are doing when they make an exhibition. Exhibitions can have a profound effect on visitors at many levels but it doesn't happen very often. Is that because visitors seek another kind of experience from what we typically offer?  相似文献   

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Museums, art galleries, botanical gardens, national parks, science centers, zoos, aquaria and historic sites are important public learning institutions. The free‐choice learning offered in these settings is closely linked to visitors' intrinsic motivation, making it important to understand the motivational factors that impact on visitors' experiences. This paper presents data from a questionnaire administered to visitors at three sites: a museum, an art gallery, and an aquarium. Similarities and differences among the sites are reported in relation to visitors' expectations, perceptions of learning opportunities, engagement in motivated learning behaviors, and perceptions of the learning experience. The importance of learning to museum visitors and the unique opportunities and challenges of the museum in relation to other educational leisure settings are discussed. The authors argue that the study of motivational factors might contribute to the development of a common theoretical foundation for interpretation in museums and other informal learning settings.  相似文献   

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Abstract This article examines the writing left in “comments” books at thought‐provoking museum exhibitions. What moves a visitor to share criticism, praise, political invective, or spiritual reflections in a public place where the writing is guaranteed to be seen by others? In a world transformed by text messaging and online communication, museum guestbooks are one of the few remaining opportunities to share hand‐written insights. Do visitors have a learning curve? Some leave inappropriate, even hateful remarks. By comparing the different moods of comments books at a variety of installations, this essay pays tribute to the legacies of public dialogue in museums, a medium of free speech made possible by a simple blank book.  相似文献   

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Abstract Restorative environments possess a combination of attributes that facilitate recovery from mental fatigue. Most previous research in this regard has focused on natural environments, but this paper explores the extent to which museum environments also provide access to restorative experiences. Visitors (307 tourists and 274 local residents) to a history museum, an art museum, an aquarium, and a botanic garden completed a questionnaire regarding the restorative qualities and benefits of the environment they visited. The findings indicate that for some people, museums are at least as restorative as natural environments. The paper contributes to the development of a theoretical understanding of museums as restorative environments and provides insights into the factors that facilitate and enhance restorative experiences. Such experiences have the potential to contribute to visitors’ well‐being and satisfaction.  相似文献   

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Abstract The museum landscape has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. Technology has made possible new kinds of interactions, visitor expectations have broadened, competition for time and resources has become increasingly intense, and the buildings serve ever‐more‐complex roles. As a result, interactive designers, including those of us at Second Story, have evolved our skills and approaches to keep pace. This article summarizes many of our observations while sharing some of the best practices that we have evolved to create engaging interactive installations, websites, and experiences. Despite changes in technology and user behavior, a core focus on great storytelling should drive interactive design and serve as the critical element for museums communication and connecting with their visitors.  相似文献   

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Tracking studies show that museum visitors typically view only 20 to 40 percent of an exhibition. Current literature states that this partial use sub‐optimizes the educational benefit gained by the visitor, and that skilled visitors view an exhibition comprehensively and systematically. Contrary to that viewpoint, this paper argues that partial use of exhibitions is an intelligent and effective strategy for the visitor whose goal is to have curiosity piqued and satisfied. By using analytical approaches derived from “optimal foraging theory” in ecology, this paper demonstrates that the curiosity‐driven visitor seeks to maximize the Total Interest Value of his or her museum visit. Such visitors use a set of simple heuristics to find and focus attention only on exhibit elements with high interest value and low search costs. Their selective use of exhibit elements results in greater achievement of their own goals than would be gained by using the exhibition comprehensively.  相似文献   

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In histories of the art museum, Prague has only a minor place. Yet at one crucial early moment, Prague played an important role in what we might call the prehistory of European public museums. There is a close link between art museums and nationalism. One necessary condition for being a country, it might be said, is that its people have a distinctive artistic tradition and therefore reason to build a museum in which to house it. What, then, is the relationship between Prague’s art museums and the identity of the Czech people?  相似文献   

18.
Studies exploring very young children visiting museums and art galleries are few. The majority of research about museum and gallery visitors explores family group interactions. This paper examines the findings of a study involving three‐ and four‐year‐old children visiting an art exhibition in a national museum on more than one occasion. The children's construction of knowledge about being a museum visitor and exhibitor indicates their ability to develop an appreciation of art and an understanding of the purposes of museums and art galleries.  相似文献   

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Abstract In 1999, the first author and his colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution published an article in Curator: The Museum Journal introducing research on the experiences visitors find satisfying in museums. Subsequent data collection has expanded on these findings, as this Research Note will elucidate. In general, the team found that experiences that visitors were looking forward to on entrance tended to have a distribution similar to that of the experiences they found satisfying on exit. The aim of this note is to present data that demonstrates this consistency, and to observe that visitors’ expectations that they would have certain types of experiences upon entering a museum or exhibition were a much larger factor in determining their responses than were minor differences in museum or exhibition content or presentation. In other words, on the whole they came in knowing what experiences they expected, and they left having found them, regardless of what museum personnel presented to them inside.  相似文献   

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This article reports on a study of young children and the nature of their learning through museum experiences. Environments such as museums are physical and social spaces where visitors encounter objects and ideas which they interpret through their own experiences, customs, beliefs, and values. The study was conducted in four different museum environments: a natural and social history museum, an art gallery, a science center, and a hybrid art/social history museum. The subjects were four‐ to seven‐year old children. At the conclusion of a ten‐week, multi‐visit museum program, interviews were conducted with children to probe the saliency of their experiences and the ways in which they came to understand the museums they visited. Emergent from this study, we address several findings that indicate that museum‐based exhibits and programmatic experiences embedded in the common and familiar socio‐cultural context of the child's world, such as play and story, provide greater impact and meaning than do museum exhibits and experiences that are decontexualized in nature.  相似文献   

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