Writing the History of Humanity: The Role of Museums in Defining Origins and Ancestors in a Transnational World

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.     

Visitor Meaning-Making in Museums for a New Age

The concept of meaning-making is generating excitement within the museum community, with good reason. Providing an approach to understanding visitor experiences, the paradigm illuminates the visitor's active role in creating meaning of a museum experience through the context he/she brings, influenced by the factors of self-identity, companions, and leisure motivations. As a result, visitors find personal significance within museums in a range of patterned ways that reflect basic human needs, such as the need for individualism and the need for community. The dynamics of visitor meaning-making indicate the importance of fashioning a better “fit” between people and museums in two critical areas: (1) between human meaning-making and museum methods and (2) between human needs and the purpose of museums in society. Each of these areas illuminates a promising direction for a new age of museums in which we actively support, facilitate, and enhance the many kinds of meaning possible in museums and explicitly incorporate human needs into exhibit goals and institutional missions. Examples of successful strategies are discussed.     

Reading Weil: A Premature Appreciation

Abstract Reviewing the published legacy of museum scholar Stephen E. Weil, this paper analyzes the development of Weil's thought and appraises his contributions to museum discourse. It traces two shifts in Weil's published writings: first, the broadening of his interests from the legal field and the art world to the situation and purposes of museums generally; second, the liberalization of Weil's museological politics, which gradually altered his early view of the (art) museum as a private, sacrosanct realm and led to his later calls for museums to act as community servants. The paper also examines Weil's rhetorical strategies, with particular attention to the hypotheticals and analogies for which he was well known, and offers a provisional evaluation of the extent of his influence on museum debate and practice.     

Museums and Impact

Since the 1980s, governments throughout the western industrialized world have required greater emphasis on fiscal and public accountability within the public sector. As a result, museum value has been constructed in response to economic rationalism and government policies without sufficient input from the museum sector itself. This paper asserts that any discussion of the role of museums, the contribution they make to societies and appropriate ways of evaluating their impact requires the perspectives and contributions of all stakeholders. It examines preliminary findings from a study that asked about the impact of museums from the perspective of museum professionals and end‐users. It reports significant areas of agreement between public and professional cohorts regarding the role museums play and the contribution they make both to individuals and to the social and economic development.     

Coming Together to Address Systemic Racism in Museums

A group of 25 multi‐generational, multi‐racial museum professionals met in January 2016 for a 3‐day dialogue about museums and race. They concurred that forming alliances among museum practitioners of all races and ethnic backgrounds is a critical step in dismantling the persistent and pervasive presence of structural racism in museums. This article asserts that there are both demographic and ethical imperatives for close examination of all aspects of museums’ programs, their staffs and boards, the publics they serve, and the organizations that exist because of them. It provides an introduction to the vocabulary and attendant systems of white privilege, oppression, and intersectionality, offers concrete suggestions for people of all backgrounds to join forces, and ends with a call to action to bring racial awareness and action to the forefront in our institutions, our communities, and our nation.     

走向科学博物馆

广义的科学博物馆包括自然博物馆、科学工业博物馆和科学中心三种类型,狭义的科学博物馆指其中的科学工业博物馆。本文通过对比分析国内外科学博物馆的发展历程与现状,认为近年来中国的科学博物馆事业过于偏重于科学中心的发展,缺失了科学工业博物馆这一类型。本文提出:因科学工业博物馆在展示内容、展示方式上的独特优势,中国的科学博物馆应补上这一课,大力建设科学工业博物馆。     

A Consideration of Museum Education Collections: Theory and Application

Abstract This article addresses problems associated with museum education collections. Museum education collections are used to provide visitors with opportunities to handle museum objects. These collections are primarily composed of objects that are damaged, lack provenance, or do not fit the scope of the collection. Sometimes, these collections are displayed haphazardly and their interpretation may lack thematic context. Some museum education collections are not being utilized to their fullest educational capacity. The application of cognitive, exhibition, and collections management theories can alleviate some problems with museum education collections. A critique of the education collection at the Lubbock Lake Landmark is presented as a case study of these problems and some of the potential solutions to them. The study can be used as a template by other museums to solve similar problems in their education collections.     

For Whom Are We Building These Gems? Redefining Impact at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca

Abstract Can museums still be valuable to populations that don’t visit them? The city of Oaxaca, Mexico is home to a flourishing museum scene, but despite a desire by those museum professionals to serve the Oaxacan community, the city’s museums largely lack a local visiting base. This article, which reflects on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oaxaca in 2010, explores the implications of the disjunction between intention, assumption, and reality in some of Oaxaca’s museums, especially the Museo Textil de Oaxaca, a small private textile museum in the city’s historical center. By considering the museum’s inherent value and its innovative attempts to tangibly impact a specific community outside of the museum edifice, I suggest a way to rethink impact in museums by, in effect, turning them inside out: shifting the focus away from “public value driven by a universal right to cultural access” ( Stein 2012, 219 ), toward more tangible, external outcomes, including direct interventions in the dynamic world beyond the quiet galleries.     

Evaluation, Research and Communities of Practice: Program Evaluation in Museums

Museums present different contexts for learning, particularly when compared with places such as schooos, universities and libraries. They have been described as free-choice learning environments visited by a broad range of people. Museums have the opportunity to shape identities—through access to objects, knowledge and information visitors see themselves and their culture reflected in ways that encourage new connections, meaning making and learning. However, across the world museums are finding themselves competing with other leisure and learning experiences in an increasingly global world. The long history of audience research in the cultural sector demonstrates the interest museums have had in their visitors over time. This paper outlines the development of audience research in museums, the context within which it operates, and describes the processes of audience research through a series of case studies drawn from the work of the Australian Museum Audience Research Centre. It is argued that the shift in museums from mission-led program development to balancing content and audience needs through a transaction approach requires a broader research-focused agenda. While traditional ways of conducting evaluations are necessary and useful, to remain viable audience research needs to be more strategic, working across the sector in new ways and utilising new methods. How programs impact on users and facilitate learning about a wide range of key issues that museums are concerned with is a leadership role that audience research can take across both the cultural sector and other free-choice learning contexts. To achieve this, a communities of practice approach is suggested as a potential framework for audience research in the contemporary museum.     

Personal Beliefs and National Stories: Theater in Museums as a Tool for Exploring Historical Memory

How does what we remember about history relate to true historical understanding, and how can the museum become a location for these conversations? During the summer of 2011, the National Museum of American History challenged audiences to consider issues of historical memory and national history through the performance of an interactive museum theater program, The Time Trial of John Brown. Using the Time Trial approach as a case study, this article reveals that interactive theater in museums can provide a platform from which audiences assert their own historical understanding while learning firsthand about their role in creating a shared knowledge of American history. As the role of museums evolves in the twenty‐first century, new attention must be paid to this personal process of examining and creating history and memory through performance. It is through performance and participation that history and memory are both examined and created by the audience.     

Looking Back and Looking Forward: The Rise of the Visitor‐centered Museum

Abstract This paper presents some personal perceptions about “drivers of change,” which have impacted the role and nature of museums since the 1980s, leading to the rise of the visitor‐centered museum. Such changes mirror developments occurring in society. In the case of museums, a decline in public funding has occurred at a time when increased resources are required to enable museums to successfully compete for the visitor dollar in the expanding “experience economy.” The authors suggest that the role and nature of museums in the future will be shaped by their responses to many challenges, the most important being: how to increase visitor numbers without negatively impacting on visitor satisfaction; how to adjust policy and practice as museums approach the limits of visitor growth; how to start to reverse the trend of declining public funding by demonstrating museums’ value to society through the adoption of community‐centered policies and practice; and perhaps the most unpredictable, how museums will adjust their policies and practices in the face of possible climate change.     

“When I Grow Up I'd Like to Work in a Place Like This”: Museum Professionals' Narratives of Early Interest in Museums

As part of an exploratory research study, museum professionals were asked to share their stories about pivotal learning experiences in museums. Several offered personal narratives of how they first became interested in museums and started down the path toward careers in museum work, or had their imaginations opened to the possibility of broader life horizons. This group of stories seemed to be grounded in particularly vivid memories and frequently elicited strong emotions in the telling. The narratives are evidence of the impact of early museum experiences on people who later found their way into museum careers, and suggest avenues for further study of the roots of museum careers as well as other ways museums profoundly affect people's lives. The stories can also reveal to the teller, as well as to researchers and others, what stands out in their memories and the importance they assign to those memories. By attending to the thematic and emotional content of these narratives, both narrator and colleagues can find clues about where their beliefs and values really lie and, therefore, where their and the profession's time and resources might be most productively invested.     

Redefining Access: Embracing multimodality,memorability and shared experience in Museums

The authors discuss the principles of “access for all” in museums, both physical and intellectual access. They explore this question of multisensory processing in neurologically typical individuals, and case studies of two Portuguese museums that experimented with implementation of an “access for all” approach to the presentation of their permanent collections. The study was designed with three phases: addressing architectural barriers to access, preparation of accessible information about space and objects, and testing of alternative formats to convey this information to learn how to meet diverse needs in different ways. Set in the context of research on multisensory learning, this article discusses why an access for all principle is a majority issue as well as a moral and legal concept. It discusses two case studies where an “access for all” museological approach has been applied to access to the collections, with differing success. The discussion focuses on how an “access for all” approach could enhance learning, long‐term memorability and the ‘cultural value’ of a museum experience for all visitors.     

Cueing the Visitor: The Museum Theater and the Visitor Performance

There are an estimated 17,500 museums in the United States. If people think these institutions are pretty much the same once you get inside or that the differences between them are unimportant, it might be hard to persuade them that all 17,500 are needed. Exhibitions can have great transformational power; why don’t they exercise that power more often? Have museums not fully understood exhibitions as a medium? Have we not devoted enough attention to the full repertoire of visitor feelings? Have visitors been telling us this and we have failed to listen? For many people, museums play many roles in their lives; for most others few or none. How can this be? “Museum‐adept” visitors seem to prize museums as theaters in which their own emotional and spiritual journeys can be staged, but what about the non‐museum‐adept? Can the museum‐adept teach us how to realize our medium’s full potential?     

Crafting Museum Experiences in Light of Research on Learning: Implications of the National Research Council’s Report on Informal Science Education

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.     

From Knowing to Not Knowing: Moving Beyond “Outcomes”

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?     

Challenges for Directors of University Natural Science Museums

Universities and natural science museums have a long, productive history; however, this has been an uneasy alliance in the United States at least since the 1880s. Decreasing resources and increasing expectations have made the position of all museum directors extremely difficult, but the situation for university natural science museum directors is probably the most complicated among these because they direct museums that are small administrative units within larger university organizations. Some of their challenges include conflict between museum and university missions, governance issues, relationship between director and the university administrator/board member, lack of understanding of museum functions, middle management role of the director, lack of control of staff time, lack of staff support, public access to museum, and limited public and fiscal support. Solutions offered to meet these challenges include a written mission statement, recognition of education as the primary goal of the museum, a written strategic plan, accreditation, a highly active faculty/staff, documentation of the museum's economic impact, the creation and building of a public support organization, the formation of alliances with local cultural organizations, continuing education for staff, and an open decision-making process.     

Participatory Communication with Social Media

Abstract Major museums worldwide are starting to use social media such as blogs, podcasts and content shares to engage users via participatory communication. This marks a shift in how museums publicly communicate their role as custodians of cultural content and so presents debate around an institution's attitude towards cultural authority. It also signifies a new possible direction for museum learning. This article reports on a range of initiatives that demonstrate how participatory communication via social media can be integrated into museum practices. It argues that the social media space presents an ideal opportunity for museums to build online communities of interest around authentic cultural information, and concludes with some recent findings on and recommendations for social media implementation.     

Are Museums Still Necessary?

Museums today face a crisis of confidence arising from two issues: (1) the erosion of a historically unreliable funding base, and (2) a challenge for audience by entrepreneurial elements in the culture. Other issues center on a growing public idea that museum work can be shared by entities such as theme parks and exhibition halls and the perception that education should be shaped as recreation. Museum responses to these problems have exacerbated their vulnerability as unique institutions. Certain dichotomies in the museum world help to explain this situation: (1) professionalism versus the audience, (2) connoisseurship versus the public experience, (3) the centrality versus the peripherality of objects in museums, (4) museums as businesses versus museums as educators, and (5) visitor expectations versus available resources. Resolution of the conflicts requires museums to remember that they are communication systems capable of teaching hard information, to stop emulating the forces that threaten to destroy them, and to pay attention to certain lessons understood in the business world. Museums also must find stable and reliable funding, reinvigorate the museum accreditation program, and pay attention to what museums really exist for. Museums are still necessary only when they function as true museums.