The Engaging Museum Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement

About this book

This very practical book guides museums on how to create the highest quality experience possible for their visitors. Creating an environment that supports visitor engagement with collections means examining every stage of the visit, from the initial impetus to go to a particular institution, to front-of-house management, interpretive approach and qualitative analysis afterwards. This holistic approach will be immensely helpful to museums in meeting the needs and expectations of visitors and building their audience base and includes: - chapter introductions and discussion sections - supporting case studies to show how ideas are put into practice - a lavish selection of tables, figures and plates to support and illustrate the discussion - boxes showing ideas, models and planning suggestions to guide development - an up-to-date bibliography of landmark research. "The Engaging Museum "offers a set of principles that can be adapted to any museum in any location and will be a valuable resource for institutions of every shape and size, as well as a vital addition to the reading lists of museum studies students.

Contents

List of illustrations Preface. Acknowledgements Book Introduction: Meeting the demands placed on the twenty-first century museum Section 1: Museum Audiences: Their nature, needs and expectations Introduction 1. Traditional Museum Audiences: A quantitative and qualitative analysis Case Study: Lessons for tourism research 2. Developing New Audiences Case Study: Developing museum content for young children and families with babies/young children Section 2: Operating for Quality Introduction 3. Stimulating the Visit Case Study: Re-positioning Manchester Art Gallery 4. Visitor Services: Operating for quality Case Study: Adapting Servqual to measure visitor services Section 3: Learning in Museums Introduction 5. Museums and Lifelong Learning Case Study: Evaluating visitor learning in museums 6. Use of Museums by Schools Case Study: Education resource packs/websites Section 4: Planned to Engage: Using interpretation to develop museum displays and associated services Introduction 7. Applying the Principles of Interpretation to Museum Display Case Study: Exhibition standards/guidelines 8. Interpretive Master Planning Case Study: Process mapping 9. Concept Development for Museum Galleries Case Study: A design brief for a small gallery at New Walk Museum, Leicester, UK 10. The Engaging Museum Case Study: The visitor response Bibliography Index

Customer Reviews