Museum, Media, Message

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134640744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Museumsverwaltung

Collecting together a group of talented writers, Museum, Media, Message considers, in depth, the most up-to-date approaches to museum communication including: museums as media; museums and audience; and the evaluation of museums.

Addressing the need for museums to develop better knowledge of visitor experience, this volume introduces a broad range of issues, and presents the ultimate how, why and who of museum communication.

Museum, Media, Message combines philosophical discussion, practical examples and case studies and examines museum communication in three sections:

• analyzing how museums and galleries construct and transmit complex systems of value through processes of collection and exhibition
• raising philosophical and management issues and exploration of work with specific audiences
• introducing methods for studying the audiences' experiences of communication events in museums.

Perfect for people who want to develop a more critical and informed professional museum practice, and for students looking to enhance their skills of analysis and reflection, this book is of value to anyone interested in the current debates and issues of this new and growing field.

1

Museums and communication: an introductory essay

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill

The third international conference in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester was held in April 1993. One hundred and twenty delegates attended from Britain, Sweden, Canada, Malta, Holland, South Africa, America, Switzerland, Taiwan, Croatia, New Zealand, France, Finland, Denmark, Greece, Portugal, India, West Indies and Malaysia.

The first and second international conferences were held in 1987 and 1990, resulting in Pearce, S. (ed.) (1989) Museum Studies in Material Culture, Leicester University Press, and Kavanagh, G. (ed.) (1991) Museum Languages – Objects and Texts and The Museums Profession – Internal and External Relations, Leicester University Press.

The third international conference took museum communication as its theme. This volume, which resulted, brings together a varied group of papers written by museum and university professionals from Britain, South Africa, Canada, America, Croatia, India, Israel and Austria. Four papers have been specially commissioned for the volume.

The papers include approaches to both theory and practice, with practical case-studies, and many of them address issues that have not been addressed before in any detail, such as adult education and museums, and the role of museums in a new South Africa.

This chapter has four main purposes: first, to outline the framework for the conference and hence for this volume; second, to review some aspects of museum communication in Britain, particularly issues relating to the museum audience; third, to relate audience research in museums to audience research in other cultural fields; and finally to describe the structure of this book.

A framework for the conference

I began to plan the conference ‘Museum: Media: Message’ in 1990. At that time, it was beginning to seem as though a conference three years later devoted to issues of communication in museums and galleries would probably be pretty topical. In 1990 we were witnessing in Britain the decline of public funding for the arts and museums, and were in the middle of a push by government to think of ourselves as an ‘industry’ with an economic role to play in social life, and with customers to satisfy. Marketing officers were being appointed in museums, and the concept of the ‘audience’ (all those people who might come to the museum) as opposed to merely the ‘visitor’ (those who did come to the museum) was beginning to take on considerable importance. It seemed reasonable to assume that the focus on audience would increase, and this has, indeed, proved to be the case.

Standards of management in general have come under scrutiny in both local and national museums, and standards of what has been called ‘visitor satisfaction’ (Office of Arts and Libraries 1991; National Audit Office 1993) and ‘customer care’ (Museums and Galleries Commission 1993) have been one important aspect of this. The Museums and Galleries Commission has issued guidelines on the quality of service for all visitors in museums (Museums and Galleries Commission 1993) and also guidelines specifically on provision for people with disabilities (Museums and Galleries Commission 1992). The Museums Association has established a working party whose work on equal opportunities in museums is well under way.

The assumption that attention to audiences would become of greater importance has been vindicated. From the chapters that follow, we will see how this has been reflected in practice in museums in Britain and in many other parts of the world.

It was more difficult to see in 1990 the severe recession that we have endured. Museums in Britain, and especially local authority museums, are now at a time of great crisis. Many museum people are losing their jobs, and many others are under threat. Nearly every local authority museum has been restructured, and some of the larger independent museums are on the verge of bankruptcy.

The reasons for this disruption are many, and it is not only museums that are suffering. Schools are losing teachers, and leisure facilities such as swimming pools are opening less frequently; many businesses have closed down, and very many people live in daily fear of losing their jobs. This context gives a particular poignancy to a book dealing with museums as communicators. It throws into high relief the past successes and failures of individual museums and galleries, and casts all our futures in a less than certain light. In my view, it tells us all too powerfully that if museums are not seen and felt to be part of the daily life of society, they will not survive.

Although survival is not automatically assured once social relevance is made clear, certainly without it closure is more than likely. The key to the development of well-understood social roles is the development of a better understanding of the tools with which we can work (collections, exhibitions, educational programmes) and the establishment and maintenance of qualitative relationships with audiences. Museums and galleries are fortunate in that there are many roles which they can play, there are many communicative methods to explore and many audiences with whom to work. For the future, development in all these areas will be vital.

This was the framework for the conference from which most of the chapters which follow were written; it is one of acute anxiety, but also one of immense opportunity. Change offers points for development and for new approaches. Survival demands this. Today museums must step forward to define for themselves a new future.

Museum communication in Britain

But what of the past? If the future for museums lies in the development of the communicative competence of the museum, what can the past offer us to help? I want to focus particularly here on what we know about museum audiences, because if we want to become better communicators we have to become very aware of our partners in the communication process.

What do we know about our audiences? I want to discuss this mainly in the British context, as this is the one I am most familiar with, but also because the nature of the field in Britain demonstrates some important points rather well. Let us consider audience studies in British museums.

Surveys of visitors to museums began in the 1960s. On the whole they were very small scale, and concentrated mainly on the demographic details of visitors such as age, sex, geographical location and so on. Mostly these small studies were carried out by museum staff, sometimes with the help of the local university or college. They were generally done with very limited resources, tended towards amateurism in methodology, and contented themselves with measuring a limited range of visitor characteristics. As public accountability increased, so the pace and the professionalism of visitor surveys has accelerated, with a particular urgency in the last eight years. It has been discovered that, with some exceptions, visitors to museums tend to be better educated and of a higher social class than the population in general. On the whole, it is the white population that sees museums as relevant, although specific exhibitions will attract specific audiences: in Leicester, for example, an exhibition of Afro-Caribbean history and art was visited by the Afro-Caribbean community, and exhibition called ‘Vasna – an Indian village’ was very popular with Leicester's large Asian population. This has taught us that museums attract the audiences they provide for.

Very few museum visitor studies looked at the museum visitor profile in the context of the profile of the local population, but gradually this too has become more frequent. Now, most museums know who their visitors are, how they reflect population patterns within a specific geographical area, how they relate to tourist movements and so on. Surveys in both local and national museums are carried out over time to monitor change and the effects of major policy shifts. Gathering basic data about visitors has become a necessary management tool.

During the 1980s a second type of analysis, which can be called participation studies, began. Government statistics such as Social Trends or Cultural Trends had already built up a small amount of not very helpful data on museum visitor patterns. During the 1980s, more specific studies commissioned by the tourist organizations (English Tourist Board 1982), central government agencies (Myerscough 1988) and some arts and museum bodies (Middleton 1990; Touche Ross 1989; RSGB 1991) began to look in more detail at what proportion of British adults visited museums, who they were, and, in outline, why they visited, generally looking at the last twelve (sometimes twenty-four) months. These studies were necessarily more broadly based than the museum visitor survey. They accelerated towards the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s.

Their conclusions are difficult to analyse as they variously report that 24 per cent, 33 per cent, 45 per cent and 56 per cent of the general population of Britain visit museums (Merriman 1991). Clearly we have to examine these data very carefully and ask questions about what definition of a museum has been used – whether, for example, this includes or excludes art galleries, or the built heritage. The time frame is also vital. The longer the time span, the greater the number of people who respond positively. In other words, if people are asked if they have visited a museum during the last two years, they are more likely to say yes than if they are asked about the last twelve months. The data suggest that a small proportion of people visit fairly frequently, but that a great many people visit rather irregularly over a longish period of time.

The most encouraging of these studies is one carried out for the Arts Council in 1991 (RSGB 1991) which used the time frame ‘nowadays’, which generally means ‘in the last four weeks’. This showed that 48 per cent of the British population visited art galleries, museums and exhibitions, combined as a joint category, ‘nowadays’. If ‘nowadays’ is a fairly short time span, and positive responses increase with longer time spans, a very large proportion of the British population is interested in museums and related institutions.

What do we know about what visitors do once they arrive in a museum or gallery? Research here is lamentably thin in Britain, although, under the title of evaluation, some work is beginning and some of the work that has been done is discussed in Part 3 of this volume. The pioneer in this area is, of course, the Natural History Museum in London.

The work that has been carried out at the Natural History Museum under the direction of Roger Miles is familiar to many. It is interesting that this work was carried out in a science museum, rather than in an art gallery. Science museums are often more aware of a specifically didactic purpose than other types of museum, and therefore have felt more strongly that they need to know what their visitors have learnt.

During the 1970s the Natural History Museum began to develop a series of new exhibitions. This was done as a very self-conscious process that was continuously monitored and documented. It was virtually unique at the time, although there was a glimmer of interest in exhibition theory at Liverpool Museum by the early 1980s, and further interesting evaluation work has been carried out there since.

Roger Miles and his colleagues concentrated on building an effective exhibition technology, using communication models from information technology, learning models from behaviourist psychology and sociological models from positivist American mass communication theory (Miles and Tout 1979). The assumption of this research was that by perfecting the medium of communication (the exhibition), a successful transfer of messages would take place. It was assumed that if the exhibition was sufficiently expertly designed, visitors would automatically respond; in other words, that the medium itself was all-powerful and that the visitors were open to manipulation through its effects. Visitors were treated as a mass, a ‘population’. After much trial and error and nearly two decades of work, it was admitted that this approach was not entirely successful, and that more attention needed be paid to the visitors and to their reasons for being in the museum in the first place (Miles and Tout 1991).

Other research into museum visitors at this time was virtually non-existent. Exhibitions were designed for ‘the general public’. In the education department, with face-to-face teaching for identifiable groups with specific learning needs, the attention to audience was much more sharply focused, but this approach was not perceived as relevant to any other aspect of museum work. Now in the early 1990s, and specifically after the research carried out by Paulette McManus (see Peirson Jones, this volume), we are becoming more aware of the importance of the social context of museum visits, and of the fact that museum visitors do not become new-born beings as the enter the museum. People come to museums carrying with them the rest of their lives, their own reasons for visiting and their specific prior experience.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s the introduction of marketing methods to museums coincided with the rise to power of younger staff who frequently held strong convictions that museums should be more open and more democratic. These two forces both focused on audiences and their needs, and this resulted in the opening up of the issue for the first time of what people felt about museums. The combination of marketing and the move to democratize museums led to a pioneering study in London of the attitudes towards museums of people who were not regular visitors. A mass communications research firm, Mass Observation, was commissioned to do the work by the London Museums Service (which is a London-based museum advisory body, part of the Area Museum Service for South Eastern England). Earlier demographic surveys which had identified the main characteristics of typical museum visitors were used to construct a picture of those who were unlikely to visit. Discussion groups were then formed with, for example, men over 60, Asian women, and women with pre-school children. Together with an experienced and appropriate moderator, perceptions of museums were explored. For the first time in Britain, market research techniques were applied in the museum context to build a picture of perceptions and attitudes (Trevelyan 1991). Further work was carried out of a similar nature in Croydon (MacDonald, this volume).

In museums in North America, this approach to the collection of qualitative data is one aspect of what is known as naturalistic evaluation (see Hein, this volume), but in Britain this is still very unfamiliar. Marketing methods in British museums have, therefore, established the value of regular research into demographic profiles of visitors, and research such as the London studies are demonstrating how valuable qualitative work can be.

A further concept from marketing is that of ‘target groups’. We now no longer design exhibitions for ‘the general public’. We understand that different sections of the audience have different expectations and approach the museum for different reasons. We consider the needs of children, families, tourists, the elderly, schools, and people with a range of disabilities. This is becoming almost routine. However, our concept of ‘need’ is still at a very primitive and underdeveloped stage.

We have just about got to the point in museums in Britain now where we are asking what we can do to behave in a more sensitive way towards our audiences. We are beginning to wonder what ‘evaluation’ is and whether it can help us to do our job better. Finding very little qualitative work with audiences in museums, we are beginning to look outside to see what other people are doing. In the National Museums of Scotland, for example, an assessment of visitor responses to their Discovery Room in the summer of 1990 was organized jointly with the Open University in Scotland, and video techniques generally used for evaluating lecturers were adapted (Stevenson and Bryden 1991).

If we do look outside museums for helpful methods, where should we go? We can argue that museums work with two distinct models of communication. On the one hand, we can use interpersonal, face-to-face communication, and we see this in action in inquiry services for example, where the curator and an inquirer meet each other directly. Other examples might be found in some aspects of the educational work of museums, where museum teachers work directly with groups. On the other hand, museums can also be categorized as mass communicators, as, in addition to dealing with some people face to face, they also deal with a great number of people in a less personal way.

Many exhibitions share the major characteristic of most forms of mass communication in that they involve a one-way process, a single message sour...