Meeting Museum Visitors Where They Are
We were having a pretty significant case of writer’s block last month, and the meme gods produced some wonderful inspiration for us.
Investing in content creation that stimulates curiosity and conversation is far more valuable than sharing academic or industry jargon. If your goal is to engage a diverse range of people in your museum’s work or nonprofit’s mission, it is more important to create dialog based on facts.
In 2009, our founder wrote Images of American: Franklin Park (and also managed a project for a book from the same publisher for The House of the Seven Gables). The beauty of these books is their approachability – rich with historic images and captions that share accurate historical knowledge without being overbearing to a reader. These books are popular and have helped tell the complex histories of small communities and major historic attractions and have sold millions of copies.
Writing this book required an equal amount of research to a traditional nonfiction text and included the additional challenge of writing 25-75 word captions for the historic images. The research was painstaking and included a great deal of time in libraries and archives in the Boston area, communication to procure images, oral history collection to enhance the history, and supporting digitization of negatives in return for image use without cost. Putting this diverse and complex history of an urban park into caption required challenges to ensure that the best history was being shared while keeping the average reader in mind.
Designing an exhibition for museums requires a similar skillset. Curatorial, collections, and education staff spend months, if not years, researching their topic, selecting appropriate collections to enhance the stories, vetting the process with other museum departments, etc. A big challenge in creating an exhibition is writing museum labels that share an accurate, engaging history while being approachable and educational to a wide audience.
Many best practices for education and interpretation today have been inspired by the work of Freeman Tilden’s 1957 book, Interpreting Our Heritage. In this book, Tilden outlines the importance of creating meaning and relationships for visitors while sharing a layered and accurate story. The six principles are:
Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.
Information, as such, is not Interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based upon information. But they are entirely different things. However all interpretation includes information.
Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.
The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.
Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part, and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase.
Interpretation addressed to children (say up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults, but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program.
Thanks to Katharina Faller aka @KateGoesMuseum (Instagram) for allowing us to share her images in this post.
We’re going to repeat ourselves: Investing in content creation that stimulates curiosity and conversation is far more valuable than sharing academic or industry jargon. If your goal is to engage a diverse range of people in your museum’s work or nonprofit’s mission, it is more important to create dialog based on facts.
At MuseumTastic, we firmly believe in the importance of creating a welcoming, judgement-free space that allow your staff, visitors, and supporters to engage with your mission and educational values. We believe that the stories you share should pique interest and provide fodder for deeper conversations – it is not about the full “information dump” while introducing people to a topic. Meeting people where they are will help to produce a better connection, build support for your work, and increase engagement on topics that matter.