Museum Practitioners Research Articles

Participatory Research with Museum Practitioners: A reflection on the process

This research explores the process of a Participatory Research (PR) project that brought together university researchers with museum practitioners to create reflective tools that can be used to better understand real practical challenges. This project followed Bourke’s (2009) definition of PR, viewing the process as a collaborative endeavour between researchers and practitioners in all steps of the way including project planning, research design, data collection and analysis, and distribution and application of research findings. In this project, we ran three main workshops with small group meetings in between, which were audio and video recorded and subsequently transcribed. These were then analysed to capture the PR process using James and Shaw’s (2023) Heuristic Framework as our analytical framework while using deductive and inductive techniques. Our analysis focused on understanding the dynamics between researchers and practitioners in this PR project in order to better understand how to conduct PR projects in this context. Our analysis offers a refined model that can be adapted and used with museum practitioners while identifying areas that need further attention in the process of PR. We included an important phase of reflection, and we offer recommendations for those who would like to take a PR approach in their research.

Moving On: Rethinking Practice and Transforming Data at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Scholarly attention is increasingly focusing on museum catalogues: their histories, challenges and, as this paper explores, their potential. Many databases contain outdated information and offensive language, the legacy of colonial-era knowledge production and digitization processes that translated catalogue cards into database entries. Much has been written about the potential of catalogues to act as sites of contact and collaboration, as well as how institutions can and should mitigate harm stemming from discriminatory language within their catalogues. Yet as museum practitioners are acutely aware, the extensive work required to enact change throughout a database is rarely perceived as exciting enough to garner dedicated project funding. This paper uses the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Stores Move Project (2020–2024) as a case study to illustrate how museums can, and realistically must, integrate critical documentation work into larger projects in order to achieve these objectives. The authors first engage with MAA’s own history of collecting and cataloguing, before detailing how collections staff have incorporated documentation priorities (re-cataloguing, historicizing data, and addressing bias) into the larger Project. They conclude with the hope that by making this work more visible and demonstrating its value, such projects might attract dedicated funding in the future.

Real-time Multi-CNN-based Emotion Recognition System for Evaluating Museum Visitors’ Satisfaction

Conventional studies on the satisfaction of museum visitors focus on collecting information through surveys to provide a one-way service to visitors, and thus it is impossible to obtain feedback on the real-time satisfaction of visitors who are experiencing the museum exhibition program. In addition, museum practitioners lack research on automated ways to evaluate a produced content program's lifecycle and its appropriateness. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel multi-convolutional neural network, called VimoNet, which is able to recognize visitors emotions automatically in real-time based on their facial expressions and body gestures. Furthermore, we design a user preference model of content and a framework to obtain feedback on content improvement for providing personalized digital cultural heritage content to visitors. Specifically, we define seven emotions of visitors and build a dataset of visitor facial expressions and gestures with respect to the emotions. Using the dataset, we proceed with feature fusion of face and gesture images trained on the DenseNet-201 and VGG-16 models for generating a combined emotion recognition model. From the results of the experiment, VimoNet achieved a classification accuracy of 84.10%, providing 7.60% and 14.31% improvement, respectively, over a single face and body gesture-based method of emotion classification performance. It is thus possible to automatically capture the emotions of museum visitors via VimoNet, and we confirm its feasibility through a case study with respect to digital content of cultural heritage.

Artists at the Museum

ABSTRACT Artistic and educational possibilities abound when institutions open their doors to local artists and allow them to work within their confines. The following case study articulates how the often unrecorded and unseen discourse between cultural workers leads to a deeper understanding and application of strategies that encourage effective collaboration. Made possible through my year-long appointment as an artist-in-residence at a contemporary art museum in Salt Lake City, UT, each example demonstrates how the relational exchange of knowledge between museum practitioners, artists, and the public results in new possibilities for community-engaged art education.

Analysis of Croatian public museums’ digital initiatives amid COVID-19 and recommendations for museum management and governance

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented challenges for public museums in Croatia. This study examines how museum management and professionals have responded to the closure of museums during the pandemic by exploring digital initiatives and online engagement with remote audiences. The authors analysed data from 162 Croatian museums registered in the Museum Documentation Centre in Zagreb to investigate the relationship between socioeconomic and demographic indicators and museums’ digital activities using multiple regression analysis. The findings revealed that half of the museums in the sample were active online, with social media being a commonly used platform. Interestingly, museums with a stronger online presence, lower regional unemployment rates, and a lower tourism development index were more likely to engage in activities during the pandemic. The authors conclude with recommendations for museum management and governance to embrace digital acceleration and adapt to the digital age. The study findings hold significant relevance for museums preparing for future pandemics or crises as they highlight the importance of digital initiatives and online presence in ensuring continued engagement with audiences during periods of closure. By leveraging digital tools and platforms, museums can overcome physical limitations and effectively reach remote audiences, thereby enhancing their resilience and adaptability in times of crisis. This study contributes to the understanding of museums’ digital transformation in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and provides valuable insights for museum practitioners, policy-makers, and researchers to shape future strategies. Further research could explore the long-term impacts of digital initiatives on museums’ sustainability and visitor engagement beyond the pandemic context.

Does additional audio really work? A study on users' cognitive behavior with audio-visual dual-channel in panoramic digital museum

Multi-channel human-computer interaction offers a new perspective for optimization research in the digital museum, though there is no empirical evidence on how these factors affect cognition. This paper conducted a controlled experiment using the audio guide as a breakthrough point, aiming to determine the cognitive changes before and after the audio-visual dual-channel interaction. The results demonstrate that adding the auditory channel brought more cognitive load but not better cognitive outcomes. This paper evaluated the reasons behind it and noted that designing channels based solely on technical feasibility is undesirable, with suggestions proposed for museum practitioners and platform developers.

Understanding levels of online participation in the U.K. museum sector

ABSTRACT COVID-19 has undeniably affected museums’ online content, yet attempts to identify or understand sector trends have been hampered by a lack of data. This paper uses a representative sample of 315 U.K. museums to create a much-needed benchmark against which museum practitioners can evaluate and contextualise prior studies and their own experiences. Gathering data from museum websites and five social media platforms, this paper is one of the largest studies of its kind in the European museum sector and the first of such scale in the U.K. Beginning with an overview of social media adoption, the paper then investigates museums’ use of YouTube to identify sector trends. Crucially, this paper demonstrates a scalable methodology that enables a broader analysis of European and North American museums using TripAdvisor. This method has applications beyond the heritage sector and is pertinent to the study of any public facing attraction.

Uncertainty as Affective State and Critical Engagement Strategy in Museum and Heritage Site Settings

Some pasts have long been uncertain—among those, prehistoric lives in areas where limited archaeological evidence has been unearthed. The Scottish Crannog Centre holds a collection of Iron Age artifacts that have been excavated from the bottom of Loch Tay, jigsaw pieces that are used to tell the story of the everyday lives of crannog dwellers two and a half thousand years ago. The visitor experience at the museum is built on direct interaction with the museum team as the visitors are guided through the site, presenting ample opportunities for critical questions to be raised and discussed about how the past can be understood in the present and how it can inform the future. Facilitating such conversations—and using Iron Age artifacts as points of connection and as conversational prompts—involves a careful balance between fact, interpretation, and imagination; what we know for certain, what is likely, and what we do not, and cannot, know. This paper focuses on how Scottish Crannog Centre museum practitioners employ uncertainty as a feeling, a process, and an engagement strategy in generating critical reflections and conversations among visitors. Drawing on data generated through twenty-five interviews with museum staff, apprentices, and volunteers, as well as ethnographic observations, we explore how the team manages uncertainty, how it is positioned and functions in interactions with visitors, and how uncertainty facilitates a sense of connection to the distant past. In so doing, we argue that uncertainty can be more clearly conceptualized as an affective state and a critical strategy when exploring how prehistoric and present-day life are connected in museum contexts.

Illumination in Restoration Workshops: Pressing Challenges and Their Solutions

Restoration workshops often stay in the periphery of museum life standing in the background of headline exhibitions. At the same time, restoration is an essential part of cultural heritage conservation. In this report, we would like to review the matters of formation of an optimal luminous environment using the workshops of the Grabar Art Conservation Centre as an example. The nature of light in a workshop is of primary importance for high quality of restoration work. We consider this case important since the Grabar Art Conservation Centre cooperates with many regional museums of Russia, and its experience may be interesting for museum practitioners.

Teaching Decolonizing and Indigenizing Curatorial and Museum Practices

Decolonizing and Indigenizing work needs to be done in museums and our day-to-day lives. On Turtle Island or so-called North America, the current settler colonial states add urgency to this work. Many settlers live on stolen land and benefit from colonial structures in ways that Indigenous friends, colleagues, and hosts do not. This article presents a self-reflective account of two museum studies courses I have been part of developing and delivering that incorporate decolonizing and Indigenizing principles. From my white settler perspective, I discuss the need for settlers to educate (or reeducate) ourselves as museum practitioners by putting decolonizing and Indigenizing words into conversation with our accountabilities in daily life.

An Analysis of Public Decision Making to Visit Archaeological Museums in Greece Using the Discrete Choice Model

AbstractThis study explores how the decision to visit an archaeological museum in Greece is influenced by a range of structural attributes, including admission fee, opening‐hours, collection type, and use of multisensory experiences, using the discrete choice model (DCM). DCM is used to study individual preferences towards a set of scenarios that describe a range of choices regarding museum attributes. Study conclusions are drawn from estimated model parameters that determine the most favoured attributes identifying the basis of visiting archaeological museums in Greece. According to the study, participants assess positively the introduction of specific museum services and exhibition features which seem to affect their decision making to visit archaeological museums. The results obtained are useful both from a theoretical point of view, given that there are few writings on this topic, and from a practical point of view, as they provide elements for visitors’ particular needs towards which museum practitioners and cultural policy makers should redirect their attention.

Challenges and Issues Confronting Sri Lanka in Museum Tourism Development

AbstractCultural tourism has emerged as a growing sector of the global tourism industry. Theme‐based museums have evolved as important partners in this burgeoning sector of the national economy. However, the statistics recorded only 29% of foreign tourists visiting museums during their visits to Sri Lanka in 2018–2019. This research identifies the prevailing challenges and issues museums face in developing museum tourism as a part of the national tourism strategy. This study has been narrowed down into the cluster of museums administered by the Department of National Museums of Sri Lanka as it is the major governmental body responsible for maintaining the national museums. The researcher conducted 18 semi‐structured interviews with administrative positions in the Department of National Museums (DNM) and Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority (SLTDA) in order to collect qualitative data during the study period of January to July 2019. Findings revealed the key challenges and issues as limited visitor facilities, funding barriers, structural barriers, emerging technologies, location and access barriers, limited collection, and unpublished competition in diversifying museum tourism experience in Sri Lanka. Finally, the researchers summarize the paper with a set of recommendations that may be useful for museum practitioners facing similar challenges.

Museums and the Pandemic, One Year On

Written as notes from the field, this article explores the overlaps between researcher development and the idea of academic resilience within the museum and heritage studies community. During a climate of uncertainty and rapid change, it argues that alongside the academic literature, positive psychology methods transfer well into the researcher development space. Methods involved informal email conversations with museum and heritage practitioners united by how COVID-19 and border lockdown presented new opportunities to connect, share ideas, and rethink. Presented as short narratives, these findings show how researchers and practitioners in northern Europe, the United Kingdom and Canada share similar concerns to those in the southern hemisphere about climate change, equity, well-being, resilience, and sustainability. These narratives highlight the importance of encouraging critical engagement, finding ways to traverse time zones that build international networks and provide leadership opportunities for researchers at any level.

Psychometric Assessment of Young Visitors at the National Museum Of Malaysia

Abstract: Museums have become an important institution for learning activities especially for young visitors as it provides significant function towards educational benefits and knowledge enrichment. The actual outcomes from learning experience need to be encountered in order to indicate satisfying experience level from museum visiting. However, the assessment of satisfying experience on museum visit is entirely lacking in the existing literatures. Therefore, this study proposes a set of assessment for young visitors in order to evaluate their satisfying experiences in museum. The items were adapted and developed from the concept of satisfying experiences established by museum practitioners. This paper aims to present evidence in order to show the validity of the survey data and the instrument meets the requirements of specific measurements as determined by Rasch model. It is hoped that the assessment of satisfying experience will benefit researchers as well as practitioners and educators in managing the quality of young visitors experience in museum. The literature also intends to add to the body of knowledge in museum context.
 
 Keywords: Learning, Museum, Rasch model, Satisfying experiences, Young visitors

Islamic heritage versus orthodoxy: Figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls at the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures

Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) challenges anthropologists, Islamic Studies scholars, art historians and museum practitioners to question the theological assumptions underlying conceptions of Islamic art and material culture. This article analyses three object types key to Ahmed’s analysis – Islamic figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls – from the vantage point of the collection of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures. Based on the author’s experience as Assistant Curator for West Asia and North Africa in 2015–2016 and on exhibition developments up until 2019, Ahmed’s framework is demonstrated as a guide for critical interpretations of exhibitions of Islamic art and material culture. This perspective lays bare a tension that contemporary museums struggle with in response to nationalist pressures to integrate Muslim citizens in Western Europe: between a diverse Islamic heritage, on the one hand, and orthodox desires to materially purify the very idea of Islam, on the other.

Whether and How Knowledge Moderates Linkages between Parent–Child Conversations and Children’s Reflections about Tinkering in a Children’s Museum

ABSTRACT This study is a collaborative project between university researchers and museum practitioners investigating ways to advance STEM learning opportunities for young children and their families in museums. The focus of the work is on how the knowledge resources that are available to families (e.g., prior knowledge, information provided by the museum staff) can support talk about STEM during and after hands-on problem-solving activities in a museum exhibit. More specifically, we asked whether and how associations between parent–child talk about STEM during tinkering, and the STEM content of the children’s reflections on their learning afterward, might vary based on the knowledge that is available to families to make sense of their experiences. One hundred and eleven families with 5- to 10-year-old children (M = 7.23 years) were observed in a tinkering exhibit in a children’s museum. Results indicated that the more parents and children talked about STEM during tinkering, the more the children talked about STEM in their reflections. This association was moderated by children’s knowledge based on prior tinkering experiences, and knowledge that was acquired through a pre-tinkering, facilitated orientation by museum staff about engineering, but not by children’s age or parents’ educational attainment. Implications for museum research and practice are discussed.

Mineralogical, petrological and planetological heritage. The (Italian) story so far

The goal of this work is to further increase the use, by all the stakeholders, of well-established and official cataloguing methods for the preservation, valorisation and study of naturalistic heritage. The work describes the standards of the Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation (ICCD) for cataloguing the Italian mineralogical, petrological and planetological heritage to the community of scientists, curators and museum practitioners. This work then provides an overview of the geoscientific heritage already catalogued through these standards and freely available for study and research purposes on the SIGECweb online database. Finally, the importance of a standardized cataloguing—in the comprehension of the historical, cultural and ethical aspects relative to the conservation and valorisation of the geoscientific heritage—will also be highlighted.

“The Bloody Hell and Holy Cow Moment:” Feeling Awe in the Art Museum

AbstractResearch shows that awe has various positive benefits for people. Research also suggests that viewing art can elicit awe. Therefore, art museums seem well positioned to foster awe, yet there is almost no evidence that art museum visitors experience awe during their visit. This study assessed whether and how people experience awe during an art museum visit, to establish an empirical foundation. A total of 132 adults were interviewed at two different art museums in London, UK. Study results point to three key findings: (1) art museum visitors say that they feel awe, and it may be correlated with several other positive emotions; (2) art museum visitors say that they experience some dimensions of awe more strongly than others; and (3) art museum visitors mostly felt that it was aspects of the art work that elicited their feelings of awe in the art museum. Results have implications for art museum practitioners developing interpretive strategies for connecting people with works of art, and for researchers investigating the nature of museum experiences.

“Guest Workers” in Mining

Over the past five to six decades, oral history has become a complex and diverse tool, not only for uncovering and analysing individual and collective patterns of memory but also to inscribe them into public historical narratives. In the wake of the decline of the mining industry in the Ruhr region, local history workshops, academic historians, filmmakers, and museum practitioners began to construe miners and mining communities as historical subjects from the bottom up. Throughout this time, personal narrations played an increasingly important role as both a source of research and a tool for public historical representations. Using the case study of the Ruhr area, this article deals with the functions of public oral history narrations about the region’s mining past. It will particularly address the question of how the work and life stories of Turkish immigrant labourers, officially labelled as “guest workers”, have been represented in regional historical culture. To what extent did they become narrative agents in the Ruhr’s historiography, from a democratic and participatory “history from below” to an increasingly institutionalised approach in public history?

Museum program design supports parent–child engineering talk during tinkering and reminiscing

This study focused on tinkering, a playful form of open-ended problem solving that is being widely adopted in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education as a way of encouraging children’s engagement in disciplinary practices of engineering. Nevertheless, the design of exhibits and programs and the nature of children’s interactions with adults can determine whether and to what extent tinkering engenders participation in engineering practices such as testing and redesign. Researchers and museum practitioners worked together using design-based research methods to develop and test tinkering programs that could best support engineering learning. Two of the programs specified what families’ engineering projects should do and provided exhibit spaces for testing and iterating the design (i.e., function-focused programs), and two programs did not. A total of 61 families with 6- to 8-year-old children (Mage = 7.07 years; 25 female) were observed during one of the programs and when reminiscing immediately after tinkering. Parent–child interaction patterns associated with understanding and remembering events—parent–child joint hands-on engagement and joint talk—and engineering design process talk were measured. All four programs were similar in terms of parent–child joint engagement. Compared with families who did not participate in function-focused programs, families who did talked more about the engineering design process during tinkering and when reminiscing. Parent–child engineering talk during tinkering mediated the association between the program design and engineering talk when reminiscing. Implications for research on children’s learning and museum practice are discussed.