Visitor Books Research Articles

The unique preservation of Yves Saint Laurent’s birthplace: A singular cultural heritage in Oran

Abstract In 2020, the Affane Mohamed Foundation initiated the restoration of the Yves Saint Laurent house in Oran, Algeria, led by architect Youcef Fernane. The project aimed not only to restore the artist’s birthplace but also to showcase his first private theatre, sketches, drawing table, study, and personal bedroom. The house, built in 1925 in the Plateau Saint-Michel district (now Hai Sidi El Bachir), exemplifies neoclassical architecture with Art Deco influences. This project stands out as a unique initiative in Oran, where the preservation of public figures’ homes is rare, making it an exception in Algeria. The restoration, completed in 2022, has attracted significant attention, drawing visitors locally and internationally, particularly through social media, highlighting the cultural and historical value of the site. The research addresses visitor feedback, hypothesising variability in their testimonials, which serve as constructive criticism of this initial tourism initiative in Oran. The dual objectives are to illuminate the significance of the Yves Saint Laurent residence and to analyse visitor perceptions and attitudes towards this memorial site. Methodologically, the study is based on documentary research, including recent surveys and photographs from the Youcef Fernane design office and qualitative data from online questionnaires and visitor books. The results highlight the house’s importance as a cultural landmark but also reveal a lack of publicity, affecting its visibility. Conclusions suggest that the museum significantly enhances Oran’s cultural landscape, offering emotional and educational experiences. However, there is a need for better promotional efforts to increase its visibility and appeal to a broader audience, emphasising the importance of strategic marketing and visitor experience improvements for future projects.

Memory discourses in visitor books of travelling exhibits in Southern Chile

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile hosts regular travelling exhibits about the country’s recent traumatic past of 1973–1990. In this article, I study the visitor books (VBs) that accompanied travelling exhibits to the cities of Valdivia and Puerto Montt to examine their effect on the audience. The entries reflected a variety of writers, from younger generations to survivors and witnesses. The analysis shows that the VBs are used to exercise the right to memory, to confirm their ‘duty to remember’ manifested in the presence of transitional justice discourses, and to express emotions that seem to reflect a positive and healing effect. Moreover, it was proven that the nature of the visitor’s memory (direct or postmemory) would showcase different reactions to the exhibit experience.

Review Essays

Reviews are one of the chimeras that exhibitions leave behind along with, if we are lucky, archives, visitor books, and catalogs that record and imperfectly reinvoke their transient existence, the scholarship and resources that conjured them into being and the responses they elicited. Reviews have value, even when published after an exhibition closes, not only in its assessment, but as an integral part of its archive. The exhibition Arte de los Pueblos de México: Disrupciones Indígenas marks a turning point in public scholarship on the history and interpretation of what has variously been described as “artesanias,” “arte indigena,” and “artes populares,” which most assuredly warrants being widely recorded, remembered, argued over, and incorporated into the annals of critical museology, much as its curators, Juan Rafael Coronel Riviera, Octavio Murillo Álvarez de la Cadena, and Lucía Sanromán Aranda, and the director of the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Miguel Fernández Félix, surely intended.

Editor’s Corner

Editor’s Corner

Assessing visitor experiences at the Iron Gates hydro-electrical power plant (Romania)

Guest books are acknowledged as a means of public dialogue and have been used as a source of information regarding visitor experiences in museums. The current paper focuses on an exploratory case study, namely the experiences visitors have at the Iron Gates Hydro-electrical power plant in Romania. According to the classification of Pekaric et.al. 1999 and using the entries in the visitor books for 12 months, the study highlights the fact that while Object experinces are dominant, there is no doubt that for quite many visitors, there is a feeling of pride and ownership obvious in their short narratives.

The Museum Visitor Book as a Means of Public Dialogue about the Gulag Past: The Case of the Solovki Museum

The Museum Visitor Book as a Means of Public Dialogue about the Gulag PastThe Case of the Solovki Museum Zuzanna Bogumił (bio) There is common agreement that history museums are deeply engaged in transforming history into identity, because they create a public space where “personal, private or autobiographical narratives come into contact with larger-scale, collective or national narratives in mutually inter-animating ways.”1 It is thus very important to establish how museums affect the visitor’s memory and perception of the past on display. Visitor books in museums, where visitors can share their feedback and impressions of exhibitions, offer a space to present their views on the issues discussed in the exhibition.2 Moreover, they confirm that visitors are not mute observers but active participants in a public dialogue.3 As a specific source, visitor books do not offer [End Page 315] a full understanding of social memory. However, they shed light on how the perception of the past has changed among museum visitors: what they paid attention to and what they agreed or disagreed with. The role and function of visitor books differ depending on the cultural and historical contexts.4 As the extant research shows, since the 1960s visitor books fulfilled the role of a virtual public sphere in the Soviet Union.5 Soviet citizens actively and willingly responded to the exhibitions they visited, and their responses reveal the diversity of opinions that existed in society. Since one of the roles of Soviet museums was to educate society in Soviet culture, the responses in visitor books show how effective this education was.6 When the Soviet Union collapsed and the political system changed, museums in Russia, especially historical ones, had to reconceptualize their mission and goals.7 As a consequence, the visitor books also changed. They still play an important role of intermediary in the communication between visitors and museum staff, but they are also a valuable historical source, reporting tool, and a tool for the formation of the museum’s image.8 In this article, I refer to the reflections noted in visitor books by those who visited an exhibition on the history of the Solovetskii Special Purpose Camp (abbreviated as SLON in Russian) in the Solovki State Historical, Architectural, and Natural Museum-Reserve, to show how they participated and still participate in forming memories of the Gulag on the Solovetskii Islands in the White Sea in northern Russia. The visitor books from the museums on the Solovetskii Islands are a unique source of data for analyses of the attitude of the Russian audience toward the repressive past. The archipelago played an important role in the formation of the Gulag system and later in constructing memories of the Soviet past.9 Many historians and memory researchers regard the Solovetskii Islands [End Page 316] as a prism for understanding broader processes taking place in Russia.10 Moreover, the archipelago played important role in discovering memories of the Gulag in the late 1980s. Many well-known and appreciated former camp prisoners, such as Dmitrii Likhachev, visited the islands and shared their experiences of the SLON; movie and documentary makers came to Solovki to make documents that bring the camp story closer to society;11 and the Solovetskii stones became important carriers of memory and were located on significant sites, such as Lubianka Square in Moscow. Finally, one of the first historical exhibitions telling the history of the Gulag in the USSR was opened on the archipelago. This exhibition, SLON—Solovetskii Special Purpose Camp, opened in 1989 and was displayed in the Solovetskii Kremlin (fig. 1). It closed in 2008, and a new, revised exhibition, Solovetskii Special Purpose Camps 1920–1939, opened in 2010 in a reconstructed former camp barrack located on the main street of the Solovetskii settlement.12 In the article, I analyze selected visitor books from both exhibitions in an attempt to understand how visitors reacted. I ask the following questions: What did they write about and how? What did they pay attention to? Was it the history of the event, the fate of the prisoners, the memory of repressions in Russia, or personal family stories? Family stories are particularly interesting because, as Veronika...

Review: Collecting the Globe: The Salem East India Marine Society Museum, by George H. Schwartz

Review: <i>Collecting the Globe: The Salem East India Marine Society Museum</i>, by George H. Schwartz

The undervalued power of museum-guided tours: a case study of Xuhui Art Museum in China

ABSTRACT Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, how to attract back visitors has been a major problem for museums across the world. Among diverse museum activities, human-guided tours remain under-studied to date. A post-hoc case analysis on Xuhui Art Museum provided empirical evidence demonstrating the potential power of guided tours. Quantitative methods in content analysis and semantic network analysis were employed to identify general features of visitor comments from both visitor books and social media. An in-depth interview was also conducted with the Chief Curator. Results reveal that the work of ‘jiangjie’, or tour guiding, is greatly appreciated and plays a vital role in improving visitor experience and satisfaction. This study calls for re-evaluation of the functions, potential and effects of tour guiding, and a renewal of live tours for better on-site experience in a post COVID-19 period.

Visitor Books and Memory – Evaluating the Bautzner Straße Dresden Memorial Site's Significance for Former Stasi Prisoners’ Individual Memories

Abstract Memorial sites document aspects of history. Thus, they represent a historical past deemed relevant by the initiators in the public sphere. The former Stasi detention center and district administration in Dresden Bautzner Straße is a memorial site that is dedicated to a critical representation of the communist dictatorship in East Germany. This does, however, not tell much about the historical site's meaning to the visitors. In order to get an impression of the visitors’ spontaneous reactions and thoughts, I systematically examine and categorize the memorial site's visitor books. Through these books, memorial sites offer visitors the opportunity to write down their thoughts thereby enabling an open channel of communication. My focus is on entries by persons who explicitly identify as former inmates of the very detention center they visited. They make up roughly 10 percent of all entries. I examine which thoughts former Stasi prisoners wrote down having visited their place of ordeal. What feelings and thoughts emerge after the visit? My aim is to shed light on the memorial site's significance and importance for the prisoner's individual memory by analyzing the entries’ type and content. The visitor books offer an authentic and intriguing access to former political prisoners’ mental world and their individual memory. This contribution connects the media representation of the communist dictatorship and its meaning for the former prisoners’ individual memory.

Longings, Letters and Prayers: Visitor's Books at Hungarian Marian Shrines

The following study seeks to show the flow of contemporary rituals associated with pilgrimage shrines. I will consider how visitor’s books placed on display at shrine churches are being utilized in the modern context by pilgrims and tourists alike. Requests, words of thanksgiving, and testimony are coupled with an honest, reflexive style that lends to the formation of these individualized prayers. These prayers are original, specific and peculiar as they follow patterns that are informal in nature. These prayers allow pilgrims to initiate contact with the Transcendent through the act and practice of writing. An idiosyncratic form of sacred communication arises in these prayers. In what follows, I will seek to evaluate such books, as well as prayer slips with similar prayers, found at five notable Hungarian shrines. I will seek to determine the function and purpose of said books. First, I am curious as to what gestures and practices are typical of pilgrims who write in such books. Lay tourists follow patterns they became acquainted with at museums, or galleries where they encountered similar books. However, most pilgrims who visit such shrines in Hungary will use these visitor’s books as a forum of thought, and as a vessel for longings and prayers. In their own petitions to the Transcendent realms, they not only make requests, worship, and give thanks but rather, take concrete steps towards solving their problems. They do so by writing down their cares and troubles. This task lends itself as a way to find spiritual relief and peace of heart. In my study I present the different ways visitor’s books are used in the shrines. My aim is to show how, in this particular, written rite, the border between tourism/commerce on the one hand and religion or the profane and the sacred is blurred.

Developing and managing rock art tourism: The importance of site histories, visitor centres, visitor books and visitor experience

Archaeotourism is a major global industry that takes many forms, from onsite visitation to museum visits and, increasingly, various sorts of virtual experience. Of the different types of places people like to visit those with rock art can be particularly powerful. Rock art consists of paintings, prints, stencils, petroglyphs, bas relief and other human-made marks in caves and rock shelters, as well as on boulders and rock platforms. Worldwide there is growing public interest in visiting rock art sites or replicas of important sites closed to the public. Across Southeast Asia there are a range of sites open for public visitation with widely variable infrastructure, management strategies, custodial arrangements and funding. Management and conservation plans are rare as are long-term monitoring programme. However, sites remain popular with tourists and often are a source of national pride. In this paper, these issues are explored with examples from various Southeast Asian countries, especially Malaysia. Lessons from new research into Australian rock art tourism is also referred to. Among other things, the importance of site histories, visitor books and visitor centres for rock art sites open for tourism is emphasised, as well as the nature of visitor information and experience. It is concluded that rock art site visits should be grounded in other sorts of archaeological tourism as well as experiences of nature wherever possible. Also, we need to make sure sites are well looked after and not 'loved to death'. Lastly, these sorts of tourism experiences can be promoted as a way of enhancing personal health and well-being given recent happiness' research results from many parts of the world.

When Memorials Cease to Commemorate: The Museum of the History of Political Repression in Tomsk as a Place of non-Patriotic Remembering

This article examines tourists’ experiences of visiting the Tomsk Memorial Museum of Political Repression. Through a semiological reading of the exhibitions and textual analysis of visitor books, I show how despite the museum’s proclaimed purpose as a place of remembrance, tourists frame their visits in terms of education and entertainment. Referring to memory as a discursive practice, I demonstrate how the exhibition does not fit the dominant patriotic discourse, wherein actors are remembered for their contributions to the Motherland. Because those killed in Gulags are represented as victims rather than heroes, their story remains insignificant and immemorable to many Russians.

Left justified: The early campaign for an international law response to Khmer Rouge crimes

In April 1979, a mission of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers made a solidarity visit to Cambodia in the immediate aftermath of Khmer Rouge rule of the country. One of the mission members, John H. E. Fried, a former advisor to the United States' military trials at Nuremberg, was moved to subsequently advocate for United Nations recognition of the then ostracised Cambodian state. The crisis of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and the political justifications made by early visitors there, illuminate late Cold War cultures of progressive international law scholarship and activism through their constitutive affects and material practices. While legal investigation of Khmer Rouge crimes is now largely understood through the frame of ‘transitional justice’, this paper rejects such a framing. It argues instead for attention to Cambodia's early experiences, in which left legal activism – calling for Nuremberg's lessons to be applied to the violence perpetrated in Vietnam and Cambodia – played an important role. For scholars interested in post-1979 Cambodia, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum historical visitor books, recently digitised, promise insight into the multiple actors, motivations and understandings of international ‘early responders’ to evidence of Khmer Rouge crimes.

Stance-taking and participation framework in museum commenting platforms: On subjects, objects, authors, and principals

AbstractThe realization of subjectivity through language use is a key concern of sociolinguistic research. We argue for examining it by juxtaposing Goffman's participation framework and Du Bois’ stance triangle. We focus on museums’ commenting platforms as ‘stance-rich’ media (Du Bois 2007:151) by examining the communicative affordances of a visitor book at the Florida Holocaust Museum and analyzing museumgoers’ texts (3,064). These texts are homogeneous in their morally indignant evaluation of the Holocaust and their alignment with the museum, but heterogeneous in positioning and participation framework. Museumgoers’ texts are highly responsive to the setting and previous discourses of the museum and include patterns of shared authorship and principalship. These patterns allow museumgoers to construct shared, institutionally mandated, subjectivities while maintaining personal commitment. These findings contribute to our understanding of the construction of subjectivity as inherently dialogic, and as involving the purposeful use of a multiplicity of contextual resources. (Participation framework, stance triangle, repetitions, principalship, commitment, Holocaust, museums, visitor books)

“Lies, damn lies and statistics”: a history of museum visits in Australasia

ABSTRACTWhile a great deal of attention has been paid to museum visit data in the last few decades, very little is known about long-term trends. This article examines the distinctive history of museum visits in Australasia through a comparative study of eight key institutions from across the region. Archival research was undertaken at each institution to compile as complete as possible a data set of annual visitation from opening until present day. Any stated changes in funding, admission charges, buildings etc. were also recorded, along with comments indicating contemporary explanations for fluctuations in visitation. Sources included official documents such as annual reports and trustee minutes, as well as visitor books and attendance records. We provide an initial overview of the quantitative and contextual data we collected from the case study museums focusing on a number of key questions: How have museums in Australasia been counting and reporting visit data over the past 150 years? What does this reveal about changes over time in the perceived value of visit data and museum attitudes towards their visitors? What are the key trends in museum attendance at the local, national and regional level in Australia and New Zealand? What contemporary explanations were given for fluctuations in museum attendance and are they supported by a long-term, cross-institutional comparison of the data? The study provides insights into historical shifts in thinking about the importance of visitors, appropriate methods for recording visitation, and the value of this data. The findings are also relevant to how museums today interpret attendance figures. The ways in which visit data were included or excluded from historical narratives about the value of museums highlights the constructed nature of visitor data and raises questions about the role of visitor research in contemporary museums.

KAJIAN DAN EVALUASI PEMUSTAKA UNIT PELAKSANA JASA PDII-LIPI DI SERPONG

The study aims to evaluate the number of UPJ PDII-LIPI Serpong visitors from 2010 - 2016. The study was carried out descriptively, with data sources obtained from visitor books and UPJ PDII-LIPI Serpong monthly reports. More in-depth information was explored from the visitors regarding factors that influenced the interest of visitors. Based on the results of the analysis, it can be concluded that: (1) total visitors to UPJ PDII-LIPI Serpong from 2010 - 2016 are as many as 2331 people (41,8%) from the Puspiptek area (LIPI, BPPT, BATAN, PPIT, KLHK; and 58,2% from outside the Puspiptek region (school students, university students, the general public, industry, and institutions outside the Puspiptek area); (2) visitors from the Puspiptek area are dominated by LIPI followed by BPPT, BATAN, PPIT, and KLHK. While visitors from outside the Puspiptek area are dominated by school students, then followed by university students, the general public, industry, and institutions outside Puspiptek area; (3) the purposes of visitors to UPJ PDII-LIPI Serpong are to get references, do observations, literature studies, comparative studies, reading, browsing internet, working on research assignments/reports, and consulting about libraries; (4) the decreasing a number of visitors at UPJ PDII-LIPI Serpong.

‘The happiest time of my life …’: Emotive visitor books and early mission tourism to Victoria’s Aboriginal reserves

On the afternoon of 16 January 1895, a group of visitors to the Gippsland Lakes, Victoria, gathered to perform songs and hymns with the Aboriginal residents of Lake Tyers Aboriginal Mission. Several visitors from the nearby Lake Tyers House assisted with the preparations and an audience of Aboriginal mission residents and visitors spent a pleasant summer evening performing together and enjoying refreshments. The 'program' included an opening hymn by 'the Aborigines' followed by songs and hymns sung by friends of the mission, the missionary's daughter and a duet by two Aboriginal women, Mrs E. O'Rourke and Mrs Jennings, who in particular received hearty applause for their performance of 'Weary Gleaner'. The success of this shared performance is recorded by an anonymous hand in the Lake Tyers visitor book, noting that 9 pounds 6 shillings was collected from the enthusiastic audience. The missionary's wife, Caroline Bulmer, was most likely responsible for this note celebrating the success of an event that stands out among the comments of visitors to Lake Tyers. One such visitor was a woman named Miss Florrie Powell who performed the song 'The Old Countess' after the duet by Mrs O'Rourke and Mrs Jennings. She wrote effusively in the visitor book that 'to give you an idea of enjoyment down here would be impossible. Everyone must find out for him or herself. The happiest time of my life was spent here. The kindness of Mrs and Mr Bulmer is past description'.

Uncharted territory: Visitor books of Indian museums. The Madhya Pradesh Tribal Museum in Bhopal – a case study

Visitor books for the general public are rather uncommon in India. As far as research is concerned, they are still mostly uncharted territory. The few existing visitor books, however, acquire a special significance: as pioneers in a nascent dialogue between visitors and institutions. This article explores their potential for providing information about the visitors to museums in India: their expectations and experiences, even their consciousness as citizens. Taking the visitor book of the Madhya Pradesh Tribal Museum in Bhopal in central India as an example, the article shows how the priorities of Indian commentators differ significantly from what researchers have found in visitor books of museums in the West – in terms of the issues addressed, of the form and style of the comments, and of the social references. This piece of research is part of a larger study examining how the historically foreign concept of the museum can be culturally adopted and made its own by an Indian public.

A Museum in a Refugee Camp. The National Museum of the Saharawi People in Algeria, Its Use and Function

AbstractThe paper considers the unique conditions that describe the National Museum of the Saharawi People, its relationship with visitors and its representation of the rights of residents of the refugee camp where it is located. In 1998, a National Museum of the Saharawi People was created in one of the several Saharawi refugee camps established in Eastern Algeria in the mid‐1970s. The museum was designed to provide knowledge about the cultures of the Western Sahara and to disseminate information about the challenges faced in the Saharawi territory. In 2006, a new curatorial investment was made and new exhibits mounted following a devastating flood that destroyed a substantial portion of the museum. In 2013 the Museum was remodelled. This case study undertaken after the 2013 reinstallation explored comments in the visitor books to understand how the museum contributed to cultural heritage, participated in the process of social cohesion, and supported the political struggle of a people demanding their right to self‐determination after decades of exclusion as residents in a refugee camp.

Six Degrees from Walter Scott: Separation, Connection and the Abbotsford Visitor Books

Scott, we know, cast a long shadow for writers and readers alike. Yet the author's house, for all its blocky solidity, offers a challenge to any linear notion of literary and cultural inheritance. Abbotsford holds visitor books that date from the house's opening shortly after the author's death, and that have been consistently maintained through to today. These books provide unique data expressing how Abbotsford and author evolve in a tangle with quite other people and distant places. ‘Six Degrees from Walter Scott’ reads the walls of signatures in Abbotsford's guest books through theories of actor networks and the archive that raise important questions of signing, meaning and being for author and signatory alike.