When is visitor participation APPROPRIATE?

• By Jenny Parker
• June 4, 2008

It is worth pointing out that not all museums or exhibits are deemed appropriate or appealing to visitors as an opportunity to contribute. Or may immediately seem that way. In our recent paper Art of Storytelling, we point to this quote from Matthew MacArthur of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History:

“My staff and I were talking to a group of interns here at the museum, explaining our program which oversees the Web site. We thought it would be good opportunity to toss around some ideas for the future of the site with this group of young, smart students who undoubtedly all had their own Facebook profiles and were otherwise immersed in the world of Web 2.0. However, when it came to notions of user-contributed content on the site, all we got were blank stares. A few of them explained to us that as users, they would be looking for authoritative information from the Smithsonian, not input from other users or opportunities to participate. This group of aspiring museum professionals may not be a representative sample, but it definitely provided food for thought.” —(MacArthur, 2007, http://museumsremixed.blogspot.com/)

It is impossible to say with any certainty which museums, collections, and exhibits are most appropriate for visitors’ contributions. In researching our paper we developed some helpful insights:

First, visitors are more likely to speak about what they know over what is archaic or alien to their experience. For our storytelling project with the Delaware Art Museum, visitors wrote more stories about late 19^th century illustrative and 20^th century modern and contemporary works than they did about pre-Raphaelite and 19^th century American art.

Second (and most importantly!), it isn’t simply about the nature of the museum collection itself. It’s about identifying and providing multiple and relevant access points to your collections.

This requires some creative thinking. Again, our storytelling project at the DelawareArt museum: Here, visitors remixed art from the museum collection to create their own original illustration – they weren’t tied down to a particular genre or time-period. Remixing allowed visitor to find their own personal access points and connections; we think this was a critical factor to the program’s success.

Filed under: trends