Museum pricing in contemporary museums : a hybrid model

What are the museum pricing strategies in contemporary western museums? A large qualitative study on museum pricing decisions was conducted between 2001 and 2009, based on thirty case studies in Canada, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France Australia. Results show that the different strategic motivations of price decisions fonn a hybrid model. The hybrid model varies according to unequal organisational learning of the strategic role of pricing in the international museum community. A discussion about these results enables us to understand how this hybrid pricing model in contemporary museums denotes their hybrid transitional identity.<br /

Thinking about audience and agency in the museum: models from historical research

This paper examines a current trend within museum studies to conceptualise the contemporary museum as democratic, open, and working in partnership with its community, which is seen as a fundamental change from museums at some point in the past, when they were didactic and produced or encouraged a passive audience. This trend, it maintains, is not just produced by museums needing to fit into various agendas for social inclusivity, but also by some of the most important texts in museum history, which look at the ways in which various forms of agency worked to deny agency to the public. It argues that such a view radically understates the forms of agency available to ‘outsiders’ to museums in the past; and that as a corollary, analyses of the contemporary museum need to be wary of seeing shared agency as already achieved. By exploring the forces which work to distribute agency widely inside and beyond the museum, alongside those which worked to centralise agency in the institution of the museum and its curators, we can gain a much fuller understanding of museums past and present

Converting Family Into Fans: How the Comtemporary Jewish Museum Expanded Its Reach

The last in a series of 10 case studies explores how The Contemporary Jewish Museum in SanFrancisco worked to attract families of all backgrounds and build the next generation of museum supporters. It describes how the museum convened focus groups to better understand the needs of families with young children, designed programs and exhibitions to meet those needs, offered family discounts and entered into community partnerships to build awareness of the museum's offerings.Although The Contemporary Jewish Museum sought to attract families, it did not want to become a children's museum. It therefore took extra efforts to balance the needs of children and adults. It worked to manage parents' expectations, created spaces for children to work on activities and trained its staff to draw families to areas most appropriate for children.These efforts resulted in a nearly nine-fold increase in family visitors over seven years, the report finds. Authors suggest that the museum's successes relied in part on a nuanced understanding of its target audiences, mutually beneficial partnerships with schools and libraries and careful evaluation and refinement of engagement strategies.

Some tentative suggestions for a children's museum

The need for a Children's Museum or, at least, for some sort of Museum-School Service has been felt for some time in education circles in Malta. At a time when stress is put on environmental studies and extra-curricula activities the setting up of such a service has become increasingly important. This report contains suggestions for a Children's Museum devoted primarily to Maltese Archaeology, History and Folklore. Museums are usually planned for an adult public and, therefore, often lack appeal to children. The conventional arrangement of show-case after show-case with methodically arranged, carefully labelled exhibits is meaningless to children. These need a special type of museum where show-cases are reduced to a minimum and the display is organized in a way that will stimulate interest and excite imagination. It is a basic principle in education that memory depends on the kind of material to be remembered; the more meaningful the material the more easily is it assimilated.peer-reviewe

Colonel Wily’s Brainchild: The Origins of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa’s Cartier Square Drill Hall, 1880–1896

Since 1996 the Canadian War Museum (CWM) has been a major partner with the Wilfrid Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies in the production of Canadian Military History. The CWM was described in 1991 by a government appointed Task Force on Military Museum Collections in Canada as the country’s “flagship military museum,” but, as the report made clear, the museum lacked many of the essential resources for that role. The CWM occupied cramped and antiquated quarters on Sussex Drive in Ottawa and was receiving only about 125,000 visitors a year.1 Since then, in May 2005, it has moved into a greatly expanded, up-to-date facility on Ottawa’s Le Breton Flats, and the number of visitors has more than quadrupled. The new building has recently received its one millionth visitor within a period of less than two years, results that give much more substance to the term “flagship.” The museum’s ongoing association with Canadian Military History and the publicity surrounding the opening of its new building must sometimes cause readers to wonder where this institution came from and how it became established as Canada’s national military museum. The story is a long and interesting one, with many twists and turns. The present article focuses on the original museum to which the CWM traces its beginnings. The CWM’s lineage goes back 127 years to a small military museum that opened in Ottawa in 1880, at a time when the stirrings of a national cultural life in the capital were beginning to be felt in a number of areas. This museum flourished for 16 year before closing in 1896. Parts of its collection survived, however, and today are incorporated into the current museum on LeBreton Flats

From Artist to Patron : The Fraser Collection of Engravings Presented to Dr. Robert Gibbes

This catalog accompanies an exhibition that deals with collecting, taste and culture in the nineteenth century. Although many individuals enjoy visiting museums to admire individual objects, few people ever wonder why a particular object was collected. Rarely are collections themselves considered a single entity worthy of study. This examination of the print collection assembled for Robert Gibbes by Charles Fraser, however, reveals the value of utilizing collections to study cultural history

Radiocarbon dating results from the Beakers and Bodies Project

The Beakers and Bodies Project is a two-year project based in Marischal Museum, University of Aberdeen, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. It is assessing the beaker-related evidence from North-East Scotland (between the Moray Firth and the Firth of Tay), including the dating and stable isotope analyses of some 40 human skeletons from museum collections. The project builds on the North-East dates resulting from the Beaker People Project (Parker Pearson, 2006; Sheridan et al., 2006) and earlier programmes and studies (e.g. Shepherd, 1986). It also includes a consideration of beaker typology and manufacture, burial contexts, grave goods, human osteology and evidence for diet from stable isotope analysis

Persuasive Technology for Learning and Teaching – The EuroPLOT Project

The concept of persuasive design has demonstrated its benefits by changing human behavior in certain situations, but in the area of education and learning, this approach has rarely been used. To change this and to study the feasibility of persuasive technology in teaching and learning, the EuroPLOT project (PLOT = Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies) has been funded 2010-2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) in the Life-long Learning (LLL) programme. In this program two tools have been developed (PLOTMaker and PLOTLearner) which allow to create learning objects with inherently persuasive concepts embedded. These tools and the learning objects have been evaluated in four case studies: language learning (Ancient Hebrew), museum learning (Kaj Munk Museum, Denmark), chemical handling, and academic Business Computing. These case studies cover a wide range of different learning styles and learning groups, and the results obtained through the evaluation of these case studies show the wide range of success of persuasive learning. They also indicate the limitations and areas where improvements are required

Critical Museum Theory/Museum Studies in Canada: A Conversation

CANADIAN SCHOLARS HAVE BEEN CRUCIAL in shaping the active field of critical museum theory/museum studies, with anthropologists, sociologists, historians, art historians, and curators working to challenge and reimagine the educational function, social role, politics, and pedagogy of museums while expanding the very notion of what a museum has been in the past and could become in the future. The trajectory of this endeavour has been examined at length in university courses, essays, and handbooks, which all highlight arguments made since the 1960s about the powerful role of museums in reinforcing class distinctions, creating narratives of national identity, and glorifying colonial attempts to subjugate Indigenous peoples as well as more recent considerations of how museums foster the active contributions of visitors, promote varying modes of intercultural exchange, and enable affective encounters with memory. In an effort to reflect on the current state of this field in Canada and share some of its diversity, Lianne McTavish decided to pose questions to leading scholars and invite their response. Her goal was to highlight the issues of particular interest to Canadian museum scholars, which have developed alongside but also in distinction from the burgeoning literature on museums stemming from the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia – all centres of research on museums

Visitors' Interpretive Strategies at Wolverhampton Art Gallery

Making Meaning in Art Museums is one of two research projects on the theme of art museums and interpretive communities. The first was published as Making Meaning 1:Visitors' Interpretive Strategies at Wolverhampton Art Gallery (RCMG 2001). Making Meaning in Art Museums 2 is the second of two research projects on the theme of art museums and interpretive communities. The Long Gallery at the Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery was selected as the research site for this second study. Both studies have explored the ways in which visitors talked about their experience of a visit to the art museum-both what they said about the paintings and the whole of the visit.The research questions on which this project is based are: What interpretive strategies and repertories are deployed by art museum visitors? Can distinct interpretive communities be identified? What are the implications for the communication policies within art museums? This research is an ethnographic study, using qualitative methods.This research project was funded through a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Boar