Hi everyone! At the Australian Musuem in Sydney we are currently
     looking at the idea of open collections. At the moment we use our
     collections as the basis of many of our exhibitions, but like most of
     you have a huge range of 'stuff' out of the public eye (both natural
     history and anthropological collections).

     We have three questions of you all:
     1. Do visitors want to see museum collections? Has anyone conducted
     any research into this?
     2. Would visitors come to museums more often if they knew they could
     see more of our collections? Is there research/data supporting this?
     3. Any examples of other institutions that have undertaken this either
     successfully or unsuccessfully? (we do have some literature already)

     I know there was a thread discussing this last year and I kept all the
     responses but we're interested in these 3 questions in particular. I
     will post a summary to the list if there's sufficient interest.

     Thanks in advance.
     Lynda kelly, Evaluation Coordinator, Australian Museum, Sydney
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