Dear Linda,
You wrote:
> 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?...
In 1995 the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago commissioned a front end
evaluation study that bears on the first question. The quick answer to
question one would be that most visitors to Field Museum don't even know that
behind-the-scenes collections even exist! Here's a citation:
Perry, D. L. & Forland, E. (1995). The Exploration Zone at the Field Museum;
Front End Evaluation. Unpublished monograph. Chicago: The Field Museum.
The Field Museum may still have some copies available. Try contacting Rich
Faron at < [log in to unmask] >
We also did a summary of that study:
Gyllenhaal, E. D., Perry, D., & Forland, E. (1996, May). Visitor understandings
about research, collections, and behind-the-scenes at the Field Museum. In
Current Trends in Audience Research and Evaluation, Volume 10. (pp. 22-32).
American Association of Museum, Committee on Audience Research and Evaluation.
I can e-mail you a copy of this if you're interested, and I've appended a
paragraph or two about collections below.
In answer to the second question, many museums, including the Field Museum,
have done "Resource Centers," which tend to combine open collections with
written and AV-materials. The Naturalist Center at the Smithsonian is another
example. In my experience, museum educators often wind up with responsibility
for these areas, and I've often heard educators at the Field Museum complain
about how few visitors they get in the Resource Centers. I know the gentleman
in charge of the Naturalist Center hangs out on the Museum-Ed List -- maybe
you should ask your question there, as well.
Eric Gyllenhaal
Selinda Research Associates
[log in to unmask]
Here's a quote from Gyllenhaal, Perry, Forland (1996):
"Two interesting trends emerged during our discussions of collections with
museum visitors. First, we found that most visitors tended to vastly
underestimate the size of the museum's collections, guessing regularly in the
thousands, with one million as an upper limit. (The Field Museum currently
estimates its holdings at about 20 million specimens and artifacts.) The
second trend was that visitors tended to grossly overestimate the percentage
of the collections on display. Many visitors estimated that about half of the
collections were on display, whereas the museum actually exhibits just over a
tenth of one percent of its holdings. Most of this overestimation seemed to
be rooted in visitors' perceptions of The Field Museum as being primarily
focused on exhibits. If the reason to have stuff is to display it to the
public, it would seem logical to exhibit as much as possible rather than
hiding it behind-the-scenes.
"The majority of visitors acknowledged that a portion of the museum's holdings
are not on display, but their reasons for why the museum would have things in
storage were varied. The most common response was that there was limited
exhibition space. Visitors said that the objects in storage are on a rotation
which keeps new items coming onto the floor and local visitors coming back.
Other common reasons visitors gave for behind-the-scenes storage were object
preservation and maintenance. Some visitors felt that the objects kept in
storage were the least interesting or popular of the museum's holdings. Other
visitors suggested that some objects were in storage because they were too
valuable to display. A few visitors talked about research on collections as
being an important reason objects were stored behind-the-scenes. The most
common form of collections research mentioned by visitors was the
determination of the age of objects, with research for writing exhibit labels
a close second. Only a few visitors indicated that original, scientific
research was the major purpose of the museum's collections."
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