I am a graduate student at IUPUI working on my master's in Museum Studies. I have been exploring ways for museums to enhance the experiences of our audiences through the use of object biographies that can give more of a personal story rather than stating facts about items. I am hoping to find that by focusing more on stories of objects, our visitors will develop an emotional connection to an object that we helped facilitate. By doing this, audiences can see a reflection of their own personal histories in museums and will know that we are representing communities and their interests rather than serving the interests only of museums. 

In what ways do your various institutions try to connect with your audiences and local communities? I am interested in hearing about different public programs, uses of technology, public forums, artistic demonstrations, live interpretations, etc. What were your goals when you implemented different modalities and forms of object and story interpretation? Were they successful? In what ways are you using your collections with a purpose to serve the community rather than being institutions strictly of connoseurship?

I am researching this information for my object based learning course and I am hoping to continue with the information I gather for an independent study course for next semester. Ideally I would like to discover ways to facilitate audience discussion and relationships based on either similar or different emotional responses we are able to evoke through object interpretation.

Thanks for your time.

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