Kevin, I do agree with much of your msg, but take issue with your observation
re; the elitist demographics of museum populations.

I probably would have agreed with you, up to even a few weeks ago, when I asked
my contracted number-cruncher ($250CDN a day and he's FAST and VERY GOOD - eat
your hearts out!) to draw out visitor profiles from the data we have collected
over the last several years. Not only did he do this well, but he also did some
analyses of trends. We find, as a result, that in terms of age, language,
gender and, most interesting of all, education level, our visitor demographics
are moving very rapidly (in demographic measurements!) toward the general
distributions for populations both across Canada and in our national capital
region (per the most recent Census Canada data), notwithstanding the fact that
only 27% of our visitors come from this region, 9% are from the USA, 17% are
from other countries and the rest are from other parts of Canada.

Our tentative (and I MEAN tentative) conclusion is that we are attracting less
of what might be called an elite population, and more one which is
representative of the population at large and that our demographics are
changing very rapidly - and most of us see this as a major accomplishment.

lots of holes in the data and much is tentative, but these most recent
cross-study analses have really surprised us.

Harry Needham