From Taipei, Part 3

Final day of the trip was Monday when I gave two papers:

• The Role and Development of the Australian Museum Audience Research Centre discussing how the Australian Museum Audience Research Centre was developed using a series of evaluation studies as examples
  
• How to be a professional audience researcher using a large evaluation of a Museum exhibition to illustrate how to do audience research
  

These papers can be found here on my Audience Research wiki.

Here are the other links I promised:

• Museum professional development and training in Australia: my notes about this talk are here and the PowerPoint slides are online here
  
• Older Audiences and Museums publication can be downloaded from the website here
  
• Telling Lives exhibition: where visitors could video-tape their response to an exhibition which were then uploaded to YouTube (Inthink, it's been awhile since I looked here
  
• Museum 3.0 social network: feel free to join up, ask questions and contribute to discsusions
  

Finally, thought I'd repeat a quote from my favourite audience researcher, Benjamin Gilman, as we started and finished the day with him:

To fulfil its complete purpose as a show, a museum must do the needful in both ways. It must arrange its contents so that they can be looked at; but also help its average visitors to know what they mean. It must at once install its contents and see to their interpretation. (1918, quoted in Black, 2005).

It's all so simple really...

Anyway, overall a successful trip and looking forward to working together a lot more in the future. Thanks for your hospitality and the poster (which I almost left at Hong Kong airport!) was truly awesome – I'll try find somewhere appropriate to hang it in my new office.

Summative Evaluation

Anonymous asked: Dear Lynda, Does visitors book and feedback form that we found at the end of exhibition falls under summative evaluation?

Hi Anonymous. In my view visitors' books and feedback forms, when used strategically, can be a very valuable and easy form of summative evaluation. For example, we used feedback forms for a controversial exhibition, and by posting up others' forms coupled with media clippings found that we had a series of conversation happening – visitor-to-museum and visitor-to-visitor. Feedback forms can also help gather demographic information if you don't have the resources to do a targeted survey.

For more information about summative evaluation see the information sheet called Exhibition Evaluation on my website, and also the paper outlining the history and future of audience research that I have posted to my wiki – it is the one called Evaluation, Research and Communities of Practice: Program Evaluation in Museums (go down the page a bit).

Audience Research Readings

Digital Eva asks: I'm wondering if there any precise and comprehensive guide of evaluation process available. At this point, the information that I have is just basic. Is the evaluation process in museum exhibits different than other kind of evaluation process?

Hi Eva, there are plenty of texts that relate to museum evaluation. I have noted some of them on this post, with a link to my website where there is a downloadable list of texts.

The best one to start with is Judy Diamond's book Practical Evaluation Guide: tools for museums and other informal educational settings (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1999) and the paper I wrote for the Journal of Archival Science which outlines the whole process and gives examples (and also has a very comprehensive reading list). I plan to post this paper to my wiki. George Hein's Learning in the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998) is also a good introduction to museum evaluation methods.

The evaluation processes used in museums are no different to those in general social and educational research, and any general methodology text is very applicable to refer to. When doing my doctorate I found Cohen and Manions' text Research Methods in Education (London: Routledge, 1994) the most useful as it outlines a huge range of methods/approaches that can be used in evaluation.

Doing audience research

Mel asked "What are traditional methods of finding out about your audience and is the internet affecting the way you do audience research?"

Audience research is a discipline of museum practice that provides information about visitors and non-visitors to museums and other cultural institutions, influencing the ways museums think about and meet the needs of their audiences and stakeholders. Audience research is also a strategic management tool that provides data to assist museums more effectively plan and develop exhibitions and programs; to meet their corporate goals; and to learn as organisations.

In audience research a range of methods are used to address issues such as who visits; motivation; behaviour; satisfaction and learning; as well as who does not visit and why. Areas examined include visitor demographics, visitor behaviour, leisure habits and learning strategies. Methods are chosen in accordance with the questions that need to be answered.

In a 1990 paper, Chan Screven noted that the most popular methods inlcude structured and open-ended interviews, questionnaires and rating scales, informal conversations, tracing visitor movements through exhibits and unobtrusive observations of stops, time spent, exhibit usage, and reactions to mocked-up exhibit components.

Other ways of conducting audience research include video-taping visitor behaviour and audio-taping conversations. Focus groups; telephone surveys; and online surveys and panels are also employed to research current and potential audiences as well as non-visitors.

A list of beginning readings about audience research in museums can be found on the
FAQ section of my website - on there you'll also find a downloadable list of beginning references.

I also wrote a paper on the history and practice of audience research in cultural institutions: Kelly, L. (2005). Evaluation, Research and Communities of Practice: Program Evaluation in Museums. Archival Science, 4(1-2), 45-69. This paper contains a good list of references. More information about it can be found at the publishers' website.

I'll get to the internet part of your question shortly.