Eilean Hooper-Greenhill

Museums and Their Visitors

Museums are at a critical moment in their history. In order to ensure survival into the next century, museums and galleries must demonstrate their social relevance and use. This means developing their public service functions through becoming more knowledgeable about the needs of their visitors and more adept at providing enjoyable and worthwhile experiences. Museums and Their Visitors aims to help museums and galleries in this crucial task. It examines the ways in which museums need to develop their communicative functions and, with examples of case-studies, explains how to achieve best practice. The special needs of a number of target audiences including schools, families and people with disabilities are outlined and illustrated by examples of exhibition, education and marketing policies. The book looks in detail at the power of objects to inspire and stimulate and analyses the use of language in museums and galleries. This is the first book to be written to guide museum and gallery staff in the development of provision for their visitors. It will be of interest to students of museum, heritage and leisure and tourism studies, as well as to international museum professionals.

Measuring Learning Outcomes in Museums, Archives and Libraries: The Learning Impact Research Project (LIRP)

Museums, archives and libraries in Britain operate within an outcomes‐driven political climate, as do cultural institutions elsewhere. The need to demonstrate accountability and social value has led to a demand to measure the impact and outcome of learning. How can the complex and unpredictable character of learning be ‘measured’? This paper sets out the policy context and the conceptual framework that underpins the development of a new approach to the measurement of the outcomes of cultural learning. It has been developed by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) at the University of Leicester for the Museums, Archives and Libraries Council (formerly Resource). The use of five generic learning outcomes (GLOs) enables both the quantification and the in‐depth analysis and description of the results of learning.

Museums, Schools and Geographies of Cultural Value

This article explores a paradox and a possibility that have emerged from two pieces of policy-related research concerning educational use of museums within England. The paradox relates to the use of museums which, whilst widely perceived as rather elitist institutions, appear from a postcode analysis of school visits to museums to be visited by large numbers of schools located in areas of social deprivation. The present analysis further explores this paradox, drawing on revised postcode analysis and governmental indices of multiple deprivation and income deprivation affecting children. The analysis supports the contention that museums attracted visits from schools located in areas with some of the highest levels of deprivation, although it suggests that this result needs to be considered in relation to regional differences in areas of social deprivation, the location of museums and the differences between individual and area-based measures of deprivation. Attention is then drawn to the potential of considering museums through a geographical perspective, and specifically through Foucaults notions of primary, secondary and tertiary spatializations. It is argued that primary spatializations encompasses how museums are conceptualized and classified; secondary spatializations concern how various elements of museums are articulated together; and tertiary spatializations relate to the placement of museums in wider societal contexts and processes. It is suggested that the postcode analysis of school visits points both to the significance of considering tertiary spatializations relating to the social circumstances of museum visitors but also raised questions concerning primary spatializations of museums. Attention is drawn to changes in the classification and grouping of museums, and how these often encompass geographically based criteria related to the social reach of museums. The article ends by considering the degree to which museums might seek to further change their primary spatialization to reflect tertiary spatializations relating to cultural value.

Foucault and museum geographies: a case study of the English ‘Renaissance in the Regions’

This paper explores the subject of museum geographies, focusing particularly on the development of museum policies in a changing political context. The empirical focus is the emergence and transformation of the museum programme Renaissance in the Region, which is linked to the concepts of primary, secondary and tertiary spatialisations presented by Michel Foucault. The paper discusses the development of the programme and how it transformed aspects of the primary, secondary and tertiary spatialisations of museums in England, before focusing attention on the geography of school visits to museums. The results of two extensive studies of school visits to museums in the programme suggest that large numbers of visits come from schools located in areas with high indices of multiple deprivation and income deprivation affecting children. It is argued that this social geography reflects the tertiary spatialisation of museums linked to their emergence in areas of past industrial development, although practices linked to reconfigurations of the primary and secondary spatialisation as part of the Renaissance in the Regions programme may also have played some role. The paper concludes by discussing recent changes in government policy and the degree to which the ‘New Renaissance’ policy may signify reductions in the social reach of museums into areas of social deprivation and exclusion.