Audio tours - how participatory do we want our visitors to be?

It would be such a boring world if we all agreed with each other. In museum circles opinions on the level of interaction that we expect between exhibition visitors and with an exhibition itself vary widely. A couple of articles in recent museum magazines highlight this. On the one hand a reviewer in the UK’s Museum Journal commenting on the redeveloped Roman Baths exhibition at Bath notes that “For all the exciting opportunities to connect with audiences through interactive displays and costumed interpretation, audiences are failing to connect with each other… there was a sense of physical isolation and passive participation….at odds with the noisy and lively way in which the baths would have been experienced in Roman times”.


Across the Atlantic the American Museums Association Jan/Feb magazine reviews Nina Simon’s book The Participatory Museum, discussed in my blog last year. The review is somewhat critical of Nina’s goal for museums to “change the dynamic of the visitor from passive consumer to cultural participant, similar to the way YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Wikipedia have transformed our expectations for accessibility, community and interactivity”.

It sounds as the reviewers should have swapped assignments and they would each have been happy! The answer in my view is that it is horses for courses. Some exhibitions are better placed to be participatory than others, just as some visitors choose to be actively involved whilst others not. Check out my blog on the work the Dallas Museum of Arts has been doing on understanding the latter, identifying four types of visitor clusters, namely: Observers, Participants, Independents and Enthusiasts.

However one comment that caught my attention in the Roman Baths article was that passive participation could be attributed to audio guides. Whilst these are providing useful information and increased dwell time, the article says, they are also inhibiting discussion and a shared experience.

This is an issue on which I have had many a robust discussion. Personally I very rarely take audio tours except when I am visiting a museum on my own. I much prefer taking my own time and route and sharing observations and experiences with whoever I am with. Audio tours tend to lock you into your own world and dictate your pace and route (“when the music stops move onto the next exhibit” etc).

That said there is no doubt that audio tours provide a much more meaningful experience to many visitors, and are a highly effective tool to have in the visitor access tool box. What intrigues me is how the next round of audio tour technology evolves. They have developed from clunky cassette players to wands to MP3 players. Surely now they will move into smartphones through dedicated apps, and indeed as I previously blogged, there are signs this is already underway. What I find particularly exciting is the iPad format, as at last we have a way in which exhibit content can be delivered on a big enough screen that it can be shared with others. But this is going to need some logistical readjustment with visitors no longer having to pick up and drop-off an audio tour machine at the entrance, but now download an app onto their own smartphone/iPad either before hand or at the time of arrival. Sorting out the business model around this is going to be interesting, e.g. how is the app charged for, along with coping with current reticence by visitors to use their own equipment.

I see the Museums and the Web 2011 conference program in Philadelphia in six weeks time has a number of papers on this issue, so, as I shall be there, I will report back soon.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Building Museum Revenue

Whilst the worst of the GFC may be behind us, the effects of it are going to be long lasting in the museum sector. No major capital works are in the pipeline, even in the two most likely organizations, the Queensland Museum (now the only Brisbane South Bank institution that has not had major new buildings in the last ten years) and the Western Australian Museum (still reeling from the cancellation of its $450 m Swan River power station revitalization and relocation).
So we are going to have to think more ingeniously about how we drive both capital works and new revenues.
A new book I have come across Museums, Libraries and Urban Vitality; a Handbook (Edited by Roger L.Kemp and Marcia Trotta. McFarland and Co 2008) intrigued me. It gives examples of no less than 43 US urban projects where museums and libraries have been important economic drivers. Particularly interesting is the concept of including museums in broader retail and commercial developments. The Daniel Libeskind- designed wing at the Denver Art Museum includes 56 apartments (known as Museum Residences), and the Newseum in Washington DC also includes apartments and a high- end restaurant. It reminds me of the abortive plan to incorporate a hotel in the new Sydney Cricket Ground grandstand, and then let out the rooms on match days. Whilst that never got off the ground, perhaps this could be one way of funding capital works with our sector, particularly given the location of many of our museums, Brisbane’s Southbank being a prime example.

In regards to new revenues, the buzz word is ‘participation’. Nina Simon of Web 2.0 fame has just released her "Participatory Museum". The forthcoming American Association of Museums conference in LA in May is all about how to get new and younger audiences to interface with museums in innovative, user-generated, participatory ways.

And there is a fascinating new study recently released by the Dallas Museum of Art on the results of a 7 year study on the preferences and behaviours of museum visitors , ‘A Framework for Engaging with Art’. Drawn from 3,400 qualitative surveys, the study concluded there were four types of visitor clusters:
· Observers – those that stand back, having limited knowledge of art, preferring a guided experience
· Participants – those that enjoy learning and the social experience of being in museums and galleries
· Independents – those that are more confident with their knowledge and prefer independent viewing
·Enthusiasts – those who are confident, enthusiastic, knowledgeable and comfortable looking at art, and who are most likely to actively participate in museum programs and be members
What this information has catalyzed is a series of innovative programming strategies and operational changes throughout the Museum resulting in a 100% increase in attendance and motivating over 50% of the Museum’s visitors to participate in its’ programs. Some great revenue creation stuff to build on here.

Making museums better by adding visitor content

Nina Simon is as live a wire as you get in the museum world and her blog reflects that liveliness big time. For my money her entries are all a little long, but the content is invariably stimulating. As her address is Museum 2.0 http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/you can guess what she writes about. I came across her at Museums and the Web 2009 in Indianapolis where she was very much a shaker and mover of the conference.

And her latest blog has once again delivered, raising an interesting issue. Nina comments on how Web 2.0 gets better by the minute as each new byte of information is added to it – and she posits what if museums got better for every visit? What if information about every exhibit was added to by the visitor, or educational problems linked each class that had visited?

It’s a good thought. Museums have for too long been stuck in the rut of permanent exhibitions being just that – permanent and given a lifespan of eight years or so. Most of them take a mammoth amount of work to get to opening and museum staff sit back exhausted, happy that it will fill the space with only a minor facelift (a coat of paint, a couple of new labels, perhaps daringly a bit of new content) after four years. The web is changing the thinking on this as on-line exhibitions can change by the hour and moreover their success or otherwise can be charted by Google Analytics.

So what if an exhibition could be added to in some way so that not only would it have changed by the time the repeat visitor decided to return, but the content just got richer and richer. I am reminded of a show I think I saw at the Migration Museum in Adelaide where a local ethnic minority had started by exhibiting examples of their community. Word had got around and other members of the community started bringing in related material. By the time the show was over, the exhibition was so much richer, and I suspect the community was also socially much stronger, so it had benefits on a number of fronts.

That brings me to another related point that there is a real opportunity to create a forum for exhibition reviews. A National Gallery blockbuster may warrant a review but when else have you ever seen a review of a new exhibition, except in professional magazines. You can read web critiques ad infinitum on the latest theatre or film in town but not of the newest exhibition. Are people not interested? I don’t believe so – if there were reviews to read I am sure they would be quickly picked up. further adding to the way in which visitors can bring value (for better or worse) to their museum/gallery-going experience.

Museums and the Web 2009 – the final word

And the final word, I promise on this. It’s always interesting to see post mortems on international conferences like this, because everyone comes away with a slightly different perspective. The UK is about to run its own one day version (World Wide Wonder: museums on the web) and Sara Wajid writing in the latest edition of the UK Museums Association Journal makes some succinct comments on MW2009. What she got out of it is that the web is moving from being a place where museums can dump their collection content and feel ‘ job done’ to a place which facilitates an online landscape, which is a fertile breeding ground for future museum visitors and donors. She cites the dynamic Nina Simon, who runs the Museum 2.0 blog who said at the conference that ‘ ...people in positions of power in museums are finally getting interested in the internet … as a starting point for innovations.. They are looking for information about how the rise of the social web will affect the business model and viability of museums”.

Sara also picked up how Google analytics are now providing more and more sophisticated data about web site use (incidentally now considerably better than physical visitor data), but that museum evaluation staff are reluctant to switch to it because it notoriously shows lower (although more accurate) figures. Don’t think that response is going to hold water much longer.