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Museum visitor books, although held by almost all museums, are rarely used as a research source. This article explores their potential to provide insights and information about audience views, experiences and understandings. To do so, it focuses primarily on visitor books at the Documentation Centre of the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany. The article highlights questions about using such books as a research source and to this end it contains discussion of forms of address, visitor conceptions of the nature and role of visitor books and of museums and exhibitions, styles of entries, and ways in which visitors talk about exhibition media and types of display, and make comparisons and links with their own experience. It also includes discussion of some themes more specific to history exhibitions, including different possible 'temporal orientations' exhibited by visitors; as well as some more specific to the exhibition of morally and politically difficult topics, and of Nazism in particular.

This article draws on media theory in order to theorize the role of tour guides as a form of cultural mediation. It does so by analysing the work of tour guides at a site of 'difficult heritage', the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany. The work of tour guides is here conceptualized primarily as a process in which guides, and the organization for which they work, are engaged in trying to encode preferred readings. The empirical study shows how this 'encoding attempt' is a complex, negotiated and sometimes conflictual process in which guides try to deal with the materiality of the site and the social dynamics of the tour group. This has implications for understanding the nature of mediation and of different forms of tourism.

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This article seeks to provide a review of research on museum visiting which has particular relevance for exhibition design. It focuses on empirical studies carried out in a range of social and cultural disciplines. The article begins with an overview of some of the main directions that have been reported in museum visitor study, in particular a shift towards considering visitors as 'active' and to looking at affective and embodied dimensions of the visitor experience as well as at the cognitive and ideational. It then looks in more detail at findings and attempts to build a conceptual vocabulary in three related areas of museum visitor research: media, sociality and space. In addition to assessing the state-of-play so far, the article seeks to outline areas for future research.

This article raises issues concerning popular representations of science, and in particular of scientific controversy, through a case-study of the treatment of food poisoning controversy in a museum exhibition. It is argued that the science that is created for the public is shaped not only by the overt intentions of the exhibition makers but also by constraints inherent in structural aspects of the exhibition-making process and exhibition philosophies. More specifically, we argue that some of the strategies intended to foster public understanding of science create problems for the representation of scientific controversy, and, more generally, for certain types of science. The article also gives attention to scientific sources and the politics of the museum's relationship with the scientific community and the food industry. The contrast with other media is made throughout the article as a means of highlighting the different strategies employed, and constraints experienced, by the various institutions involved in putting science on display for the public.

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