A Research Vision for Museums

Abstract

I love museums, and I love the museum family and these yearly family gatherings. I am particularly honored to be invited to address the CARE community gathered here today because I think you are critical to the salvation of our family.Our museum family is in danger. Outside economic forces find us vulnerable because of internal divisions and because we don't have our act together. So, I am here on a mission to save museums and to engage your considerable skills in a family intervention, for we have lost our way. Management has failed our mission by focusing on outputs like attendance numbers, and audience researchers have failed management by not shedding light on the connections between the pleasure of learning and attendance or, if you will, between individual gains and a museum's public value. This research vision for museums looks at how you can make that connection and save museums in their hour of need.We are all museum professionals. We are part of that larger field, with this AAM Big Tent conference hosting our largest family gathering. After the "museum boom" of the Giddy Nineties, there are now more museums than Starbucks (Katz, 2008) -yet many of them are struggling in today's economy and wired lifestyle.I mentioned that I am particularly fond of these annual family gatherings, where I run into friends and colleagues near the registration desks and in the aisles of AAM's Expo Center. This annual conference has always reminded me of a Lewis Thomas quote from his Lives of a Cell, that Jeanie and I used as one of our marriage readings, over 25 years ago. As you listen to Thomas's description, think of our professional family and of this conference:

Contemporary Experimental Aesthetics: State of the Art Technology

“…From a practical perspective, visitor-based investigations of the museum experience are critical because in the last 10 years museum culture has made a major shift from its traditional roles of collection and preservation of artifacts and of scholarship to museums as public educational institutions. Yet, despite this shift, Jacobsen ( 2010 ) points out in an article entitled “A research vision for museums” published in a recent issue of Curator: The Museum Journal that audience researchers continue to focus their in-house investigations on such factors as attendance numbers, visitor behaviors, and satisfaction with the permanent collection and special exhibitions. For the most part they continue to neglect studying the underlying perceptual-cognitive processes responsible for the pleasure which accompanies the learning experiences in art museums.…”