Science museums can be a rich learning context, where visitors engage with scientific practices with few formal requirements. However, science museums can be experienced as not welcoming to migrant families due to social, economic, and cultural barriers. In this study, we asked what language-related challenges migrant families experienced in Dutch science museums and what recommendations they had for linguistic inclusion. We interviewed twelve families of Turkish, Moroccan, or Syrian backgrounds after their visit to a Dutch science museum. We discovered that (1) first-generation families found the predominance of Dutch in the museum challenging, (2) the science language used in the museum brought on additional challenges, and (3) the families saw potential emotional benefits to the presence of their mother tongue in the museum, albeit expressing a need for Dutch to remain at the center of the linguistic landscape in the museum. These findings show that language plays a role in migrant families’ experiences in science museums. The findings invite science museums to engage in a dialogue with migrant communities about their needs when it comes to more inclusive museum experiences.
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The paper investigates the use of mobile tools by museums in order to provide mobile access to their permanent collections and special exhibitions. In fact, it deals with the wider topic of how museums tackle the complex issue of communicating with their present and potential audience using modern (i.e., mobile in this case) technologies. The paper presents and discusses the results of a survey that was proposed to Dutch and Flemish museums mainly dealing with modern and contemporary art or with science and technology. We tried to derive some trends and best practices in order to identify a good way to provide an engaging (mobile) experience to museum visitors. These results, although not always stirring in terms of answer percentages and of what most museums seem to be doing with new media, do show a clear interest towards mobile technologies and openness to innovation in the Dutch cultural sector.
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In this article, we investigate how small museums running on volunteers deal with the challenge of innovation given that the future is becoming more digital. From the literature, little is known about the strategies and practices for designing innovative visitor experiences in small museums and about the skills needed for doing so. In particular, we were interested in understanding how professionals working in small museums design experiences that mainly appeal to and engage a younger public and how digital innovation can play a role in both attracting and keeping such audiences engaged with the museum. Our most important conclusion is that the question of “how to innovate” is misplaced and that small museums rather need to capitalize on the strong tie with the community they serve. Only in this way can they lower the threshold to access and connect to a broader public that is younger and more diverse.
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Recently, museums have increasingly become parts of ecosystems of people and organizations in their functioning. As a consequence, museum experience designers are stimulated to think in a holistic way, about experiences of people that engage with networks including the museum, as well as about the role of individual museums within such ecosystems (Vermeeren et al in Museum experience design – crowds, ecosystems and novel technologies, 2018a). This raises the questions of: What are ways in which a museum experience relates to experiencing its embedding context? And, what does this imply for the process of designing the museum experiences? In two design case studies, four ideas for museum experiences have been developed based on different ways in which museums relate to their embedded network. The ideas illustrate how the focus of the design may be different depending on the role the museum plays in the overall experience, and how the design process is complicated by having to deal with a larger group of stakeholders when designing. Finally, all ideas came forth from taking a broader view of the potential museum target group than seeing them solely as visitors to the museum. This was seen as crucial for inspiring solutions to museum experiences beyond more traditional museum visiting experiences.
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The web is widely used by museums as a low-barrier platform to inform people on activities in the museum and publish their collections online. It is not uncommon that this publishing consists of an simple web interface connected to a database that holds records with limited information about the artifacts; information that is more relevant for managing the collection than for informing a wider public. It is not uncommon for a description to have no reference at all to that what is visible in the picture. Moreover this situation is hardly a worst-case scenario. In the Netherlands over 20 million artifacts in museums await a description, artifacts that do have a (scanty) description only half of them is available digitally. Four museums in the Netherlands (Naturalis, Museon, University Museum Utrecht, Dutch Institute of Image & Sound) together with three research and knowledge institutes (University of Applied Science Utrecht, Novay, BMC Group) decided in 2008 to explore the potential of user groups tagging collections and the effects of this on the involvement of these people towards the museum. For this purpose a dedicated social tagging tool was developed and implemented: www.ikweetwatditis.nl
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In this paper we discuss the general approach and choices we made in developing a prototype of a social media monitor. The main goal of the museum monitor is to offer museum professionals and researchers better insight in the effects of their own social media usage and compare this with other actors in the cultural heritage sector. It gives researchers the opportunity to consider communication within the sector as whole. In the research project “Museum Compass” we have developed a prototype of a social media monitor, which contains data of current and historic online activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and Flickr of all registered Dutch museums. We discuss – mostly in a practical sense – our approach for developing the monitor and give a few examples as a result of its usage.
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This publication gives an account of the Public Annotation of Cultural Heritage research project (PACE) conducted at the Crossmedialab. The project was carried out between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2009, and was funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. Three members of the Dutch Association of Science Centres (Vereniging Science Centra) actively participated in the execution of the project: the Utrecht University Museum, the National Museum of Natural History (Naturalis), and Museon. In addition, two more knowledge institutes participated: Novay and the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. BMC Consultancy and Manage¬ment also took part in the project. This broad consortium has enabled us to base the project on both knowledge and experience from a practical and scientific perspective. The purpose of the PACE project was to examine the ways in which social tagging could be deployed as a tool to enrich collections, improve their acces¬sibility and to increase visitor group involvement. The museums’ guiding question for the project was: ‘When is it useful to deploy social tagging as a tool for the benefit of museums and what kind of effect can be expected from such deployment?’ For the Crossmedialab the PACE project presented a unique opportunity to conduct concrete research into the highly interesting phenomenon of social tagging with parties and experts in the field.
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A general trend of museums and cultural heritage institutions besides digitizing their collections is to involve the public more and at various levels. Technology plays an increasingly important role in this involvement. Developments we have observed in museum experience design, include trends towards 1) dialogical engagement of the public; 2) addressing crowds as audiences; 3) the use of Internet of Things (IoT) and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) technology in museums; and 4) designing for museum systems and institutional ecologies instead of for individual museums only. In this one-day workshop we especially focus on exploring the implications of museums reaching out to crowds beyond their local communities, and of museums increasingly becoming part of connected museum systems and large institutional ecosystems. By means of a tangible game we will brainstorm about future opportunities and challenges, cluster and evaluate them, and suggest future work.
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Many visitor studies make social background variables the central point of departure to explain participation patterns. How the past is 'staged', however, also has an influence on those to whom it appeals. This relational perspective calls for new conceptual tools to grasp empirical reality. Inspired by the historical philosophy of Georg Simmel and the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin a number of concepts which enable us to grasp the subtle relationship between museum presentations and visitors are presented. Bakhtin's notion of chronotopy serves as a key concept. By linking museum presentations and visitor perceptions with each other, it is also possible to identify certain tendencies within the contemporary museum landscape.
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