More of the Same? Different? Deeper? What Should a Museum Do?

On Easter Sunday, I visited the National Museum of Folk Architecture and Life in L'viv.  It's in a city park, just a short tram ride from the center.  And once there, I found an audience that any of your museums would love to have.  Who did I see?

• Young teenagers on their own
• Older teenagers, hanging out and playing the guitar
• Families
• Older couples
• Hipsters

Many of these people, as you can see from the photographs, were wearing some version of traditional Ukrainian dress, as is customary on holidays here (and to me, on some increase since the Revolution of 2014).

And what were all these people doing?  That's the interesting part.  Very few of them were doing what we think museum visitors "should" be doing--that is to say, looking at objects and learning about the past.  They were listening to music, making music, dancing, strolling around (it's a beautiful area), playing games, picnicking, talking, enjoying.   If I were categorizing them in terms of Falk and Dierking's visitor identities I would say I saw all of these:

• Explorers
• Facilitators
• Experience Seekers
• Professionals/Hobbyists 
• Rechargers 
• Cultural Affinity

I think the largest categories were facilitators (parents and grandparents), rechargers and cultural affinity.   The museum is a huge success by attendance measures:  over the three day Easter weekend, more than 25,000 people visited, a large percentage of their 125,000 annual visitation.  I loved watching the people, but I found myself on this visit frustrated (probably the only one) by wanting to know more and not getting it.  My good friend and colleague Eugene Chervony, deputy director of the museum,  and I talked about the challenge of balancing the kind of social visitor wants and needs that we can see, with the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into a more complex understanding of western Ukrainian traditional culture.  The conversation sent me back to Nina Simon's posts on the event-driven museum--her museum's process of becoming a place where people come because something is happening.  Are successful events self-fulfilling beasts, always consuming--and providing--more?  How can we deepen experiences at this kind of event, or encourage visitors to return another time for a different kind of experience?

The Museum of Folk Architecture and Life has incredible collections, and they will soon begin digitizing them and putting them on the web.  That's one way for someone like me to dive deeper. But the experience of walking into historic spaces and having conversations with interpreters is something that rarely happens here (except for this great breadmaker, below).   Eugene is beginning the process of visitor surveys to learn more to inform this process, and we both suspect that the answer is not necessarily technologically driven, but rather ways for visitors to access information through human resources (although technological solutions are surely possible).

So I hope the next time I visit (or the time after that) that I still see all of the same enjoyment that was so evident on Easter but also that learners like me and this curious girl below, who very carefully was checking out a list of objects and matching them with the object itself, can go a bit deeper.

More of the Same?  Different?  Deeper?  Perhaps all of the above.

Families, Part 2

I was surprised by the number of comments that came as a result of the post about defining family audiences.  Evidently it's an issue for us as museum workers and as museum-goers.   If you're in California,  you might be interested in a session chaired by Margaret Middleton at the California Association of Museums conference, "Welcoming 21st Century Families in Museums" which sounds like a lively conversation on the topic.  I really appreciated those of you who shared your own issues as a museum-goer in the comments.  It's all too rare that we really think from a visitor perspective and how that perspective should inform our work00each thoughtful comment drives that work further.

But yesterday's news that the new National September 11 Memorial Museum will have a $24 admission charge but that families of victims will not pay any fees, brings so many questions to mind.  Here's just a few.

• How will the museum define "victims' families"?
• How do you prove you're part of a family?
• How long into the future does the concept of "victim family" last?
• Are there other family rates at the museum?  How are those families defined?

 Your thoughts?

What's a Family Anyway?

I'm beginning work with the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia re-visioning their family programming.  The Rosenbach's collections are incredible, including Maurice Sendak's archives and they undertake a wide variety of programming.  New opportunities abound with a merger with the Philadelphia Free Library Foundation so it's an exciting time to be pondering what makes a great family program with the staff.

But we began with some conversations with staff and docents about what a family is.  To museum educators, family programs has quite a specific meaning.  Generally, it's programming designed for parents and elementary age children.  But is that how we should be defining a family?  Here's some of the responses:

• They choose to be together and consider themselves to be a family
• Wide range of ages
• Group or unit that's somehow connected together but not necessarily living together
• Some relationship:  love, blood, dependency
• Self-defined as related to one another
• 2 or more people long-term invested in each others well-being
• Caregivers too?
• Extended family who choose to associate together
• A hierarchy of relationships, within an established group
• and, as one docent definitively remarked, "It's not the 1950s any more!"

That's a giant pile of definitions that go far beyond the parent and young child relationship so often assumed in museum family programming.  I've found the USS Constitution's Family Learning Forum website incredibly useful in so many ways, so I went back to check out what they said about family definitions.  On their site, Lynn Dierking came to much the same conclusion we did.  Here's her definition:

Two or more people in a multi-generational group that has an on-going relationship; they may be biologically related but not necessarily. In fact, the general rule is that if a group defines itself as a family they are one!

We asked the volunteer docents at the Rosenbach to share their most memorable family experience in a museum.  Lots of intergenerational work at play:  grandmothers sharing recent visits with grandchildren;  a look behind the scenes at Williamsburg with family members;  learning a story about a family at a historic site.  One docent shared the experience of going to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for an open evening event with friends, people she considered family.

Does this mean that we'll rename family programming at the Rosenbach?  Not necessarily, but I think we'll be asking this question as we go forward in conversations with all sorts of audiences and potential audiences and be particularly aware of barriers to participation that the lack of thoughtful language might bring.  How do you define families at your museum?