Museum Audience Studies

Introduction

(N.B.: This Pathfinder is made up of three parts: this Introduction, the Bibliography, and the Pathfinder itself. Please visit the links below to access each part of the pathfinder.)

Museum audience (or visitor) studies have emerged into a field of international interest as museum administrators and educators seek to understand the communities they serve. Research into museum visitor behavior intensified in the 1980s and 1990s and continues into the 21st century in response to "...the challenges presented by the increasing commoditization of learning and the breakdown between the for-profit and the non-profit world."¹ Museums, especially in the US, compete for private, corporate and government grants, and for attendance and revenues in a fast-paced market place. Necessarily, focus on collections and research has shifted to the museum audience.

This pathfinder directs students in Dr. Loriene Roy’s graduate Library and Information Science course to museum audience studies research for a virtual museum concept paper. Keeping in mind the ultimate project regarding virtual museums, I pursued sources that explain what motivates people to visit museums, what factors influence the museum visitor’s experience, and how and what people learn in museums. I ultimately chose sources that contributed to my own understanding of what audience studies are and how they are conducted; that explain the theory and methodology behind audience studies; and that present actual audience study results. The sources included here are available at The University of Texas at Austin General Libraries or on the Internet.

I began my search with UTNetCat, The University of Texas at Austin’s online catalog. Subject keyword searches with the headings "Audiences–art museum," "Art museums–attendance," "Art museums–visitors," and "Art museums–social aspects" brought several overlapping lists of book titles with American and British emphases. These books undoubtedly support the Department of Art and Art History’s Museum Education department–the only museum-related program at UT Austin. This may account for the art museum focus of these sources. My index searches for periodical literature were largely unsuccessful, so I turned to two professional museum association web sites–the American Association of Museums (AAM) and the International Council of Museums (ICOM). ICOM’s searchable site (http://www.icom.org/) produced many promising article titles of world-wide influence. Unfortunately, most of these journals are unavailable at UT Austin. AAM’s site (http://www.aam-us.org/) provides an index to its own journal, Museum News, which is available in the Fine Arts Library. I located several relevant articles in AAM’s index and have included three in the attached bibliography.

Another rewarding web site for locating audience studies material is Archives & Museum Informatics (http://www.archimuse.org/), sponsor of the annual Museums and the Web Conference. The site is searchable and contains the text of papers presented at the conferences. I also consulted the Britannica Encyclopedia Online’s (http://search.eb.com/) "virtual museum" entry to affirm my interpretation of the phrase. Finally, I turned to the Internet search engine, Google, in hopes of locating audience studies research that was produced within the last five years, and that make a connection between audience studies and virtual museums. I located such material using the keyword searches: "museum visitor studies," "visitor behavior," and "museums" AND "audience studies."

PDF Version

To Museum Audience Studies Bibliography

To Museum Audience Studies Pathfinder

Created by Joanna Cook for LIS 382L.2 taught by Dr. Loriene Roy, Fall 2000

Graduate School of Library and Information Science, UT Austin