Museums And The Shaping Of Knowledge

Drawing on numerous case studies, Hooper-Greenhill presents a critical survey of major changes in current assumptions about the nature of museums, and argues that museums are consciously organizing their spaces and collections to aid self-learning.

A guide for museum and gallery staff in the development of provision for their visitors, to ensure survival into the next century.

Grounded in the strengths of its first edition, this book has been restructured to include new papers and recent articles, and presents front-running theory and practice as it addresses the relationships of museums and galleries to their audiences.

This is a multi-disciplinary study that adopts an innovative and original approach to a highly topical question, that of meaning-making in museums, focusing its attention on pedagogy and visual culture. This work explores such questions as: How and why is it that museums select and arrange artefacts, shape knowledge, construct a view? How do museums produce values? How do active audiences make meaning from what they experience in museums? This stimulating book provokes debate and discussion on these topics and puts forward the idea of a new museum - the post-museum, which will challenge the familiar modernist museum. A must for students and professionals in the field.

Museums are at a critical moment in their history. In order to ensure survival into the next century, museums and galleries must demonstrate their social relevance and use. This means developing their public service functions through becoming more knowledgeable about the needs of their visitors and more adept at providing enjoyable and worthwhile experiences. Museums and Their Visitors aims to help museums and galleries in this crucial task. It examines the ways in which museums need to develop their communicative functions and, with examples of case-studies, explains how to achieve best practice. The special needs of a number of target audiences including schools, families and people with disabilities are outlined and illustrated by examples of exhibition, education and marketing policies. The book looks in detail at the power of objects to inspire and stimulate and analyses the use of language in museums and galleries. This is the first book to be written to guide museum and gallery staff in the development of provision for their visitors. It will be of interest to students of museum, heritage and leisure and tourism studies, as well as to international museum professionals.

Museums and the Past explores the central role of museums as memory keepers and makers. Using case studies from a Canadian context, the contributors to this collection reflect on the challenges in maintaining and developing museums as meaningful places of memory and learning. Discussions of museum practice and historical consciousness – how our understanding of the past shapes our sense of the future – consider the modern museum’s narratives and pedagogical responsibilities and how museums continue to inform our sense of history.

This very practical book guides museums on how to create the highest quality experience possible for their visitors. Creating an environment that supports visitor engagement with collections means examining every stage of the visit, from the initial impetus to go to a particular institution, to front-of-house management, interpretive approach and qualitative analysis afterwards. This holistic approach will be immensely helpful to museums in meeting the needs and expectations of visitors and building their audience. This book features: includes chapter introductions and discussion sections supporting case studies to show how ideas are put into practice a lavish selection of tables, figures and plates to support and illustrate the discussion boxes showing ideas, models and planning suggestions to guide development an up-to-date bibliography of landmark research. The Engaging Museum offers a set of principles that can be adapted to any museum in any location and will be a valuable resource for institutions of every shape and size, as well as a vital addition to the reading lists of museum studies students.

Museums are usually seen as arenas for the authorised presentations of reality, based on serious, professional knowledge. Yet, in spite of the impossibility of giving anything but a highly abstract and extremely selective impression in an exhibition, very few museums problematize this or discuss their priorities with their public. They don’t ask “what are the other truths of the matter?” Though the essays in this collection are not written with museums and truth as their explicit subject, they highlight contested truths, the absence of the truth of the underprivileged, whether one truth is more worthy than the other, and whether lesser truths can dilute the value of greater truths. One of the articles included here lets youngsters choose which truth is most probable or just, while another talks about an exhibition where the public must choose which truth to adhere to before entering. One shows how a political change gives a new opportunity to finally restore valuable truths of the past to the present, and another describes the highly dangerous task of making museums and memorials for the truths of the oppressed. Lastly, one explores whether we live in a period where the sources for authorized truths are fragmented and questioned, and asks, what should the consequences for museums be?