If a tree falls in the forest...

I was recently in a meeting discussing the use of technology by historic sites in Anne Arundel County when we began talking about the use of blogs as a very user-friendly means of talking about what historic sites are up to. One of the meeting attendees commented on the blog at Port Tobacco here in Maryland as one of the better examples. This blog provides information as to the status or projects, new ideas, and what staff members are up to in bite-sized amounts which gave you quite a bit of detail without being overwhelming and conveying the excitement and energy the writer is feeling towards a particular project. As I was reading the blog, I found myself thinking about how information is provided to visitors by museums and vice versa and how it it changing.

Using Seeking Liberty as an example, we have tried to provide information in four different ways, each one with differing approaches and results. The first method is through the exhibition itself. The exhibit has physical objects, labels, and text panels - all things expected in a museum exhibition. The exhibition has been extremely popular with visitors near and far, with many people coming specifically to see this exhibit. Within the exhibition is a survey asking visitors to take a few minutes to provide us their feedback. I am very interested in the fact that few visitors fill out the forms and when they do, they do not leave us much feedback. However, in our permanent exhibition on the second floor, we have a nearly identical survey which is filled out quite frequently. On this form we ask visitors to rate different experiences they had in the exhibit as well as tell us how they connected with the exhibition. On the permanent gallery forms, we receive quite a bit of feedback - sometimes quite extensive feedback. In Seeking Liberty, that is not the case. The forms, when they are filled out, generally only have numeric answers without any comments.

At first I found this to be rather disheartening. I found myself asking whether or not the visitors were truly engaging in the exhibit or were they simply walking into the exhibit and walking out, following the directions of the security guard to go into the first room they saw. I saw some truth to that when I worked the front desk and would provide a different overview of the museum and would not direct the visitors to immediately enter the exhibit they were standing next to. After doing so, I found that visitors would often actually choose to go to the permanent exhibition first. What did that mean for the attracting power of Seeking Liberty? Is this exhibit not as engaging as we once thought? Are people simply not engaging with the subject matter beyond what they read within the exhibit? Do they not take anything out of the museum from the exhibit?

I ended up getting my answer in a very unexpected place - this blog. One of the major concerns many museum folks have it that if you put exhibitions and exhibition content online, people will not want to actually come and see the physical exhibit. My argument has always been that putting information online is a way of attracting visitors to the exhibition and to allow people who will never be able to see the physical exhibit a means of accessing it. To put in another way, if someone does not have the means to go to Paris themselves, does that mean that looking at images, reading about the city, and owning Paris-themed objects will deter them from ever wanting to actually go?

When reviewing the statistics for this blog and the exhibition website I was very surprised to learn that while people are not necessarily filling out the evaluation forms, they are giving us feedback through their visitation to the blog. We are seeing that many visitors have come to the museum and then gone home to view the website and blog. This showed me that perhaps I was a bit hasty in my thinking that people are not getting anything out of the exhibit because they were not filling out paper forms. The return visits, to me, are far more gratfying because they show me that people are enjoying the exhibition so much that they are willing to give the museum a second visit - this time virtually.

If you visited the exhibit at the museum and this blog, which did you visit first? What made you come back for a second look at Seeking Liberty? If you have only seen this blog, or the exhibit's website for that matter, has it stopped you from wanting to come to the museum to see the physical exhibit?