Day 3 of my adventure in getting to the core of museum work led me to two articles. The first, “How to Behave in an Art Museum” by Timothy Aubry, and a response, “Let the Little Children: How to Behave in a Museum” by Bob Duggar. I was intrigued because they both cite museums as places of reverence, albeit reverence defined differently across generations and individuals.
Both discuss how visitors behave in museums, but as I find is usually the case, no mention is made of staff. Museums are portrayed as they often are- institutions that exist as concepts as much as physical spaces- designed and run by people not well-known by the public yet holding tremendous power in defining each experience. The institutions are presented without reference to the individuals that chose how to design the space, what words to put on the labels and what food to serve at the casual MoMA Friday night event.
Likewise, how many hours have I spent with colleagues discussing the democratization of museums, or the shift toward education that came with Excellence and Equity in the 90s, without a visitor in sight? Having been immersed in work as an administrator the last decade of my career, I yearn for more direct interaction with visitors and their analyses of experiences such as Aubry and Duggar present .
When I worked as a docent or in a museum store, I loved the immediate feedback I could get about visitors’ experience. Yet doing the “front line” work left little time to record reactions consistently or in a way that was used to analyze or make decisions moving forward. While the person at the ticket counter or in a gallery knows more about visitors than any other staff member, in my experience ongoing documentation to share across departments is rare.
There is of course a large body of literature and research regarding museum visitor behavior. 
However, my non-scientific Google search tonight first revealed lists of rules for behavior at museums – mainly written in the negative- such as “don’t touch”, “don’t run” and my favorite “keep ample distance between yourself and artworks”.
Further down the search was an AAM published study by Edward Stevens Robinson in 1928 recommending museum directors become “experimental psychologists and undertake behavioral inventories” and Kevin Coffee’s 2007 audience research paper that asserts “museum use is an inherently dialogic and social practice- sets of actions and cognitive processes that are enacted in response to, and within, specific socio-cultural contexts and within specific social relationships”. In my experience the two-way social relationship between visitor and staff is less explored. Nonetheless, we as museum professionals often behave as if we know what is best for visitors or create statistics donors, funders, boards and we ourselves want to see.
While we have moved guest book comments to Facebook pages, and we can scan the Internet for articles such as these found today, I wonder if dialog between staff and visitors is recorded and used regularly across museums? Having just reviewed grant applications for IMLS funding, I found a few focus groups or taking surveys on site often presented as the full extent of a museum’s visitor research. Even at recent professional conferences, the sessions I attended presented communication as overwhelmingly one way from staff to visitor, and did not maximize existing social networks or technology as informative tools.
Hopefully this walkabout will reveal recent research and practical applications of innovative ways museum staff and visitors communicate with and influence one another’s behavior… I plan to follow Duggar’s advice:
“Maybe we should look to the children for the right way to enter the paradise of museums. ….. with the same wide-eyed wonder as they do—a mix of curiosity and fearlessness with a healthy dose of admiration.
Museum Life 