Museums and identity – a research project about the value of museums
Normally Martins Museumsblog is in Danish, but this blogpost is for my non-Danish reading friend, associated in museums and other who could be interested in my research project about the value of museums for the individual users.
This year I started the research project “Museums and Identity”, an Industrial PhD with Den Gamle By and Copenhagen Business School (CBS) as the main partners and a project made possible through a grant from the Danish Innovation Foundation.
The project aims to investigate how users perceive, value and use the museum visit. The success criteria for the project are developing an evaluation model that systematically can identify what the guests bring home from the visit, and that this knowledge of the guest’s reflection and reflections on the visit can be incorporated into the museum’s strategic and practical work.
Central in the project is the insight museums thinker as George Hein, Stephen E. Weil, Lynn D. Dierking, John H. Falk, Stephen Bitgood, Richard Sandell, Graham Black, Nina Simon and others has discussed: The visitor constructs their own meaning in the museum and they use the museum visit for own purposes as part of their social and personal life.
In the project I will investigate what use the visitor have, what they share about their visits and thereby what value the museum has for them. One way I will do that is by using a research method where I collect data of the visitors use and valorisation of the museum weeks after they have visited the museum instead of doing the survey at the museum like it often is done. In some time we at Den Gamle By have experimented with that type of visitor surveys, and in 2019 I described other benefits with that method in Nina Simons Museum 2.0 blog: http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2019/04/guest-post-by-martin-djupdraet-let.html
Today I had a Work-In-Progress seminar at CBS. I presented my project and had very useful comments, critiques and appreciations from the seminars two discussant, professor Trine Bille from CBS and director of the European Museum Academy Henrik Zipsane, and also good and useful remarks from colleagues from museums and CBS. I will dare to sum up the comments: It is a very relevant, but also very difficult project I am engaged in.
The seminar was held in English and for the session today I made an English presentation of my project. After today’s insightful and relevant comment, I can see there are element in the presentation that can be improve, but those of you who will like to read more about the research project you can see the presentation of my project like it is now: https://martinsmuseumsblog.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Museum-and-identity-an-investigation-in-the-values-of-museums-August-2021.pdf
I am looking forward to contribute to the museums research with this project, and to discuss it with Danish and non-Danish museums professional and researchers. Please reach out, if you would like to hear more about my research in the years to come.
