Understanding Visitors

After reading the articles, it is important to make the museums more patron-friendly. It is important to have the library be more user-friendly through having signs, ramps, and clean bathrooms so the patrons will want to come back and visit the museum again. It is also important to make the museum a welcoming place for school kids who come with their teachers. This can be done through working with the teachers in order to integrate some part of the collection into the teacher's study plan. Then the students can come to the museum and see what they have been learning about. There can be teaching moments through exhibits or hands-on areas. As well, the museum can open up its collection to visitors who want to see what is there through open shelving and access. This will allow learning opportunities for the community to know about the world around them and what is going on in their own community. through having more access to the collections. Also, this will lead to the museum knowing how best to serve its patrons. There has been some study on this, but more work needs to be done. There can be a lot of work done in order to get a feel for how patrons feel about the exhibits and the museum itself. This work is performed through performing visitor surveys in order to gather as much information as possible. In my own personal experience, I have seen how museums have worked to get more visitor exposure. I visited the British Museum and saw how it worked to make itself more visitor friendly. There were a lot of signs in a number of different places. Also, there are a lot of exhibits on one floor so people would not feel so tired of going around in the museum. There are also pamphlets in different languages for people who are coming from different countries.

On 10/24, there was a class visit to the Denver Botanic Gardens. There was a lot of different things which were being discussed, like getting enough money through bonds and fund raising to pay for the operational costs. This money goes to pay for things like the new parking structure, replacing the 30 year old irrigation system and ADA improvements. There is the desire to have a face lift for the conservatory since it was built back in the 1960s. There is also hope for new greenhouses which would bring more open storage behind the scenes. Also there would be a new restaurant built, and a new library which would bring more space to store things.There is the hope to activate more space within the facility. The problem which comes about through the gardens is bringing in people to the facility year-round, also that the museum wants to connect plants with people. There is a resistance w/in the art community w/ competition w/ getting audiences to the facility. The title of the tour guide is exhibition manager and she is a DU alum. She runs a concert series which operates as a membership drive to get more members for the gardens. There is a 50K budget for the different exhibits which go on in the gardens. There was a discussion about the signs and how they are UV resistant in the vinyl and the inks. These signs can be reused. There is also effort in getting new signs for the facility. The museum is very vocal in what it wants, since their comments go into all of the planning. There is a new logo which has come out, since the old one is over 30 years old. The signs are the #1 complaint since they are so hard to fond, and are not helpful.