Survey says…

These last few months we were joined by Margita van Vugt who, as a student of the local Reinwardt Academy, spent some time researching new developments in the dutch cultural scene. What follows is a quick summary of her research and results. We’ll be sure to update this post as soon as the actual research paper is released, so watch this space if you interested in the full results.

Some time ago I read about NARB and got stoked, what a great idea! I study museology and art history and am interested in ways of making art more accessible. Luckily Tijs and James accepted my request to do an internship at NARB, and I started in February. At that time the business situation was not optimal. In earlier blog posts you probably read about it: visitor numbers and participation were not solid enough to build a business upon, so it was clear something had to change. We decided that I would set up a survey to find out what changes would be most beneficial.

I thought it would be helpful to get an overview of experiences of museums with new technology. What are their experiences so far and what are their wishes for the future? A questionnaire was sent out to 235 museums and I received 65 responses.

The results showed:

• All museums are open to new things
• Some museums are very progressive and active whilst others are faced with too many stumbling blocks
• Time and money are the biggest stumbling blocks
• There needs to be a change in attitude among museum staff, but this requires more time

Next to the questionnaire I spoke to several people working at museums. This gave more insight in the different attitudes. Some are active in the (r)evolution that ICT accelerates in business, in showing the collection and in interaction with the public. For others the first wish is still to digitize their collection and they don’t see big changes for their institution in the near future. 

Some, in my opinion, more unexpected results of the survey are:

• More than half of the museums (52%) responded positive to the question if they would like to show opinions of visitors to other visitors on screens in the exhibition space (like a Twitter feed). The majority of art museums, historical museums and ethnological museums are in favour of this and all technical museums
• 75% scored 7 or higher on a scale of 0 to 10 for the question how important they considered it to use new media to present their collections
• The survey results did not show big differences between museums with a small number of visitors and museums with big visitor numbers in opinions about different media. (Obviously the bigger museums have tried more stuff already because they had the possibility to do so)
• Two out of every three museums say that when making the exhibition program, the wishes of their public influence the content of the exhibition for 50%.

Conclusion: It is a time of experiments but not everybody has the time/money/manpower to partake in these trials. The museums that do have these resources are testing new applications on a large scale. The others are mainly waiting until time has shown the best ways to incorporate new technologies so they can adopt those without risks.

My opinion about these findings? Most of them are not very surprising and it’s too bad the survey couldn’t help to save NARB the art guide. But for me it was a really good experience to talk to different people about the subject and to hang out at NARB HQ. 

The results show that the slow uptake of NARB is not a due to lack of enthusiasm of museum people. So I hope this promises good things for the future of exhibitions!

Margita