68 <strong>MusLi</strong> - No qualifications needed: museums and new audiences case 04 Description András Jósa County Museum is housed in an early 19th century neo-classical building, situated in Nyíregyháza, in the north-eastern corner of Hungary. The museum is financed by the city government and they have capital resources from the archaeological income. The museum has several collections from the following fields: archaeology, ethnography, fine arts, arts and crafts, local history and numismatics (coins and medals). The Museum was named after András Jósa (1834-1918), who was a doctor, archaeologist, a real ‘renaissance’ man. He founded the first collection of the museum. As an enlightened scientist of his era he was intent on acquainting everybody - including uneducated and less well-qualified people with the museum and its collection. The museum has not yet made an extensive survey into the educational qualifications of its visitors: it only has informal data. On occasions the museum has experimented with a questionnaire but found that people are loath to fill in questionnaires especially about their qualifications. The museum is not sure whether it posed the questions in the wrong way or whether visitors feel ashamed of their low education. It may be that questionnaires are not the right method for surveying this target group. The museum estimates the composition of the visitors to be the following: 8% have a low educational level, 92% have higher education. Interestingly, the temporary archaeological exhibition, “Motorway from a mole’s view”, seemed to be a success with this latter target group too. This temporary exhibition at the András Jósa Museum was one of a series of shows presenting the finds from excavations on the sites of motorway or other large-scale constructions. The simple and accessible show, featuring the lovely character of a mole as a “guide”, focused on the work carried out by the team at the M3 Motorway site in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county (2004-2005) from the very first steps to the analyses. It introduced different periods and typical finds from the site so that visitors had a comprehensive picture of the process and importance of the project. The little mole in the pictures wore different clothes according to the archaeological periods: for example Stone Age, Neolithic, Bronze Age and Hungarian Conquest. The exhibition was prepared with a small budget, the museum creating almost everything in house: the little mole, scale-models and illustrative materials. They only bought in the display cases. The museum also created an archaeological sand-box and playground, but not just for children! They organized interactive guided tours to the exhibition. Visitors could even handle several archaeological finds. All the excavation workers, from archaeologists to unskilled labourers, could see themselves represented in the posters. The message of the exhibition emphasized that everybody was important, it was a team effort. This exhibition toured other cities in the same county between 2006 and 2007. Why did this exhibition attract people with a low education level? The exhibition was: informal, humorous, playful, understandable, traceable, and everybody was addressed. It also represented the unskilled labourers who participated in the excavations. These unskilled workers visited this exhibition with family or friends and they were proud of playing a part in it.
<strong>MusLi</strong> - No qualifications needed: museums and new audiences They presented the exhibition and explained the archaeology; what they did at the excavation and what they learned. They were exhibition guides for their friends and relatives. There was no official evaluation carried out for this exhibition, so this summary is based on the personal experiences of museum staff. 69
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