Australia Yearbook - 2001

540 Year Book Australia 2001
twentieth. In the 1950s, Australia’s major
museums were mostly still presenting exhibitions
informed by the ideas of social and natural
evolution and racial progress that had emerged in
the previous century. Museums continued to
assert that such representations encapsulated the
natural and human worlds. Australian museums
also continued to understand themselves as
primarily institutions for public education, as
arenas where the knowledgeable few might
create technologies which would encourage the
rest of society to rational enjoyment, greater
knowledge and improved sentiment. From the
1920s, however, Australian museums began to
envisage the process of education in which they
were engaged, and particularly the audiences
which they were educating, in new ways. The
process of education was no longer assumed, or
estimated from the fact of people visiting the
museum, but itself became a subject of analysis.
At the beginning of the twentieth century,
museum professionals, and especially those in
the United States, began to look at what visitors
actually did in the museum and particularly
within exhibitions themselves, and what they
derived from the experience of visiting. Inspired
by new methods and ideas in psychology and
education that emphasised experimental research
and statistical analysis of behaviour, visitor
research began with simply observing and
recording what people did in museum
exhibitions. Early research identified phenomena
such as ‘museum fatigue’, generated by
exhibitions requiring too much effort to
apprehend and understand, and was concerned
to identify how to make museums more
enjoyable and comfortable experiences by
altering exhibit design. 18
Studies of the 1920s and into the 1930s employed
hidden observers to record how visitors moved
through exhibitions, identifying how long they
paused in front of particular objects and whether
exits distracted visitors from the exhibits.
Experimentally minded researchers persuaded
museums to design maze-like exhibitions in
which observers could record visitors’ reactions
to various spatial and aesthetic qualities. These
studies stimulated new approaches to exhibition
design as they encouraged an understanding of
the exhibition as an environment for processing
visitors. Museums sought new techniques, such
as the division of exhibition space into cells or
chambers, and the use of clear organisational
plans, to direct and hold visitors at the most
important parts of the exhibition. The time
visitors spent observing or dwelling in one
area was equated with the visitors’
absorption of knowledge from that area. 19
These early studies constituted the first steps
in the development of exhibition evaluation
methodologies designed to establish what
visitors were actually learning during their
visits to museums. As evaluation emerged as
a distinct practice in the late 1950s, the
earlier focus on visitor observation was
largely replaced by survey research designed
to elicit visitor parameters and their attitudes
to exhibitions, and to estimate the amount
and nature of information visitors derived or
retained from museums programs. During
the 1960s, primarily through the work of the
American researchers Harris Schettel and
C.G. Screven, this practice was formalised as
an evaluation process demanding the prior
clarification of the cognitive or affective
objectives of an exhibition, a statement of
practical behavioural objectives for the
exhibition, and the measurement of the
achievement of those objectives. 20 This
approach to evaluation, which dominated
museums through the 1960s and is still a
powerful influence, tended to see exhibitions
as extensions of the school or book and
focused almost exclusively on learning
objectives. Visitors were understood as
essentially the passive recipients of the
museum’s educational message, and the
museum retained a vision of itself as a
technology for the transmission of expert
knowledge to a relatively uneducated visitor.
Evaluation was simply providing information
on how to better effect that transmission.
It is somewhat unclear how influential these
early evaluative studies were in Australian
museums, although the predominantly
American methodologies were certainly
being implemented by the 1970s. By the
1960s, Australian museums had also started
to investigate their visitors in another way.
Museums began trying to establish who their
visitors were and why they visited, employing
survey questionnaires, sometimes supported
by interview, to develop complete
sociographic profiles of visitors. The first
major survey conducted by the Australian
Museum in 1976, for example, sought to
establish general patterns of visitation,
frequency of visit, associated visiting habits,
place of residence of the visitor, method of
travel to the Museum, source of information