Improving Experiences
Collecting Information about Visitors to Provide Personalised and Inclusive Experience within Museums: The Profiling Tool and the Web App “Inclusive Memory” View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Antonella Poce, Maria Rosaria Re, Mara Valente
Applications for customising the experience within museums are becoming increasingly popular. Providing visitors with tools to access personalised educational experiences could be one of the key strategies to make museums accessible and inclusive. For these reasons, within the Inclusive Memory project a user profiling tool has been developed to be delivered through the use of a multifunctional Web App. Before adopting the methodology developed with subjects at risk of social exclusion, we decided to carry out a preliminary validation involving 15 in-training museum educators with the dual purpose of verifying the hypothesis that there are associations between the artistic preferences and personal characteristics of museum visitors and to collect feedback from museum education specialists on the use of the Web App for social inclusion purposes. The data were collected through the integrated use of the questionnaire and focus group discussion. Preliminary results revealed an association between levels of extroversion, artistic preferences and ways of using the museum. Further administrations of the questionnaire were carried out in experimental settings in order to verify the data obtained in the first pilot phase and, in particular, the correlation between extroversion/introversion and different kind of cultural mediation tool. The importance of collecting user data in order to provide the best experience within the museum are discussed.
Towards a Human Universal Design in the Museum: Reflection on a New Hybrid Profession Between Museum and Educative Mediations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Muriel Molinier
We are studying the partnership between museum educator (called mediator in France) and accompanying person for vulnerable publics (weakened by medical, social or medico-social issues). This work is taken from our french PhD on inclusion in fine arts museums in France and North America. We have observed that this co-creation work is developing in many museums in order to integrate small groups of vulnerable publics, but in our opinion this is still only a step towards the inclusion and universality of a mediation. Information and communication sciences allow us to analyze the relationship between these actors in mediation. Qualitative observation and interview methods were used. We observed specific visits and then we spoke with mediators and accompanying persons. We have highlighted two pitfalls: on the museum side, the lack of questioning of the accompanying person's vision on his group of vulnerable publics; on the accompanying person side, the efforts made to access knowledge located in a single place (not transferable to another museum). Thus, beyond the role of mediator, working in co-creation with accompanying person of vulnerable groups, we are proposing the creation of a new profession: the “remediator”. Inspired by our training as a special educator, we mixed educative mediation with museum mediation, to conceptualize a double mediation called “remediation”. Addressing all the vulnerable public (autonomous or with an accompanying person) and to all, these remediation offers would make it possible to create an inclusion beyond specific reserved reception: we are aiming for the constitution of a "universal public".
Organizational Knowledge in Museums: Enablers, Orientation, and Performance
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Neville Vakharia
This study investigates the role of organizational knowledge and knowledge management in small and mid-sized museums in the United States. Building on multiple theories and constructs of knowledge management, a new conceptual framework is empirically tested to assess the enabling practices and behaviors of museums that foster knowledge creation, management, and sharing. The framework links these practices and behaviors to a multi-modal perspective of museum performance and inclusivity. Studying 191 museums, statistical analyses indicate the socio-technical nature of museum knowledge management, uncovering relationships between a museum’s leadership, technology infrastructure, organizational culture, and their ability to achieve performance and inclusivity goals.
