Sixteenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The Social Barometer of Museums (BSM) is a project that aims at becoming a basic tool for increasing awareness of museums’ public value. It seeks to show the benefits contributed by the museums to society, highlighting the positive impact they have on people’s individual and collective lives and showing the collaborative work they perform to meet current societal challenges. To achieve these objectives, the BSM needs to gather data that measure museum’s capacity to facilitate social impacts, that is, it must become a tool that generates evidence and numerical data that can provide a basis for communicating their work and contribute to improving museum management. In 2022, the Observatory of Audiences of Cultural Heritage of Catalonia implemented a test phase, with the goal of verifying and scaling application of the tool. This phase has focused on the quantitative analysis, whose results are presented. The quantitative analysis has used a self-assessment methodology in which 12 museums in different parts of Catalonia, with very different sizes and areas of specialisation, have voluntarily contributed information about the 35 indicators. This study also offers many examples of good museum practices. Counting and analysing museums’ social impact, first quantitatively, and, in the future, qualitatively, is a complex exercise. In this, it is pioneering the field in Spain and is the first that makes it possible to assess a series of actions that are essential for defining what a museum is and which are normally not included in the statistics.

Presenters

Xavier Ulled
Researcher, The Observatory of Audiences of Cultural Heritage of Catalonia, The Catalan Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (ICRPC-CERCA Programme), Spain

Pol Casals
Technician, Observatory of cultural heritage of catalonia , Spain

Joaquina Bobes
Manager, ARTImetria, Spain

Antoni Laporte
Director, ARTImetria, Spain