In this article, Valerie D. Thompson of the San Diego Zoological Gardens discusses findings from a 10-week observational study during the summer months of 1977 to investigate the nature of noncompliant behavior of zoo visitors. Noncompliant behaviors included distracting, teasing, feeding, or attempting to injure the animals. Thompson addresses how these findings have helped alleviate problematic behavior at the zoo.
This is a summary of A.W. Melton's 1936 paper, "Distribution of Attention in Galleries in a Museum of Science and Industry." Melton studied the role of movement in attracting visitors by evaluating a gear-shaper located in the machine tool section of the New York Museum of Science and Industry. Melton determined that while any kind of movement attracts visitors, the overall consequences of this movement on the exhibit may not be be positive.
This is a brief summary of A.W. Melton's 1936 paper, "Distribution of Attention in Galleries in a Museum of Science and Industry." Melton studied how visitor behavior was impacted by manually-operated exhibits demonstrating electricity. Automatic operation of the exhibits was compared with manual operation.
In this article, Randi Korn reviews the "Museum Audiences Today: Building Constituencies for the Future" study, a 1984 evaluation of 25 museums in Southern California. Korn summarizes the book and key findings from the study.
This is a summary of A.W. Melton's 1935 paper, "Problems of Installation in Museums of Art." Melton described a series of studies that demonstrated two important factors that influence visitor behavior: (1) the tendency to turn right when entering a museum gallery and (2) the strong attraction of exits.
This is a brief summary of Edward S. Robinson's 1928 AAM Monograph "The Behavior of the Museum Visitor." Robinson highlights the importance of object size, positioning, and density for determining visitor attention in art museums.
This is a summary of studies from "The Behavior of the Museum Visitor" (1928) by Edward S. Robinson, who studied the problem of museum "fatigue." Robinson suggested that this "fatigue" is caused by multiple factors like physical fatigue and object satiation.
In this article, Jacksonville State University's Stephen Bitgood presents a summary of issues related to evaluation discussed in visitor studies literature. These issues include research vs. evaluation, formative vs. summative evaluation, goal-free vs. goal-referenced evaluation, and developmental vs. post-design evaluation.
In this article, Jacksonville State University's Stephen Bitgood Ph.D. presents an overview of the methodology used in visitor studies research. Bitgood identifies reliability and validity as the two most important standards, defines several types of visitor research (experimental, correlational, descriptive/observational), and describes two methods of measuring visitor behavior (direct observation and self-reporting).
In this article, Donna M. McElroy, education curator at the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center (Pueblo, Colorado), discusses evaluation strategies and key findings used to create and improve a self-guide "birds-eye view" map to the Asian Collection at the Denver Art Museum.
In this article, Colorado State University researcher Jerome Dagostino presents a review of three noteworthy museum studies to highlight the variety of different survey techniques used to evaluate art museums.