Interpretive Media

Today, museums all over the world are faced with the opportunity to re-invent themselves and their relationships with their publics. But what will it take to do so? In 2011, the authors began the research project “ONLY
CONNECT: Visitor-Centered Museum Interpretation”—at once a search for defining criteria of excellence across museum types and an opportunity to visit salient sites, observe and talk with visitors and fellow museum professionals, and report back to the field. Initially hoping to benchmark “best practices” in museum interpretation, we solicited nominations and criteria from more than 50 colleagues in North America and Europe. From that list, we distilled a small subset of museums that, with the help of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, we were able to visit, document, and describe. All told, we conducted 35 interviews, including 11 with museum directors and seven each with curators, educator-interpretive specialists, and cross-departmental collaborative teams. We began the study by looking for innovative interpretive practices. What we found was something more: a visitor-centered focus leads to organizational transformation. Once a museum decides to shift its approach and place visitors at the center of its mission, how does it follow through on that goal? The following anecdotes offer a first glimpse of what we saw, a set of scenes that touch on the changes taking place in museum practice.