Museum Recollections

Museum learning involves a wide range of recollections about a diverse set of experiences encountered over the course of a museum visit. Three key features are: 1) visitors "learn" about many different aspects of a visit (not just exhibits); 2) experiences are stored in memory and are recallable; and 3) learned experiences persist for long periods of time (i.e., months, years and decades). A series of pilot ethnographic style interviews were conducted. Each of eleven subjects was conversationally "walked" through his recollections. Several consistent themes ran through all the recollections: 1) Every individual interviewed can place the museum visit within a context—social, geographical and temporal; 2) Every individual interviewed has a surprisingly good recollection of how long they spent in the museum, and often what their mental state was at the time—such as being bored or harried; 3) Most individuals can recall at least a few exhibits they saw, and some specific details about them, though none of these people could recall a full visit's worth of things they saw; 4) All individuals refer to some aspect of the museum's architecture or "feel". These interviews also suggested that often museum memories are "bound together" in individualized ways that make total sense to the individual who is relaying the information, but not necessarily to an "objective" outsider.

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