Poet’s House, a preeminent poetry library in New York City, will collaborate with ten public libraries and zoos across the United States to support library-zoo partnerships in five cities. The project teams will install exhibitions that use poetry as an interpretive tool to deepen visitor thinking about wildlife and conservation in each zoo. This project follows a year-long planning grant funded by IMLS and extends the success of an IMLS-funded partnership in New York City between Poets House and the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Central Park Zoo, which pioneered the installation of poetry in the zoo. The new project will create a set of models and tools for developing strong collaborations and exhibits by carefully documenting the process of building these partnerships and evaluating their impact on visitors, the community, and professional audiences.
Considerable time and effort have been invested in understanding the motivations of museum visitors. Many investigators have sought to describe why people visit museums, resulting in a range of descriptive categorizations. Recently, investigators have begun to document the connections between visitors' entering motivations and their exiting learning. Doering and Pekarik have proposed starting with the idea that visitors are likely to enter a museum with an “entry narrative” (1996; see also Pekarik, Doering and Karns 1999). Doering and Pekarik argue that these entry narratives are likely to be