Accounting for new technology in museum exhibtions

Museums of fine and decorative art increasingly deploy computer-based interpretation devices such as Personal Digital Assistants and information kiosks into their exhibitions. Museum managers hope that such new technology will help raise visitor numbers, attract new audiences and enhance visitors’ experience of exhibits. Yet, we have relatively little knowledge of whether the investment in digital resources ‘pays off’ for museums. Conventional accounting methods and techniques largely assess whether investment in exhibitions leads to higher visitor numbers and increased revenue, but ignores the museum’s agenda and mission. Studies of visitor behavior and learning primarily focus on whether visitors attend to exhibits but largely lack methods to examine the quality of the museum experience. This paper wishes to contribute to current debates about the adequacy of methods favored in financial accounting and visitor studies for the assessment of investment in new technology in museum exhibitions. It draws on two cases to explore how the deployment of PDAs and information kiosks influences the ways in which visitors examine and experience the exhibits. The findings are used to assess the deployment of new technology in exhibitions, to provide practical information to managers and designers who plan and develop such technologies for art museums and to show how ethnographic and videobased methods can contribute to current practice in museum accounting.

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