Anthropology of Museum Visitors, ANT 3181 Anthropological Museology guest lecture. University of Florida, March 25, 2013.

1. Anthropology of Museum Visitors
Jessica Belcoure
Volunteer Coordinator
Panama Canal Museum Collection
George A. Smathers Libraries

2. Museum…
• Audience
• Visitors
• Constituents
• Guests
• Slight differences
• Generally interchangeable

3. Knowing Your Audience
• Can you ever really know your museum’s audience?
• We can try!
• Unintended Audiences
• Potential Audiences

4. Knowing Your Audience
• Two ways of getting to know your audience
• Evaluations (or Assessments)
• Demographic Studies
• Both are valuable
• Provide very different information

5. Evaluations
• Subjects for museum evaluation:
• Exhibits
• Programs
• Staff helpfulness
• Food in the food court
• Anything!
• Ask the questions:
• Are we serving our audience in the way we intended?
• Is this program effective and popular?
• Is this exhibit popular with families with children, like we wanted?
• How can we serve our audience better?

6. Demographic Studies
• Subjects for demographic studies:
• People.
• Groups of people.
• Asks the questions:
• Who is our audience?
• What are they like?
• Similar to an ethnographic study

7. OUTREACH MAPPING
A Demographic Study

8. Mapping Outreach
• Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA)
• Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD)
• Mapping the outreach efforts of the DIA
• Visitor data
• Collected automatically
• Categorized by types of groups
• Sent to AAMD to generate maps

9. WHY Map Outreach?
• To find out who comes to the museum
• What types of groups?
• Where are they coming from?
• How often do they visit?

10. Why Map Outreach?
• To find out who does NOT come to the museum
• What areas have no dots?
• What areas have only one kind of dot?

11. The Big Picture

12. Michigan

13. Southeast Michigan

14. 40 Miles Around DIA

15. 20 Miles Around DIA

16. Central Detroit

17. What To Do With This Information?
Respond to it!

19. THE “BUILT-IN” AUDIENCE
The Panama Canal Museum

20. The “Built-In” Audience
• Some museums or collections seem to come with an audience
• The content of may be of very specific interest
• May have a personal relationship with the museum or its
content

21. The Panama Canal and Museum
• History
1903 -1979
• Panama Canal: American control
• Canal Zone established
•Family neighborhoods, schools, businesses, police, etc.
1979 -1999 • Panama Canal: Joint American / Panamanian control
1999
• US gives control of canal and Canal Zone to Panama
• Americans living in Canal Zone move to the US
• Panama Canal Museum established (Seminole, FL)
2011 • Panama Canal Museum gives its collection to UF
2012 • Transfer of PCM collection to UF is completed

22. Panama Canal Museum (PCM)
• Seminole, FL
• Almost entirely volunteer run
• Repository for any and all items relating to the American Period of
the Panama Canal
• Personal items
• Documents
• Memorabilia
• Books
• Construction equipment
• Artwork
• Photographs

23. The PCM Audience
• When UF received the PCM collection, we also got their
audience
• “Zonians”
• Lived (many born and raised) in the Canal Zone
• Previous museum volunteers
• Friends of the Panama Canal Museum
• Panama Canal Society members

25. PCM Audience Issues
• Feeling that they are not in control of their own memories
• Have been moved twice
• Canal Zone to US
• Seminole, FL to UF
• Feel neither move was entirely by choice

26. The PCM Collection
• Memorabilia
• Not an objective/scholarly history of the Panama Canal
• A history of the people who lived in the Canal Zone during a
defined period of time
• A record of what life was like for Zonians

27. Collection / Audience Issues
• Must prove we are good stewards of the collection
• Fostering goodwill and community among PCM members
• Nothing is deaccessioned (removed) from the collection
• Donors and other constituents are very active and involved in the
collection and its care
• No longer on display
• Research collection within UF Latin American Collection
• Finding a way to let audience engage with collection remotely
• Remote metadata

28. Whose History?
• Any collection has inherent biases
• Tells a specific story
• One story is not more valid than another
• What is our responsibility as museum professionals?
• In exhibitions? In collecting practices?

29. Lots of Questions… Few Answers
• Still processing much of the collection
• Collections Management Policy in development
• Defining (and re-defining) relationships with Zonians
• Finding ways to make the collection accessible to all

30. Want to Help?
• Original PCM was volunteer-run
• So is UF’s PCM collection!
• We need help:
• Processing the collection
• Researching
• Digitizing items
• Making the database searchable
• Planning exhibits
• Contact Jessica:
• 352-273-2502
• jbelcoure@ufl.edu

31. Questions?