Last summer, on one of those all-too-rare days that are half work, half pleasure, I went to the press preview of the renewed Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
The last time I was at the venerable Fitz, a decade or more before, I was furious at the museum's lack of interest in its visitors and the dreadful interpretation.
This time I was pleasantly surprised. Duncan Robinson, the director of the museum, says it now sees that it has a responsibility to give visitors information, guidance and help, as well as to continue its traditional role of caring for and studying its objects.
With its education spaces, ambitious interpretation, children's packs, social inclusion programmes and gleaming new entrance, cafe and shop, the Fitz seems the model of a modern British museum.
Encouraged, I decided to find out how other museums are getting closer to their visitors. I wanted to get beneath the government policy documents, the forward plans full of New Labour rhetoric, and the high-profile trail-blazers of new practice such as Tyne and Wear Museums, to find out what is really going on in those institutions that are steadily changing and quietly thriving.
I avoided heavyweight national museum directors and instead sought out the new generation of museum staff - young people I'd chatted to at conferences, those in the Diversify scheme, potential museum leaders of the future.
My first stop was the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, where the displays are heavily interpreted and there are lots of activities for adults and children. It's a far cry from the days when art was presented with only brief descriptions.
Then the purpose of a typical exhibition was to display valuable objects rather than help visitors understand them. The scholarship that underpinned displays was rarely made explicit and was therefore only evident to experts in the audience. If it was spelled out, it was in obscure language that meant little to most visitors.
As Kate Brindley, the head of arts and museums at Wolverhampton City Council, says: 'Museums used to be dominated by curatorial interest. While the curatorial discipline remains central, we are becoming more sophisticated in how we communicate with our audiences, through our interdependency with education and marketing expertise, and by directly working with visitors.'
In regional art galleries (as in social history, natural history and science displays) hands-on interactives, children's activities, descriptive labels and introductory panels are the norm. Even some London nationals now have computer terminals in front of their paintings.
Kathleen Soriano, the head of exhibitions and collections management at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and currently on secondment as a Clore Leadership Fellow, explains how things are changing: 'Over the past four or five years we have been trying to listen to what different types of visitors are saying about their experiences. We are questioning, listening and experimenting more.'
Soriano traces this back to the 1990s, when the NPG started putting on temporary displays that, unusually at the time, were led by the education department and were far more interactive than before. This has subsequently been adopted in the main displays.
It is now common practice in many museums for educators, marketers, conservators and designers to join curators in planning displays and exhibitions. As Soriano says: 'The presentation of an exhibition is no longer based solely on an individual's view.'
Museums also increasingly involve audiences in planning displays. At the National Maritime Museum (NMM), Liz Smith, the head of education and interpretation, is pleased that all big gallery renewals now include audience research and that there are interpretation strategies for all major exhibitions.
Although some argue that paying too much attention to what audiences want is to the detriment of collections, Smith disagrees: 'There are endless ways of using collections creatively. We have confidence in our subject matter attracting different audiences.'
Listening to audiences appears to work: the NMM and the NPG have both increased their numbers of visits significantly over the past few years. Between 1999 and 2003, annual visits were up by 39 per cent at the NMM and 32 per cent at the NPG - all the more impressive at the latter as it has always been free and therefore did not get a boost when other nationals introduced free admission in late 2001.
Maggie Appleton, the museums manager at Luton Museums Service, says: 'You don't have to be accessible at the expense of collections. Just because we want everyone to enjoy the collection doesn't mean that we are devaluing it. The important thing is to decide what you want people to get out of the visit.'
Appleton says the aim is to make the museum's subject areas more interesting, not to increase visitor numbers at all costs. With temporary exhibitions, it is important to balance popular ones with collections that may not be as accessible or that target a specific audience.
Luton is planning to redisplay the Mossman collection of horse-drawn carriages, which are housed in a purpose-built museum that is rather dull and under-visited. Appleton says: 'If you're interested in carriages, that's fine - but if you aren't, you're not going to come back regularly.
You need more to engage people and bring them back to a permanent collection. The carriages can tell some wonderful stories. People are interested in people, so we use the objects to tell stories about them.' But collections, or at least the themes covered by them, remain at the core of exhibitions.
Brindley in Wolverhampton says: 'If we wanted to massively increase our audience we'd do something like a Star Wars show. But we don't do that. We believe our role is to open up our collections and in our case 300 years of art.' To do this, Wolverhampton carries out extensive audience research, including regular visitor and non-user surveys.
Formative evaluation is a normal part of display development. For the forthcoming pop art display at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, ideas have been tried out in a temporary exhibition, and focus groups have been trying to find out the views of 14-25 year olds, a key audience for the new gallery.
Brindley says: 'We pilot, evaluate, refine and then create the display. After it opens we undertake further evaluations and then make changes if we feel they will add to the visitor experience.'
Although it is becoming more common for museums to experiment and evaluate, to consult visitors, and displays are far better than they were, many exhibitions are still unattractive, confusing and exhausting.
Often this is the result of incompetence - bad lighting renders some displays virtually invisible and there are never enough seats.
Museums have to enthuse visitors. Displays need to grab people's attention and encourage them to spend a little longer looking, thinking and reflecting. Only then will learning be possible.
Many temporary exhibitions are plain dull. Subjects that should fascinate are rendered tedious. Fantastic objects are brought together at great expense and then installed unimaginatively in a plodding sequence.
Worthy but uninspiring graphic panels and labels tire rather than inspire. There are exceptions, but too often visiting a museum is less satisfying, and harder work than reading a magazine, watching a TV documentary or going to see a play. Why should that be the case?
One explanation could be that display and interpretation - the core of an exhibition - are somehow the responsibility of everyone and no one. Teams of educators, marketers, conservators, curators and designers work together, but no one takes final responsibility.
There is no equivalent to the magazine editor, the theatre director or the TV producer.
Sometimes, an individual designer, educator, curator, or even museum director, fulfils the role of museum editor, display director or exhibition producer.
But too often no one has enough expertise and experience to know what will work and, crucially, what won't.
Knowledge is often poor. At a recent meeting for organisers of forthcoming major art exhibitions, I was shocked to hear that no one had yet visited the Compton Verney art gallery in Warwickshire and so hadn't been able to consider whether its approach had implications for their own practice.
And how often do people experience overseas working methods or even read about them seriously in Museum Practice? Museum staff are busy and feel that time is short, but in the long run people work more effectively if they make the effort to study other practices and reflect deeply on their own work.
The ignorance of what's being tried in other museums is made worse by a general lack of agreement about areas such as the best type size and text length, how much can be sensibly presented in an exhibition and the correct density of displays.
It would be helpful to have some basic rules - these could be broken, but only when it is done deliberately and not out of incompetence. For permanent displays, there aren't even standard stages in the production process.
It increases the risk of failure if systems for each new project have to constantly be invented from scratch. In sharp contrast, magazine and television production benefit hugely from a general agreement on the basics - this makes it easier to get an end result that works, and more time can be spent on doing things imaginatively and creatively.
Perhaps we need a new breed of museum professional who is dedicated to leading the exhibition and display process or at the very least a more professional approach to display and interpretation. Without this, there will continue to be serious flaws at the heart of museum work.
Maurice Davies is the deputy director of the Museums Association
The last time I was at the venerable Fitz, a decade or more before, I was furious at the museum's lack of interest in its visitors and the dreadful interpretation.
This time I was pleasantly surprised. Duncan Robinson, the director of the museum, says it now sees that it has a responsibility to give visitors information, guidance and help, as well as to continue its traditional role of caring for and studying its objects.
With its education spaces, ambitious interpretation, children's packs, social inclusion programmes and gleaming new entrance, cafe and shop, the Fitz seems the model of a modern British museum.
Encouraged, I decided to find out how other museums are getting closer to their visitors. I wanted to get beneath the government policy documents, the forward plans full of New Labour rhetoric, and the high-profile trail-blazers of new practice such as Tyne and Wear Museums, to find out what is really going on in those institutions that are steadily changing and quietly thriving.
I avoided heavyweight national museum directors and instead sought out the new generation of museum staff - young people I'd chatted to at conferences, those in the Diversify scheme, potential museum leaders of the future.
My first stop was the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, where the displays are heavily interpreted and there are lots of activities for adults and children. It's a far cry from the days when art was presented with only brief descriptions.
Then the purpose of a typical exhibition was to display valuable objects rather than help visitors understand them. The scholarship that underpinned displays was rarely made explicit and was therefore only evident to experts in the audience. If it was spelled out, it was in obscure language that meant little to most visitors.
As Kate Brindley, the head of arts and museums at Wolverhampton City Council, says: 'Museums used to be dominated by curatorial interest. While the curatorial discipline remains central, we are becoming more sophisticated in how we communicate with our audiences, through our interdependency with education and marketing expertise, and by directly working with visitors.'
In regional art galleries (as in social history, natural history and science displays) hands-on interactives, children's activities, descriptive labels and introductory panels are the norm. Even some London nationals now have computer terminals in front of their paintings.
Kathleen Soriano, the head of exhibitions and collections management at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and currently on secondment as a Clore Leadership Fellow, explains how things are changing: 'Over the past four or five years we have been trying to listen to what different types of visitors are saying about their experiences. We are questioning, listening and experimenting more.'
Soriano traces this back to the 1990s, when the NPG started putting on temporary displays that, unusually at the time, were led by the education department and were far more interactive than before. This has subsequently been adopted in the main displays.
It is now common practice in many museums for educators, marketers, conservators and designers to join curators in planning displays and exhibitions. As Soriano says: 'The presentation of an exhibition is no longer based solely on an individual's view.'
Museums also increasingly involve audiences in planning displays. At the National Maritime Museum (NMM), Liz Smith, the head of education and interpretation, is pleased that all big gallery renewals now include audience research and that there are interpretation strategies for all major exhibitions.
Although some argue that paying too much attention to what audiences want is to the detriment of collections, Smith disagrees: 'There are endless ways of using collections creatively. We have confidence in our subject matter attracting different audiences.'
Listening to audiences appears to work: the NMM and the NPG have both increased their numbers of visits significantly over the past few years. Between 1999 and 2003, annual visits were up by 39 per cent at the NMM and 32 per cent at the NPG - all the more impressive at the latter as it has always been free and therefore did not get a boost when other nationals introduced free admission in late 2001.
Maggie Appleton, the museums manager at Luton Museums Service, says: 'You don't have to be accessible at the expense of collections. Just because we want everyone to enjoy the collection doesn't mean that we are devaluing it. The important thing is to decide what you want people to get out of the visit.'
Appleton says the aim is to make the museum's subject areas more interesting, not to increase visitor numbers at all costs. With temporary exhibitions, it is important to balance popular ones with collections that may not be as accessible or that target a specific audience.
Luton is planning to redisplay the Mossman collection of horse-drawn carriages, which are housed in a purpose-built museum that is rather dull and under-visited. Appleton says: 'If you're interested in carriages, that's fine - but if you aren't, you're not going to come back regularly.
You need more to engage people and bring them back to a permanent collection. The carriages can tell some wonderful stories. People are interested in people, so we use the objects to tell stories about them.' But collections, or at least the themes covered by them, remain at the core of exhibitions.
Brindley in Wolverhampton says: 'If we wanted to massively increase our audience we'd do something like a Star Wars show. But we don't do that. We believe our role is to open up our collections and in our case 300 years of art.' To do this, Wolverhampton carries out extensive audience research, including regular visitor and non-user surveys.
Formative evaluation is a normal part of display development. For the forthcoming pop art display at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, ideas have been tried out in a temporary exhibition, and focus groups have been trying to find out the views of 14-25 year olds, a key audience for the new gallery.
Brindley says: 'We pilot, evaluate, refine and then create the display. After it opens we undertake further evaluations and then make changes if we feel they will add to the visitor experience.'
Although it is becoming more common for museums to experiment and evaluate, to consult visitors, and displays are far better than they were, many exhibitions are still unattractive, confusing and exhausting.
Often this is the result of incompetence - bad lighting renders some displays virtually invisible and there are never enough seats.
Museums have to enthuse visitors. Displays need to grab people's attention and encourage them to spend a little longer looking, thinking and reflecting. Only then will learning be possible.
Many temporary exhibitions are plain dull. Subjects that should fascinate are rendered tedious. Fantastic objects are brought together at great expense and then installed unimaginatively in a plodding sequence.
Worthy but uninspiring graphic panels and labels tire rather than inspire. There are exceptions, but too often visiting a museum is less satisfying, and harder work than reading a magazine, watching a TV documentary or going to see a play. Why should that be the case?
One explanation could be that display and interpretation - the core of an exhibition - are somehow the responsibility of everyone and no one. Teams of educators, marketers, conservators, curators and designers work together, but no one takes final responsibility.
There is no equivalent to the magazine editor, the theatre director or the TV producer.
Sometimes, an individual designer, educator, curator, or even museum director, fulfils the role of museum editor, display director or exhibition producer.
But too often no one has enough expertise and experience to know what will work and, crucially, what won't.
Knowledge is often poor. At a recent meeting for organisers of forthcoming major art exhibitions, I was shocked to hear that no one had yet visited the Compton Verney art gallery in Warwickshire and so hadn't been able to consider whether its approach had implications for their own practice.
And how often do people experience overseas working methods or even read about them seriously in Museum Practice? Museum staff are busy and feel that time is short, but in the long run people work more effectively if they make the effort to study other practices and reflect deeply on their own work.
The ignorance of what's being tried in other museums is made worse by a general lack of agreement about areas such as the best type size and text length, how much can be sensibly presented in an exhibition and the correct density of displays.
It would be helpful to have some basic rules - these could be broken, but only when it is done deliberately and not out of incompetence. For permanent displays, there aren't even standard stages in the production process.
It increases the risk of failure if systems for each new project have to constantly be invented from scratch. In sharp contrast, magazine and television production benefit hugely from a general agreement on the basics - this makes it easier to get an end result that works, and more time can be spent on doing things imaginatively and creatively.
Perhaps we need a new breed of museum professional who is dedicated to leading the exhibition and display process or at the very least a more professional approach to display and interpretation. Without this, there will continue to be serious flaws at the heart of museum work.
Maurice Davies is the deputy director of the Museums Association
