When Poole Museum was redeveloped in 2007, it updated its diorama-based displays with contemporary glass cabinets.
But the change didn’t necessarily herald an improvement for all the museum’s audiences, says Trudie Cole, the learning and access manager, culture and community learning, at Poole Borough Council.
“It looks really nice and was a good change at the time, but in terms of how the collection works for children, that method of display isn’t as popular as the old dioramas,” Cole says.
To help overcome this challenge, the museum uses trails, most of which are printed on two sides of A4 paper.
“The trails help to focus children on bits of the collection that they might be most interested in, give them a little context and encourage them to look more closely. As well as being a bit of fun [trails] also work as an interpretive tool,” says Cole.
Children are just one of many visitor groups that benefit from trails, which are an effective way of helping a wide range of audiences enjoy and understand exhibitions.
Poole Museum has two permanent trails (which use word search and I-spy activities) and an additional four or five themed trails a year, created for school holidays. The themes may be related to the time of year, like Easter or Halloween, or a temporary exhibition or event at the museum. A small reward, such as a chocolate, is sometimes offered as an incentive for completion.
Children follow each trail by searching for items placed among the museum’s display cases. For last Halloween’s Awesome Owls trail, they needed to find small model owls, by using a clue to search for the object the models were placed next to.
The holiday trails use a simple format: they are printed on two sides of A4 paper. This allows the museum to update them regularly.
“We have lots of families coming in,” says Cole. “They know that we do these things just for holidays and it’s going to be different every time, so it encourages them to come back.”
Cole says that ideally the museum would like to refresh its permanent trails, however. For those with the resources, there is a huge range of possible options for moving beyond basic trail formats.
Blackbird Publishing is a partnership between writer Jane Yorke and designer and illustrator Stephanie Strickland that provides creative services for museums and heritage centres.
Their work involves creating a large number of trails, predominantly aimed at primary school age (five-11) children. Strickland says that illustrations to help children use their imagination to understand collections.
“A museum may have been donated obscure pieces of equipment linked to a local industry, and we can bring them to life with illustrations and put characters in there, showing how the objects would have been used in the past,” she says.
Creating activities and text is the other part of the equation. The aim of these is “to encourage children to look at something again at something and engage with the exhibition,” says Yorke.
“They might have to count something, look closer, reflect, or imagine themselves somewhere. There are lots of little prompts,” she adds.
Yorke says that the idea is for families to enjoy the trails together, so the activities include aspects that all ages can appreciate. “I think parents enjoy the trails as much as the children,” she says. It’s a quick way to understanding an exhibit. With kids you don’t always have time to read all of the signs.”
In fact, museum trails don’t have to be aimed at children at all. The principle of drawing out a collection’s relevance can be applied to other audiences and adapted to each museum’s particular situation. And by having a range of trails, museums can cater for more than one kind of visitor.
Debbie Challis, the public programmer at the Petrie Museum, says trails were used to compensate for the lack of interpretive text in its “old-fashioned” displays. Alongside family trails, many of the Petrie’s trails contain more weighty material, such as those focusing on Islamic and Coptic Egypt – and typically contain suggestions for further reading.
The trails enable the museum to gear its collection towards different audiences – often by re-purposing content from events. A trail themed on alternate sexualities is based on talks an author had given at the museum and elsewhere.
“The talk was so popular that we had to turn people away. I thought it would be a good idea to turn it into a trail so that anyone could pick up at any time,” says Challis.
Gothic and sci-fi themed trails have also developed from events. Trails aimed at specific interests like these have proven useful as marketing tools, for instance, when staff presented their sci-fi trails to the Worldcon science fiction fair. “We had quite a lot of visitors afterwards bringing that trail with them or wanting to pick it up when they came,” says Challis.
Tailoring trails to the needs and interests of specific groups has many possibilities. Some museums create trails linked to the educational curriculum, designed for school visits (see feature). Other trails may be written for younger children, such as the trails for under-fives at the British Museum, or people with a disability, such as the RAF Museum’s trail for autistic visitors (see case study).
Trails can be presented in a range of formats from concertina booklets to foldout maps. Other options include a set of cards on a keyring and a backpack. And digital technology brings even more possibilities (see feature).
Some museums, like Newark’s National Civil War Centre, have created augmented reality apps where capturing a certain object or scene with a smartphone or tablet’s viewfinder triggers multimedia content. iBeacons are another technology that has attracted interest, because they allow content to be triggered when a person carrying a device moves to a certain location. Leicester Castle used an app tour to make a heritage attraction come to life using audio content.
One advantage of a digital trail is that it allows institutions to make effective use of archival material, often by taking it out of the museum’s physical space. Poole Museum has a trail around the town where signposts direct people to films, photographs and audio files related to the location’s history using code words and QR codes.
But innovative trails don’t have to be digital. Poole Museum also has tactile trails, consisting of a series of stations, where children can take part in activities linked to the exhibitions. These may involve interacting with objects from the stores or making replicas of objects on display.
The museum also offers sensory trails aimed both at people with a sensory disability and young children. The trails are presented as a lunchbox that contains a booklet and materials to feel and smell. They also involve red buttons placed around the museum, that visitors press to hear a sound.
“If someone has one sense that isn’t working as well as the others, there are still a range of ways for them to explore the museum, ” says Cole.
There are endless possible formats for a trail, but sometimes the simplest techniques are the most effective. Cole says that the basic holiday trails remain the most popular: “All our trails are appreciated,” she says. “But the things that people really like are still the bits of paper on a clipboard that they can run around with.”
But the change didn’t necessarily herald an improvement for all the museum’s audiences, says Trudie Cole, the learning and access manager, culture and community learning, at Poole Borough Council.
“It looks really nice and was a good change at the time, but in terms of how the collection works for children, that method of display isn’t as popular as the old dioramas,” Cole says.
To help overcome this challenge, the museum uses trails, most of which are printed on two sides of A4 paper.
“The trails help to focus children on bits of the collection that they might be most interested in, give them a little context and encourage them to look more closely. As well as being a bit of fun [trails] also work as an interpretive tool,” says Cole.
Children are just one of many visitor groups that benefit from trails, which are an effective way of helping a wide range of audiences enjoy and understand exhibitions.
Poole Museum has two permanent trails (which use word search and I-spy activities) and an additional four or five themed trails a year, created for school holidays. The themes may be related to the time of year, like Easter or Halloween, or a temporary exhibition or event at the museum. A small reward, such as a chocolate, is sometimes offered as an incentive for completion.
Children follow each trail by searching for items placed among the museum’s display cases. For last Halloween’s Awesome Owls trail, they needed to find small model owls, by using a clue to search for the object the models were placed next to.
The holiday trails use a simple format: they are printed on two sides of A4 paper. This allows the museum to update them regularly.
“We have lots of families coming in,” says Cole. “They know that we do these things just for holidays and it’s going to be different every time, so it encourages them to come back.”
Cole says that ideally the museum would like to refresh its permanent trails, however. For those with the resources, there is a huge range of possible options for moving beyond basic trail formats.
Blackbird Publishing is a partnership between writer Jane Yorke and designer and illustrator Stephanie Strickland that provides creative services for museums and heritage centres.
Their work involves creating a large number of trails, predominantly aimed at primary school age (five-11) children. Strickland says that illustrations to help children use their imagination to understand collections.
“A museum may have been donated obscure pieces of equipment linked to a local industry, and we can bring them to life with illustrations and put characters in there, showing how the objects would have been used in the past,” she says.
Creating activities and text is the other part of the equation. The aim of these is “to encourage children to look at something again at something and engage with the exhibition,” says Yorke.
“They might have to count something, look closer, reflect, or imagine themselves somewhere. There are lots of little prompts,” she adds.
Yorke says that the idea is for families to enjoy the trails together, so the activities include aspects that all ages can appreciate. “I think parents enjoy the trails as much as the children,” she says. It’s a quick way to understanding an exhibit. With kids you don’t always have time to read all of the signs.”
In fact, museum trails don’t have to be aimed at children at all. The principle of drawing out a collection’s relevance can be applied to other audiences and adapted to each museum’s particular situation. And by having a range of trails, museums can cater for more than one kind of visitor.
Debbie Challis, the public programmer at the Petrie Museum, says trails were used to compensate for the lack of interpretive text in its “old-fashioned” displays. Alongside family trails, many of the Petrie’s trails contain more weighty material, such as those focusing on Islamic and Coptic Egypt – and typically contain suggestions for further reading.
The trails enable the museum to gear its collection towards different audiences – often by re-purposing content from events. A trail themed on alternate sexualities is based on talks an author had given at the museum and elsewhere.
“The talk was so popular that we had to turn people away. I thought it would be a good idea to turn it into a trail so that anyone could pick up at any time,” says Challis.
Gothic and sci-fi themed trails have also developed from events. Trails aimed at specific interests like these have proven useful as marketing tools, for instance, when staff presented their sci-fi trails to the Worldcon science fiction fair. “We had quite a lot of visitors afterwards bringing that trail with them or wanting to pick it up when they came,” says Challis.
Tailoring trails to the needs and interests of specific groups has many possibilities. Some museums create trails linked to the educational curriculum, designed for school visits (see feature). Other trails may be written for younger children, such as the trails for under-fives at the British Museum, or people with a disability, such as the RAF Museum’s trail for autistic visitors (see case study).
Trails can be presented in a range of formats from concertina booklets to foldout maps. Other options include a set of cards on a keyring and a backpack. And digital technology brings even more possibilities (see feature).
Some museums, like Newark’s National Civil War Centre, have created augmented reality apps where capturing a certain object or scene with a smartphone or tablet’s viewfinder triggers multimedia content. iBeacons are another technology that has attracted interest, because they allow content to be triggered when a person carrying a device moves to a certain location. Leicester Castle used an app tour to make a heritage attraction come to life using audio content.
One advantage of a digital trail is that it allows institutions to make effective use of archival material, often by taking it out of the museum’s physical space. Poole Museum has a trail around the town where signposts direct people to films, photographs and audio files related to the location’s history using code words and QR codes.
But innovative trails don’t have to be digital. Poole Museum also has tactile trails, consisting of a series of stations, where children can take part in activities linked to the exhibitions. These may involve interacting with objects from the stores or making replicas of objects on display.
The museum also offers sensory trails aimed both at people with a sensory disability and young children. The trails are presented as a lunchbox that contains a booklet and materials to feel and smell. They also involve red buttons placed around the museum, that visitors press to hear a sound.
“If someone has one sense that isn’t working as well as the others, there are still a range of ways for them to explore the museum, ” says Cole.
There are endless possible formats for a trail, but sometimes the simplest techniques are the most effective. Cole says that the basic holiday trails remain the most popular: “All our trails are appreciated,” she says. “But the things that people really like are still the bits of paper on a clipboard that they can run around with.”
