The important role that museums can play in education and lifelong learning is now widely recognised, not just by museum professionals and educators, but also by government and funding bodies. The Heritage Lottery Fund, once requiring only a business plan and conservation plan, now expects an audience development plan and access plan to support a major grant application.
Exhibitions are seen as an educational experience for all the family and simply placing objects on display alongside some obtuse text is not good enough.
To be fair, most history and science museums had recognised the value of contextualising collections and providing a range of ways of understanding them long before the arrival of lottery loot.
But today, even that most traditional and undidactic of institutions, the art museum, has embraced the new philosophy - witness the British Galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the highly interpreted, and even interactive spaces within the Manchester Art Gallery.
In this laudable rush to communicate and educate through collections a lot of thought and effort has been given to providing different ways for people to learn through their preferred learning styles, but a lot less to the messages or stories that are told through collections.
Most museum staff understand, not least through the work of people such as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, that visitors come to museums with their own agendas and that communication is a two-way process. But this understanding doesn't seem to delineate any limits on the display message considered appropriate or effective.
Every medium of mass communication has its strengths and limitations. It would be a brave TV director who suggested a peak-time series discussing the merits of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Producing a radio programme on how perspective is achieved in paintings might be a challenge. And so too with museum displays.
Museum displays are at their most effective when messages and stories arise out of collections and visitor studies and then focus the visitor's attention back onto collections, rather than them simply acting as incidental props in another story - an offence of which history and science museums are particularly guilty.
How many exhibitions have you seen where after reading all the text, watching the videos and playing with the interactives, the collections have been but bit players in a wider socio-economic/scientific treatise and in fact might not have been there at all?
In downtown Washington DC, a ten-minute taxi ride from the White House, the Historical Society of Washington DC has opened a new City Museum in the impressive Carnegie Library building. To quote the website: 'The City Museum serves as a model for other cities around the world demonstrating how the historical community can play an essential role in economic development.'
The museum has had only 33,000 visitors in six months. It seems to have forgotten that visitors go to museums to see and be inspired by important, attractive and unusual stuff and not to plough through hours of oral history and acres of text and photographs with barely an object in sight.
The consultant Stephen Feber castigates the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester for its displays not 'showing how science, technology and settlement work together to make a great city', (Museums Journal June 2004, pp38-39).
Speaking as a former curator, maybe these collections, or any others for that matter, are just not up to the job and what is really needed to address this subject is a book, not a display.
Grand overarching display narratives barely touching base with the collections can be found down the road at the new Imperial War Museum North. Dramatic audiovisual presentations intermittently fill the main gallery, virtually forcing visitors to watch 15-minute expositions on topics such as 'Why War?'
Whatever the merits of such conscripted viewing, and I'm an agnostic, the presentation makes no attempt to weave the objects on display into the story being told. When the presentation ended I had no more desire to look at the objects on display than if I had sat through a Channel 4 documentary.
I learned a bit about 'Why War?', but I could have done that at home watching the history channel. And yet smack bang in the middle of the gallery is a piece of artillery that fired the first shell in World War One. What poignant, instructive stories might have been told, for example about its destructive power on the human body?
We have collections. That is what makes a museum a museum and not a cinema, not an oral history project and not a book on a wall.
Lawrence Fitzgerald is the manager of the Museum of Transport, Glasgow
Exhibitions are seen as an educational experience for all the family and simply placing objects on display alongside some obtuse text is not good enough.
To be fair, most history and science museums had recognised the value of contextualising collections and providing a range of ways of understanding them long before the arrival of lottery loot.
But today, even that most traditional and undidactic of institutions, the art museum, has embraced the new philosophy - witness the British Galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the highly interpreted, and even interactive spaces within the Manchester Art Gallery.
In this laudable rush to communicate and educate through collections a lot of thought and effort has been given to providing different ways for people to learn through their preferred learning styles, but a lot less to the messages or stories that are told through collections.
Most museum staff understand, not least through the work of people such as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, that visitors come to museums with their own agendas and that communication is a two-way process. But this understanding doesn't seem to delineate any limits on the display message considered appropriate or effective.
Every medium of mass communication has its strengths and limitations. It would be a brave TV director who suggested a peak-time series discussing the merits of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Producing a radio programme on how perspective is achieved in paintings might be a challenge. And so too with museum displays.
Museum displays are at their most effective when messages and stories arise out of collections and visitor studies and then focus the visitor's attention back onto collections, rather than them simply acting as incidental props in another story - an offence of which history and science museums are particularly guilty.
How many exhibitions have you seen where after reading all the text, watching the videos and playing with the interactives, the collections have been but bit players in a wider socio-economic/scientific treatise and in fact might not have been there at all?
In downtown Washington DC, a ten-minute taxi ride from the White House, the Historical Society of Washington DC has opened a new City Museum in the impressive Carnegie Library building. To quote the website: 'The City Museum serves as a model for other cities around the world demonstrating how the historical community can play an essential role in economic development.'
The museum has had only 33,000 visitors in six months. It seems to have forgotten that visitors go to museums to see and be inspired by important, attractive and unusual stuff and not to plough through hours of oral history and acres of text and photographs with barely an object in sight.
The consultant Stephen Feber castigates the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester for its displays not 'showing how science, technology and settlement work together to make a great city', (Museums Journal June 2004, pp38-39).
Speaking as a former curator, maybe these collections, or any others for that matter, are just not up to the job and what is really needed to address this subject is a book, not a display.
Grand overarching display narratives barely touching base with the collections can be found down the road at the new Imperial War Museum North. Dramatic audiovisual presentations intermittently fill the main gallery, virtually forcing visitors to watch 15-minute expositions on topics such as 'Why War?'
Whatever the merits of such conscripted viewing, and I'm an agnostic, the presentation makes no attempt to weave the objects on display into the story being told. When the presentation ended I had no more desire to look at the objects on display than if I had sat through a Channel 4 documentary.
I learned a bit about 'Why War?', but I could have done that at home watching the history channel. And yet smack bang in the middle of the gallery is a piece of artillery that fired the first shell in World War One. What poignant, instructive stories might have been told, for example about its destructive power on the human body?
We have collections. That is what makes a museum a museum and not a cinema, not an oral history project and not a book on a wall.
Lawrence Fitzgerald is the manager of the Museum of Transport, Glasgow
